If you’re a film buff polishing your list for 2011
Scroll through  my 12 Feature + 3 Documentary Film Capsules
Because there’s a little of you in each one. 

The Rum Diary starring Johnny Depp, 2011

If you’re wondering what path to take in a world made by others
See The Rum Diary for a rowdy walk with a freelancer
Because you’ll find yourself loving who you are when it’s over.

Another Earth starring Brit Marling, 2011

If you’re a believer in second chances
See Another Earth to get past stereotypes of wasted life
Because no one – I mean no one – knows what’s around the corner.

The Ides of March starring Ryan Gosling, George Clooney, 2011

If you’re reluctantly fascinated by twists of fate in power politics
See The Ides of March throw innocence and idealism in the dirt
Because betrayal is no game — it’s a tragedy.

Anonymous starring Vanessa Redgrave, Rhys Ifans, 2011

If you’re intrigued by conjecture, open to new configurations
See Anonymous cast Shakespeare in Olde England’s politics
Because “truth is truth, to the end of reckoning.”

Moneyball starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, 2011

If you’re tired of glamour and glitz (and love baseball)
See Moneyball put a geek up to bat, back faith with smarts
Because extraordinary is only a few numbers from ordinary.

J. Edgar starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Judi Dench, 2011

If you’re a student of character, a close observer of ambition in high places
See J. Edgar forge a federal backbone from secret files and coded fingerprints
Because force of personality bestows a lasting legacy better known than ignored.   

The Descendants with George Clooney, George Clooney & George Clooney, 2011

If you’re a sucker for superlative film blurbs in advertisements
See The Descendants leave rare inherited land to a dysfunctional family
Because this land is their land, it’s not our land, not yours, not mine.  

Midnight in Paris with Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, 2011

If you’re looking for the romance and glamour of a bygone age
See Woody Allen make dreams come true with Midnight in Paris
Because the mind is more than a cross-town taxi — it’s a time machine.

The Artist starring Jean Dujardin, Berenice Bejo and John Goodman, 2011

If you’re looking for a movie as memorable as it is fresh
See The Artist pan old-fashioned silence for gold when times change
Because hope is in the air, around the next corner, in your shoes. 

Poetry starring Yoon Jeong-hee, 2011

If you’re wondering how to make sense of the senseless
See Poetry, where a quiet older woman reforms ugliness
Because you’ll find the poet within

Hugo directed by Martin Scorsese, 2011

If you’re someone who likes things to run like clockwork
See Hugo repurpose images from the past for new inspiration
Because imagination is more than fun, it’s the fifth dimension.

The Flowers of War directed by Zhang Yimou, 2011

If you’re taken with archetypal imagery, open to fables of war
See The Flowers of War celebrate fantasy, sacrifice beauty
Because terrors of war by any enemy shatter real people.

Three Outstanding Documentaries

Cave of Forgotten Dreams exquisitely filmed by Werner Herzog, 2011

If you’re an old soul yearning for today’s “aha!”
See proof of 32,000-year-old human spiritus in Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Because consciousness was always magic, still is and will be tomorrow.

Bill Cunningham New York, delightfully filmed by Richard Press, 2011

If you’re looking for the pleasure of age at any age
See Bill Cunningham capture NYC streets live, camera in hand
Because esprit de vie is catchy, catching and catch-able!

Pina, tribute to Pina Bausch directed by Wim Wenders, 2011

If you’re a true believer in soul
See Pina set the body free to dance life, love and longing
Because full immersion in emotion has never been finer.

Article Written by Dr. Jane Alexander Stewart

Newtopia staff writer Jane Alexander Stewart, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles who writes essays about mythic themes in film, creates “Myth in Film; Myth in Your Life” seminars for self-exploration and travels a lot. Her film reviews have been published in the San Francisco C.G. Jung Library Journal, Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture and Los Angeles Journal of Psychological Perspectives.  Jane’s popular essay on “The Feminine Hero in The Silence of the Lambs” appears in the anthology, The Soul of Popular Culture, and in The Presence of the Feminine in Film as one of its authors. She’s also presented myth in film programs at Los Angeles County Museum, University of Alabama and C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich. A collection of her reviews and other writing can be found at www.CinemaShrink.com.

HOW TO FIX A REPUBLIC

Buddy Roemer wants you to understand that the only way to save our country is to reform our elections. Today Kucinich proposed an amendment to end Citizens United, which would require all federal campaigns to be financed exclusively with public funds. We all know how easy getting anything past the House and Senate is these days but it’s a nice gesture.  Buddy Roemer believes the only way to  achieve campaign reform is transparency and limits.  He wants criminal charges for hiding the identities of donors. As he has said sunlight heals. He’s the only candidate who refuses to take any money from special interests, PACs or lobbyists.  He limits his donations to one hundred dollars.  Since the 1% pay most of what elections cost, he’s hoping the other 99% of us will get the idea and pitch in so we can clean up politics in America.  As he has said: “It will take one million contributors in the primary to win, and five million in the general. It can be done in the age of the internet.”

HOW NOT TO FIX A REPUBLIC

What’s a voter to do?  Everyone knows how important the 2012 election is, except those of us who think it doesn’t matter because it’s all at worst a sham and at best a logjam.  The U.S. economy is still floundering and in danger of being pulled under by the drowning E.U.  The environmental consequences of our energy decisions are still on display in the gulf and at Fukushima.  Our desire for security is threatening our liberty with levels of citizen surveillance never attempted before, and we see the erosion of our rights by the passage of new laws that undermine the Constitution.  Our educational system is expensive and ineffective.  Our infrastructure is dated and rickety.  We need a candidate who can bring a new way of doing things to the gridlock that is Washington D.C.

On the GOP side we have a hateful Newt promising to ignore laws he disagrees with and to dismiss judges and federal employees who don’t share his ideology; Ron Paul who mixes startling lucidity with moments of extremism, not to mention promising what can’t be delivered; Rick Santorum, Christian crusader; and the ultimate Stepford candidate Mitt Romney, a vulture capitalist who has contradicted almost everything he himself has said at one time or another.  The GOP is suffering several civil wars in one.  The Tea Party libertarians, the Christian fundamentalists and conservative Catholics, and the old school Wall Street party for the wealthy can’t agree on much of anything except how much they want to replace President Obama.

And what about the President?  It’s hard to find a Democrat who isn’t disappointed in him.  At best apologists point out his struggle facing a do nothing GOP congress and senate, where Democrats also oppose him, for example voting with their wallets by supporting SOPA when he didn’t.  Environmentalists think Obama hasn’t done enough for green energy.  Feminists say he hasn’t stood up for women’s rights at a time when we have seen unprecedented attacks by the GOP on choice and laws against domestic violence.  Meanwhile the President staffs his administration with Wall Street insiders, Goldman Sachs talent, and prepares to launch a billion dollar election extravaganza diametrically opposed to his original platform of campaign reform.

ME?  SUPPORT A GOP CANDIDATE?

I’ve always thought of the GOP as the butt end of the same coin the Democrats are on.  I gave up on both parties awhile back, though I did help a little with the Obama campaign, not so much because I bought the hope hype; I was dedicated to dumping the Republicans after eight years of W.   I’ve never once considered voting for a Republican.  But I’m considering it now.  Buddy Roemer is not your typical Republican.  For example he visited OWS and gave speeches supporting it when his GOP colleagues were dismissing it with the latest professionally devised catch phrases. 

We certainly don’t agree on some issues; he’s not my dream pro choice candidate; he has said he would defund Planned Parenthood, he’s against the use of taxpayer money for abortions; but having said that, he vetoed two abortion bans when he was governor.  The second one didn’t protect the life of the mother.  Roemer said it wouldn’t stand up to Roe vs. Wade.  It likely cost him his reelection.  When the bill passed anyway it was finally judged invalid, costing taxpayers plenty.  Buddy says he’s a Methodist when it comes to choice.  He thinks protecting the mother is just as important as protecting the child.  He’s also mentioned in this context the separation of church and state.  He’s proud of being a listener, so I hope he’ll come to understand why Planned Parenthood was a Godsend to me and still is to many others.

I cast a skunk eye at fracking, nuclear energy, and deep water drilling, but I also realize solar, wind and the other renewables have a long way to go. Buddy Roemer supports drilling but he wants the industry to maintain a reserve of resources for immediate cleanup.  He also wants regulators to be independent of producers.  He says we’re paying a terrible price for foreign oil in lives, and money.  He wants to tariff domestic oil to use the revenue to pay down the national debt.  He’d end all subsidies for all energy businesses to level the playing field.  Some knowledgeable people in solar and other renewable energy companies should get in touch because I think Buddy Roemer would listen to them.  He comes from a state where they’ve been digging for natural gas since the 1800′s, but he took on the oil and gas industries when he was governor, and that takes serious cajones in the state of Louisiana where so much money flows from oil and gas.

Of gay marriage he says gay people are protected by the constitution and should be. Personally he’s opposed to gay marriage, but he points out that each church must decide for itself whether to marry gay couples. Separation of church and state.  

His proposals about Medicare and Social Security recognize the power of incremental change over twenty years.  A gradual approach that allows time for adjustment not only for recipients but also for the government, should conditions change.  Most important of all, his plan gives businesses and individuals certainty.

How would he create jobs?  Besides giving decision makers the kind of certainty that’s impossible in today’s highly partisan gridlock, he’s an advocate of fair trade.  Our trade relationship with China made sense when we were helping lift them into the world economy, but things have changed.  Globalization doesn’t have to be a one-way street.  Fair trade means China starts to live up to higher standards and better pay for their workers instead of us having to live down to compete for jobs with people getting paid pennies.  Made in America was once the world standard.  People preferred to buy American.  You got good value and superior quality.  American businesses should be given incentives for buying American.

He would enforce immigration laws, but set quotas based on the needs of the labor market, instead of a number chosen by electioneering political policy.  He would study ways to allow illegals to go home and apply for citizenship, while protecting immigrants here legally from suffering discrimination.

To prevent another economic crisis this successful banker would increase capital reserves for big banks, and end too big to fail by restoring the separation of commercial banking from investment banking.  That separation was made after the 1929 market crash, and undone by the enthusiasm for deregulation, leading right to the 2008 crash.

His tax plan is 17% with the first 50k exempt.  No loopholes.  No deductions.  Just a simple tax.  Corporations get the same treatment, no loopholes.  Their tax breaks for shipping jobs overseas gone. No national sales tax.

His solution for health care includes coverage of preexisting conditions but no mandate.  But how will companies profit, you wonder, when only sick people want insurance?  He would let consumers buy insurance across state lines, enact tort reform as he did in Louisiana, and bring competition back to the pharmaceutical industry.

When you hear him say he wants to board up the top floors of the Department of Education keep in mind what he thinks the department should be:  “a small and professional body that focuses on data collection and acquiring best practices that show how schools around the country and the world have improved education.“

These aren’t sexy solutions, calculated to rile up the base.  These are common sense approaches and they’re not hot air, they’re inspired by experience.

CLEANING UP THE MAGNOLIA STATE

Now, a little history.  Charles Elson “Buddy” Roemer III is the son of Charles E. Roemer II, former campaign manager and then commissioner of administration for the notorious Louisiana governor Edwin Washington Edwards.  Edwards was the classic charismatic but crooked southern governor, enjoying four terms even though everyone knew he was corrupt.  His supporters excused him by pointing out he generally stole from the wealthy and he didn’t make much of a secret of it.  Buddy Roemer’s father went to jail for a scandal that most people think should have sent Governor Edwards to jail; fall guy was the phrase frequently mentioned.

After graduating from Harvard, and returning to work with his father at a pioneering computer company, in1978 Buddy Roemer ran for Louisiana’s 4th congressional district but he didn’t make it past the primaries.  Two years later he was elected; unopposed he was elected again in 1982, 1984, and 1986.   As a Congressman, he was what they called a boll weevil, he was a southern Democrat who often voted in support of the policies of Ronald Reagan.

At the end of his third term Governor Edwards wasn’t quite as popular as he had been.  He could only charm his way through so much corruption.  Louisiana was dead last in many measures of how states are doing in the United States.  Roemer ran for office calling for a “Roemer Revolution.”  He promised to “scrub the budget,” reform campaign finance, cut the red tape of state bureaucracy, and fix the woeful educational system.  Those problems sound pretty familiar don’t they?

Governor Roemer convened a special session of the Louisiana Legislature to push an ambitious tax and fiscal reform program statewide and locally.  He aimed to slash spending, abolish wasteful programs, and close ineffective state-run institutions, giving more power to local communities.  Voters rejected his proposals in a statewide constitutional referendum.  He also worked to protect the environment, despite opposition from the state’s mighty oil and gas interests, and from a state legislature still stuffed with cronies of Edwin Edwards.

How did Buddy do? He reduced 12+ percent unemployment by half.  He tested teachers, who were paid less than anywhere else in the US, and gave the ones who passed a thirty percent raise.  The state budget was a mess, yet he balanced it the very first year and every year after without new taxes. Louisiana bonds, the lowest rated in the US, received five upgrades during his administration.  Louisiana had the worst air and water toxicity in America.  He closed loopholes, used tax incentives, penalized offenders and won a Sierra Club award for cleaning up the state.  

To raise more revenue for the state he legalized and regulated gambling, restoring the state’s iconic riverboat gambling businesses.

In 1991 after twenty years as a Democrat, Governor Roemer joined the GOP, just a few months before the next election.  He opposed many of the policies of the Democratic Party, he has said it had changed so much since the seventies he felt more comfortable joining like minded politicians in the GOP.  The change was unpopular with Democrats and Republicans alike and didn’t help his chances for reelection.  Caught between the improbably triumphant return of Edwin Edwards and the KKK candidacy of Duke, he finished third and Governor Edwards served his fourth term.  Two years after it ended Edwards was indicted and convicted.

Buddy Roemer ran for governor again in 1995 and ironically was knocked out during the primaries by a conservative state senator who switched from Democrat to Republican during his campaign.  Ah the fickle electorate, what they didn’t like today may thrill them four years later.  In Louisiana the feeling persists that Governor Roemer should have been one of the all time greats, but the state was too big a mess, his staff inexperienced and too ready to step on important toes, his agenda too ambitious; no wonder as you’ll see during this interview he has sympathy for Barack Obama.

HOW A GOOD AMERICAN BANK HANDLED THE FORECLOSURE CRISIS

Buddy Roemer left politics for the world of business.  He built retirement communities for alumni close to their beloved alma maters.  He started Business First Bank of Baton Rouge.  The nature of that bank tells us a lot about Buddy Roemer.  They don’t have nationwide or international branches.  They specialize in what their name tells you: putting local business first.  They didn’t get caught up in the derivatives and quarterly profits circus that crashed the world economy because they stayed focused on what they did best instead of mindlessly growing.  They took no bailout money.  They restructured loans instead of foreclosing on mortgages. They even pay the ATM fees for their customers. 

I know what you’re thinking.  First I got sweet-talked by a smooth talking black man from Chicago, now I’m falling for a Louisiana boy “campaign shouting like a southern diplomat.”  He hasn’t got a chance, you want to tell me.  They won’t let him into the debates.  The national media refuses to take his campaign seriously.  I know.  But that’s where the fun begins.  As far as I’m concerned his main message about campaign reform is more important than any of the usual flavors of fake pedaled by the professionals.  And there’s this thing called Americans Elect, google it if you don’t know about it.  I think Buddy Roemer and Americans Elect could be made for each other.  I think he’s a guy the Tea Party and OWS could agree on.

To some people DIY means amateur.  But I know what DIY really means.  It’s about staying true to what you know is right.  It’s about loving freedom.  Could it be that Buddy Roemer is the DIY candidate?  Could Americans Elect be the DIY party? And with the GOP reeling from one scandal and attack ad to the next, maybe they’ll wake up and smell the coffee and invite Buddy Roemer to explain how he’d change the game for the better.  This election could get much more interesting.

You can read the key points of his platform at his website under the Issues tab.  http://www.buddyroemer.com

INTERVIEW WITH BUDDY ROEMER (Conducted January 19, 2012)

As we talk the online blackout to protest SOPA and PIPA are live across the Internet and your campaign website is blacked out, too, except for a short paragraph that ends: “How can we advocate for greater liberties in China and around the world while restricting our own?”  Amen. So what’s a better way to control the pirating corporations complain about?

They have a choice to make.  They can choose to do business or not in China.  These guys are businesswomen and men. They work for profit.  They’re the ones that developed the Chinese market with the government breathing down their necks, stealing their ideas, pirating their IP, and they say nothing? I had a CEO of a major corporation, a top 500 corporation, tell me that they had lost 85% of their potential sales in China from piracy.  And I asked him why do you remain? And here’s his answer: damn good question.  All of these free traders got the idea that these foreign countries were like America that they would trade freely.  Well they aren’t like America and they don’t trade freely. The biggest criminal area, illegality area, is the whole business of IP, patents and software.  We need to set a standard, each individual company, as to what they will and will not stand for, and they need to pull out of China if the government does not enforce the rules of liberty.  I don’t believe China will.  Let me go a step further. I’ve been to China many times, as you know, and I have sold American made products there, and it’s like pulling teeth.  They want to flood this country with their cheap products, made often by child labor, in plants that could not open legally in America, and they don’t want anybody to say anything about it.  But try to put an American made product in there and it takes an act of their parliament. So it’s not free trade, it’s not fair trade, it’s piracy.  In the United States our companies are flexible, focused, fast and friendly, what I call the four F’s. We don’t need the government to regulate the Internet.  We need to have it be a place of confusion, innovation, and entrepreneurship. When we see violators of the truth, or of other people’s rights, then they can be prosecuted under the criminal justice system of the freest country on earth, the United States of America.  We don’t need more laws.  We need more citizens involved.  We need more freedom, and we need to let the chips fall where they may.

You’ve been a congressman and as governor you cut enormous state unemployment by half during your term, balancing the budget, and improving education.  You run a billion dollar bank that didn’t get caught up in the Wall Street debacle. Yet you’ve been excluded from the debates.  A beautiful example of what happens to independents in a society of cliques, sound bytes and corporate culture, the same thing that happened to the music business, and the movies, happened to politics, too.  So how can authenticity prevail in a world of croney-ism and manipulation?

There are no easy answers here.  Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.  The influence of money is just an example of that.  If you think Washington D.C. is a fair shake, if you think Washington D.C. is on the level, you just don’t understand what happens in America.  It’s the few elite at the top, no one else counts. I have decided, I did it about a year ago, that the only way to bring change was to stand up.  That’s what I’m doing.  I’m not pretending to be the best candidate for president.  Maybe there are others better than I, no doubt about it.  But I am saying that of all the people that have announced to run I’m the only one that doesn’t take checks from the corporate interests or from the special interests.  Therefore I’m the only one who will be free to lead on fair trade, on tax reform, on immigration reform, I’m the only one, and everything works against me.  I haven’t been invited to any debate.  It’s been a real struggle. But let me give you the good news. Last week was our best week in the year that we’ve been running.  We raised more money, got a higher standing in the polls, we got to three percent.  We’ve had contributions from all fifty states.  We’ve had fifteen thousand to twenty thousand people who have contributed to our campaign an average of 25 to sixty dollars, that’s the way I like it.  No PAC money. No Super PAC money.  Everything reported.  I am so proud of what we stand for.  Now my hope is to get beyond pride and get to the practical business of getting people’s attention.  I’m not going to be able to do that unless I’m invited to one of these debates.  I’m hoping that somehow some way somewhere they’ll take the only person who is running who has been a governor and a congressman and say, what do you think, Buddy?  That’s when our campaign starts.

The key to your policy is campaign reform.  You’re waking people up to the fact that until we take the dark money and big lobbies out of politics nothing else can get fixed.  That can’t be pleasing to the people who grease their wheels with all that money.  To what do we owe this foolhardy bravery?  

Experience.  I grew up in a state where politics was corrupt. We had very flamboyant governors, they were very popular and they were very polished politicians.  We had the highest unemployment rate in America.  We had teachers who were not paid.  We had bond ratings that were the worst in the country.  We had a population that stagnated and decreased.  Our kids left the state to get jobs.  That was not because Louisiana was not a great place to eat and live, and dance and sing, it’s a great place to live.  But it was corrupt at the top.  What we did was to clean out the corruption and have the toughest campaign laws in America.  We’ve had twenty years now of government that’s been good, better and best.  We’ve had Mike Foster.  We’ve had Kathleen Blanco.  We’ve had Bobby Jindal.  Clean, honest.  Louisiana hasn’t had twenty years like that in its history.  And you see things change.  There’s more hope.  There’s more jobs.  Kids don’t leave Louisiana for employment anymore.  Our net worth, our value, our incomes are going up.  So you have to defeat the corruption, and I think the lessons learned in Louisiana are applicable to the national government.

Lousiana is the microcosm, Washington D.C. is the macrocosm?

Exactly. That’s why I recognized it a year or so ago when I went to Washington.  I hadn’t really looked at it in ten or fifteen years.  I hadn’t been there in twenty years.   But I looked at it and said, man that looks a lot like Louisiana.  Your success depends not on what you know but on who you know.  And that’s corrupt.

Here it is, the China question.  You say we are stuck with a policy toward China that reflects economic conditions long gone, we need a level playing field.  Others say your policy would trigger a trade war with China that could break the world economy.  Can you explain how some of the changes you would make could benefit both America and China?

The Chinese could always make a decision to level the playing field.  After all they’re a communist nation, and one party, one man makes all the decisions.  He could decide that they don’t want to trade with America anymore.  We’re their largest customer.  They’re not going to make that decision.  They could, but I predict that they won’t.  What I want to ask them to do is to trade fairly.  To not send us products made by children.  To not send us products made by prisoners.  To not send us products made by forced labor.  To allow our products to go there.  To meet the standards that working people around the world have to meet.  They should meet them in China.  We will gain because our manufacturing jobs will increase.  We’ll quit letting these cheap goods come in made by children, and we’ll make them in America.  Maybe they cost a nickel more, but we’ll get jobs in America.  The Chinese will gain because the standards they’ll have to meet to get their products into our country will raise the living standards in China.  As far as I’m concerned we’re in a trade war right now.  We have surrendered.  We have said send us your crap and we’ll pay for it.  I’m going to say something different.  I’ll say send us your best products, made to our standards, and we’ll do some business.

One of your fair trade policies is to ban trading with partners who practice prisoner labor.  Does that mean we can’t trade with ourselves? You talk about the power of reform, how would you reform our prisons

We need fewer prisoners.  That means we need more jobs, which makes for less time to steal, cheat and hurt each other.  I’m a Methodist boy.  I think that people who do harm and damage need to go to prison.  I’d like to live in a society where there’s less harm and damage.  Where there’s more work and less welfare, and we treat people with pride and honor.  That’s why I spend my time on economic revitalization, and economic health.  I think a family without work is not happy, not healthy and not free.  Their chance of going to prison doubles and doubles again when they don’t have a decent job.  My time is going to be spent on changing the world by creating jobs, fair trade, an economy that’s growing, and campaign reform that gets the crooks out of Washington.  If we get the crooks out of Washington we’ll have fewer crooks in our prisons because there will be more jobs.

The war on drugs has filled our prisons and eroded our rights. Obama promised to respect the states, but the feds still enforce federal law, ignoring state laws.  What’s your stand on the war on drugs, and would you respect state laws?

I do respect state law, after all I was a governor.  I know that Louisiana is different from Idaho and should be allowed the right under our federal constitution to have different laws.  There are certain things that are the national government: military defense, relations with foreign governments, that’s all Washington D.C.  But things like the application of marijuana laws or the application of certain work standards, those sorts of things are under state purview.  I would honor that.  The war on drugs is an important war.  I’m not a believer as a father or grandfather that everything goes.  Drinking is legal but it’s voted on parish by parish, county by county, and we need to agree on those differences.  But even where drinking is legal there are age requirements, there are restrictions.  So the states need to run their state as long as they honor the federal constitution I will let them do that.

The War on Terror is terrifying in more ways than one.  The surveillance technology now available and the militarization of our police forces make many Americans fear for our liberties.  We all know the Ben Franklin quote about liberty and security.  Can we stay safe while preserving privacy?

We always have to work on that.  This is always going to be a struggle.  The government always has an excuse at the moment why they need to temporarily scrutinize us, review us, question us, fingerprint us.  I’m skeptical.  I’m a constitutional freedom loving person, and I think the Patriot Act goes too far.  I don’t think we need to give up a single right while we fight the war on terrorism.  Let me say it again.  We do not need to give up a single right to catch a terrorist, if we do the terrorists have won.

You’re a supporter of natural gas for cleaner more independent energy.  You say fracking technology needs to be improved.  Should there be a moratorium on fracking until we feel reasonably certain that we’re not poisoning water tables or causing earthquakes?

We have plenty of history on fracking. It can be done wisely and well, it can be environmentally sound.  I think we need to keep improving it.  There’s seventy years of experience with fracking in Louisiana and everybody’s drinking the water.  Any process can be dangerous.  All processes must be watched.  I’m an environmentalist.  I’m the governor who got the Sierra Club award for the state of Louisiana.  We cleaned up our air and water.  I believe in natural gas, I believe it’s energy for the next fifty years.  It’s plentiful and cheap.  I believe we have to break our addiction to foreign oil.  I would frack, I would do it below a certain depth.  I would have clear standards.  I would have penalties for those who violate them.  But we need to drill, we need to create jobs, we need to have an energy supply that is not controlled by Saudi Arabia.

Would you continue to spend federal money on radioactive waste disposal, which amounts to an enormous subsidy, or should the companies that own the nuclear plants be trusted with that?

There’s a third option.  I would open Yucca Mountain storage facility in Nevada.  We built it over twenty years ago.  It’s the best in the world.  It should be the repository for nuclear waste.  Nuclear energy generation is unsafe now because we’re storing the waste at each of these sites and these sites were not designed for five years, and ten years, fifteen years and twenty years of storage.  They’re overcrowded, they’re overburdened, they’re unsafe.  The government ought to collect this waste we process, the spent fuel, and sent the remainder to Yucca Mountain and store it safely.  France does it.  Frances has 85% of their electric energy produced by nuclear plants.  They use vitrification, which is a process I’m very familiar with.  It’s done safely and it’s stored in a storage facility that’s safe, earthquake proof and that can stand for a million years.  We already have that facility in this country, we just don’t have a president with an energy policy to make nuclear safe.  I will make it safe.  Vitrification is a glass process, it’s sand and glass, and it stands for a million years.  We know about it.  We would vitrify our spent fuel and store it in Yucca Mountain.  That’s what it was designed to do 29 years ago.  I voted on it on the floor of the United States Congress.

You support renewable energies.  You say you would cut all energy subsidies.  The Chinese are spending a trillion or more on solar and wind over the next five years.  Won’t they outpace us in the new energy economy if we stay dependent too long on our old energy standbys?

The market will beat them every time.  The government never made anything.  They can subsidize all they want.  We subsidized ethanol for 27 years.  For what?  I mean, what government ought to do is have education run locally, revise the tax code, have corporations pay seventeen percent, let there be no exceptions.  Have your highest tax rate at 17%, no exceptions, do away with double taxation, do away with alternative minimum taxes, do away with the marriage penalty.  Let’s make it simple, clean, non lobby-able.  Let’s get on with being in the marketplace.  Government does not pick winners among solar, geothermal, or wind.  The government cannot pick winners there.  It ought to get out of the business and let the market operate.

Regulation is such a blurry word.  We want clean air and clean water.  But our good intentions wind up smothering new businesses that can’t afford compliance officers, and we still don’t have clean air and water.  How would you find the balance between environmental protection and improved opportunities for small business?

I would have two kinds of regulations.  I would have regulations for companies with five hundred employees and more, and they would be tough and clear and fair.  I’d have a lot fewer regulations for companies under five hundred.  These are the companies that create jobs.  These are start up companies.  These are companies that don’t have lawyers, they don’t have a compliance officer, they don’t have a lobbyist in Washington.  These are companies that should be given more freedom.  They create jobs.  I would regulate them very lightly.  I would heavily regulate the major corporations, who have more lawyers than good sense.  They have twenty lobbyists in Washington, and have compliance officers everywhere.  I would hit them hard and fair.  That would give us balance.  We’d clean up the air and water with the big boys, and we’ll let the little guy create jobs.

What would you do about the revolving door of politicians and lobbyists, all those juicy jobs former regulators know they’re going to get?

I would prevent it.  I would have a seven-year requirement before a member of congress or a chief executive officer in government could lobby, and become a registered lobbyist in Washington.  Seven years.  The current rule is two years and it is not enforced.  I would change it.  Number two: I would not allow a lobbyist to bring a check to a politician.  Number three: I would not allow a senior executive or a former member of congress to lobby on behalf of a foreign country ever.  I would make those three changes the first day I was president.

America’s infrastructure is a joke, how can we afford to repair and modernize it?

We’re going to have to dedicate some money to the repair of our infrastructure.  It should be led by the states, but it should be supplemented by the federal government. We have federal taxes already on the books designed to do that.  Except that the federal tax is being used for other things.  I’ll invest in infrastructure.  I did it as governor, I’ll do it as president.  It will be a light touch, but it will be an early touch, use the taxes already in place.  I would cut the department of transportation by 3/4, by a hundred billion dollars, and I will take half that money saved, and I will spend it on infrastructure, without raising any new taxes.

My dad was a Marine and my big brother was a grunt, what can we do to help our veterans, so many of whom are homeless, and suffering post traumatic stress and other long lasting war wounds?

Well, we have a commitment.  We need to honor our commitment.  We need to decentralize our health care so it will be in more locations.  We need to make sure that we offer coverage of all damage done by war and half of that is mental, and mental instability.  So that does not need to be an unspoken rule.  That needs to be talked about, discussed, fully funded, and taken care of, it’s very straightforward.  You know the political warriors never want to talk about the full cost of war.  it’s time that we do that.  It’s also time that we be more careful in the wars we get into.  We’re took quick to decide.  And too slow helping those who get hurt.  To summarize, I see a need for a change in attitude.  Congress needs to vote on wars, not presidents. Number two: we need to support our troops while they fight and while they recover.  That needs to be a full commitment.

You seem to be the perfect candidate for Americans Elect. You were a Democrat for twenty years, and then a Republican for another twenty years.  The parties have veered to the left but mostly right while you pretty much stood fast.  Your campaign reforms of transparency and limits dovetail nicely with Americans Elect which is itself a campaign reform, a way of inviting the American people into the process 21st century style.  Do you think Americans Elect can challenge these billion dollar candidates? 

It remains to be seen.  It’s a question that doesn’t have an answer yet.  It won’t happen unless Americans Elect as a unity ticket really appeals to plain people.  Most Americans don’t give a penny to a presidential candidate.  The people that do are the elite, the well to do, and the special interests.  Americans Elect will not win if they appeal only to the elite, the well to do and the special interests.  They have to appeal to plain people to get them involved, so our candidacies are a natural fit.  I like unity.  I like rebuilding America.  I like small contributions.  But it remains to be seen whether Americans Elect can catch fire.  We’ll see.  I like what they stand for, but we’ll see if they catch fire.

Buddy Roemer at Occupy DC

Ever hear that joke, how do you start a fight on the Internet?

Express your opinion and wait.  What I like about you is you aren’t afraid to identity real problems and you have practical solutions for many of them.  But people wonder how you’ll get by the gridlock of the parties, and of the parties within the parties. The whole country seems to be paralyzed by emotional politics and culture war.  How will you go about refocusing the American people so cooperation becomes possible?  

It’s why I’m running this way.  I think you best serve by how you run.  I don’t think it works to run for political office in one manner, and then try to serve another.  It must be seamless.  So I run without PAC money, without Super PAC money, with no large checks.  That is the key to serving.  I will throw the lobbyists out of the room.  No lobbyist will be allowed to bring a check.  No lobbyist will be allowed to be on a fundraiser.  We’ll have plain people make these decisions.  For example, in health care reform, I’ve been a diabetic for forty years, I believe in health care reform.  Many Americans can’t afford to be sick.  But the way to get reform is not to get with the big boys who give the big money, that’s the insurance companies, that’s tort lawyers, that’s pharmaceuticals, no, they want to keep the system just like it is.  If you want change and you want reform you get doctors, nurses and patients in the room.  Plain people, and design a different system, a system of competition and choice in clinics and you will lower health care by twenty percent or more in the first year, and you’ll have a different America.  It’s true in bank reform, it’s true in tax reform.  I don’t want to be president and have a gridlocked nation, so I have run for office deliberately the most difficult way possible, with small contributions from a lot of people because that’s the way I will serve, and that’s the way congress will follow.  They’ll see the power in people, and they’ll see a president who will listen to them, play poker with them, watch football with them, have dinner with them, give them credit, they’ll see a whole different approach.  They’ll see an approach not giving republicans credit.  Republicans can’t run this country; they’ve proven that.  It’ll be an approach not giving democrats credit.  It will be an approach giving America credit.  That’s the way to rebuild the nation and that’s the way you break the gridlock.  Listen.  Act.  Include.  Give credit to others and good things will follow.

You’re teaching by example?

It’s the only way.  I mean, I wouldn’t run, who wants to be president?  Can you imagine being Obama?  What a sad situation.  No budget reform, no tax reform, no jobs reform, no immigration reform, nothing.  I don’t want to be nothing.  I want to the president of a society that has decided to correct its problems.  I want to be president of a country that decides to rebuild.

Who is your favorite president and why?

Of course, my favorite president, I didn’t know him, but I just think he’s the best president we ever had: Abraham Lincoln.  Abraham Lincoln ran for president with two words: one nation.  It was a real simple concept.  He said when you join you cannot leave.  Told them all that.  One nation.  Then when he ran for reelection he ran with four words: One nation no slaves.  He was the greatest president.  He gave us the nation.

Article written by Tamra Spivey

Newtopia staff writer TAMRA SPIVEY is a founding member and primary singer of Lucid Nation, executive producer of the documentary Viva Cuba Libre, and associate producer of The Gits documentary. She was art editor and west coast editor of Newtopia Magazine in its former incarnation, collaborating on in depth interviews with whistle blower Michael Ruppert, ACLU and record business honcho Danny Goldberg, and grassroots political strategist Larry Tramutola. Follow her on twitter @MongrelPatriot.

“Like all geniuses, he can be a pain in the arse, but it goes with the badge.”  Keith Richards

One of a handful of music producers who can rightfully be called legendary, Rob Fraboni was born to a musically inclined family in southern California where he started drumming for his first band when he was twelve years old.  Just a couple years later he hitchhiked to Hollywood where he got in the habit of sneaking in the backdoor at Gold Star Studios so he could observe sessions produced by the legendary Phil Spector.  In 1971 he moved to NYC to study under Al Grundy at the Institute for Audio Research.  Soon he was an assistant engineer at the Record Plant where his peers included the likes of Jack Douglas, Jay Messina, and Jimmy Iovine.  At the Record Planet Rob worked with John Lennon, Patti Labelle and the Bluebelles, Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan.

After moving back to Cali in 1972 Rob was hired to maintain the gear at The Village Recorder.  But his skills were quickly recognized and he was promoted to chief engineer.  He designed Studio B where he recorded his first hit record “Sail On, Sailor” by the Beach Boys.  He mixed half of their Holland record, then went to work on Goat’s Head Soup for the Rolling Stones, “You are so Beautiful” by Joe Cocker, and Planet Waves for Bob Dylan and the Band.  Dylan invited Rob to be his sound consultant for the Dylan/Band tour in 1974.  The following year, Rick Danko found a house built in 1958 in Malibu that Elvis had rented for a couple of years.  Mister Ed, the talking horse of black and white television fame had been stabled there off-season.  Dylan & The Band hired Rob to design and build a recording facility at the house that became the legendary Shangri-La Studios.  For ten years Rob was president and co-owner of Shangri-La where he worked on classic records by The Band, Eric Clapton, Wayne Shorter, and Bonnie Raitt, the album Green Light of which was nominated for a Grammy.

During that decade Rob was hired to produce the music for The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese’s ground breaking documentary of the last show by The Band.  Rob faced some interesting challenges.  A buzz in keyboardist Garth Hudson’s tracks required the virtuoso to re-record all he had played.  It took three months for him to transcribe and replay what he had played in one night.  At the concert, which Rob attended as a guest of Eric Clapton, Rob found  the sound men arguing during his solo on “Further On Up The Road” and he noticed Eric’s guitar was too low in the mix so he jumped in and pushed it right up which got a rise out of the audience that you can see in the film. The Band and Scorsese asked him to handle the post- production of the film soundtrack and accompanying LP. Upon Scorsese’s suggestion, Rob innovated a new style of mixing for the film.  Watching the footage he would ride the volume of the instruments to reflect who was featured on the screen creating an impressionistic mix that added an engaging and unique quality to the soundtrack of the film, which was nominated for an Academy Award and the LP soundtrack was nominated for a Grammy.

In 1985 Rob moved back to NYC when Chris Blackwell hired him as vice president of Island Records.  He executive produced the record that introduced Melissa Etheridge to the world, signed Etta James to Island, and remastered the entire Bob Marley catalog.  Rob left Island just before it was sold to Polygram in 1990.

Since then through his record companies Domino Records, Ardeo Records and ISM Records he has released albums by Ivan Neville, Alvin Lee, John Mooney, Rusty Kershaw, Cowboy Mouth and many others.  In 1995 he produced the most rare outdoor recordings ever made of the Nyahbinghi sect with Keith Richards in Jamaica. The work featured membranophones played at Rastafarian groundation ceremonies, vocals and guitar, and was released on Keith’s Mindless Records label as The Wingless Angels.  In 1997 Rob produced Keith’s songs for Bridges to Babylon by The Rolling Stones, which was nominated for a Grammy.  Rob won a Grammy in 2002 for his production of Keith Richards’ song “You Win Again” on Timeless, the Hank Williams tribute album.  Most recently he’s been helping out Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros.

As the pirate they call Mr. Richards points out in his autobiography Rob Fraboni is a rare blend of talents.  He’s a superb technician; along with Shangri-La and Village Recorder’s Studio B, he designed and built Keith’s home studio in Connecticut, Room Called L.  But Rob is also a recording engineer with a rare understanding of the elusive process of making real music.  Real music, in case you’re wondering, is that stuff that so many music fans complain isn’t getting made anymore; real music is the kind that was made decades ago but still outsells most of what gets recorded now.  As Keith puts it: “His knowledge and his ability to record in the most unusual places are breathtaking.”

My guitarist and writing partner learned more about recording in one phone conversation with Rob than in all our years of studio and home recording.  As a singer I’ve always hated using headphones.  Rob liberated me from them, pointing out that the split second delay in hearing when a singer is in the room with the drummer creates an ease to the groove that the precision of instant snare drum in your ear loses.  Rob also explained to us why one well-placed mic on a drum kit can make a much better recording than the standard practice of a mic for each drum.  In essence, to mic each drum makes the mixer the drummer, when what is really needed is a recording of the drummer working the kit with all the harmonics of the room intact.  The fetish for precision, which led us to ProTools and sampled musicians, is one reason music is less exciting today.

Another reason is digital recording.  When my band was starting out, a mastering engineer by the name of Hank Waring was a good friend to us.  Hank was known for his hot masters, including “Born to be Wild” by Steppenwolf.  Hank worked with Bob Marley in the early days and was one of the first white men to visit Trenchtown; kids there would touch his skin, thinking he was covered with ashes and there must be black underneath.  He had a dust covered recording studio downstairs where he gave The Germs, X and other classic Los Angeles punk bands their start.  Hank told us his theory that digital was destroying music.  He said all his female employees got headaches from early digital recordings.  He explained that the unbroken flow of analog music is like streaming water, and compared digital information packets to a subliminal clickety clack of train tracks.

Rob has developed a process he calls RealFeel to restore the flow to digital recordings.  He was kind enough to demonstrate it at my kitchen table.  I noticed that digital CDs and radio made my friends ask me to “turn it down” because the music was interrupting conversation.  But once Rob applied RealFeel even louder volumes seemed to encourage communication, creating that talking by the campfire feeling that vinyl records give music.  Rob used deltoid muscle reflex testing to demonstrate how digital music weakens us.  No matter how hard we tried to keep our arms up we couldn’t; once RealFeel was applied we had no problem holding strong.  Left with sample CDs I tried them out on my musicians, friends and especially skeptics.  I would play the same song twice in a blind test.  Almost unanimously everyone chose the RealFeel recording though they couldn’t explain why.  My engineers studied the wav forms but couldn’t explain it.  Rob has been in talks with big potential partners like Apple and Amazon, and plans are in process to introduce this technology to everything from hearing aids and television to movie soundtracks.  Just imagine if Hank and Rob are right, we’ve been virtually imprisoned in the annoyance of digital sound for a couple decades now, what Neil Young has termed “The Dark Ages of Music”.

Rob explains more about his passion for the music in my interview below:

Were there any special sonic influences that influenced you as a child?

My parents owned a Grundig Majestic hi-fi and I immediately noticed a difference over the hi-fi’s at my friend’s parent’s homes. This sparked my inquisitiveness at the time and inspired me to start building small HeathKit amplifiers and eventually guitar amps when we started our band in 1963. That eventually led to me putting together a small studio in a guesthouse, recording our band, The NobleMen, and I just never stopped…

In August last year you spoke at a screening of “Last Waltz” in Minneapolis, did you hear anything new seeing it on the big screen 33 years after its release?

Mainly it was an interesting experience because I had transferred my original VHS master of the film to DVD myself and compared it to the digitally remastered 5.1 surround mix that was later released, finding that I much preferred the original mix because as you pointed out, the mix was made to match what was on the screen and the new mix didn’t use that technique. It was immediately apparent to the entire audience in the theatre when we A/B’d the two and the crowd preferred the original mix so that was the one we screened. I had also applied RealFeel technology that gave the mix the analog feeling of the original release of the movie in 1978.

You’ve had a rare view of the music industry, from the days when it is was rapidly growing and innovating, and a young gun such as yourself could find himself swept up to the heights of audio stardom, to the ruin it is today, with sales plummeting in flurries of pink slips as corporate conglomerates gobble up all the independents.  Did you see this coming or did it take you by surprise?  Do think there is hope for the music industry or do you think the golden days are in the past?

I feel that the whole process has been gradual and insidious. This has been due to many factors from the advent of multi-track recording and the use of individual microphones on each instrument to the advent of digital recording. I watched a documentary on Bluegrass music years ago called “A High Lonesome Sound” and in it they showed chronologically the evolution of “The Grand Old Opry” and it was astounding to see it go from one microphone to 20+ microphones over a 20 year period and the sound went from having great depth and dimension in mono to a very small sounding stereo soundstage. That was eye opening but at that point, not a surprise. With the advent of digital sound it was more of a surprise because at first it seemed so accurate and noise free but as one continued to listen, it was apparent that there was something truly lacking in the emotional content. It was very hard to put your finger on though and it took time to really understand what was happening. I feel that digital recording is still in it’s infancy in a sense and what we are using now will ultimately be replaced by a system that will not sacrifice emotion for the sake of convenience. I know in my heart there is hope.

To my ears great records like Exile on Main Street which may not have been perfectly clear analog but blended into a beautiful sonic stew are far less pleasing when parsed out into their individual details in their new digitally mastered forms.  Do you think the lust for precision has helped or hindered the creation of music?

That’s an interesting description: “The lust for precision”, because it’s very true. Digital is mathematically accurate but as I said above, sacrifices emotion in the quest for accuracy and convenience. It definitely hinders the production of music because the sound is fatiguing and you find yourself engaged in a fight between your left and right brain hemispheres. One has to work harder to achieve the same results, not to mention the temptation to over-perfect things and lose precious spontaneity.

You once told me how you and some famous musician friends used to get together weekly to each share your favorite albums, and how CDs seemed to take the life out of that communal pleasure.  Can you share that story, please, as it’s one of the “aha” moments that led to your RealFeel project.

I had an apartment in Los Angeles that had a very large living room with a 25 foot ceiling. I had a nice pair of Tannoy Golds in there with Belvedere cabinets, kind of the cream of the crop and the room sounded really nice. I had 6,000 vinyl records and it was a music lover’s paradise and became an attractive place for my musician, engineer and producer friends to spend many hours there listening to music. Everyone from Glen Frey, Don Felder, Mick Fleetwood, Bonnie Raitt, Steve Tyler, and Joe Perry, to Eric Clapton would drop by. We would all be sitting with a few albums in our laps waiting our turn to play the songs we had picked. This would go on continuously for as long as eight hours a night, a couple nights a week. We did this for years between 1975 and 1984. Then something strange happened. CDs came on the scene and suddenly we found ourselves losing interest in our long listening sessions. It got to the point after about six months where we all lost interest in our intense listening parties. But it happened gradually over that six months or so and we didn’t really understand what was happening.

RealFeel fascinates me because sound is such an intrinsic part of human life, and if it’s true that digital sound is subliminally irritating to the brain, and detrimental to our biology, then it’s one of the most horrible environmental pollutants we are immersed in.  One we hear almost nothing about. Can you tell us a little about the reactions you’ve been getting when you demonstrate RealFeel to heavy hitters at the big companies who are considering implementing your technology?

Honestly, at first there’s a bit of resistance and disbelief because as the name implies, it’s about feel more than sound. And there is a lack of awareness in general as to what’s really happening to the listener. Digital sound has the identical effect on the human body as fluorescent lighting. I find that musicians are much more sensitive to this, which stands to reason, and are quite ready to embrace it. But like anything new and different, there’s a certain resistance. Once one notices the difference and really feels the difference, it becomes hard to go back and becomes more and more apparent. It’s a universally accepted fact at this point that there is something “not quite right” about digital sound and it’s the subject of discussion by producers and engineers the world over. And one sees the consumers starting to pick up on this as witnessed by the renewed interest in vinyl records that’s growing at a surprising rate. One thing I hear frequently is that ‘no one cares, especially the “youth”. In my experience I have found that not to be true. It’s a question of education and awareness and the whole process is starting to pick up steam. One can find numerous articles in print and on the Internet on the subject at this point. And when you stop and consider the implications, it affects many areas of our lives, from cell phones to hearing aids, CDs, video games, DVDs, radio and television and movie theaters as well. And I haven’t even touched on mp3s which is sound at it’s chintziest.

You’ve seen American society drift and twist through the protests of the 70′s through the punk rock revolution and the yuppie devolution all the way up to our current predicament.  What do you think of Occupy Wall Street and the current political climate of the United States?  Does it seem different to you or just more of the same?

This is a very important and pressing issue that could easily be the subject of an entire article. People are being deceived. It’s deep and controversial. We’re in a pressure cooker. Something’s got to give. There is a tremendous lack of respect for the planet and all life upon it, plant and animal and human. Infinite growth is a fallacy.

You’ve spoken about how improvisational and immediate Bob Dylan’s inspiration would be, and how there would be little conversation, he would play and The Band would jump in.  I get the impression there was a sort of silent conversation going on between the maestro, his musicians and you.  Was it exciting to be part of a process so different from the usual engineer behind the glass with a rehearsed band?

It was an extraordinary experience. At that point in my career I was 22 and had been making records for seven years. I had never made a record where everything was performed live in the studio especially the lead vocals that were to be the final and only vocals. Believe it or not, at that point in Bob’s career he had NEVER overdubbed a lead vocal on any of his records. In fact the first record that he did where he overdubbed some of the lead vocals was the record he made with Jerry Wexler, Slow Train Coming. It was a little scary actually to think there was no room for error on my part. Bob and The Band were rehearsing for “Tour ’74″ out in Malibu and they had only rehearsed three of the songs that ended up on Planet Waves. The rest of the songs were done spontaneously with The Band watching Bob hands on the guitar to know the changes. Typically they would play a song once and the next take or maybe two would end up being the final version. I was amazed by their ability to pull this off.  I’m sure what made this possible was the fact they had performed so many shows together and knew each other quite instinctively. That, plus the fact they were so incredibly talented.

Shangri-La was was put up for sale last year for a little over four million and sold for about two million, quite a bargain considering the gear, its history, and its location across from Zuma Beach.  I know the design was tweaked by the last owner, but does the studio still reflect your vision?  Do you know if it will continue to function as one of the last of the great analog recording studios?

Actually I was there about 18 months ago and it had changed very little from the original design. Beej Chaney was still the owner at that time. The thinking that went into the design of Shangri-La was to retain the feeling of a house and not to overdo the acoustic treatment. Some of the equipment had been changed but the layout and rooms were still as they were originally though they had of course been refurbished with time. The only architectural change was the opening of a rear window in the control room that we had covered. It did still have an analog multi-track but of course, ProTools had been installed as well. I tried to reach Beej just before the studio was sold, as Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros were interested in using it and I had heard he had sold the gear separately from the real estate.  I am not sure about its future as a studio.

Since almost every musician today is forced to be an engineer and producer, a predicament that reminds me of the old adage that only a fool has himself for a lawyer, what are the three best pieces of advice you can provide for recording today?

1. As an artist, be the artist and get at least one person to help. To really do yourself justice as a performer you need to be in your right (creative) brain. If one tries to engineer your own record you’ll find yourself constantly going back and forth between left and right brain. The technical side of engineering is initially left-brain. Get an engineer or at least a friend you can have assist you with these things while you’re performing. If you’re having to play everything yourself you’ll especially want someone to help you so you can be objective.

2. Have your studio setup done in advance and avoid confusion, the enemy of creativity. Keep it simple. This goes for your recording setup and your song arrangements. It’s easier to add than to take away. I find it preferable to use as few mics as possible and to carefully consider their placement. Generally speaking, further is better than closer.

3. Do your pre-production. Have a basic arrangement to build on and you’ll be able to have some spontaneity when it comes time to start recording. This will also help avoid the tendency to prop up a weak arrangement by overdubbing things to try to strengthen the song. You’ll find that the better your arrangement is, the better it will sound, too. Avoid doing too many takes in one sitting. If you’re not feeling it after a couple of takes, move on to another song and come back to the first one fresh, a little later. It’s much better to stick to one or two songs at a time and finish the recording of one song at a time, rather than cutting a number of rhythm tracks and having them all getting intermingled in your head. This helps keep more variety between songs.

Article written by Tamra Spivey

Newtopia staff writer TAMRA SPIVEY is a founding member and primary singer of Lucid Nation, executive producer of the documentary Viva Cuba Libre, and associate producer of The Gits documentary. She was art editor and west coast editor of Newtopia Magazine in its former incarnation, collaborating on in depth interviews with whistle blower Michael Ruppert, ACLU and record business honcho Danny Goldberg, and grassroots political strategist Larry Tramutola. Follow her on twitter @MongrelPatriot.

Queen to Play, 2011 (French)
Writer/Director — Caroline Bottaro
Actors — Sandrine Bonnaire as Helene, Kevin Kline as Kroger

Cinemashrink says:

If you’re afraid to make a commitment to what gives you pleasure
See Queen to Play and feel inspired to get in the game
Because if you don’t risk, you lose – and for sure, you can’t win.

Let the unexpected reign.  I love a story in which an ordinary person living an ordinary life comes upon an irresistible urge.  Against all odds, such a person plunges forward.  In the face of setbacks, they persist.   Following an invisible line of knowing not-knowing, they work hard.  They pick their way along a vein of dormant desire long ago left aside for practical reasons.  In Queen to Play, more delightfully called Joyeus in French which is the feminine form for player, a forty-ish cleaning woman making a bed in a hotel room can’t take her eyes off a couple on the balcony.  They’re playing chess.  Even after the woman wins, they continue laughing and loving.  The woman stands up, moves away from the table to stand at the railing.  The man follows, attentive and affectionate.  A subtle expression of surprise passes Helene’s eyes. Such a reaction goes against her expectation.  The two women exchange looks as if each knows what the other is thinking. How can a woman winning a game against her man enhance her attractiveness, spur greater pleasure and intimacy?  It’s a notable moment for Helene.  She buys a chess set and gives it to her husband as a gift.

So much said in such a small gesture.  Helene wants to feel beautiful, smart and well loved all in one swoop.  She longs to open a closed door of passion.  Her husband, however, simply shrugs his shoulders.  Chess holds no interest for him.  Helene is left on her own to discover where the desire will take her.  Never before has she been challenged to go beyond being a wife and mother, beyond being married.   What will it mean to follow the desire? Natural next phases of a life are often triggered by a moment of intense emotion.  It’s time for Helene to learn more about herself.

In a move quite out of character for her, she asks a reclusive ex-pat, Dr. Kroger, for whom she cleans house to teach her to play.  Kroger reluctantly agrees and slowly gets drawn into her determined effort.  First she surprises him by having a knack for chess.  Then she surprises him by beating him.  Then the relationship falters, shifts, starts, stalls and withstands reversals.  He makes mistakes.  He’s had a bad experience failing his deceased wife in her creative efforts to be a painter.  Helene withdraws.  She’s hurt by his apparent duplicity, admiring her in private and dismissing her as a cleaning woman in a letter of recommendation to play in a public tournament.  She has to insist, demand his respect.  That’s another step out of character for her.

He makes her accountable for her own gift.  As he reveals himself to her, he ventures, “No one can save another person.”  But then he goes on, telling her, “You have something that can’t be taught, not by another person, not in a class, not in a school.” She requires a partner to make the discovery of her passion but her gift is not contained, limited or defined by partnership.

As she goes public with her chess playing, Helene begins to shine.  She wins tournaments, triumphs over the best local players and gains an opportunity to leave Corsica and go to Paris.  Not surprisingly, her opportunities threaten to dim her marriage.  It takes time, takes her out of the house and takes her on her own path where she feels the conflict.  She’s a woman bound to the tradition of marriage and loves her husband.  For Helene, longtime wife and mother to a teenager, finding her gift as a master chess player is a little like discovering the queen is the strongest piece on a chessboard.  It upsets belief.

Helene’s relationship with Kroger, intensely erotic if not sexual, rouses her to a level of intimacy in which she feels equal.  She plays a determining role in what happens between them as well as on the board.  Intimacy where man and woman respect one another opens an unexpected sense of doing right by the other, challenging stereotypical scenarios.  We find ourselves being treated to a view of individual uniqueness that enhances rather that destroys the beauty of a situation.

As Helene steps forward as a first rate chess player, she draws upon the erotic energy of play with Kroger but she falls more in love with her husband than before.   She transforms her life and her marriage.  Helene’s awakening into full-blown womanhood becomes more than a delicious marshmallow for immediate consumption.  She releases Kroger from his guilt and then lifts her marriage as well as her life onto another level.  To see a new woman emerge from a game as old as chess…well, it’s a beautiful thing to watch.

Article written by Dr. Jane Alexander Stewart

Newtopia staff writer Jane Alexander Stewart, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles who writes essays about mythic themes in film, creates “Myth in Film; Myth in Your Life” seminars for self-exploration and travels a lot. Her film reviews have been published in the San Francisco C.G. Jung Library Journal, Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture and Los Angeles Journal of Psychological Perspectives.  Jane’s popular essay on “The Feminine Hero in The Silence of the Lambs” appears in the anthology, The Soul of Popular Culture, and in The Presence of the Feminine in Film as one of its authors. She’s also presented myth in film programs at Los Angeles County Museum, University of Alabama and C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich. A collection of her reviews and other writing can be found at www.CinemaShrink.com.

Did you ever hear the story of how your parents met?  We pretend America began with the Pilgrims but our unclaimed spiritual heritage starts much earlier.  According to the current consensus, twelve thousand years before European colonists landed, Paleolithic tribes arrived having hunted mammoths, mastodons, and caribou from generation to generation across a continent. They followed their prey in seasonal migrations through lichen rich spruce forests.  As the ice age declined and the mastodon died the hunters applied their skills to smaller game: moose, deer and elk.  By around 8000 BC they established regular camping spots in what we now call New England, then a great pine forest.  At first families gathered at these sites, then small communities of several families.

“If you want to be friends don’t ask me if that hat makes you look taller.”

By 6000 BC villages were forming near bays, lakes and rivers teeming with fish.  Instead of following the migration of their prey, the people could survive until the herds returned.   A thousand years later millstones were used for grinding grain, tools became more specialized.  A thousand years after that as pine trees disappeared the forest of oaks and hemlocks included plants, birds, animals and other residents we would recognize in all the rich variety the abundant new environment could provide at the close of the ice age.  Populations grew around the coast where great migrations of fish flourished in the warming waters.  Seal hunting and shellfish gathering provided not only food, but also new skills.  By 2500 BC sophisticated assemblies for catching fish were built.  One survives to this day: 65,000 wooden stakes driven into the riverbed.  Inserting brush between the stakes made a net to catch even the strongest fish.  Villages of circular lodges, replete with a ceremonial lodge, left burial mounds that showed great respect for the dead.  It took fifteen hundred more years for agriculture, and especially squash, beans, and corn cultivation, to arrive from the south.  But by 300 AD the natives were smoking tobacco out of neatly carved soapstone pipes that would not have looked out of place in a head shop in the 1960s.

To talk about native culture as if it were similar from coast to coast is impossible.  Over 550 languages were spoken and many had a variety of dialects as different from each other as the southern Californian dialect is from that in Scotland.  Religious beliefs, political organization, family traditions and every other aspect of life widely differed.  For example, not all natives lived in sustainable harmony with nature; the Mississippian culture for example developed urban centers that were doomed by the amount of resources they consumed.  However it can be said that in contrast to the colonists, native culture considered the world a sacred space.  Nature was not a fallen, cursed place.  The natural world was holy and living a good life depended on living in harmony with it.  Hunter and harvester both said prayers of apology and gratitude when taking the life of an animal or a plant.  The four directions were sacred, and since every ritual was intended to restore lost harmony, they began with prayers to the east, west, south and north.  Power could be found in the correspondences and resemblances of everything in their world, and every thing deserved respect, not only for having meaning, but also for having consciousness.  As Black Elk would say, around the time Elvis was getting started, a message from the Great Spirit could come from a messenger as small as an ant.  Nothing in nature was without spiritual essence; even a stone could have a soul.

What’s left of the first big city in America

The first great North American urban society we now call Mississippian.  Archeologists have found Mississippian sites, circa 150-750 AD, along the Florida Gulf Coast and in the valleys of Alabama and Georgia.  The Mississippian culture split into at least seventeen of the indigenous nations still with us, from the Rockies to the eastern seaboard.  Around 800 AD they built a native metropolis across the river from what is now St. Louis.  The area may have been settled as early as 1200 BC but in the early 1100s AD the inhabitants built a two-mile stockade around their city, with guard towers every seventy feet.  Within a hundred years the city was larger than London or Paris at the time, and probably quite a bit cleaner.  At the peak of its population it housed an estimated 40,000 natives in a complex of plazas and 120 earthen mounds covering six square miles.  The great mound covers fourteen acres, rises 100 feet, and was topped by a massive 5,000 square-foot building another fifty feet high.

Woodhenge, a circle of posts used to mark the solstices and equinoxes, stood to the west of the great mound.  Archeologists also discovered the remains of a copper workshop, and evidence of what may have been ritual human sacrifice, apparently the executed were meant to follow some celebrated leader into the afterlife.  Rulers lived in wooden houses on platforms atop the mounds.  Their favorite ornaments were made of seashells traded for with tribes a thousand miles away.  Farms surrounding the city supplied it with corn, beans, squash, pumpkin and the other necessities of daily life.  The complex was abandoned a hundred years before Columbus arrived.  Resources in the area may have been depleted, or an urban disease may have broken out.  The natives scattered to live as hunters and gatherers.  Later they began to breed the horses brought by the Europeans and to hunt buffalo on the plains.

Just as the European colonists were travelers to the furthest edge of their known world, so too were these tribes the descendants of several waves of immigrants who traveled not only across the Bering Straight but also all the way across the North American continent to its furthest edge.  But their culture would be lost in just a few generations.  By the late fifteenth century English, French and Portuguese explorers were arriving in America hoping to find the kind of incredible wealth the Spanish had exploited further south.  Fishing crews, especially English and French, used the beaches of North America to dry their summer catches.  By the time the first English settlements were attempted there was already almost a century of interaction between natives and Europeans.

NATIVE SEASONS: LIFE BEFORE EUROPEANS

No wheel tracks

How did the Algonquins live before the Europeans arrived?  Spring began when green shoots sprouted and the wild geese returned.  This was the time to repair fishing gear and prepare canoes.  By late March smelt arrived, so many you could grab them out of the water with your hands.  By April spawning sturgeon and salmon provided most of the food, while fields were sewn.  In early May ocean cod and freshwater trout, striped bass, and flounder were added to the feast along with scallops, clams, crabs, oysters and mussels gathered by the women and children who also snared ducks and collected their eggs which were twice as large as those of European hens.  They tapped the sugar maples for syrup.  Every year the natives would burn away the thick bramble of the woods.  This not only made travel easier, but animals more visible for hunters; one Pilgrim said a deer could be seen from four miles away.  Burning the underbrush also encouraged the growth of grass, berries and other delicacies loved by prey.

Spring was for freshwater fishing in streams.  The men fished by day, using weirs and nets, funneling the fish to the place where they would be most vulnerable.  Beans spiraled up the corn stalks, fertilizing with nitrogen, while melons growing on the ground below helped preserve moisture.  Native tradition told of a crow that came from the west bearing a corn kernel and a bean.  In appreciation the natives never killed crows.  Some tribes built small covered platforms where a native would sit scaring the birds away from the crops.  Others had tame hawks to scare crows.  While most fields were gardens, some colonists reported several hundred cultivated acres of white, red, yellow and blue corn.  But it did not grow easily, and the natives would often remind the colonists that not only did they have to be taught how to grow it, but their results were always inferior.  One reason for this was that the English simply couldn’t resist the urge to neatly divide their crops, thus missing out on the synergy enjoyed by promiscuous native fields.  The English attitude can best be understood by considering the changes in the definitions of two words.  Today natural has mostly positive connotations, while artificial is often viewed with suspicion.  For the English colonists and their relatives back home natural meant rude and undeveloped, while artificial was a compliment, indicating that human artifice had improved on nature.

In the summer women carefully weeded gardens of corn, beans, squash, cucumbers, Jerusalem artichokes, pumpkins, sunflowers and gourds.  When the soil was exhausted every decade or so the natives would move to another location where they would fell trees to make new gardens.  Men had their own gardens, too, where they tended tobacco. Tobacco was used as a gift to be thrown into the air, on the ground, or in the water, in thanks for a successful hunt, good fishing, an escape from danger, or victory in battle.  A pinch was dropped into the water before bathing every morning.  To quell a storm they would throw it into the elements.  For good luck they’d toss some on a hunting trap.  If they escaped from danger the tobacco was not enough, they would stamp, dance, clap their hands, or turn them palms up looking at the sky.  The Europeans thought it all some strange ritual but animals in nature do similar things after escaping danger, except the tobacco.  I imagine most of us have danced, and emitted strange words with our eyes and our hands heavenward after one close call or another.

In July and August, children gathered cranberries, raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, and grapes.  Men hunted deer, moose, ducks, geese, swans, and turkey.   When passenger pigeons in huge flocks that blocked out the sun arrived women and children would knock them off their perches with a long stick like abundant fruit on a mature peach tree.  The women along with all their other duties would find time to locate clay banks for their baked pottery.  The men tended their snares, and their traps, including dead falls of precariously balanced tree trunks piled with rocks so heavy they could kill a bear.  Summer was for fishing in the sea.  During the day they hunted seals, porpoises, walruses and whales.  Night fishing by torchlight, they speared the fish attracted by the glow.

Torch fishing on a warm summer night under the full moon…good times.

Summer was also a time of gathering for celebration.  Stick ball, lacrosse, running races, stone throwing, archery contests, dance competitions, were all performed before appreciative audiences, including a native game comparable to soccer but the field, a sandy beach, was a mile long, and the game took two days to play.  Tripping an opponent was allowed in England at the time, but not among the natives.  Some of our most iconic American foods came from these tribes.  Popcorn, Johnnycakes, snow cones (the cone was bark, the snow was sweetened with maple sugar and syrup), baked beans, hominy, succotash and clambakes were all inventions of the New England natives.  They had infant formula if a mother had no milk, and “no cakes” as they called a simple pounded parched corn cake.  Four days worth could be kept easily in a small pouch tied to a hunter’s belt to be mixed with water whenever needed.

In the fall as the leaves turned red and gold firewood was stacked.  Bird flocks were hunted as they resumed migration.  Wild nuts, acorns and wild herbs were gathered.  Corn ripened and some was stored for the harsh winter months.  The big harvest came in September and the abundance was boiled, dried, and sacked.  Inside the village stockade five foot deep and five foot in diameter pits lined with clay and bark were filled with containers of reeds, silk grass, dried tree bark, and wild hemp full of sun dried berries, smoked meat, walnuts, and acorns.

In winter the tribe gathered for two main deer drives.  Large groups of several hundred natives cooperated to chase a herd of deer into a funnel of fences where hunters stood ready.  Fishing through holes chipped in the ice provided extra food.  This was a quiet time spent with family.   Women cured furs, making them into clothes and blankets.   Men carved holes into lucky stones to wear as reminders of spiritual experiences.  Winter was a time of feast or famine.  When meat was served the band might eat ten times in a day and then fast for days until the next successful hunt.  Winter ended with a healthful one-hour steam for the entire tribe, followed by a cold plunge into a lake or stream, a health regimen popular throughout America’s history of alternative healing.

The earliest Thanksgiving on the continent was not the turkey dinner of the Pilgrims we celebrate yearly.  Many tribes had Thanksgiving ceremonies.  The Seneca tribe of the Iroquois League performed their Thanksgiving ritual for all-important events except death.  Before the assembled tribe the story was told of how the Creator invented all the good things of this world with forethought for the well being of his human creations.  Herbs to be used as medicine, and the moon to give light in the night, all these promises were fulfilled.  As the story is told the orderliness and harmony of the world is revealed.  Gratitude is given.  The Creator inspires love and thankfulness in the people; appreciation as worship.  Natives quietly prayed before every meal whether alone or together.  A Roman Catholic observer in Maryland noted that the first corn, or first fruits of hunting or fishing were prayed over by an old shaman, who would take a portion, burn half, then eat the other half; only then would the tribe partake. While some English writers reported native feasts where they ravenously ate everything and saved nothing for the future, when natives were invited to eat with the colonists they showed good manners, not only eating reasonable portions but waiting for their hosts to sit down before beginning their meals.

Festivals of dancing, singing and feasting were held in early spring, late summer and midwinter, and for turning points in the human life cycle, with ceremonies of naming, puberty, marriage and death.  Special festivals of ritual were held during times of sickness, famine, drought or war.  But individual natives were known to create personal ceremonies.  One colonist tells of a native woman who having suffered many hardships and the deaths of close relatives chose a day and place where she spoke of her troubles, declared her intent to have a prosperous future, danced, gave away gifts to the poor, and received a new name. We’re not far here from American Metaphysical Religion’s belief in self-reinvention and rebirth.

LIFE BEFORE EUROPEANS: RELATIONSHIPS

Home sweet home Iroquois style

Incest taboos were strictly observed.  English writers reported that sexual freedom was allowed before marriage, including homosexual relationships.  But most writers admitted the native women were more modest than the gals back home. Unmarried Algonquin women could sleep with any unmarried Algonquin men, but to become pregnant outside marriage was a disgrace.  Fortunately the Algonquin women knew what herbs to take, a stark contrast with the Puritans who could only condemn what they considered promiscuity and infanticide.  The opposing opinions on the abortion issue that so deeply divide America existed at the very root of the country, at first contact between the natives and the colonists.  We cannot doubt that this argument only added to the Puritan sense of moral authority; but one wonders if they ever pondered the fact that rape did not exist among the natives, even captive females from enemy tribes were safe.  While Europeans sold captive women and children into slavery, the Iroquois adopted them into families who had lost loved ones to war.  Enemy warriors however were usually not so fortunate, as we’ll see later.

The Iroquois League has often been called an inspiration to the democracy of the United States of America, mostly on the basis of Benjamin Franklin’s caustic remark: “It would be a very strange thing, if six Nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a Scheme for such a Union … and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a Dozen English Colonies.”  But we have no proof that the founding fathers considered the government of the Iroquois when designing their own, and if they did they certainly left out a key aspect of that native culture.  Iroquois women were property owners; hereditary leadership passed not through fathers but through mothers. Women owned dwellings, horses and farmed land, and her property prior to marriage was never mixed with her husband’s.  Newlywed couples lived with the wife’s family.  Divorce was as easy as asking a bad husband to leave home and take his possessions with him, but one English writer reported that he knew many native couples who had been married two, three, even four decades.

A few English writers alleged that prostitution, the trade of goods for sexual favors, was practiced.  Reports conflicted regarding the fidelity of spouses.  All writers agree loyalty was cherished, but some say philandering was acceptable, while others insist adultery was severely punished.  Perhaps it depended on the tribe.  Polygamy was available to chiefs but even they usually had one wife, though some had several.  However as tribes broke down due to disease and warfare it became more common for powerful chiefs to take many wives, solidifying alliances between tribes.  The natives were very puzzled indeed when told that the King of England had no wife.  They wondered how anything got done in his household.

English observations on gender relations among the natives emphasized that the men seemed lazy while the women did all the work.  On the other hand, the natives thought English women were lazy and were scandalized that male colonists worked the fields without their women.  Native women were portrayed as living lives little better than beasts of burden or slaves, while their men hunted and cultivated tobacco, lounging and smoking like British gentlemen.  The truth was more complex.  Women planted, cared for the crops and harvested.  They preserved and prepared food.  They built houses, and when the tribe moved they carried the poles and woven mats from which their dwellings were built.  These woven mats provided such excellent insulation from rain and sleet the colonists would steal them when they couldn’t barter for them. When men fished they tossed their catch on the bank and the women fetched and prepared the fish.  When men hunted, women dragged the kill to the place where they would make it into food, skins, rope and tools.  With great care the women kept the hearth fires; if it went out that was a bad omen.  But men were known to help with the crops.  Men cleared the fields, or the fields were cleared and later harvested by the gathered tribe.  Tribal chiefs made their own bows and arrows, shoes and clothes, as well as planting and hunting for themselves.  Many writers commented on how hardy native women were.  One testified he had seen a new mother with her four-day old baby strapped to her back digging clams out of the ice for her husband.  The English also failed to notice that the women owned the corn they grew and the houses they carried.  Menstrual huts provided segregated sanctuary for women monthly.  Women preferred to give birth in solitude.

An Iroquois woman, a warrior, and a false face dancer pose self-consciously.

Many English writers commented on the affection shown by native families.  They noticed how quiet the tenderly cared for native children were.  They criticized the way the aged back home in England were treated in comparison to the respect and consideration shown to native elders.  Native fathers doted on their children and hated to be separated from them.  Their adopted fathers regarded colonist children captured by the natives and raised within their families with just as much affection. This made all the more heinous the colonist strategy, advocated by John Smith, of kidnapping native children to make the tribes compliant to colonist demands.

Children were bathed in concoctions that were said to make them nearly impervious to any kind of weather.  Buried up to their necks in snow they learned how to ignore the cold.  By age two boys began training with bows and arrows.  English writers praised the superior health and physical powers of the natives.  Until the devastation wrought by European diseases the natives had lived without the scourges that made life miserable back home in Europe.  Natives suffered neither from gout nor colds.  Their senses astonished the colonists.  Thomas Morton himself witnessed a native with eyesight so sharp he sited a ship at sea two hours before any Englishman could.  Tom also reports on a native who could tell fresh deer tracks from old just by the sight and smell of them.

In oral traditions written down by historians and folklorists at the beginning of the 19th century we find records of advice given from fathers to sons that provide a unique glimpse of the native worldview.  Fasting is the means to gain favor from the spirits the creator put in charge of giving blessings.  These spirits of the waters, of the sky, of animals and of plants give wisdom and power to those who earn their respect. Tobacco being loved by all spirits offering some to be poured on the ground or thrown into water or the air would inspire blessings.  Apparently one thing all creatures of Earth would agree on was the pleasure of a good smoke. To have no spirit helping you was to live a bad life.  Even one spirit could guide a man through life’s “narrow passages,” multiplying the goods things of life and preventing suffering.  To live in harmony with life was to live a trouble free life, a life blessed by good timing and good sense, one of the foundational beliefs of American Metaphysical Religion.  Why fasting?  Of course, food could not always be counted on.  By fasting a man could learn to go without, allowing his family to have more.  Fasting also produced trance states including a heightened sense of awareness; it naturally inspires meditation, and a contemplative state of mind.

Stay the fuck away from white men, son.

Fathers also told their sons to learn all the medicines.  Medicines were mostly herbal, but they could also be methods of gaining shamanic power.  Medicine could heal the sick, reduce hunger or cause it, induce a man to run after women, or a woman to fall in love.  Medicine included the knowledge of how to prepare a field with signs that would keep out intruders, and to prepare war paint, which contained power of the spirits of water, so that every arrow or bullet would miss, and victory was assured.  But to die at war was best.  Men were told not to listen to their women who would try to keep them home safe from battle.  To die in battle meant to die conscious.  To then have the power to consciously choose whether to be reborn as a man, a mighty stag, or a walker on the light, as birds were known.  Spirits, birds and animals were to be spoken to like any other person except by singing, chanting and prayers. They were not inferior; they were other.  “To be alive now on the Earth” was a bond between all beings, and a gift of responsibility from your ancestors and the Creator.

The morality taught was not so different from Christian ethics.  Feed the hungry, always share your food or your food becomes poisonous.  Show gratitude for all you receive from the Earth.  Treat your wife with kindness for the Earth is your grandmother and sees all and if you are cruel she will cause you to live a life of suffering and early death.  Be good to your children.  Get along with everyone.  Take care of old people and learn from them.  When you share your war stories don’t exaggerate, be humble.  Don’t be jealous or your sisters will join in and your wife will become annoyed and leave you.  Keep your word and guard your honor.  Don’t ask a second question until the first has been fully answered.  Give to the poor.  Learn which plants heal the sick, so you can heal yourself and your own family, and be asked to heal others.

While natives could be said to own the tools they made, their snares and weirs, and the prey caught in them, they were also obligated to share their possessions and their food for the good of the tribe.  The native reputation for stealing began early when European visitors misunderstood the ritual of reciprocal gift giving.  The natives gave gifts and when the Europeans didn’t give them gifts in return the natives took a gift they considered to be of equal value.  Europeans, on the other hand, frequently used force to take whatever they needed.

Among the natives, orphans and widows were cared for, no one was reduced to begging for their survival.  Meanwhile the City of London would soon be shipping starving street children to the colonies.  Strangers were welcomed by chiefs, given shelter, food, and entertained according to their station.  Natives were known to go far out of their way, and to face danger, to rescue and return home hapless colonists dying in the wilderness.

Some English writers exaggerated war among the natives, based on evidence as trivial as after dinner shows commemorating battles.  Roger Williams testified that their warfare was much less bloody than war in Europe, with very few casualties, perhaps twenty in pitched battle.  Another observer wrote that in seven years they might lose only seven men.  Rattles of various sizes and primitive flutes along with shouting and singing were used to frighten off the enemy.  When John Smith tried to get corn from the natives they refused him.  When his party tried to take the corn by force they were met by several dozen natives painted red, black and white who charged them with an idol made of skins stuffed with moss, hung with chains and copper.  They expected to chase the English away with a loud display of spiritual force, but the colonists fired their guns, frightening the natives into dropping the fetish.  To get it back they offered a canoe stuffed with corn, venison, and turkey.

Most battles ended with a few wounds or one of the opponents running out of arrows.  Even the most concentrated native attacks on the colonists would not be followed by more attacks until annihilation.  The natives were accustomed to their enemies withdrawing.  They expected that after being soundly defeated the English would leave and never return.  Wars were not fought for land.  They were fought to get more women and children to be incorporated into the tribe, because their work was the most important sort of wealth.  War could be avoided by giving objects of value to the aggrieved in cases of revenge, and even by gambling and games.  No fights erupted.  A player might lose everything he owned but he would not argue.  Thunder stones, pieces of crystal or perhaps meteorite dug from the ground under lightning struck trees were considered the ultimate good luck charms for gamblers. Hubhub, for example, was played with peach pits painted white on one side and black on the other.  Tossed into a shallow basket the player would have to guess how many of each color would show.

As the colonists sought to learn native languages the natives tried to teach them, but they taught simplified versions of their dialects.  Many Europeans developed the mistaken opinion that native languages were simple, lacking fine distinctions, but the truth was that the natives were deliberately teaching a dumbed down dialect so they could preserve the privacy and accuracy of their own communications.  Observant colonists noticed that even those among them who were said to be fluent in native language had no idea what was being said when natives were speaking amongst themselves.  Roger Williams was an exception to that rule.  He understood the subtlety and detail of the native languages.  He pointed out that they had five words for soul, and that they believed the principle seat of the soul in the body was the brain. One word for soul was related to their word for sleep, because the soul was most active in dreams.  Another word for soul was related to their word for the image of a clear reflection.  The great American linguist Edward Sapir described Algonquin words as “tiny imagist poems.”

ROGER WILLIAMS: THE FIRST FOUNDING FATHER?

He respected your right to your religion, even though Satan made it up.

Natives watching Christians pray with eyes turned to the heavens asked politely whether this was moon worship, or sun worship, then laughed quietly wondering which star was held in such special esteem by the newcomers.  Meanwhile the English wondered what it could mean when hundreds of native men stamped on the ground, then beat sticks on stones, then beat the stones on the ground, looking around as if expecting some imminent arrivals.

Ironically, to begin to talk about the spiritual beliefs of the natives of New England we must first understand a certain Puritan writer.  But Roger Williams was an English Puritan a bit different from the sort that colonized Plymouth.  He arrived with his wife Mary in America in 1631 where he was immediately invited to become assistant minister, presiding over Boston church while its minister returned to England to fetch the wife.  Roger created quite a stir when he turned down the position, explaining that the civil authorities should have no right to punish religious infractions, and that every colonist should have freedom of conscience to pursue religion as he or she saw fit.  His invitation to preach in Salem was blocked by Boston.  He was allowed to enlighten Plymouth, but became disenchanted.  He wanted to see a stricter separation between church and state.

Roger faced trial in Boston, and his writings were burned.  His attempts to set up a colony reflecting his beliefs, and those of his followers, were fought until at last he sojourned far from the beaten path and bargained with the natives themselves for the land that would become known as Rhode Island.  With twelve friends he established the town of Providence.  This colony of heresy was considered a threat, but when the Pequot War broke out the powers that be had to rely on the intelligence provided by Roger and his followers, and many lives were saved because he convinced his friends the Narragansett tribe not to join in the attack.  For thirty years the colonies of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Plymouth had worked to undermine and destroy Providence and the Narragansett tribe, and gratitude was not a good enough reason to stop.  Finally in 1643 they formed the United Colonies military alliance to purify America by wiping out the heretics.  That same year Williams published his book A Key Into the Language of America, printed by the great Protestant poet John Milton’s own printer. The book was a great success in England.  When Williams returned there to seek legal protection for Providence to the dismay of the other colonies he got it.

Williams was disgusted by the religious wars ravaging Europe and his homeland.  He blamed them on the use of government to impose religion.  He declared that civic authority should have no right to prosecute over religious dogma.  The towns that had sprung up around Providence eventually joined in the formation of Rhode Island, which became  a sanctuary for Jews, Quakers, Baptists and all square pegs who could not fit the round holes of American Puritan society.  His contemporaries thought him something like an anarchist and believed his ideas could lead only to disaster.  They were equally chagrined that he not only declared the natives as good as any Europeans, but more, once he had learned their language, and their customs, he refused to try to convert them to Christianity.

Williams was the most trusted Englishman among the natives.  Sadly, when King Philip’s War was waged by the tribes to eliminate all the colonists in 1676, (one hundred years before the birth of the United States of America), Providence and Roger’s own home, were burned.  The story is told that Roger marched right up to the natives and demanded to know why they had burned to ashes a home so many had been sheltered by.  He was told that the times were strange and that God was angry at the English for their many injustices.  Williams guided the rebuilding of Providence over the next dozen years before this defender of what he called “soul liberty” died peacefully in his bed.

Roger Williams had this understated stamp version of the famous Obama hope poster.

According to Williams, the natives had words for themselves as a collective people, as tribes and as individuals but they had no word for stranger until the Europeans arrived.  The Europeans came from a culture where the stranger was a fearful and long held concept, back beyond the Romans with their contempt and eventual terror of barbarians, to ancient Egypt and their dreaded god red Set, a god of liars and strangers, perhaps the first prototype for the Christian Satan.  The natives had viewed all people as part of one great family of human beings, but the Europeans had a long tradition of fearing people across borders.

The natives differed from the Europeans in another crucial way.  To the native culture, for example, the sun itself was a living being, a non-human person, a conscious God pouring blessings of light and warmth upon the world.  To the Natives consciousness created form, not the other way around.  Everything in the world, animals, plants, stones, were respected as conscious beings.  For the Europeans with their monotheistic God and their hierarchical Bible promising them all living things as their bounty, the world was not a cosmic dance of living forces.  At best it was a clock that had been created by divine consciousness.  Plants and animals lacked souls.  The sun was merely there to serve humans, as was everything else in the world.  Since incarnation was caused by sin the world itself was a sinful place where beauty was a snare and eternal suffering must lurk behind every temporary joy.  Even today this perspective persists as certain schools of modern Christians advocate using up all natural resources, which will run out just before the divinely appointed end of the world.

Though he had many deep discussions with natives about their spirituality, Roger Williams refused to attend their rituals, because he considered any religion either than his own the work of the devil.  For the same reason he would not attend Anglican or Catholic rituals.  But he did write of the great feasts of the Narrangansetts, that might involve a thousand people, who would be given not only food but gifts of every kind, accompanied by rituals so strenuous the shamans glistening with perspiration would sometimes faint.  Some natives burned their worldly goods in bonfires during these feasts of thanksgiving, and believed this sacrifice kept them free of diseases and other curses that troubled the Europeans.  Since trading with the newcomers had made some tribes unusually wealthy this return to the more modest ways of the past may have been understood as a way of restoring balance and harmony to the native world.

Here is perhaps the most famous paragraph by Roger Williams on native beliefs: “There is a general Custom amongst them, at the apprehension of any Excellency in Men, Women, Birds, Beasts, Fish, etc to cry out Manittou, that is, it is a God, as thus if they see one man exile others in wisdom, valor, strength, activity, etc they cry out Manittou A God: and therefore when they talk amongst themselves of the English ships, and great buildings, of the plowing their fields, and especially of books and letters they will end thus: Manitowock.  They are gods.  Cummanitoo, you are a god, etc.”

The natives so loved to receive news of current events that a colonist who could update them in their own language was declared manitou.  Among the Dutch colonists this was spelled menetoo, and they explained it as applying to anything that was beyond human skill and power.  Wonderful has been offered as a translation, but is perhaps too meek a word.  Manitou might be compared to classic southern California surfer slang: a wave or a song or any special moment might be described as “godly” but manitou was no mere adjective for emotional appreciation. Like the Iroquois word orenda, manitou referred to a supernatural voltage of holy or magical power, power that is local not omnipresent, specific not omnipotent, like a spirit shining through matter.  The sensitive orenda of a hunted animal who escaped a skilled hunter was said to have foiled the hunter’s orenda.  But the term was also applied to something unexpected, surprising or uncanny because unknown.  To the natives the world was filled with spirits that could be known by seeing them, hearing them, feeling them emotionally, dreaming of them, and by the signs and results they provided.

WHEN SPIRITUAL WORLDS COLLIDE

Tough room

While Williams remains an essential source for understanding native spirituality in dialogue with European spirituality, modern scholarship has given us a much more comprehensive view.  Shamans could be roughly divided into two classes, those whose responsibility was healing and worship, and others who provided military and spiritual leadership.  Thomas Harriot noted that their ability to predict the future, or report the location of enemies or prey, was so accurate he ascribed their skills to the devil.  They could bring rain during droughts.  They were called to find lost or stolen people or objects.  Many of their skills were the same as those of the cunning men and women back home in England, witches in all but name, tolerated by the common folk and nobility for their useful skills.  The shamans knew how to communicate with the gods, usually in swamps.  They could visit the spirit world, usually in dreams, and return with crucial information, unusually accurate.  They knew how to summon and banish spirits.  They shared a language known only to other shamans.  Their hairstyles and other adornments of office such as a cloak of quilted rabbit fur made them readily recognizable.  The colonists reported that Cheepi and other gods and spirits were said to directly materialize in their rituals.  But then Cotton Mather reported the materialization of an angel into his own study.

Sometimes instead of seeing apparitions shamans heard voices that guided them.  In fact, the shamanic tradition has some close parallels with what became trance channeling, a popular practice of American Metaphysical Religion.  Shamans who exhausted themselves dancing around the flame, hitting themselves to inspire greater effort, consuming intoxicating brews, would at last fall into a trance.  As they lay on the ground senseless the chiefs would ask them questions and receive answers.

The brightest, strongest boys were chosen for shamanic training.  Fasting, and lack of sleep, were augmented by hallucinogenic brews, some of which included white hellebore.  They beat their shins with sticks, according to one European author, forcing them to run through brambles into the cold, making them tough; the exhaustion and stress contributed to the power of their visions.

Shamans could treat individuals or convene a family or entire tribe for ritual healing.  For the ritual of a great chief a thousand might attend.  Williams reports that the shamans conjured and threatened illness out of the victim’s body.  The natives believed that divine powers live in the human body, in the pulse, heart, and breath and the shamans would communicate with these powers, sucking out bad spirits, imitating the sounds of various animals, hitting their own arms, chests, thighs, even frothing at the mouth in the delirium of the ritual.  Stroking the skin with their hands or a rattle, sprinkling the body with water, they would chant.  Fresh or powdered herbal applications were applied to wounds sucked free of poison. Williams admitted the cures were often dramatic but of course believed they were provided by the devil.  Shamans received generous gifts for their cures, and Williams criticized them for it because natives were forced to save up so they could afford the services of their greedy doctors.  He pointed out that the poor received less lavish treatments and seemed to succumb to their illnesses much more often.  He did not however mention the same state of affairs more or less among the Europeans back home.  Williams believed Christian ministers should not accept salaries, and that healing performed by the power of Christ should always be free, one of his points of agreement with the Rosicrucian manifestos that had been circulating around the time he was a child back in England.  Williams may never have encountered these revolutionary tracts, he certainly never mentions them, but as we shall see in the next and last installment of this three part series the culture he emerged from was deeply informed by their ideas and ambitions.

Drawing of Algonquin female shaman’s dream vision circa 1852.  What’s up with that guy with rays around his head wearing a referee shirt?

Natives reported that the most powerful shamans could produce a green leaf in dead of winter, turn a dried snakeskin into a living snake, surround themselves with an aura of flames, make rocks move, trees dance, and water burn.  An eyewitness account recorded by one European writer claims an honest gentleman of his acquaintance testified to a healing where the stump of a small tree stuck in a native’s foot was wrapped in beaver skin, the shaman put his mouth to the beaver skin and using sucking and other charms removed it, spat it into a tray of water, and revealed the foot healed.  Other witnesses reported tests reminiscent of Houdini: shamans bound in iron chains and carefully watched who always broke free. Cotton Mather testified that shamans had the power to quiet dogs.

The shamans were so deeply respected by their people one reverend in Virginia in 1621 fumed that the only hope for conversion was to slit the throats of every last one of them.  One wonders how the ideal represented by Jesus the Prince of Peace who taught his followers to teach only by example relates to such a violent fantasy of redemption.  What must have that reverend thought about Colonial America’s first practitioner of a gender alternative lifestyle, Thomas Hall?  In 1629 Hall faced the General Court of Virginia.  Hearing that Hall sometimes dressed as a woman he was set upon by several colonists who wanted to find out exactly what was going on underneath his clothes.  Hall testified that he had lived as a woman in Plymouth where he did needlework, but earlier had served as a male soldier for the British Army against the French.  Upon physical examination it was found that Hall was a hermaphrodite so the court decreed he must wear man’s clothes but a woman’s cap and apron.

Thomas Morton reported on another shaman who amazed his colonist audience by chanting until a thick cloud arrived out of nowhere.  Thunder resounded and  a chunk of ice appeared in the bowl of water on a hot summer day.  As usual, Satan was given credit for the demonstration.  Colonists also reported cases of being bewitched by shamans.  Hearing “oho” chanted in the dark outside their settlement one group of English testified that they became so confused they began fighting with each other, wielding the wrong ends of their tools, they found they could say only “oho” and had lost the power to communicate with each other.

But the shamans could not stop the diseases brought by the Europeans.  Because the colonists sent by Sir Walter Raleigh did not get sick, and because they brought no women with them, Thomas Harriot reported that the natives thought the English an ancient race who had taken bodies again, and they had brought with them English spirits who shot the invisible bullets that killed the natives with disease.  When a native living among them as a sort of ambassador told the tribes that the Pilgrims had a cache of these invisible bullets buried in the ground behind their stockade walls, most of the English were outraged, but some found the ruse useful.

Shamans could also practice malevolent magic.  They were said to be able to send rattlesnakes to kill their enemies.  One shaman was supposed to have by ritual forced the uneasy spirit of a drowned Englishman into the body of a native woman who became very ill.  Another shaman removed it, but told her to relocate far away, for English spirits were difficult to control.  Shamans could “shoot bones” into people’s bodies and these embedded spiritual fragments became the source of pain and disease.  To have a fragment of foreign bone festering in the body is a good metaphor for the localized pain of a disease. This belief isn’t far from Mary Baker Eddy’s conviction that she was being killed by the expectations of death thought by her contemporaries.

Souls were especially vulnerable during sleep and a shaman might steal a fragment of an enemy’s soul and attach it to a fly, which he then imprisoned.  Whatever he did to the fly would then be reflected in the condition of the victim’s body.  Some of the shamanic rituals for war resemble the sympathetic magical practices of ancient Egypt.  Egyptian priests would make figures that represented pharaoh’s enemies then with appropriate ritual and prayer crush them under foot.  Native American warriors would choose fire brands out of the bonfire and mock fight them, until every warrior had thus vanquished a symbol of the enemy.

The natives carved and painted black and white four foot tall idols kept in crude temples.  Thomas Harriot reported that the simpler among the natives considered the carvings themselves to be gods, while the more sophisticated understood them as symbols.

False face-masks of the Delaware tribe or your parents’ unexpected visit?

Certainly some of the glamour of a shaman was the result of bravado.  In an early interaction between a shaman and a colonist, when the colonist interceded to protect a terrified native, the thwarted shaman made terrible threats, promising he’d fly out the chimney and leave the house in ruins behind him.  The colonist promptly seized the shaman, tied him up, hung him on a hook and horsewhipped him.  Apparently neither he nor the intended native victim suffered any repercussions, but the shaman lost his status with the tribe.

Today many psychics and ghost hunters insist that the presence of skeptics weakens the phenomena.  Thoughts are things, they say, and doubt and mockery create a gravity that makes it difficult to encounter the more subtle aspects of experience. Natives were so sensitive to mockery war was often the result of an important leader being laughed at.  Many shamans refused to work in the presence of Europeans.  Shamans told their tribes that their visions and cures were much less powerful when colonists stood judgment over them.  The nexus between belief and will is at the crux of the magical tradition, and the positive thinking movement that evolved from it.  To illustrate this point from literature, when Éowyn slays the Lord of the Nazgûl in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien makes clear that its not a blade that breaks the spell of apparent invulnerability but the doubt engendered in the wizard’s mind by the gender of the attacker.

Traditions and history were kept by carefully chosen lore keepers in separate male and female lines of transmission.  History was also preserved by simple memorials.  The grave of a hero would have a stone added to it by every respectful passerby.  Where any remarkable event happened, at the place or on the path nearby, they would dig a foot deep round hole, which would be kept clear for generations as the story of what happened there was shared with anyone who noticed the subtle monument.

The two greater gods of the Algonquins had several names.  The benevolent god, Tanto was his simplest name, was removed from human affairs.  The god Squanto or Cheepi, was intimately involved in daily life, and he was feared for his power to bring harm.  Death, the cold wind of the northeast, and the underworld belonged to him.  The colonists associated Cheepi with Satan, of course.  The shaman’s job was to learn the ways of Cheepi, to protect the tribe with ritual, to divine the meaning of troubles, and to communicate with and learn from this fearsome deity in dreams and visions. But there were many other gods, some placed the number at 37, including gods of the directions, of places, of the stars, sun, and moon, of women and of children.  Each member of the tribe could have a personal god, a spirit, who would give guidance in dreams.

One English writer preserved a native’s opinion of fire: “…fire must be a God, or Divine power, that out of a stone will arise in a spark and when a poor naked Indian is ready to starve with cold in the House, and especially in the Woods, often saves his life, dresses all our Food for us, and if it be angry will burn the House about us.  Yea, a spark fall in the dry wood, burns up the Country.”  The native view of all nature as the interplay of conscious beings (rather than lifeless matter), was dismissed by critics of 20th century art and literature as “the pathetic fallacy.”

The living fire of the natives was not just a fallacy, but also pathetic, according to 20th century experts on snarky putdowns.

Christian writers reported that Cheepi threatened the natives not to live near the English, and not to learn their language, warning that they would be punished by diseases.  But Cheepi was not only a god of fear and harm; he also gave the natives the gifts of skills they used to master their environment.  He could inspire them to excellence.  Much as the Christian god was a god of both fear and love, so was Cheepi, for he loved the people and they love him.  Through his power they were healed, and received foreknowledge of important challenges and opportunities in the future.  He led them to prey on the hunt, taught them to plant and harvest, and guided even the most simple native folk through signs and omens.  The very power of plants and animals to grow, and of fruit to ripen was the gift of Cheepi.  But Cheepi was also the judge of human behavior, visiting punishment on those who deserved it.  Part of a shaman’s job was to divine what someone had done to deserve suffering.  Cheepi’s sacred color was black and the first Africans in America were frightening apparitions to the natives who sought to conjure the spirit back to its place.

The colonists were confused by the many creation stories they were told.  The Great Hare created the four directions.  He made men and women, and a deer.  Giant spirits tried to eat them but they were only able to kill the deer.  So the Great Hare spread the hairs of the deer over all the land, from which sprang all the wild deer of the American woods.  Then the Great Hare took the human beings out of the bag and put them on the land to hunt the deer.  Roger Williams reported that the Algonquin creator God first created a man and woman out of stone but displeased with them he broke them then made a new man and new woman out of a tree.  Thomas Harriot reported that the first human created had been a woman, and a God had given her the power to give birth to humanity.

When confronted with native creation and religious beliefs we face a chasm of misunderstandings.  Were the natives sharing their true beliefs?  The history of anthropology is filled with stories of tribes who have misinformed researchers for long periods of time before deciding they had earned the right to hear the real stories.  Did the colonists understand the words of these spiritual tales correctly, since they had no command of native language, only of the stripped down version they were taught?  Were the natives speaking in metaphors?  When one shaman told a colonist that he had four spirits in him: a crow in his head, a pigeon in his heart, a snake in his loins, and “a man he saw in air” who lived in his entire body, was he to be taken literally, or was this poetic language?  The crow is a fine metaphor for the alert and acquisitive human mind, the pigeon describes the human heart alternately peaceful and fretful, and the snake, well that’s rather obvious.  The floating man made of air is a common image for the human soul even today.  Another shaman reported that he had a hummingbird that would peck at him when he did wrong, and sing sweetly when he did right.  Under further questioning this shaman admitted that the hummingbird was his metaphor for his conscience.

Thomas Morton who denied the natives had anything like religion, and who didn’t think much of Puritan religion either, reported that the natives believed in a creation that had grown evil and had been destroyed by a flood.  Roger Williams thought he found parallels between ancient Greek, Hebrew and the Algonquin language.  He relates stories they told him of Wetucks, a miracle maker who walked upon the waters Williams thought might have been a memory of Jesus.  But it’s difficult to know whether or not the natives had learned of the flood from other colonists or from the fishermen who had been visiting their shores for generations.  Were they telling Tom and Roger what they thought they wanted to hear?  Finally, it’s quite possible that many natives considered the Christian stories they were being told unbelievable, and so returned nonsense for nonsense, a joke for what appeared to them to be a joke.

Natives who were not shamans also had prophetic dreams and the experience of remote viewing was rather common, as wives kept watch on their husbands away from the hunt by dreaming and warriors located the enemy. Dreams could diagnosis and cure illnesses.  Malevolent spirits could be identified and chased away in a dream.  Such recoveries could occur when a sick person dreamed, or when someone else had a dream about a sick person.  Algonquin mothers would ask their children every morning what they had dreamed. Nightmares were considered warnings, and after awakening from a nightmare natives would pray to understand how they might correct whatever wrong had occurred.  Some natives spoke of a ball of light that would leave someone sleeping, that would return just before they awoke.  They believed this to be the soul going out to have a look for itself.  Some said the dark outline of a body could be seen surrounding the globe of light at its center.  Light phenomena were also common in areas where someone was about to die or had recently passed away.  Today’s ghost hunters call them orbs.

Jaunty Algonquin warrior painted circa 1585 by John White

Many prophecies of the arrival of the white man were given.  Uttamatomakkin, brother in law of Pocahontas, traveled with her to London where he told the English that the God Okeus had warned the shamans of his tribe of the arrival of people from across the sea.  The Mohegans told of one of their chiefs whom as he lay dying warned that light skinned people would soon arrive from across the sea.  In the 1800′s the Narrangassett historian Thomas Commuck claimed that his people had heard music in the air many years before the Europeans arrived, recognizing it at last when hymns were sung at the first church services in Plymouth.  One prophetic vision of the coming of the white race was said to have begun with the sitting of a white whale; Ahab’s Moby Dick may have been a distant memory of a warning about the arrival of Caucasians.

Names held great power to the natives, a curious reflection of the beliefs of John Dee and the other sorcerers of Europe who explored angelic language with the idea that knowing the original and true name of anything would give power over it.  Natives would not give their real names to the colonists.  Pocahontas was only a nickname; her real name was Matoaka.  Natives would also change their names to commemorate important events.  A chief who had been friendly with the English but who now planned to attack them would change his name.  Natives who were kidnapped or who chose to live among the colonists or to visit their world back home would change their names to protect themselves against danger, and to signify their new purpose.

The greatest of the chiefs among the Carolina Algonquins were mummified.  Thomas Harriot carefully described the process by which their bodies were opened and the flesh removed while preserving the skeletal structure, covered with leather, over which the skin was closed again.  The dried flesh was carefully placed in baskets at the feet of each mummy, which were laid side by side on a tall platform under which lived a shaman who prayed day and night.  So little was known about ancient Egyptian mummification at the time no theories about the Algonquins and the pharaohs were hatched.  John Smith wrote of similar practices among the natives of the Chesapeake, who also had copper chains, pearls, and favorite hatchets stuffed into their mummies, and who were carefully wrapped in white furs and woven mats.  Natives of the regular sort were simply buried in the ground in a shroud folded with flowers (unless it was winter).  Their possessions were laid in and on the grave to rot away.

Widows mourned with what English writers called “Irish-like howlings” and shouts of grief for 24 hours, their faces painted black.  Quieter mourning lasted for at least a year.  Friends visited to offer consolation.  The name of the dead person was no longer used, and if someone within the tribe had the same name, they changed it.

Thomas Harriot in the 1580′s reported two near death experiences he was told by the natives.  One freshly buried was liberated from the grave when the earth over it moved.  He reported his visit to the enormous pit near the setting sun where the wicked burn.  He was saved by one of the gods who sent him back to warn others.  The other witness walked the pathway of fruit bushes and arrived at a paradise of fine fields and handsome houses where his father told him to go back to tell the tribe of the rewards awaiting those who live a good life.

The natives believed in the immortality of the soul.  It’s amusing to read European writers’ dismissive accounts of the native afterlife as an “imaginary paradise” and the “fictions” of infernal torture for the wicked, when these beliefs were so like their own.  Williams reported that the wicked were doomed to wander helpless as phantoms.  Accounts differed.  In one the good went to the top of a great tree.  From there they could see the pathway lined by bushes of ripened fruit.  They followed it to the rising sun, pausing half-way there to get refreshments from a goddess.  Finally they came to the house of the Great Hare where they lived a carefree life in the beautiful fields many authors compared to the paradise of Islam.  There they lived until they became old and died, to be born again into a woman’s womb, to live again a physical life.  Pythagoras was mentioned as holding similar beliefs, but it was all dismissed as a fable in favor of the idea of the resurrection of the physical body at the end of days.

THE GUESTS THAT WOULDN’T LEAVE

Four legged immigrants from Europe ready for their exciting cruise to the New World.

The European colonists were the products of what has been called a disease pool, a confluence of maladies from the Far East, the Mideast, Africa and of course indigenous varieties that produced a robust immunity.  In America the natives were protected from these diseases by ice and ocean.  Once the viruses and other parasites arrived the loss of native life in many areas reached 90%.  Entire villages and even tribes were wiped out by illness and the starvation and war that followed as colonists and natives alike tried to control the resources of newly emptied land.  Thomas Morton called the area around Plymouth a second Golgotha because it was strewn with the skulls and bones of dead natives.  Since virus and other infections can have an influence on the psychology of a human being could it be that the European drive to colonize these lands, and the irrational and destructive efforts made, related somehow to the bugs the colonists brought with them?  The colonists were themselves colonized by life forms that addle human behavior.  Perhaps when we considered native society we got a glimpse of human consciousness free of those microscopic but lethally powerful influences.

The Bible commanded the colonists to “fill the earth and subdue it.”  By 1634 the four thousand colonists of the Massachusetts Bay Colony had 1500 head of cattle, four thousand goats and “innumerable swine.”  Courts regularly ordered compensation be paid to tribes whose crops and stores of corn were invaded by livestock, but woe to a native who killed a marauding animal.  The only solution was building fences, a commitment to concepts of ownership formerly foreign to the native way of life.  Many tribes used the word eat to describe possession of land, so that “we have eaten it all” meant something like ownership.

By the 1640′s native varieties of grasses were being crowded out by European grasses shipped over as fodder and spread by cow dung.  The indigenous grasses did not adapt well to the chewing down of livestock and the trampling and tearing of the ground by hooves, which removed oxygen from the soil.  Before long blue grass, for example, was considered a native grass, though it was really an import.  But the rains brought mud in a way they never had before.

The honeybee was a pleasant import but less pleasant were immigrants like the black fly, the cockroach, the house mouse and the gray rat.  Europeans brought rats and rape.  European style farming greatly increased the populations of worms, caterpillars, maggots and that considerably cuter but nevertheless relentless pest the squirrel.  Still water created by dams caused more mosquito-spread disease.  It’s hard not to think of the colonists as the vampire Nosferatu arriving in a ship teeming with plague infested vermin.

THE SPANISH DEBACLE

There goes the neighborhood.

Alonso Álvarez de Pineda followed Cortez mapping the Gulf of Mexico.  In 1521 he became the first European to sail up Mark Twain’s beloved mighty Mississippi River.  He called it Rio del Espiritu Santo, the River of the Holy Spirit.  Sailing it for a month, he reached twenty miles up river, making contact with hostile and peaceful tribes along the way, and unknowingly began the spread of epidemics.  On his way home he landed in what is now Texas where Aztec warriors burned two of his ships and captured him.  By then the Spanish had won their war against the Aztec Empire, smallpox was ruining what was left of their culture, but Pineda paid the price.  His captors flayed him alive then hung his skin as a trophy in a temple.

Six years later Jose Maria Narváez sailed with a fleet of five ships and 600 men arriving on the west coast of Florida in spring 1528.  He had already lost almost half his men to storms and desertions. Fighting hostile natives his expedition marched north searching for gold; finding none he built and boarded four rafts of which two were wrecked by a storm, killing him and everyone on board.  Less than a hundred men were left to go on.  They began an overland march to Mexico along which most died of hunger.  Only four survived.  One of them, a sailor named Corvais spent eight years walking home to Mexico City.  Natives captured him.  They forced him by starvation to work as a healer, believing that the strange men who had brought these terrible diseases must somehow be able to cure them.

From 1539 to 1543 Captain Hernando de Soto, an officer of Pizarro the conquistador of Peru, led an expedition in search of silver and gold.  They visited Mississippian villages in the Southeast.  He hoped to gain submission and peaceful compliance from the natives by encouraging them to believe that he was an immortal, a sun god.  They found countless tribes, five hundred different languages, but no treasure.  To each tribe they read in Spanish the Requerimento, first read in 1514 far to the south in what is now Venezuela, it had made its way north all the way to the heartland of what would become the United States of America.  The Requerimento was an announcement in this case delivered by six hundred soldiers, that threatened slavery, “harm and evil,” “deaths and damage;” further declaring that the blame would fall on the natives for disobedience, not on the soldiers or the King.  They claimed all the land as the property of Spain.  The natives must have stood dumbfounded as the Spanish wrote down, witnessed, and signed their justification for invasion in a foreign language.

For many natives it was not only the first time they saw Europeans, it was also the first time they ever saw a horse, or the shining chain mail and battle lances of European soldiers.  The Spanish also brought with them a breed of giant mastiffs bred to kill, called the Canary Island Mastiffs because they exterminated every native inhabitant of the Canary Islands during the Spanish conquest.  These dogs also wore chain mail; the horses had chain mail and metal helmets.  No wonder modern Americans have been so fascinated with the idea of aliens arriving in shiny silver ships out of nowhere to claim dominion.

The epic journey of de Soto the sun god began around what is now Tampa, Florida and continued through Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas. In some villages he stayed for a month or more.  Some of these visits were violent and others peaceful.  Some native leaders used his presence as leverage for peace treaties with rival tribes.   When hostilities broke out de Soto’s men usually instigated them.  At Mauvila a fortified native city in southern Alabama a major battle occurred.  Thousands of native warriors were killed.  Two hundred Spaniards died, another 150 were severely wounded.  Mauvila was burned down, but the Spanish had lost most of their supplies and many horses.  Their attacks were so savage that some soldiers of the Spanish expedition were horrified by the terrors inflicted by their own horsemen.  Native women and children were tied to trees then set on fire.  Incidents of rape can be glimpsed in the chronicles, not surprising, since during the conquest of Peru de Soto himself had organized the gang rape of Inca sacred virgins.

In spring 1541 de Soto demanded 200 Chickasaw natives for service as porters to make up for the lost horses. They refused, attacking the Spanish camp at night. The Spaniards lost dozens of men and what was left of their equipment.  According to de Soto’s records the Chickasaw could have killed them all but showed mercy.  By May the expedition reached the Mississippi River.  Their crossing was dangerous as natives patrolled the strong current of the broad river.  Soon after, de Soto was the first European to see the Valley of the Vapors, now Hot Springs, Arkansas.  Tribes had gathered there for generations to heal in the thermal waters.  No weapons were allowed.  De Soto stayed only long enough to claim it for Spain.

De Soto, a Spanish sun god buried in the Mississippi River

After a harsh winter de Soto’s interpreter died, making communication and trading for food even more difficult.  De Soto faced warriors of greater skill and more ferocity as he journeyed west.  He decided to head back for the great river.  Somewhere on the border of Arkansas and Louisiana he died of fever in a native village.  His men hid the sun god’s corpse in blankets weighed down with sand and sank it at night in the Mississippi River.  The survivors headed home by way of Mexico City.  Some of the hogs brought along by de Soto escaped to become the ancestors of the razorbacks of the southeastern United States.  His expedition spread epidemics across America.

The Spanish may have been more ferocious than other European invaders but they could also be more compassionate.  Bartolomé de las Casas first arrived in Cuba as a conquistador but the cruelty he witnessed caused him in 1515 to reject the practices of the Spanish Conquest.  He freed his native slaves and returned to Spain to tell the King what he had seen and to suggest more humane and Christian strategies, ironically, one of which involved bringing over African captives to take over slave labor from the natives.  Casas was sent back to the new world with the title Protector of the Indians.  First as a Dominican Friar and then as the first Bishop of Chiapas he fought for fifty years to give rights to the natives, the same rights any other subject of the Spanish King expected.  Native attacks on his attempts at peaceful communities and Spanish attacks on peaceful natives plagued his efforts.  Many authors who praised the civilizing and missionary glory of the Spanish Conquest sought to undermine him but in 1552 he published his influential A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies.  Eventually the Spaniards in the new world created the first universities where natives could study, and the first laws to protect them.  They intermarried with them blending cultures to a degree never practiced by English colonists.

The Spanish visited Chesapeake Bay in 1561.  The son of a chief agreed to go with them to their world.  Don Luis de Velasco was treated like an aristocrat in Mexico City, Havana, and Spain.  The Dominicans took care of him, the crown paid his way, and the viceroy stood for his baptism.  In 1570 the Jesuits brought him back to Chesapeake area where he was to spearhead their mission to bring Catholicism to the tribes.  They were so sure of his conversion they didn’t bring soldiers with them.  Five days after they arrived Don Luis abandoned them.  Shortly after he led the attacks that exterminated the priests and their mission, allowing only a boy to survive.

In what is now North Carolina the Mississippian culture was again confronted by more Spanish explorers when the Juan Pardo expedition built a base there in 1567 christened Fort San Juan. Eighteen months into the experiment the natives killed all the colonists and destroyed the fort.  Five other supporting forts were burned and 120 soldiers killed, leaving only one survivor. So ended the first European colonization of America.  21 years later Sir Walter Raleigh’s Virginian project began, planting the first seed of the culture that would become the thirteen colonies of the United States of America.

PEOPLE WHO ARE INTOLERANT OF OTHER PEOPLE’S CULTURE AND THE DUTCH

Manna-hatta before and after

In 1609 Captain Henry Hudson, an Englishman who worked for the Dutch East India Company, and his crew sailed up what became known as the Hudson River.  Hudson’s pilot jotted down a note in his journal about a place the natives called Manna-hata.  His explorations led to the establishment of New Netherlands in 1624 when the first Dutch fur trading outpost was set up on Governor’s Island.  A year later construction began on Fort Amsterdam on Manhattan Island. The site was bought for about a thousand dollars in today’s money value, an amount paid to natives who lived in what is now Brooklyn, instead of the locals themselves.  Even then.  New York City was born.  New Amsterdam was no puritan Boston; this Protestant town was infamous for its taverns full of smugglers.

Today’s Wall Street takes its name from the earthen wall on the north border of New Amsterdam, protection against not only natives, but also the English.  It should perhaps come as no surprise that the original wall of Wall Street was built by African slaves, as was the settlement, its docks and roads.  Bloody slave rebellion ended in horrific spectacles of torture and execution of rebels.  After much Dutch soul searching the Africans were given “half-freedom.”  They had to pay a yearly tax, and they could be called back to work at any time by the Dutch West India Company.  But they were allowed to have their own homes, and they created one of the first free black towns in America.  The Dutch West India Company was not interested in the sort of homesteading practiced by the English colonists, instead they competed with the French, developing fur trading outposts on the Hudson, Mohawk, Delaware and Connecticut rivers.  The experiment of New Amsterdam only lasted fifty years.

The natives of New England called the ships of the colonists’ giant birds that coughed thunder and lightning.  In the 1630′s William Wood reported that the Massachusetts Indians thought the first ship they saw was a floating island.  They guided their canoes to go pick strawberries on it until the cannon opened fire.  When the Dutch arrived their ships puzzled the natives.  They described them as double ships that go both in the air and under water, apparently mistaking the hull for one vessel and the sails for another.  The French and Dutch established a lucrative fur trade.  By 1628 the Mohawk tribe gained control of the fur trade at Fort Orange, the Dutch colony at New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island.  Less than twenty years later a treaty was brokered between the Iroquois and the Dutch and their native allies.  It would take another thirty more years for the Iroquois to make an alliance with the English.  The natives gained advantages from their alliances with the Europeans.  Chiefs who traded with them grew powerful.  The English were also useful allies against traditional enemies.  The Dutch were played against the English, to gain benefits from both.

But the English with their focus on settlements, and their willingness to redefine and argue any law or deal the Dutch made, eventually took most of the Dutch possessions in North America.  They did it the old fashioned way, by making babies in the New World, building houses, clearing fields, and creating a market the Dutch couldn’t exploit.

NEW FRANCE: THE NAME DIDN’T CATCH ON

French illustration of a fashionable Iroquois warrior

In 1524 Captain Verrazzano, an Italian in the service of the King of France, spent fifteen days exploring the area we now call New England.  He reported large families of 25 to thirty in each home.  He wrote down his first encounter with the native inhabitants of what we now call Manhattan.  “We saw about twenty small boats full of people, who came about our ship, uttering many cries of astonishment, but they would not approach nearer than within fifty paces; stopping, they looked at the structure of our ship, our persons and dress, afterwards they all raised a loud shout together, signifying that they were pleased.  By imitating their signs, we inspired them, in some measure with confidence, so that they came near enough for us to toss to them some little bells and glasses, and many toys, which they took and looked at, laughing, and then came on board without fear.  Among them were two men more beautiful in form and stature than can possibly be described; one was about forty years old, the other about 24, and they were dressed in the following manner: the oldest has a deer’s skin around his body, artificially wrought in damask figures, his head was without covering, his hair was tied back in various knots; around his neck he wore a large chain ornamented with many stones of different colors.  The young man was similar in his general appearance.  This is the finest looking tribe, the handsomest in their costumes that we have found in our voyage.  They exceed us in size, and they are of a very fair complexion; some of them incline more to a white, and others to a tawny color; their faces are sharp, and their hair long and black, upon the adorning of which they bestow great pains, their eyes are black and sharp, their expression mild and pleasant, greatly resembling the ancients. They live a long life and rarely fall sick: if they are wounded they cure themselves with fire without medicine, their end comes with old age.”  Here we have what may be the earliest European record of the natives that were so crucial a part of the birth of America.

Like the Dutch, the French were less interested in colonizing America than they were in profiting from the fur trade.  Outposts were established in Canada and northeastern America.  The power of trading with the French created imbalances among tribes that soon led to conflict.  As the French spread epidemics opportunistic tribal leaders tried to benefit their tribes by gaining new lands.  By 1609 the Iroquois League fought a war with the French and their native allies the Huron. They also moved against the Algonquins and the early English colonies.

Huron warrior just after winning coolest war paint of all time award

In 1634 the French Jesuit Paul le Jeune honestly recorded his attempt to convert a native.  After telling the native that he had left his home and traveled so far for love of him, the Jesuit gave a surprisingly Platonic but moving speech about the beauty and wisdom of the world proving the existence of a divine designer who must watch over every part of it and who judges the dead and keeps the good in happiness for eternity.  The native responded that the Jesuit didn’t know what he was talking about.  In 1684 the Iroquois attacked French trading outposts, which had reached all the way to what is now Illinois.  After three years of war the governor of New France convened a meeting at Iroquois occupied Fort Frontenac with fifty hereditary chiefs of the Iroquois League under a flag of truce.  The truce was a ruse.  French forces recaptured the fort and took captive all fifty Iroquois chiefs, who were sent to Marseilles, France, to be used as galley slaves.  A French armada arrived at Irondequoit Bay, devastating the Seneca homeland.  In retaliation the Iroquois became allies of the English, ending French hopes in America.

AND NOW ABOUT THE ENGLISH

Puritan humor and other myths

By the mid 1500′s hundreds of ships visited the New England coast every year, castaways and survivors of wrecks had been interacting with native society for generations. Visitors were surprised to find among the supposedly pristine tribes members wearing European clothes, or using a tailored cloth shirt for a canoe sail.  What must the Pilgrims have thought when the first word spoken by the first Indian they met was “welcome”?

In 1569 David Ingram, one of a hundred men John Hawkins left on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico claimed to have walked in one year from there with two other sailors all the way to Maine where they were picked up by a ship.  His record of the epic journey is a curious blend of observations and hearsay, much of it gathered along the way from natives.  They told him of tribes with teeth like dogs who were cannibals, and Ingram argued that the English should colonize the new world to help defend the good tribes from their monstrous enemies.  One gets the impression that the natives were telling tall tales for their own amusement or benefit.  Even the ever-tolerant Roger Williams reported on a zombie tribe that ate the brains of their enemies, but he added that they lived far away and since they were human beings they might be saved after all.  Other such tales of cannibals with three inch teeth and Mohawks shouting war cries warning they would suck the blood of their enemies were quickly discredited and discarded by publishers once the colonists gained more experience with the natives.

Partly due to prejudices about primitive culture related to their own pagan origins in the blue painted Picts and Druids of ye olden days, and partly due to the Spanish reports of Aztec religious slaughters, some English early writers on native culture assumed human sacrifice was practiced by all tribes.  The huskanaw ritual caused much confusion.  Adolescent boys were painted white.  After a feast and dance, chosen men guided them through gauntlets of men hitting them with bundled sticks while the women mourned and prepared for a funeral.  The boys would then lay motionless under a tree until being led away into the woods where the men would teach them the secrets and skills of the tribe.  Seeing the apparently lifeless bodies of the boys and the laments of the women, some observers assumed they had been murdered.  Eventually more careful witnesses noticed the boys returned after a period of weeks or months.  The famous incident when Pocahontas saved Captain John Smith from having his head bashed in was probably such a ritual, intended to rebirth the Pilgrim as a member of the tribe.  The only ritual sacrifices made by the Algonquins were occasional bonfires of their possessions, intended to restore tribal harmony and the good will of their gods.  Every year those among the natives with the most worldly goods would give them away, especially to the neediest among them, so they could prove the next year their ability to regain all that they had sacrificed.

Algonquin thunder stick carved from a lightning blasted tree

The earliest Spanish visitors to the New World reported that the natives had no religion and no god.  The English instead described the natives as pagans and idolaters, though even the earliest such reports were contradicted by more sensitive thinkers who insisted such summary dismissals misrepresented the resemblances between native and European beliefs.  Roger Williams and other English writers constantly reminded their readers that all men share basic beliefs about the divine order of the universe and the afterlife.  Many English believed native Americans were the lost tribes of Israel.  Didn’t the natives sequester menstruating women, as practiced by the Jews of the time?

From their English nobles the colonists expected courtesy and composure, dignity and honesty.  A good noble would return a favor done for him, and would be good to his word.  He would hate lying, and rude behavior and would comport himself in such a way as to never be laughed at. They were surprised to find these same qualities among the native leaders.  English writers commented on the civility of the natives in one paragraph, while in the next dismissing them as ensnared by Satan in the New World, the devil’s country.

While the Europeans thought the natives demonic; the natives thought the Europeans animal like.  They had so much body hair and a diet of raw foliage (salads).  One native described the French talking over each other in a crowd as no better than a flock of geese.  Natives were shocked by the bad manners and arguments displayed by colonists in their community meetings, since the native councils were dignified, thoughtful and polite.  They taught their children not to be boisterous, to hate ingratitude, and to share however little they might have.  Even a simple piece of bread would be divided equally among all.

As England became more powerful under the four decades of Queen Elizabeth, the Protestants of Europe began to believe the British would lead them into a world where the power of the Catholic church would be broken.  America, which they believed had been divinely hidden until this crucial time, was to become a new,  Catholic free continent, despite the presence of the Spanish in the south and west, and the Catholic colony that would become Maryland.   But England was poor, and divided.  Many loyal to the old faith thought the recurrent plagues were punishment for spiritual disobedience.  While a powerful merchant class grew, so did the numbers of the poor and homeless.  Good simple English values were being corrupted by foreign influence.  To avoid the fate of the decadent French gender distinctions were considered so important the measure of civilization applied to the Native Americans was based on their strict division between the responsibilities of men and women.  Nevertheless fads swept through the poor and rich in England, including scandalous gender bending by wearing items formerly associated only with the opposite sex.  Honesty and charity were for fools, communities neglected members who needed help; the clever were rewarded instead of the virtuous. Still they loved the accomplishments of their civilization, the pomp and splendor of their rulers, and saw themselves as “angel” saxons bringing true religion and improvements in living to the “savages” of the New World.  Meanwhile the hard work demanded by colonization would give England a way to renew the simple virtues while making wealth available to the unsophisticated.

Noble Pict of ancient Britannia, freedom loving and clothing hating tribal ancestor of the English, painted by John White

The Roman historian Tacitus was the most popular ancient writer of the day among the English.  His descriptions of the good simple people of Germania and ancient Britannia, liberty loving and valorous, in contrast to the decadence and political scheming of the Imperial Romans, caused many of the English to compare the native Americans to their own ancestors, as opposed to their fad loving contemporaries, and the corruptions of the royal court.

The English were particularly interested in native hairstyles.  The Puritans disapproved of the long hair and debauched lifestyle of the flamboyant cavaliers.  During the English Civil War that broke out in 1641 friend or enemy could be judged by hair length.  Observers noted that grieving native fathers cut off their hair.  Virgin girls wore their hair over their eyes.  Captive women were humiliated by having their locks shorn.  The most written about native hairdo was worn by males who shaved the right side of their heads and wore their hair long on the other.  Few writers pointed out the practicality involved; native hunters didn’t want their hair interfering with firing their bow and arrows.  The style led to a fad among young English men who took to wearing one long lock of hair, called a lovelock. Pundits decried the sudden variety of hair fashions for degenerating good plain Englishmen into “Virginians, Frenchmen, and Ruffians!”  Native teenage males experimented with their hair with such enthusiasm, one author observed that their hairstyles “would torment the wits of a curious barber.”

The colonists wondered that the native men didn’t sport manly beards, they were said to pluck their sparse facial hair, and if any native naturally grew a beard he was suspected of having a European father.  A few native men wore artificial beards made of animal fur perhaps to appear more European and therefore up to date with the latest historical developments.  Young native men were especially interested in acquiring European clothes but to the disappointment of the colonists they tended to wear them only when visiting, taking them off to return home.  Some among the native leaders were given fine red coats to display their allegiance to King James.

The colonists were somewhat perturbed by the native habit of painting, dying and tattooing their bodies.  Roger Williams learned how to tell them, in their own language, that “the god who made them would not recognize them.”  The colonists were also much concerned with posture, that of the natives and their own.  The Pilgrim Endicott fretted that he had posed too arrogantly for his office as justice of the peace, with his hand on his hip and elbow akimbo.  European artists depicted Sir Walter Raleigh and native chiefs alike in this pose understood to represent the power, and perhaps impatience, of aristocracy.

The jewelry that kisses you back

But the English, including comparative free thinkers like Tom Morton (LINK) nevertheless considered the new world the devil’s playground, and the natives hopelessly enthralled by witchcraft.  John Smith reported that among their curious self adornments native men sometimes sported small bright green yellow under-bellied snakes (probably Opheodrys vernalis, the Smooth Greensnake) that would curl around their necks and kiss their lips; the snake of Eden must have come to mind.  No wonder the Europeans mistook any friendliness for reverence and admiration, but too much friendliness inspired suspicions of treachery.

Native rituals, including rhythmic dances, fists slammed into the ground, nails scratching the earth, clapping, trances of staring into the sky with hands upheld to heaven, singing, howling, and exaggerated expressions, often within a circle of tobacco or corn meal, and around a fire, appeared to the colonists to be reenactments of hell.

THE ENGLISH HAD THEIR OWN KIND OF MAGIC

The first Bible translated into a native language, that of the Massachusetts tribe

An English minister was said to have converted some natives by praying successfully for rain when their shamans failed.  In 1605 Captain Waymouth used a magnet to move and lift a knife astonishing his native guests.  English technology, clocks, books, guns, were said to be manitou, and the natives wondered if the English had been taught by gods.  Demonstrating the function of a compass could save a captive’s life.  Where English medicines and treatments prevailed, sometimes saving the life of a chief, or many lives in a village, the natives thought that a demonstration of spiritual power.  When the natives attacked and destroyed half the colonist plantations in 1622 letters sent home begging for help lamented that the natives would disbelieve in the Christian god were the English to fail so miserably.  When famine and disease followed the attacks, many colonists called it divine punishment, declaring that unscrupulous private traders were cheating and abusing the natives.

The Christians of this era of colonization were not mutually tolerant.  Protestants referred to the Catholic Church as the Great Whore.  The Pope was considered an Antichrist.  Roman Catholic missionaries in the new world were called vermin.  And Catholics and Protestants referred to each other as atheists.  Preachers of either branch of the business who tried to address the tribes were often driven away.  Sometimes they were told to wait at specific places and times but no one ever arrived to hear them.  Christian ministers were sometimes horrified to hear natives tell them they had themselves crossed over into the spirit world to visit the Christian heaven.  One reported he had seen the great gentleman God, the handsome man Jesus, and the saved, like “butterflies of many colors.”

The natives adopted Christianity in their own way.  The God of the Book was added to some native pantheons.  Two of the most powerful chiefs who fought against the colonists during King Philip’s War kept the Sabbath.  They considered themselves followers of what they called the Great God.  The English blamed the Catholics, and as usual blamed it all on Satan.

Unable to stop the epidemics ravaging their people, some shamans wanted to convert, especially after colonists told them that the spirit of Jesus could do the same things for them that their familiar spirits and traditional gods did: healing, protection from suffering, an end to nightmares, giving them a smoother path through life.  They were told that their spirit guides were demonic imps and their deity the devil.  The spirit of Jesus, they were promised, was much more powerful.  Here begins American Metaphysical Christianity.  The line blurs between native and European.  Jesus becomes an especially powerful spirit, the ally of shamans.  One spirit is exchanged for another.  Jesus must perform the same services as a tribal God: warn of trouble, ward away sickness, give victory in war, end draughts, calm storms, not that he didn’t already have those functions among most European Christians.

A French museum‘s manger scene in the snow of New England, emblem of native culture overshadowed by a new myth

Measles, smallpox, typhoid fever, plague, and the common cold had been wiping out entire native settlements since the mid 1500′s.  Sweat lodges and other traditional healing methods only helped spread the diseases.  by the 1600′s devastated communities lost their ability to function collectively, and were forced to burn even their tools to keep their fires going.  Nature itself seemed to be working against them as America suffered a cold spell known as the Little Ice Age.  Growing seasons were shorter.  Prey and the wild foods natives gathered became scarce. The New England area suffered the worst drought in eight hundred years.  Survivors were forced to band together in new groups.  New leaders arose, often using trade with the colonists to build more power than native leaders had known at any time earlier in their history.  Chiefs became kings.

Powhatan, the father of Pocahontas, tried to tell John Smith that they would both benefit from a loving relationship and both suffer from war, but the natives would suffer the deprivations of hiding their supplies and sleeping uneasily in hidden places while the colonists were facing starvation.  When native food grew scarce and the newcomers ignored warnings and tried to take what they could by force several were found dead in their fort with their mouths stuffed full of bread. English officers faced the challenge of controlling their own men.  As John Smith wrote: “Much they blamed us for not converting the Savages, when those they sent us were little better, if not worse.”  Writers lamented that life in the colonies proved how degenerate and weak the English had become.  Punishments were accordingly severe: hanging, burning, broken on the wheel, shot or starved to death.  The price of English overconfidence is illustrated by an incident during the starving winter of 1609 when Powhatan had a party of English insisting on obtaining food killed and their leader tortured to death by the women of the tribe.  But then, the heads of natives killed in battle were stuck on English stakes, and colonists were known to cut off the hands of natives they thought were spies.

The starvation in Jamestown grew so severe incidents of colonial cannibalism were confessed and punished.  Meanwhile their Pilgrim brethren living by the coast hid their abundant supply of food from their suffering fellow colonists.  When supplies finally arrived from England the colonists took vengeance on the natives, seizing corn, killing the men, and taking women and children hostage. The children were eventually killed, thrown overboard, then shot in the head as they struggled against the waves.  Some argued that the chief’s wife should be burned alive, but she was run through with a sword instead.  Natives never killed women and children in war, it’s difficult to imagine how they viewed these ferocious murders.  The natives learned what the Europeans taught them and against their own tradition massacred European women and children.  Back home in England doubts about the savagery practiced by colonists were met not only by reference to King David’s War in the Old Testament but by the more recent examples of slaughter practiced in the English colonization of Ireland.  Such cruel acts were said to be merciful since the fear they invoked would hopefully prevent further defiance.  When the English Civil War broke out no mercy was shown by either side as Protestants and Catholics alike justified rape, torture and slaughter in the name of religion.

Colonists who went native were regarded with much suspicion.  One Edward Ashley was said to have joined a tribe, to have dressed like them, learned their language and cohabited with their women.  The Pilgrims accused him of cheating them and dealing guns to the natives.  They seized him and sent him back to England.  When they heard news that he was lost at sea on a later expedition they celebrated it as divine judgment against him.  Another colonist who preferred his native family to colonial civilization was captured and whipped.  On the other hand, native children brought up among the English hated to even visit the villages that would have been their homes.  One native who earnestly sought to understand Christianity after witnessing the deaths of so many of his people in a day’s battle against the English, and believing it a sign of the power of their god, braved all insults to preach to his tribe.  He was poisoned.  While many English writers trumpeted his spiritual courage and declared him the first Indian in heaven, Roger Williams reported that the man died with a heavy heart, deeply conflicted: “Me so big naughty heart, me heart all one stone,” the poor man said shortly before he died.

The Seal of Massachusetts Bay Company: note what the Indian is saying, come over and help us (get sick?).

Natives who stayed loyal to the English and their way of life were faced with taunts and death threats.  The go-betweens, essential to relations between the natives and the newcomers, lived difficult lives distrusted by both sides.

By 1677 the English Civil War and The Thirty Years War that ruined and rearranged Europe were an object of curiosity to a new generation hooked on books full of gory details.  One of the popular books of the time was written by a Puritan minister in the New World.  In it he described the torture inflicted by a tribe on a captured enemy.  The captive’s fingers were cut where they joined his hands and then torn off.  The writer was impressed by the lack of emotion on the victim’s face, he showed no sign of agony.  Blood spewing he danced around the fire in a macabre spectacle.  Next his toes were torn off.  Finally his legs were broken and he was forced to sit, waiting until they cracked open his skull.  The writer lingers on the excitement of the torturers and spectators who proved thereby that they were creatures of the devil recreating hell on earth, thus reassuring the English that they were serving the other side, fighting the good fight, though the tortures practiced during the Civil War were just as gruesome.

The natives however experienced this event very differently.  For the torturers this was an opportunity to avenge lost loved ones and to express anger against what they perceived to be injustice.  The spectators were excited not because they enjoyed seeing the suffering inflicted on a native of another tribe, they were reacting to his bravery and his resistance to pain, egging him on.  The bleeding victim was not forced to dance, he danced to demonstrate that they could not reach his inner strength, he danced to mock their torture of him.  For him this was an initiation, a test of strength, a means to achieve an honorable death that would allow him to enter the after world fully conscious.  This is not to say that when English prisoners were tortured the natives did not take sadistic pleasure in their less stoic suffering.  But keeping in mind how much death the English had brought with them the natives must have felt these villains were reaping richly deserved punishment.  Try as the Europeans might to paint the natives as ruthlessly savage, even demonic, the natives did nothing to the English that the Spanish had not already done to tribes all over the Americas, nothing that the English had not done to each other when Protestants battled Catholics.

As in Europe, among the Natives tribal enmities often won out over common interest.  When the Mohegans, made strong by their integration of the shattered Pequots, tried to convince the Narrangansetts to join them in a war of attrition against the English to drive them out once and for all by burning their crops, killing their livestock, and ambushing them, the Narrangansetts, who had long been insulted for being effeminate because they chose to gain power by trade rather than war, sided with the English.

Miantonomi advises his friend Roger Williams not to sit on snow in cloth pants.

The Narrangansetts would reverse their position, and their leader Miantonomi the Narragansett chief of the Montauk Indians of eastern Long Island, famously counseled united warfare against the colonists in summer 1642 : “… our fathers had plenty of deer and skins, our plains were full of deer, as also our woods, and of turkeys, and our coves full of fish and fowl.  But these English have gotten our land, they with scythes cut down the grass, and with axes fell the trees; their cows and horses eat the grass, and their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall all be starved.”  He was captured by a native and delivered up to the English, who gave him to the Mohegans for execution by a hatchet to the head in 1643, the same year his friend Roger Williams published his Key into the Language of America.  The Mohegan chief who killed Miantonomi is said to have eaten a piece of his shoulder.  Incidents of native cannibalism were reported.  The Iroquois were said to be especially feared by other natives for their practice of consuming pieces of their enemies, but this seems to have been rather a rare instance of ferocity, as opposed to an established practice.

By 1660 some native chiefs were warning their tribes that the Europeans would not only never be eliminated from their lands, but were too dangerous an enemy to make war against.  In 1676 a powerful chief named Metacom united the tribes in one last attempt to regain their lost world in what became known as King Philip’s War.  Metacom received his Macedonian name because it was an easy way for the colonists to remember each tribe had an elder chief, Philip, and a younger chief, to whom of course they gave the name Alexander.  Metacom was the son of a chief who had been struggling Plymouth colony’s greatest friend among the natives.  His father was the native chief at America’s iconic first Thanksgiving.

As early as the late 17th century natives had been raised as Christians, sometimes with Christian names, and they preached to small converted congregations.  They walked a difficult and narrow path, distrusted by English Christians, and despised by natives who continued to practice their traditional ways.  They suffered most during King Philip’s War.  For example a minister named John Eliot had translated the Bible into Algonquin and converted many to Christianity.  The question the natives Eliot converted most often asked him was: “Why have not beasts a soul as man has seeing they have love, anger, etc as man has?”  These Praying Indians were used in propaganda to prove that the “savages desire civilization.”  Several decades of their loyalty to the English meant little when war broke out.  They were rounded up and put in a concentration camp in what is now Deer Island, a peninsula of Boston Harbor.  Half of the five hundred prisoners died during the cold winter.  The survivors, most weak from hunger and exposure and sick with disease, were released after the colonists realized they would easily win what was left of the war.

Many colonists died and many plantations burned during King Philip’s War, eleven towns and 1200 homes were reduced to ashes, but by then it was too late.  Tribes were slaughtered, the survivors sold into slavery or stripped of property and individual rights were resettled in communities scattered all over New England. King Philip was killed, beheaded and quartered.  The native who shot him was given Metacom’s severed hand, which he preserved in rum and showed at taverns for a fee.  Metacom’s head was put on display stuck on a pike on a road at Plymouth for almost 25 years.  Cotton Mather took one of the jaws, a macabre collectible.  As for the natives, they claimed to have stolen back King Philip’s head for proper burial.  They insisted the head shown at Plymouth belonged to someone else.  Folk tales were told for more than two hundred years of King Philip’s spirit wandering his old lands, communicating only with his descendants.

HONORING THE ANCESTORS

Ninigret, Eastern Niantic chief, circa 1681, and the never-ending sunset

As the United States of America was born and history rolled relentlessly forward native beliefs were transformed into folk tales, a new tradition of story telling replaced the old.  Some of these tales were propagandistic.  The crow who brought the corn kernel and the bean became the dove that fed a white man cranberries so he could defeat a native shaman in a spiritual battle of endurance.  Other stories resemble the lore collected by Harry M Hyatt in his massive compilation Hoodoo Conjuration Witchcraft Rootwork.  A blend of coded language, for safety’s sake, and of the confusion of the disempowered (for example a poisonous root used to kill might become a charm that harms the person whose porch it’s buried under).  Witchcraft practices are a strategy for control that flourish among those disadvantaged by communal crisis.  In these stories anyone practicing traditional ways is now called a witch or a medicine devil.  Factional differences are fought out and group boundaries reaffirmed.  Wisdom can be found in the fables but only by those with a strong understanding of context, a feeling for metaphor, and a sharp sense of rural humor.  When a mother told her children that a white feather floating in the room and then up the chimney was a notorious local witch spying on their conversation what did she really mean?  A jest?  A lesson about nosy gossips and the necessity of discretion?  Or did she literally think the witch had shape shifted?

Native gods were transformed into stories about giants; their creation myths now resembled ancient Greek myths about giants throwing islands on shore to create landmark mountains.  Cheepi was reduced to a surrogate for the devil, stripped of his powers of healing and wisdom, and his office of protecting the harmony of the tribe and of nature, he was blamed for any unexplained night terror, and used to inspire greater loyalty to the church, and to make children obedient by teaching them fear of the unknown.

By 1830 writers were fondly remembering their native nannies, who told them meteors were spirits, that the winds were spirits singing lullabies, and a chirping cricket the sign that a spirit was near.  Not only did they see the deceased relatives of the families they were attached to, but they also related details about what matters had inspired the spirit to visit, sometimes startling family members with details thought secret or forgotten.  These surviving elements of native religion were dismissed as quaint superstitions.  Christian natives who practiced tribal herbal medicine were also called witches because of such traditions as picking herbs at midnight, refusing to use metal implements around the herbs, choosing the right phase of the moon for harvesting them.  To say that herbs must never be gathered during the Dog Days of summer, or that drying them in the sun gave them extra power was to risk the appearance of believing in the old sun god and native spirits.

By the mid 1800′s stories circulated about talented psychic herbal healers like Dr. Perry.  The good doctor was renowned for his healing skills.  A respectable white family reported that he healed their daughter of tuberculosis in a matter of days when European doctors had given her up for dead.  Doc Perry had a knack for sensing where he might find a rare herb he needed.  Walking through the woods he would interrupt a conversation to hike off into the trees, returning with some plant he said he had been looking for.  He also showed the uncanny knack of already being on his way to doctor serious cases before having been informed of them.  His story begins to dovetail with the stories of mediums and healers as the spiritualist movement gained momentum in America.  Now the traditional native shaman was no longer a witch but an honored ancestor of the new religion.  No wonder so many of the spirit guides of early mediums were supposed to be native Americans.

Cotton Mather, bane of witches, was not far from native beliefs when he wrote of nature as the “temple of God” and praised the wonders of the sun, stars, moon, of the natural protection and scattering of seeds, and the wonderful variety and interdependence of the animal kingdom, and of even the magnetic power of the lode stone; all were elegant examples of divine creativity.  Like a good Platonist, Mather suggested by admiring such invisible and inscrutable forces as gravity and magnetism we could be led to worshipping the wisdom of the creator.

The impact of the nature religion of the natives of America can be seen in the American Revolution.  For whatever reason the Sons of Liberty dressed themselves as natives for the Tea Party, to the Puritans that would have been an unthinkable abandonment of the trappings of civilization.  While the national flags of Europe sported crosses the flags of early America featured stars, a rattlesnake, the moon and an evergreen tree: nature not religion.  Native ideas about sickness, healing, sorcery and mysterious lights like foxfire and will o’ the wisp were adopted by the colonists.

The flag of George Washington’s navy

For most of American history academic and popular opinion agreed: the natives were savages and America was divinely appointed for Manifest Destiny.  More recently the opposite perspective has gained ground.  Natives lived in harmony with nature and the Europeans intended from the first to ruthlessly exploit and ultimately destroy them.  The truth was more subtle.  The early colonies were very dependent on the natives for food and for trade.  The colonies were business ventures that burned through money quickly.  Skeptical investors back home didn’t have the resources to keep these highly speculative experiments going.  The furs and other goods the natives provided by trade were the only promise of future profits.  Though the colonists were suspicious, rashly vengeful and self-righteous, they nevertheless understood their dependency on the natives.  On the one hand they would behead a chief, burn crops and kill indiscriminately over a rumor, or a stolen silver cup, on the other they worked to learn how to earn the respect of the natives by understanding their customs.

Popular myth told stories of the disappearance of the tribes of the New England.  Books and films have popularized the idea of the Last of the Mohicans.  But the Mohegans still exist.  The tribes found ways to survive, insulating themselves, developing relationships with the new anglo governments that allowed them to privately preserve many of their traditions, selectively fitting in with the new world that erupted around them so quickly only one hundred years after Metacom’s attempt to take back the land the United States of America became a nation.  At the end of the 20th century the Mohegans compiled enough paperwork to prove their existence and so won recognition as a tribe from the U.S. government.

As I write this blog a news story was published that proves the two roots of American Metaphysical Religion have yet to be reconciled.  According to ACLU.org: “The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Eastern Missouri have filed a lawsuit charging the Salem Public Library and its board of trustees with unconstitutionally blocking access to websites discussing minority religions by improperly classifying them as “occult” or “criminal.”  Salem resident Anaka Hunter contacted the ACLU after she was unable to access websites pertaining to Native American religions or the Wiccan faith for her own research. After protesting to the library director, Glenda Wofford, portions of the sites were unblocked, but much remained censored. Wofford said she would only allow access to blocked sites if she felt patrons had a legitimate reason to view the content and further said that she had an obligation to report people who wanted to view these sites to the authorities.  Other sites blocked by the library’s Netsweeper software include the official webpage of the Wiccan church, the Wikipedia entry pertaining to Wicca, Astrology.com and The Encyclopedia on Death and Dying, which contains viewpoint-neutral discussions of various cultures’ and religions’ ideas of death and death rituals.”

A few days later the Internet was buzzing with the news that Christian quarterback Tom Tebow had passed for 316 yards, his ten completed passes averaging out to 31.6.  In college Tebow had written John 3:16 on his eye black.  Christians took this as a miraculous sign from God.  American metaphysicians considered it proof that when enough people focus on a thought the material world corresponds.  Mathematicians with their theory of probabilities in our improbable universe were for the most part left out of the debate.  A few days later the media reported that the witches of Salem were casting spells so the New England Patriots would beat Tebow in the big playoff game.  The witches won this time.

The other day I had a meeting about a documentary film with an author and a couple of film editors, all of us white men.  The conversation turned to curing post-traumatic stress with the Peruvian sacred plant Ayahuasca.  Two of them discussed incidents that led them to describe the plant as having a spirit, an ancient wisdom that directly relates to the participant, with the ability to diagnose and cure. They began using the word medicine as the Algonquins did, meaning more than a sacred plant, or an effective herbal remedy, more than a spirit.  To them medicine meant all those things, but also a coherent force of healing, and a power of harmonizing beings.  None of this communication was self-conscious, it was as natural as slang; the simple expression of experience.  While Protestants and Catholics number in the millions, nonetheless the Native American pre-Colonial perspective on life is alive and well, and has migrated across traditional lines of heredity to blossom among the descendants of the Europeans who so readily dismissed it.  For less respectful evidence of this go to YouTube and watch “Shit New Age Girls Say.”

In history more than once the culture of the conquered has become the culture of the conquerors.  The Indo-Aryan invaders ended up practicing the yoga of the Tamil natives they conquered, and so did the British.  The Romans absorbed Greek philosophy, myths, and gods to such a degree they somewhat eclipsed their own culture.  The process takes hundreds of years.  The United States of America is less than three hundred years old.  As our society lurches from one ecological disaster to another, could it be that in the future this amalgam of wisdom native and foreign we call American Metaphysical Religion will create a culture that more closely reflects the sustainability engendered by the values of the Algonquins and Iroquois than the exploitative hubris of dominion practiced by the Pilgrims?

Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, the tragic romance at the heart of Rosicrucianism, and its influence on the birth of America.  Next month.

“America’s Forgotten Spiritual Heritage” the third and last installment of this series on the roots of American Metaphysical Religion will consider the zeal for a new world away from the dark ages of domination by the Catholic Church launched by the Rosicrucian manifestos and other visionary reformers of Europe, and the devastation of their aspirations at the Battle of White Mountain, which left America as their only hope for a brighter future.

Sources:

Iroquois Cannibalism: Fact Not Fiction
Thomas S. Abler
Journal of Ethnohistory, 1980
American Society for Ethnohistory

Nature Religion in America
From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age
Catherine Albanese
University of Chicago Press, 1980

The First America
The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots and the Liberal State
David Brading
Cambridge University Press, 1993

Native People of Southern New England 1500-1650
Kathleen Bragdon
University of Oklahoma Press 1996

The de Soto Chronicles
The Expedition of Hernando de Soto to North America in 1539-1543
Clayton, Knight and Moore, editors
University of Alabama Press, 1996

Changes in the Land
Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England
William Cronon
Hill and Wang, 1983

Davis. Jack L.
“Roger Williams among the Narragansett Indians”
New England Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 4 (Dec., 1970)

Hernando de Soto
A Savage Quest in the Americas
David Duncan
University of Oklahoma Press, 1997

Roger Williams
Edwin S. Gaustad
Oxford University Press, 2005

Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun:
Hernando De Soto and the South’s Ancient Chiefdoms
Charles Hudson
University of the Georgia Press, 1997

The Forgotten Centuries
Indians and Europeans in the American South 1521-1704
Charles Hudson, editor
University of Georgia Press, 1994

Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America
Karen Kupperman
Cornell University Press, 2000

Settling with the Indians:
The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America 1580-1640
Karen Kupperman
Rowman and Littlefield 1980

The Name of War
King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity
Jill Lepore
Knopf 1998

Manitou and Providence
Indians, Europeans, and the akin of New England 1500-1643
Neal Salisbury
Oxford University Press, 1982

King Philip’s War
The History and Legacy of America’s Forgotten Conflict
Schultz and Tougias
Countryman Press, 1999

Spirit of the New England Tribes
Indian History and Folklore
William S. Simmons
University Press of New England, 1986

First encounters in the Americas
Lectures in History CSPAN 2011
Christina Snyder

Native American Spirituality of the Eastern Woodlands
The Classics of Western Spirituality
Elizabeth Tooker
Paulist Press, 1979

The New England Indians
An Illustrated Sourcebook
C. Keith Wilbur
The Globe Pequot Press, 1996

A Key into the Language of America
Roger Williams
Gregory Dexter, 1643

Over the past few years, I have slowly become a bit disillusioned with the art world. Instead of a place celebrating creativity and the fresh bursts of inspiration that all art should joyously derive from, I have had to balance being a conceptual artist working on my own career with making a living over the past decade as various things from museum marketing person to art gallery director to arts public relations professional to art critic all in the name of making a living so I can afford to buy art supplies to fuel my true life’s blood. Because of this, I have unfortunately been privy to much of the blood-sucking reality of the market in all its permutations.

1.

As a gallery director I was often on the receiving end of multiple artist submissions a day. I know how it feels to put your life into your work only to be casually dismissed by someone on the other end of an email who may or may not be having a bad day or may or may not like the work you are doing. That’s the spine part of what we artists need to cultivate. Rejection is part of the biz just like anything else and it’s important to build a confident shield if you believe in your work. Because of this, I always took the time to write artists back and let them know that I appreciated their passion but that it was just not right for us; I tried not to be flat out rude or mean. This is unfortunately not the norm. I know better than anyone what it’s like to walk into a gallery and be greeted with a smile only until “I’m an artist” passes my lips and the smile turns to a condescending frown and a sudden hurriedness that tells me this person simply doesn’t have the time to talk to me.

2.

As a museum marketing person I learned about the academic track that artists needed to take if they were ever to be considered worthy of getting into a museum. The right college, the perfectly timed MFA, the right galleries to exhibit your work, the right number of shows in the right geographic locations, and all the other “invisible” rules that exist out there that show you exactly how to suck the lifeblood out of your art making process and place you on the treadmill that will get you noticed by the honorable institutions and collectors. And for all the renegades who hope to become a part of these hallowed organizations, you are basically told not to bother unless you are one in a million who gets noticed after your death like Bill Traylor who spent his life homeless, drawing on cardboard pizza boxes by a dumpster until he was miraculously discovered by a man who would help catapult his career. Of course these things do happen but again, you are more likely to get struck by lightning.

3.

As an art critic who is supposed to anonymously peruse the gallery openings to collect my thoughts on the current climate of exhibitions at any given time or place, I find myself jaded. Jaded, because I go to openings, most recently of which have all taken place in Los Angeles (touted as the current “it” place of the conceptual art arena) and I see the same people mooching the free wine and cheese and not taking a single second in their social agenda to actually look at a painting that is on the wall; but practically bowling over the cater staff to get past to the society photographers so that their pictures will be strategically placed in the who’s who section of the art magazines’ pictorial spreads denoting the authentic people of the scene. I hardly ever see a collector at these events because the collector’s deal directly with the directors of the gallery to buy their desired pieces at another time to avoid the cattle call.

4.

As a collector myself who has an extensive collection of works that deal in psychological concepts of being human, I find myself doing the same thing, avoiding the openings and dealing directly with gallery personnel. This brings up another notation, the idea of being a collector. I once worked for a very savvy gallery owner who told me that people should buy art because it makes their soul sing; even though, and perhaps because of the fact, that most of his sales had to do with someone wanting a piece because of its trendiness or prestige and exactly opposite the fact that it made their soul sing. I have always bought based on this premise but it’s really not a standard thing amongst all the rich people buying art for investment who purchase something because its popular or because it came from the brain of the latest kid to be honored with a place in a major art fair or popular biennale. Last week I attended Jill Greenberg’s opening at Katherine Cone in Culver City and tortuously scanned the photographs of manipulated and horrified children with crap on their faces, a frog shitting, a decapitated body and pulsating photos of still warm organs, wondering what Andres Serrano who had already done this thing for years thought of his female emulator, while also imagining in my mind some chic New York City debutant showing off her newest acquisition of a versatile man peeing in his own mouth to her wide gazed dinner parties all in the name of art market popularity.

5.

And then as a lover of art, with my own set of tastes and preferences towards what I find outstanding or banal, I relegate myself to all the aforementioned criticisms I have just written of others because I am an individual who isn’t going to like or respond to everything I see as much as the next person. So I am a walking contradiction; a victim of my own stereotyping of others, because I, too, am at fault for all the crimes against the individual artists such as myself that I internally despise.

The truth is I am as much a part of what I love and that which I abhor simultaneously and it doesn’t make me want to stop even though I am a walking contradiction. I will continue to make art, love art, judge art and buy art because I can’t live NOT doing it. It’s as essential as breathing and the fact that it puts a prickly space in my body is more good for the soul then bad for the soul because it keeps me real.

I had a good dose of my own perpetual art world bullshit propensity recently when I attended the pop up Mr. Brainwash show in Los Angeles. I know this because I was the first person to hate on Thierry Guetta, the European shop owner whose road to being an artist after idolizing street artists, was documented in Banksy’s film “Exit to the Gift Shop.” I hated on him hard core after jealously seething over his success on the coattails of our biggest anonymous street artist mystery man Banksy and seeing his sales of re-done Andy Warhol type pop cultural art fare propel him into riches.

But, when I went to the actual show my tune changed. Although the art wasn’t exactly my acquired taste, a few things struck me about the scene at his populist exhibition that would make the art world’s skin crawl but brought me back to my roots of an artist that at ten year’s old had me drawing on any kind of surface I could possibly find, blind to the “rules” of what has become my life as an artist.

Many things abounded to take me back to my humble roots. He let children in first ahead of the line so that they could feel important and be recognized as the only pure people attending the show without any idea of what the art world dictates or demands. He attended the show, not behind velvet ropes as an artist célèbre, but as a regular man and would go off impromptu-style from the cameras that were following him to write inspirational quotes on the wall, such as “Life is Beautiful” and “Follow Your Dreams.’ He took time to pose with anyone who wanted a photo with him and allowed people to take a stuffed animal from a huge installation pile on one of the floors. He had a staff giving away free posters of his work; not one piece but EIGHT posters and a stack of postcards, giving everyone the chance to own a piece of art. And he extended the show for two more full days when he realized that were a large group of people who hadn’t been able to make it the prior four days that it was up. All of these measures reminded me of the pure joy of making and sharing art, regardless of the concept, the strategy or its moneymaking potential. It shone a light on my own snobbery and put me back in a place where art should reside rather then where it so realistically oftentimes does.

Thierry Guetta, you are my accidental hero.

Ourika Valley, Morocco

September 20, 2010: Ourika Valley, Morocco

It’s our last day in Marrakech, and we drive out to visit a Berber house in the Ourika Valley of the Atlas Mountains. As we’re leaving the farmhouse, I see a mirror in a shop that I want. I’ve been looking at these Moroccan mirrors ever since I saw the first one in Casablanca. Here small mirrors are hung on walls in large decorated frames with two doors that open to reveal the mirror. They are everywhere in Morocco and I have looked closely at each of them and have found fault with every one—they’re either too touristy or they’re in bad shape or their design is simple and poorly executed. But this one is perfect in every part, except for one overly obvious flaw, so blatantly and clumsily wrong that I wonder if it was the artist commenting that the rest of it was perfect. Its frame and doors were trimmed in bone that had been incised and rubbed with coal-black, or henna, or painted with ink, and the surface of the door and the lintel and doorframe were made of hammered silver that had turned dark with dust and sand and age. The cedar doors were in perfect shape and the hinges were solid from top to bottom on both sides. The mirror itself was slightly foggy in a section near the top, but I’d already decided that if I bought one I would turn it into a shrine, and cover the mirror with an image of whatever god came to me, so it was still perfect.

The only problem is I have 450 dirhams on me and he will go no lower than 850 (a little over $100). I tell the salesman that this is all the money I have on me and I’m not coming back. But he can’t go lower than 850 and so I leave and find Ibrahim in the courtyard. I ask him if he can help me bargain. I show him the mirror and he says “That’s real bone, that’s real silver. Eight hundred and fifty is a good price.” “Yeah, I know, but I don’t have it. I’m just asking for advice. Is it fair to offer 450 dirhams?” The salesman returns—he looks weary, as if he’s dealt with Ibrahim before. Ibrahim says, “You want 850, he’s only got 450. What do you want, 450 or nothing?” “But that is worth much more”—he says, “that’s real silver, that’s real bone.” “We’re not disputing the fact that it is silver. We’re telling you we only have 450 dirhams. Do you want 450 or nothing?” The seller says, “I can show you another one for 450.” And he points to one but I say, “No, I’ve looked at all of them. This is the one I want.” Ibrahim says, “He doesn’t want that one, he wants this one. Do you want to keep it or do you want his 450 dirhams instead?” The salesman asks me, “Can you come up with a couple hundred dirhams?” I open my wallet and show it to him—“Look, there is no more money in here. If you can find more money, you can have it.” I turn every pocket inside out. Nothing. Ibrahim hands the mirror back to the salesman and throws my money at him. The salesman doesn’t reach out to catch the bills so they flutter slowly to the floor. “Do you want 450 or nothing?” The salesman turns to me again, “100 more?” “I told you, I have no more.” Ibrahim shouts, “He is leaving tomorrow, he will not be back, he has 450 dirhams. These are the facts. Do you want 450 dirhams, or do you want nothing?” “You can borrow 100 off of him,” the salesman snarls, and I turn to Ibrahim and laugh, “Well, now your tip is on the line. The only cash I have in my room is everyone’s tip. So now you’ve got as much riding on this as I do.” When we turn back, the salesman has picked up the money and slipped into a backroom, where he is wrapping my mirror in an Arabic newspaper and bubble wrap, twisting sealing tape around it several times as if he’s wringing someone’s neck, glaring at us the whole time. Since he is angry and not paying attention, he knocks several bracelets off the wall behind him onto the floor. “Look out,” Ibrahim says, “You are falling apart. Look, bracelets are falling out of your sleeves. Where did those come from? Are you made of bracelets?”

Our Berber Guide Describes What’s Happening Around Us

To rule fairly you must always close one eye and keep one eye open. Do you want to develop the desert? Well, what will you have to give in return? A basic rule in economics is that you must buy what you cannot trade for, and Morocco is a very poor country. It contains almost no oil reserves. And until the last few years it had to import wheat and had almost nothing that the wheat-rich countries wanted.

In Morocco, if you close both of your eyes and open your pockets, everything is possible. There is a saying here, “No money, no honey.” Corruption runs from one generation to another, the way the rug and leather trades are passed from father to son.

All of what’s possible in Morocco is possible because of water. We have the sand to create beaches if we have water. We can grow bougainvillea, jasmine, and hibiscus if we have water. Two years ago this was desert, now summer is four months a year in Marrakech. Even the sky is generous in this region—it is hot but windy, it has just enough sun but it also has rain.

Some people have become very rich in the last few years but it is good because now they spend their money, which benefits everyone. If you’re rich, you can sit and look out of your window at the snow on the Atlas Mountains from a mile outside of Marrakech. But it can get a little cold if you’re the ones building those houses, the ones looking in.

September 25, 2010: Flying Home, Casablanca to Boulder

The Playwright in the Airport Bar

I carried a flickering light onstage
for a season or two—but living like that
from night to night was too much for me.

I lost the words and then the actors and then the audience
and it got black as if the moon had left the theatre
and my career became a sunflower, bowed at sunset.

I still put a notebook in my pocket every morning
but I never took it out. Some nights there was music
and I danced barefoot in someone else’s story.

It doesn’t matter to me either way
but I imagine it’s better not to
remember or define it

leaving it wholly mysterious—
dying into silence.
It’s still early—

but sooner rather than later
someone turns off the lights,
freezing everything unfinished.

But I don’t want to
give up
any of it.

All I can do is
accept what’s about to change.
We stop, it continues.

But you’re wrong.
I do remember the last time we spoke
but I can’t remember what we said.

Something Unpleasant Is About to Happen—Something Already in Motion

     I have understood that the world is a vast emptiness built    upon emptiness….And so they call me the master of wisdom.—Paul Bowles, “The Song of the Owl”

Wisdom has been lost. I will never know
any sense of it other than my walking away
as if it’s not important, as a dream decays
until it disappears, like our completely vanished
prayers. This moment is the pattern of sunlight
filtered through a lattice. Once it blooms
it slowly crumbles. Whatever we see we can
never see its other side. Is that what you
want from me? Are you satisfied now?

Early Morning Flight Out of Casablanca

You tell me you are going to Fez
Now if you say you are going to Fez
That means you are not going.
But I happen to know that you are going to Fez.
Why have you lied to me, you who are my friend?
—Moroccan joke, quoted by Paul Bowles in “Let It Come Down”

Waiting for the gate to open,
wondering if I’m in the right line,
someone pushes past me,
climbs until he disappears

into the china-blue sky,
as if turning into light
is better than all of this
waiting, uncertain and slow,

that only promises to be endless,
wanting to be finished
as if that would be better than
all of this uncertainty.

No one can see darkness in the bright of
afternoon. The highlights often seem
to be in the satin, and what we’re searching
for might turn out to be empty like a stoplight

in the middle of the desert, or you know you
waited an instant too long, or you convinced
yourself that the answer was no when no
doesn’t answer anything at all.

What is going to happen is going to happen
ready or not, without understanding
anything at all, and it may be dark outside
but from here it just gets darker.

Gate B27: JFK Airport

Waiting to board our plane for Denver, an elderly heavy-set black woman with a headscarf long enough that it covers her knees is praying across the aisle from me. She spreads her hands out and knocks her overnight bag onto my knee. I pause for a moment, not knowing what to do. Do I push her bag aside? Do I replace it? Do I change its location so she doesn’t knock it over again? I decide to stand it up beside her chair, out of the way. Just then she leans backwards and I can see the dark bones in her cheeks, her eyes closed, her lips moving quickly, her hands rising off her knees as if released from gravity, timed with her whispered prayer, one, two, three times up and then back down again. This reminds the other Moslems around us to turn their faces toward Mecca and pray as well. Once again her hands lift off her knees, bending backwards, baring her face to the fluorescent lights, her closed eyelids brighter than the rest of her skin as if lit from behind. Her lips silently repeat the prayers. Bringing her hands to her face, she kisses her ring fingers, thumbs, pinkies, second fingers, middle fingers and swings her arms to the ground on either side of her body, brushing along the carpet, knocking her bag over once again, this time away from me—and her eyes flicker, as she registers that something has been moved—and I get up and walk across the aisle and set it up again. This time I put it even farther back behind her and when she senses me struggling to right her bag she looks up at me and says “We will be here another hour.” I walk over and check the board and she is right.

Article written by Randy Roark

Newtopia staff writer RANDY ROARK worked with Allen Ginsberg for the last 17 years of his life, first as an apprentice, then as his teaching assistant, and finally transcribing and editing 28,000 pages of Ginsberg’s poetry lectures, currently available on-line through the Ginsberg trust. Following Ginsberg’s death, he worked with artist Stan Brakhage, producing art events featuring his films until his death. Since 1998 he has worked with Sounds True as a producer, where he has edited artists such as Alex Grey, writers including William Burroughs and Robert Anton Wilson, and a wide variety of spiritual teachers, including Alan Watts, Krishnamurti, Jack Kornfield, Pema Chodron, and Lakota Elder Joseph Marshall.

He arrives at the end of the Renaissance with a mind so modern he was more suited for Silicon Valley than Elizabethan London.  Thomas Harriot was the first to assemble and use a telescope in England.  Months before Galileo, he was the first human being to accurately map the surface of the moon.  He was the first to make a system of binary numbers, to see the value in what would become almost five hundred years later the mathematical foundation of computer science.  He has been described as the first modern experimental scientist.  He contributed important elements to algebra, geometry and trigonometry.  He invented the symbols we still use for greater than (>) and lesser than (<).

Harriot’s Map of the Surface of the Moon

Harriot was the first Englishman to learn a native American language.  His Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia is the earliest record in English of the pristine environment and native culture, and of the moment when it was first spoiled.  He used his mathematical skills for everything from improving plumbing and refining accounting methods to finding the most efficient way to stack cannonballs on a ship, inventing what history remembers as Kepler’s Conjecture.  He began the science of dynamic stability helping design better ships.  He not only refined the navigational techniques of English sailors, he improved the quality of their navigational instruments.

But Harriot was also known for his skills as an astrologer.   He explored the mysteries of alchemy.   He proved by experiment and careful measurements how rainbows are made by refracted light.  He created an alphabet to capture the strange sounds of the native American language spoken by the Carolina Algonquins, hoping it might some day become a universal alphabet to describe all languages.  Instead, it became known as the Devil’s Alphabet.  For his efforts Harriot was imprisoned, attacked in polemic books, suspected of treason, accused of being a devil worshipper, persecuted as an atheist, and then was all but forgotten by history.  The portrait that pops up when you google him is doubtful, most historians suspect it portrays someone else.

We Have No Confirmed Portrait of Thomas Harriot

Thomas Harriot was born in 1560.  We know nothing about his early life.  History first notices him around 200 years before the birth of America when he went to study at Oxford University.   There he put on black, the color he wore all his life.  At the time only two types of Englishmen had any interest in the New World.  In summer, fishermen would land on America’s Atlantic shore to dry their ocean catches of cod and other fish.  Meanwhile, ambitious English patriots discussed the Spanish who had gained so much wealth and power from their exploitation of the New World, but who had left the northeastern part of the continent relatively unmolested.  Upon graduating from Oxford, Harriot was immediately employed by one of the latter, Sir Walter Raleigh.

Raleigh was one of the brightest stars of the court of Queen Elizabeth I.  A prolific writer, a poet, a daring sea captain and a skilled soldier, Raleigh received royal gifts of lands and titles that made him rich.  He was Captain of the Queen’s Bodyguard for a decade.  His stylish and opulent clothing was matched only by legendary arrogance made barely tolerable by his wit and charm.  On his sea voyages he carried a trunk of books so he could read undisturbed.  Of all the nobles of England none was more eager than he to colonize the New World, or as he put it: “I’m after Virginia’s maidenhead.”  Among her gifts to the man she nicknamed “Water” the Queen gave Durham House, overlooking the Thames, which would be his favorite home until her death, and the site of many mysterious and wonderful gatherings and experiments.

Sir Walter Raleigh, Lord of the Bling

Raleigh moved Harriot into Durham House where he was often found on the rooftop experimenting with tools of navigation.  We can only imagine the looks on the faces of Raleigh’s grizzled captains and navigators when confronted with the prospect of being tutored at their craft by a young pup freshly plucked from Oxford.  But Harriot made such radical improvements to the instruments and techniques of navigation that he can be partially credited for transforming the English fleet from a pack of feckless corsairs to the most fearsome marauders on the Atlantic.

In 1584 Raleigh sent two of his captains on an expedition to the New World.  They arrived in what is now North Carolina.  Scouts sent from the Roanoke, a tribe of Carolina Algonquin, approached the English with kindness.  They began gift exchanges and rituals to transform the strangers into kin.  Their chief Wingina had been badly wounded in battle with a rival tribe, so a lesser chief invited the English to visit their village on Roanoke Island.  There the rituals continued   Confident natives welcomed the nervous newcomers,  but they trembled with fear when the English demonstrated the firepower of guns.  Impressed, the natives tried to convince the English to join them in an attack on Wingina’s enemies, but the English declined to interfere with local politics.  Wingina selected two men, Manteo and Wanchese, to travel back to England, to learn the ways of their new friends.

When Raleigh introduced Manteo and Wanchese to the royal court of Elizabeth they caused a sensation among the English.  Raleigh gave them lodging in Durham House and denied the numerous curiosity seekers access.  He put Harriot to the task of learning the native language.  Manteo was a chief of the Croatoan tribe.  He was impressed by London.  He could see for himself the the level of technology enjoyed by the English.  He believed they could be a powerful ally for his tribe.  Wanchese, a Roanoke chief, was far less cooperative.  He saw the English as a mortal threat, and he was eager to go home to warn his people.

Don’t Come A Knockin’ When Durham House Does Algonquin

Harriot had already tried to adapt the Hebrew alphabet for universal usage as the alphabet of all languages.  Now he devised his own: 36 characters, a combination of Greek and Roman letters, algebraic symbols and invented cyphers.  The vocabulary he compiled was destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666, but his alphabet survived.

Manteo explained to Harriot the native concept of montoac, a sacred power of divine origin to be appreciated in the mysterious wonder of any excellence.  An especially beautiful butterfly or a bear of rare power were examples of montoac.  An act of outstanding courage by a warrior was praised as montoac. English technology: ships, clocks, compasses, mirrors, and books were montoac.  Manteo confided to Harriot that some among the natives thought the English gods, or believed they had been taught by gods.  Because only English men came to the New World, and they made no advances toward the native women, some wondered if they were an old race of half gods not even born from women.

They Were Modest in Food and Drink But Not Sitting

Manteo described the native’s war tactics.  Chiefs were only as powerful as the number of warriors they could deploy.  Sneak attacks and guerilla strikes at break of day or by moonlight were the most common methods of war.  Head on battle was only risked where there were trees for the warriors to duck behind after firing their arrows.  Harriot was reassured that the witch hazel bows and stone tipped arrows of the natives would be no threat to the armor of the colonists.

In 1585 Harriot was sent to America, while Raleigh sailed in search of the golden city of El Dorado in Guyana.  Harriot fresh from his study of native culture with Manteo may have prevailed upon his patron to treat the natives of Guyana very differently than had the Spanish, who were accustomed to taking whatever they wanted, even out of graves and homes, including forcing native men into servitude, and raping the women.  Raleigh ordered every object taken to be paid for, guides and others who served the English were paid, and native women were left unmolested.

Under the command of Raleigh’s cousin Sir Richard Grenville and of Sir Ralph Lane, seven ships sailed for the New World.  Lane’s complaints about Grenville’s obnoxious arrogance weren’t exaggerated since a contemporary account of Grenville described him downing three or four glasses of wine then crunching the glass with his teeth and swallowing the shards.  Though blood ran from his mouth Grenville didn’t seem any the worse for it.  On a ship named Tiger, Harriot and a picked crew including John White, a skilled painter, and Joachim Gans, an expert in metallurgy, joined Manteo and Wanchese for their voyage home.  Harriot’s superior navigational techniques enabled them to reach warm Caribbean waters in only three weeks.

Wingina and his tribe welcomed the colonists and traded for what they could get of their technology.  A small house was built for Harriot that he would fill with the paperwork of his notes and the specimens he gathered.  He worked with Gans at what was America’s first alchemical laboratory.  Gans was the son of David Gans, the Jewish astrologer, historian and mathematician of Prague, who had worked with Kepler and Tycho Brahe on their astronomical observations.  In 1849 a visitor claimed to have found hermetically sealed glass globes full of quicksilver (mercury) at the site of of the lab where Harriot and Gans practiced their arts.  At the same spot in 1994 archeologists recovered metallic antimony (used in the separation of silver and copper), slag (the byproduct of smelting), clinkers (the incombustible residue of burned coal), and traces of molten materials.   A brass apothecary’s weight was found in a ditch alongside glass shards from vessels used by assayers of that time, and badly burned fragments of native clay pots.  Seeds and nuts from leaf pine and shagbark hickory suggest tests for medicinal properties.

Algonquin Cul De Sac by John White

As Harriot gathered specimens, John White painted hauntingly beautiful watercolors of the natives, their native villages and ceremonies, as well as butterflies, fish, animals, and plants.  Together they collected a treasure trove of information.  Among the most marvelous of their specimens was tobacco.  English sailors who visited American shores had already taken up smoking tobacco, and there is evidence of shops in London at the time fashioning pipes for that purpose, but it took Harriot and Raleigh to make tobacco all the rage at the English court.

In Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia Harriot wrote: “There is an herb which is sowed by itself and is called by the inhabitants Vppówoc.  In the West Indies it has diverse names, according to the several places and countries where it grows and is used. The Spaniards generally call it Tobacco. The leaves thereof being dried and brought into powder they use to take the fume or smoke thereof by sucking it through pipes made of clay into their stomach and head from whence it purges superfluous phlegm and other gross humors, opens all the pores and passages of the body, by which means the use thereof, not only preserves the body from obstructions but also if any be, so that they have not been of too long continuance, in short time breaks them up, whereby their bodies are notably preserved in health and know not many grievous diseases with which we in England are oftentimes afflicted.  The Vppówoc is of so precious estimation amongst them that they think their gods are marvelously delighted therewith. Whereupon sometimes they make hallowed fires and cast some of the powder therein for a sacrifice. Being in a storm upon the waters, to pacify their gods, they cast some up into the air and into the water.  So a weir for fish being newly set up, they cast some therein and into the air.  Also after an escape from danger, they cast some into the air likewise, but all done with strange gestures, stamping, sometimes dancing, clapping of hands, holding up of hands, and staring up into the heavens, chattering strange words and noises.”

The Gayest Algonquin in Recorded History

Harriot also learned about native spiritual beliefs.  He says they worshipped many gods but only one great god who has been from all eternity and who had made the others to assist in creating and maintaining the world.  The sun, moon, and stars were lesser gods that served the higher order.  Harriot must have recognized the resemblance to Platonism.  The native genesis like ancient Egyptian and biblical creation stories began with the waters out of which the gods made the world, but the first human being was a woman.  They had no idea how long ago this had been.  They kept only oral traditions.  Harriot reports that they believed in the immortality of the soul.  When they died good people went to live with the gods in eternal bliss, while those who lived badly would burn forever in a pit where the sun set.  However these testimonies are suspect.  Harriot wanted to present the natives as ready for their Protestant makeovers so he exaggerated resemblances to European beliefs.  The natives had probably already heard some Christian doctrine from the European fishermen they had interacted with for generations.  They may have been telling Harriot what he wanted to hear.

The Algonquins Kickin’ It Old School

Harriot shared two tales of recent near death experiences he heard from the natives.  One man was buried but came back to life to report he had been sent to burn but saved by a god who told him to live again and warn others to live good lives so they could avoid the place of terrible torment.  Another who woke up in a grave that was fortunately only soil and not a wooden box reported though his body lay dead his soul lived and traveled far to a place of delicate trees with splendid fruits, and then to a beautiful encampment where he saw his father who told him to go back so he could tell his friends the good they were to enjoy forever if they lived well.

The natives believed their gods had human forms so they represented them with carved images they placed in houses and temples.  Prayer, worship, singing, and offerings were centered around these figures.  Harriot makes the point that only the most ignorant among the natives believed the carvings themselves were actual gods.  Most understood them to be symbols.  Their great chiefs were mummified and kept in a temple guarded by a life-size carving of a god.

Mummified Algonquin Chiefs.  Who Needs Pyramids?

Harriot also described the activities of what he called conjurors but we would call shamans.  They stared up at the heavens in trance.  They danced wildly and uttered mysterious declarations.  Their strange gestures, herbal concoctions and rituals were not only used for healing but for remotely viewing the activities of prey and of the enemy.  Harriot added that these predictions “often times they find to be true.”  In one of his less rational moments, or perhaps in an effort to appease public opinion back home, Harriot credited their success to the devil.  His descriptions of the activities of these shamans must have reminded some among the English of their own cunning men and women, who were consulted for similar reasons and who used comparable techniques.  In both cultures witchcraft and eclipses were fearsome threats.

Modern studies of Algonquin religious beliefs reveal some similarities to Harriot’s descriptions but some crucial differences.  The great god of goodness was not the creator of the other gods.  The god who presided over the winter, over the dark, over the pit of suffering was also the patron of the shamans.  After all, when suffering was inflicted by a divine being, one had to learn a way around it, a way to appease, one had to acquire the knowledge that could heal and restore order.  Every morning Algonquin mothers would ask their children if they had dreamed.  Not all dreams were important.  But certain dreams contained vivid messages.  Dreams could reveal ways to heal sickness.  They could tell where prey, or the enemy, could be found.  They could teach a hunter a new technique.  A wife could remotely view her husband arriving late from the hunt.  And by paying close attention to dreams, by taking them seriously, the Algonquins believed the quality of the messages would improve, providing guidance through communication with a greater consciousness.

Algonquin Shaman Models A Lovely Frock and Do

But Harriot was not content with learning the spiritual beliefs of the natives.  He wanted to share his own.  As for the Bible, the natives were “glad to touch it, to hold it to their breasts and heads, and stroke over all their body with it to show their hungry desire of that knowledge.”  He read to them from it and translated the passages into Algonquin.  The natives added the God of the Book to their pantheon but showed no signs of embracing monotheism.

Wingina must have been pleased when the English colonists burned a rival tribe’s crops and village after the failure of a local chief to return a stolen silver cup.  But then a terrible drought killed many crops and the diseases brought by the Europeans began to take their toll.  The natives sickened and died but the English remained healthy.  Some natives thought that the English controlled the disease, which they described as invisible bullets, a secret weapon supplied by the English god.  When their shamans could not stop the spreading epidemic some Roanokes, including Wingina, adopted English rituals. They prayed with the English, they sang their psalms, worshipping their God, but to no avail.  English montoac was not only marvelous but malevolent. Many began to believe that Harriot and the others had been sent to exterminate the natives and that more whites would follow to take their lands.  Their arrival had roughly coincided with eclipses and a comet.  For the natives these were omens of doom.  As an astrologer Harriot concurred, venturing that Providence had made the natives sicken and die for the benefit of the Christian colonists, who would thereby suffer less opposition.  As Harriot wrote: “There could at no time happen any strange sickness, losses, hurts, or any other cross unto them, but that they would impute to us the cause or means thereof for offending or not pleasing us.”

Watercolor by John White Believed to Be Chief Wingina

Wingina abandoned Roanoke Island, moving away his people.  He changed his name to Pemisapan.  Sir Ralph Lane was told by enemies of the Roanoke that Pemisapan was planning an attack to destroy the English settlement.  Lane was convinced by what was probably a ruse.  He called for a parlay with Pemispan.  As they talked peace Lane suddenly ordered an attack.  The chief was beheaded.  Less than two weeks later, the colony abandoned Roanoke Island, fleeing a powerful storm, amid fears of native reprisals.  No gold had been found and there were rumors that the Spanish were on their way to take what they claimed was theirs.  In the rush to leave, many of Harriot’s specimens were lost at sea, including a necklace intended for Queen Elizabeth, selected from 5000 pearls, about which Harriot wrote, “the likeness and uniformity in roundness…and many excellent colors…were very fair and rare.”  Most of his precious notes were dropped into the ocean, a priceless record of America’s dawn was lost there as the ink bled away.

This murder of a chief doomed Raleigh’s Roanoke venture.  Grenville and company, including Harriot, returned to England leaving only a small group to hold the colony.  Wanchese, whose suspicions about the English had proven true, led a raid by his followers wiping out the remaining English in the summer of 1586.  John White was declared governor and returned with a larger party of colonists in 1587.  They had been there only briefly when White found one of his lieutenants dead, arrows stuck all over his body like quills on a porcupine, his head bashed in.  When White called for a peaceful meeting only natives maimed in the attack on Pemispan’s camp showed up to remind him of English brutality.  White retaliated for the killing of his lieutenant but he stupidly killed the only natives still willing to speak with him, Manteo’s kinsmen of the Croatoan tribe.

Harriot published his Briefe and True Report on the New Found Land of Virginia in 1588, the year the Spanish armada threatened to conquer England.  Raleigh was busy leading the British Navy.  Only seven copies of the book are known to have survived.  It reads like a business plan for prospective investors, an executive summary for potential timeshare owners, but also a legal brief in defense of Raleigh’s plans for colonization.  Other reports had described the terrible dangers of the new world, the scarcity of food, and the hostility of the natives.  Harriot dismissed these as the complaints of travelers too accustomed to soft English beds.  He did not tell how the colonists had to rely on the natives to avoid starvation in the winter, robbing them of their own meager stores of corn.  He downplayed the incidents of poisonous water and food he observed.  He mentioned that the violence he witnessed may have been too fierce, but dismissed it as over eagerness caused by the English desire to instill fear and obedience so that future colonists might have an easier time civilizing the natives.

Algonquin Lawn Ornament

The Spanish since at least 1505 had been publishing sensationalized accounts of cannibalism among the natives of South America to legitimize their own brutality with lurid stories of naked native women waylaying explorers only to hit them from behind to carve them up for a feast.  Harriot portrayed the natives as sober in drink and diet, intelligent within the limits of their primitive technology.  He praised their farming methods for preserving the fertility of the soil and increasing its productivity.  Rather than separating crops, in their fields bean plants climbed corn stalks while melons on the ground preserved moisture.  He pointed out that the chiefs punished theft, adultery and other misbehavior with beatings or death depending on the severity of the crime.  He suggested they would probably welcome the friendship of the English, and he expected they would embrace the true Protestant religion.

Part one of Briefe and True Report cataloged profitable products.  It began with silk (from grass and worms), hemp, and grapes as wines.  He listed sixty plants native to the region or sown by the colonists, nearly forty animals and a dozen minerals. Two dozen plants were identified only by their indigenous names because they were entirely unfamiliar.  Milkweed was given as the antidote for the native’s poisoned arrows.  Harriot was only interested in edible animals.  “We have taken and eaten” was a common refrain applied to porpoises, squirrels, swans, turtles (sea and land), oysters, crabs, lobsters, jellyfish, herring, sturgeon, trout, mussels, scallops, partridges, passenger pigeons, cranes, geese, rabbits, muskrats, bears, wolves, deer, and wild turkeys so docile the English could shoot one and the others would not fright.   Eight water fowl unknown to Europeans were mentioned, and seventeen unknown land fowl.  It’s both comical and tragic to read his descriptions of every manner of fish, animals, and birds.  He never describes them in any detail.  He only pauses to note whether they made good eating or not.  Harriot listed varieties of trees and the commercial uses of them.  Now that the vast wealth of species and the great forests are long gone, it’s hard to miss the irony that the first person to report about them viewed the lush splendor of the New World as nothing more than a massive product aisle.

Sea Turtle by John White, They Took It and Ate It

They Ate These, Too.

Butterfly by John White, Too Chalky, Not Filling

Raleigh’s colony disappeared completely.   In 1587 Governor John White had left among others, his own granddaughter Virginia Dare, the first English European born in America, while he returned to England for supplies.  The Spanish war delayed his return until 1590.  He found only empty buildings and no signs of fire or battle.  The only clues left behind were the mysterious Roanoke carvings.  Croatoan carved on a post of the fort and Cro carved on a tree.  Historians speculate that the survivors may have been absorbed by the Croatoan tribe, but suspect they were killed off by diseases and attacks.

I Could Swear I Left Those Colonists Right Here – The Roanoke Carvings

In 1590 Harriot back home in England was lending books to the notorious English magus John Dee.  By then Harriot was voraciously reading his way through the three finest libraries in England, those of John Dee, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Raleigh’s friend Henry Percy, Ninth Earl of Northumberland, known as the Wizard Earl.  The Earl owned many alchemical painted manuscripts and books.  He had the largest collection in England of the books of Giordano Bruno who was arguing for a great restoration of knowledge through the blending of Neoplatonic paganism, scientific inquiry and Christian tradition.

Professor Frances Yates put Harriot at the center of a Pythagorean Hermetic circle, some believe Shakespeare referred to as “The School of Night” in his play Love’s Labor’s Lost where the bard clearly lampoons Raleigh’s poetry.  Modern scholars suspect Yates was seeing Rosicrucians where there were only Protestants.  Harriot appears to have been a basically sound and God fearing Englishman.  He showed no enthusiasm for grand projects of reform, preferring to pursue his own interests and the interests of his patrons.

Raleigh was a hero to the British people after the defeat of the Spanish armada.  The Queen was not the only one at court who became jealous of his popularity.  Her favor to him sharply diminished.  Then in 1592 Raleigh had an affair with Elizabeth Throckmorton, one of the Queen’s Ladies in Waiting, who became pregnant.  They wed in secret.  The Queen was furious at this impertinence.  She had Raleigh called back from his exploration of Panama and upon his return she locked up Sir Walter and his wife in the Tower of London.  Raleigh was released only a month later, but Lady Raleigh was left there to taste the harsh cold of December before her release.  Husband and wife were devoted throughout their lives together, and in a certain morbid way thereafter that will be told near the end of our tale.

With Raleigh in the Tower, the Wizard Earl took over as Harriot’s patron.  The Earl was a friend of John Dee with whom he shared a keen interest in astrology and book collecting.  But the Earl was a wizard by reputation only.  Like Dee himself he had discretely gone to the continent to sample Catholic sacraments, and it was no secret that he sympathized with the Pope.  Because he was born of hard of hearing and with a slight speech impediment he was not comfortable at the royal court, so he moved Harriot to his country estate Syon House.

The Wizard Earl, Please Don’t Mention His Cousin Tom

Raleigh had kept Harriot busy with practical matters but the Earl allowed him to follow his most esoteric scientific pursuits, treating him like a member of the family, often engaging in deep conversations over dinner, and sometimes joining him in alchemical and other experiments.  Harriot designed improvements for Earl’s plumbing and while doing so developed mathematical formulas for the velocity and volume of water.  His studies of the parabola not only related to projectile weapons, he was interested in creating a parabolic burning mirror.  Harriot was one of only two people to see Chapman’s The Iliad, the first complete English translation of Homer, eighteen years before it was published.  One can only imagine the horror Harriot and the Earl felt when their idyllic intellectual life was disturbed in 1600 by the news that Giordano Bruno had been burned at the stake as a dangerous heretic.

When the Queen died in 1603 Raleigh’s fortunes fell further.  He was arrested that year, accused of plotting against the new king.  He was immediately sentenced to death and suffered a mock execution, or a true execution was halted at the last possible moment.  Many plots were hatched against James, from both Catholic and Protestant extremists, but it’s highly doubtful that Raleigh was actually involved in any conspiracy.  He was probably singled out for being the brightest star in the legend of Elizabeth’s Court, and perhaps the most hated Englishman among the Spanish whom James was attempting to placate.  But Sir Henry Percy the Ninth Earl of Northumberland had signed the document legitimizing James as King and he rode at the King’s right hand when James took his throne.  For the moment Harriot was safe.

Sir Walter Raleigh was accused of running a “School of Atheism” where hell and godhead were laughed at.  Harriot’s name came up repeatedly in the accusations first printed in polemic Catholic books, then in evidence given in court cases like that against English dramatist and poet Christopher Marlowe, thought to be a member of the School of Night.  Dinner conversations, rumors and hearsay were the insubstantial substance of most of the accusations against Raleigh.  He and friends were said to have believed the native Americans had artifacts and oral history proving the world was older than Adam.  Harriot was accused of denying the resurrection of the body, and eternal reward and eternal punishment.  Raleigh was said to have dismissed Moses as a “juggler” and to have declared that Harriot could do better.  Another member of Raleigh’s circle was accused of tearing out pages of the Bible to use for drying tobacco.  Harriot’s own book was used against him.  If the natives thought Harriot and the other strangers from across the ocean gods then perhaps Harriot had deliberately misled them.

Harriot was accused of being worse than an atheist.   He was accused of devil worship.   Didn’t he create the Devil’s Alphabet?  He was reading books on astrology, but also books against astrology.  He was reading the pagan hymns of the Neoplatonic Emperor Julian, who had hoped to suppress Christianity and restore paganism, whose description of the sun as literally a god must have reminded Harriot of the gods of the Carolina Algonquins.  But he was also reading the Catholic Fathers.  He wrote about the power of the atom, at the time a theory considered atheism.  But was he an atheist?

The Devil’s Alphabet, as Morons Called It

One of the accusations against Harriot was that he denied the Biblical creation myth.  His notes made plain his preoccupation with the idea that nothing comes out of nothing, that things are not nothing, and therefore how could they have been created by nothing.  Harriot was accused of arguing that atoms are infinite, that the creation has always existed and did not suddenly appear a few thousand years ago.  But later, partially influenced by his reading of the great Neoplatonist Proclus, Harriot questioned whether less or more are terms that can be applied to the infinite.  Contemplating the indivisible he wondered whether “all things are made of nothing” and “out of nothing nothing is made” are really contradictions after all.  Here he came close to the metaphysics of Hinduism and Buddhism where true reality is nothing to our deluded senses and what we consider reality is nothing but maya or illusion.

In a Sotheby’s catalog of 1986 appeared a manuscript dated 1594 purporting to be notes from discussions with Thomas Harriot on theological subjects.  If this was Harriot’s conversation, he questioned why an all powerful God would create a war between good and bad angels, and why he would create such an imperfect world and inflict eternal doom on his own ignorant creations.  He doubted the miracles of the Bible since no one bears witness to them but the writers of the Bible themselves, and none have occurred in recent history.  He wondered why God would allow the Turks to flourish while Christians suffered plague every summer.  Since this was the period of Harriot’s friendship with Dee, it’s tempting to think these are truly notes of a conversation between them.  The manuscript included questions about how angels and spirits could see and hear when they lacked the organs for doing so.  How could human and angelic intelligences resemble each other?  How could one angelic intelligence be evil and another good, on what basis could such assumptions be made?  He decided human beings must be incapable of knowing anything about such beings since we can have no experience of them given our limited senses.

When King James anonymously published a book in 1604 everyone knew he wrote attacking the now widespread use of tobacco he included a veiled swipe at Raleigh and Harriot for introducing it to English society.  The monarch complained about second hand smoke, he called it passive smoke, and warned of dangers to the lungs, calling the odor hateful to the nose.  Harriot must have been mortified to be singled out.  He was still a heavy smoker, as was Raleigh, who used a long silver pipe in the Tower to help him pass the time.

His Royal Thetruth.com

At first the threats against Harriot were mere gossip.  But then in 1605 the Earl and Harriot had a guest for dinner: Thomas Percy, a distant relative of the Earl.  That night, November 4th, a rider appeared for a secret meeting with Thomas Percy in the Earl’s garden; his name was Guy Fawkes.  The very next day Fawkes would be arrested strolling out of his hiding place where the explosives he set were ready to blow Parliament and King James sky high.  The movie inspired by the ill fated plot gave the symbol of a Guy Fawkes mask to the anonymous movement four centuries later; an ironic twist since “Guido” as he liked to be called was trying to give England back to that ultimate authoritarian the Pope.  But the immediate aftermath for Harriot and the Earl was imprisonment.  Most likely they had nothing to do with the plot but the visit from Guy Fawkes was just too suspicious for King James.  After all, the Wizard Earl’s father and uncle, the two prior Earls, had been implicated in plots against their monarchs.

James became frightened that Harriot may have cast his horoscope and the horoscopes of his children.  Apparently, for James, a horoscope wasn’t only evidence that the Earl and Harriot had tried to foretell the end of his reign.  The act of casting a horoscope took on the quality of black magic, not just peering into forbidden secrets but somehow binding the monarch and his family to a particular strand of fate.  We still have the list of the King’s questions about Harriot’s horoscopes; and we still have a letter of true pathos from poor Harriot who spent several weeks in a less pleasant jail than his patrons, and who grew deathly ill there.  He wanted to be allowed to quietly pursue his studies; he promised to continue praying every day for the health and glory of King James and the royal family.  Soon after, he was released, possibly because Sir Francis Bacon was seeking scholars for his “renewal of the sciences.”

The Earl adjusted to life in the Tower, where Harriot became known as one of the Wizard Earl’s “three magi.”  Harriot was given a house connected to the Tower.  Not only did the Earl enjoy tobacco and scientific discussions with Raleigh, Harriot and other friends, he also took over all of Martin Tower, and had an outdoor bowling alley with a roof built.  Together they all conducted alchemical experiments.  But the privileges the Earl and Raleigh enjoyed were a ploy intended to get their confessions.  When the ruse failed the privileges were removed one by one.

Harriot created comparative tables of Bible translations for Raleigh, to be used in his defense as his case slowly worked its way through the English courts.  Raleigh worked on his History of the World focusing on what makes kings good or bad.  (Later King James would try to suppress the book he condemned as “saucy” but Raleigh was too smart for him, releasing it anonymously through several publishers directly to the people).  Harriot contributed to the sections on geography and chronology of the development of mathematics, but by then he was deeply involved in his experiments in refraction that helped explain rainbows.  His theory drew the attention of Kepler who corresponded with him for several years starting in 1606. When Kepler wrote Harriot about the refraction of light and his doubts about the theory of atoms because of his belief that some mysterious power, perhaps soul, infuses all matter, Harriot invited Kepler to ponder the interior of the atom where mass and motion, soul and energy unveil an infinity not of boundless cosmos but an interior infinity.

Harriot’s Diagram of Sun Spots

Kepler and Halley’s Comet in 1607 turned Harriot’s attention to astronomy.  In 1609 he bought his first telescope, an invention only a year old.  He drew a map of the moon the summer of 1609 months before Galileo did the same, and in winter 1610 he diagramed sun spot patterns.  He and Galileo were the first human beings to see the moons of Jupiter.  Harriot was somehow restored to favor at court and he became one of the principle tutors of Prince Henry.  In the third installment of this three part look at the impact of Europeans on the earliest history of America we’ll examine more deeply this royal who became for a short time the hope of all Protestants and other enemies of the Catholic Church, and the culture of hope for worldwide reform that grew up around him and his sister the Princess Elizabeth.  Their tragedies unleashed thirty years of war in Europe.  But for now Prince Henry was the darling of those who longed for the glories of the golden age of Queen Elizabeth, and his little sister was considered her potential second coming.  About Sir Walter Raleigh locked up in the Tower, Prince Henry famously observed “Only my father could keep such a bird in a cage.”  Prince Henry died in 1612 at the age of eighteen.  Raleigh, Harriot and Shakespeare found common ground in their grief.

Three years later in 1615 Harriot noticed a small red speck on his nose.  At first he didn’t trouble about it, but it concerned him as it slowly grew.  He continued visiting Raleigh and the Earl, sharing his research with them, and helping Raleigh develop his plans for regaining his freedom.  Somehow in 1617 Raleigh convinced the cash strapped King to let him go back to Guyana for another crack at discovering El Dorado.  After twenty years absence Raleigh found that the memory of him among the natives was so positive they wanted to make him their king.   But the City of Gold was never found, and the expedition was considered a failure.  Worse, he could not resist attacking Spanish ships on his way home.  Upon his return to England he was sent back to the Tower and his death sentence was reaffirmed.

Raleigh’s Room in the Tower of London – No Cushions for You, Walter

In October 1618 Raleigh was beheaded.  When he saw the axe that would behead him,  Raleigh commented: “This is a sharp medicine, but it is a physician for all diseases and miseries.” Thomas Harriot was there to watch his old patron die.  He took cryptic notes on a slip of paper which has survived.    Since Harriot wore black all his life Raleigh left him his own black finery.  Raleigh’s head was mummified and Lady Raleigh carried it with her for the rest of her life, not so different after all from the Algonquins and their temple of mummified chiefs.

By then the speck on Harriot’s nose had become a serious and painful condition.  Still supported by the imprisoned Earl he augmented his income by constructing and selling telescopes.  His doctor had been part of a circle studying Hermetic philosophy in Paris, a student of the doctrines of Paracelsus, who became the most renowned physician in England and Europe, doctor to two Kings of England, but he could not heal Harriot’s affliction.  As he grew more ill and death approached Harriot read ravenously books of theology modern and ancient including Libanius’ defense of the Emperor Julian and St. Augustine’s refutation of Julian’s arguments against Christianity.  He read the works of Rosicrucian apologists and critics, and the latest scientific volumes.  His friends urged him to publish so his discoveries would not be forgotten or claimed by others.  But Harriot had suffered too much persecution.

Only one reference to any family associated with Harriot remains, in a list of accounts associated with the expenses of the Earl, but historians believe this may have been a convenient reference to Harriot’s servants and assistants since no record remains of his ever having a wife or children.

July 18 1621, after sixteen years in the Tower, the Wizard Earl was at last released.  He had grown so comfortable there they had a hard time dislodging him.   Harriot had died sixteen days earlier in London.  His patron’s final gift was a plaque honoring his excellence in mathematics, philosophy and theology.  His grave is forgotten ground somewhere underneath the Bank of England.

Harriot was considered the most demonic of Raleigh’s circle, but no records remain to confirm his alleged heresies, only hearsay.  Hostile gossips accused him of scoffing at the idea that something could come from nothing and pointed at the red speck that grew to kill him as an example it could, and a sign of divine justice inflicted on a man who was sticking his nose where it didn’t belong.  Harriot left 7000 pages of notes as unorganized today as the day he died. His manuscript on algebra, Artis Analyticae Praxis, was published in latin ten years after his death by editors who removed whatever they didn’t understand: the best parts.

Harriot’s influence was subtle.  He inspired the metaphors of astronomy in the plays of Christopher Marlowe, especially Faustus.  He influenced the theories of Descartes.  Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll of the Alice in Wonderland books) studied hermeticism and Harriot.  Until thirty years ago Harriot was all but forgotten by historians and mathematicians.  Since then scholars have begun to reveal his genius, and that melancholy yet marvelous moment he inhabited, at the end of the Renaissance, at the birth of the modern world, at the beginning of the American experiment.

Dedicated to the Adventurers

This is part one of a three part series.  Part two When First They Met will look at the native culture the Europeans found in America and the impact of first contact made by the Spanish, the Dutch, the French and the English.  Part three America’s Forgotten Spiritual Heritage will consider the zeal for a new world away from the dark ages of domination by the Catholic Church launched by the Rosicrucian manifestos and other visionary reformers of Europe, and the devastation of their aspirations at the Battle of White Mountain, which left America as their only hope for a brighter future.

Sources:

A Republic of Mind and Spirit
A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion by Catherine L. Albanese
Yale University Press, 2007

Thomas Harriot’s Doctrine of Triangular Numbers: the `Magisteria Magna’
Janet Beery and Jacqueline Stedall
European Mathematical Society 2008

The School of Night
M.C. Bradbook
Cambridge University Press, 1936

European Visions American Voices
Thomas Harriot’s A brief and true report: knowledge-making and the Roanoke Voyage
Stephan Clucas
The Trustees of the British Museum 2009

Astrology in Harriot’s Time
Richard Dunn
The Durham Thomas Harriot Seminar #14
History Education Project, 1994

Thomas Harriot
An Elizabethan Man of Science
Edited by Robert Fox
Ashgate, 2000

The Natural Philosophy of Thomas Harriot
H. Gatti
Oxford University Press, 1993

Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America
Karen Kupperman
Cornell University Press, 2000

Settling with the Indians:
The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America 1580-1640
Karen Kupperman
Rowman and Littlefield 1980

Big Chief Elizabeth
Giles Milton
Picador, 2001

Investigating Gunpowder Plot
Mark Nichols
Manchester University Press, 1991

European Visions American Voices
Lost Colonists and Lost Tribes
Michael Leroy Oberg
The Trustees of the British Museum 2009

Don’t Eat, Don’t Touch: Roanoke Colonists, Natural Knowledge, and Dangerous Plants of North America
Karen Reeds
The Trustees of the British Museum 2009

European Visions American Voices
Thomas Harriot’s A brief and true report: knowledge-making and the Roanoke Voyage
Joan-Pau Rubiés
The Trustees of the British Museum 2009

A Sourcebook for the Study of Thomas Harriot
James W. Shirley
Arno Press, 1981

Thomas Harriot: A Biography
James W. Shirley
Oxford University Press 1983

Thomas Harriot
Renaissance Scientist
Edited by John W. Shirley
Oxford University Press, 1974

Life of Thomas Hariot
and Hariot’s brief and true Report of Virginia
Henry Stevens
Chiswick Press, 1900

John Dee’s Occultism
Magical Exaltation Through Powerful Signs
Gyorgy Szonyi
State University of New York Press, 2004

Religion and the Decline of Magic
Keith Thomas
Penguin University Books, 1973

Article by Ronnie Pontiac

Newtopia staff writer RONNIE PONTIAC is a founding member and primary guitarist of Lucid Nation, executive producer of the documentary Viva Cuba Libre, associate producer of The Gits documentary, and art editor, then poet in residence for Newtopia Magazine in its former incarnation . He’s a published author of works on obscure topics such as ancient Greek religion and the history of alchemy. Follow him on Twitter @AmerMysteries.

Catfish, 2011
Documentary
Filmmakers:  Ariel Schulman, Nev Schulman and Henry Joost

CinemaShrink Says:

If you’re nervous about the future of internet relationships
See Catfish for a romp with creative minds at work
Because fake takes on new meaning when multiples become norm

Three young men – two filmmakers and a photographer – catch the progression of an internet exchange en vivo, live on film beginning when the photographer receives an email from an eight-year-girl who asks his permission to send him a painting she’s made of one of his photographs that appeared in her local newspaper.  The photographer, that would be Nev.  The girl, Abby.  The painting was quite good. It captured his curiosity and he agreed to friend her on Facebook.

The tale is a plot worth following but a more fascinating aspect is the way the film opens up a world where reality is caught and lost numerous times, challenging the characters and viewers to keep up with the truth.  When the three men sense a cyberspace ruse being perpetrated on Nev, they opt to document it with ‘catch and release’ filming.  They film a piece and throw it back to see what happens next.  They know they’re not dealing with the truth but the truth they think they’re dealing with turns out not to be true either.

Just how many truths are there? On the other end of Nev’s line – be it online, cell phone line or a line of b.s. – is a storyteller with a fifth dimension.  That would be the eight-year-old’s mother, Angela.  Angela is a middle-aged wife and mother who lives in a remote region of northern Michigan with an atypical, albeit good-guy husband, two severely handicapped step-sons, their eight- year-old daughter and a computer.  Master manipulator of cyberspace, Angela emotionally entangles Nev by turning her eight-year-old daughter into a believable child prodigy who sells her paintings for thousands of dollars and invents, out of whole cloth, a beautiful, flirty nineteen-year-old daughter of many talents who falls in love with Nev as only a smitten teen can.

At first, Nev goes a little weak in the brain from the idea that such a beauty would want him.   He falls in love.  As he takes the bait, the camera catches him enthralled and then sobered as he realizes she is – in fact – too good to be true.  After Nev and his filmmaking buddies discover he’s being had, they agree to a ‘nothing like getting even’ plan.  The young men set off in a car for Michigan to embarrass the nineteen-year-old who could not possibly be the beauty, the singer or the seductress she makes herself out to be. But the expose turns out to be a soulful look behind the curtain of Oz.

There’s no there there.  Just a small house in the middle of nowhere with a family making do.  Angela lives firmly in two worlds, fact and fantasy, making the best of one and creating  stunning performance art out of the other. Cover blown, she slowly emerges from her lies as a hardworking woman with a deep heart, an unstoppable imagination and quite a gift with a paintbrush.  As the three young men grapple with Angela’s unraveling story, their revenge fades and their hearts open.  What they discover behind their expectations sets them back on their heels and we see a breadth and warmth of character in these three young men that is inspirational in our times.

No one gets hurt.  But which is more real – fact or fantasy? Whichever we choose, this film makes the point that our reality is constantly shifting, morphing before our eyes with no bottom line and more characters active in every exchange than meets the eye. No wonder the reaching out, the suspension of disbelief.  Beneath all the deception lies a buried truth, a deep desire to feel connected.

Why Catfish as a title?  Might a catfish have anything to do with determining what reality we’re swimming in?  At the end of the documentary, the good-guy husband of the storyteller adds a helpful two cents:

“They used to tank cod from Alaska all the way to China. They’d keep them in vats in the ship. By the time the codfish reached China, the flesh was mush and tasteless. So this guy came up with the idea that if you put these cods in these big vats, put some catfish in with them and the catfish will keep the cod agile. And there are those people who are catfish in life. And they keep you on your toes. They keep you guessing, they keep you thinking, they keep you fresh. And I thank god for the catfish because we would be droll, boring and dull if we didn’t have somebody nipping at our fin.”

In other words, Nev ‘nipped the fins’ of Angela, a highly creative woman hiding out in an upstairs bedroom across a sea of wireless space into public view as a rarely seen and even more rarely appreciated ‘everywoman’ wife and mother devoted to her family.

The identity of the storyteller – itself, herself, himself – still isn’t completely known at the end of the film.  Could Nev and his two buddies have made the whole thing up?

As the film ends we nip at Catfish, question its veracity.  And if we turn the Catfish quest for truth on ourselves, we’ll keep “guessing and thinking” about the line between truth and fantasy.  A teenage girl once said to me, “I think I’m getting this life thing.  You just make it up as you go along.”  What else could I say but “Uh huh” with an empathetic, quizzical smile and wonder how many identities she was going to explore in the next fifty years.

Article written by Dr. Jane Alexander Stewart

Newtopia staff writer Jane Alexander Stewart, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles who writes essays about mythic themes in film, creates “Myth in Film; Myth in Your Life” seminars for self-exploration and travels a lot. Her film reviews have been published in the San Francisco C.G. Jung Library Journal, Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture and Los Angeles Journal of Psychological Perspectives.  Jane’s popular essay on “The Feminine Hero in The Silence of the Lambs” appears in the anthology, The Soul of Popular Culture, and in The Presence of the Feminine in Film as one of its authors. She’s also presented myth in film programs at Los Angeles County Museum, University of Alabama and C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich. A collection of her reviews and other writing can be found at www.CinemaShrink.com.