FATHER EARTH, MOTHER SKY
In her post of August 24 Kate Ingold at Broken Windows wrote:
Around the time of my step-father's illness and death, I began to travel around the midwest researching and photographing Native American earth and burial mounds. The mounds, some earthen wombs for the dead, nearly all planted near waterways, somehow helped me through the loss of my step-father, a man who had been a father to me for thirteen years before he died.
And mentions: My master's thesis was a chapbook of photographs, poems, and essays about the mounds titled "Sky-Map: An Earthwork Diary". I was able to publish 100 color copies when I was awarded a grant by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, most of which are still sitting in a cardboard box at the bottom of our downstairs closet four years later.
I asked for and she sent me a copy of that chapbook. As I said in a comment on my last post, it was just my sort of thing and I loved it, text and photos both.
In SKY/MAP: AN EARTHWORK DIARY, Kate writes, in the section on Nazca, Peru:
In traditional western astronomy, we see constellations as connect-the-dot line drawings. We see reenactments of Greek and Roman myths through the linear connection of bright star to bright star. The Andeans see things differently. Their constellations are in the shadows. They see animals and plants in the contours of the dark space between the bright star clusters that make up the Milky Way. These silhouettes, shadow images, are signifiers of seasonal change and representations of creation stories and myths.
Along with all of Kate's words and pictures, these sentences in particular carried me like a river, like the shadow constellations that hide in the brightness of the star river, the Milky Way to my backyard and begin gathering brick and stone for my homemade labyrinth. You can't see the Milky Way from my backyard, but you can see more stars on a clear night than usual in a city like Tulsa; some big trees hold back the haze of street lights. To get a good view of the night sky I have to drive a good way out of town. Everywhere people are, there are lights to hold back the darkness of the night. To see the stars, you must go out into the dark. Go out into the dark, linger, and look. As I've written in a poem, the stars with their long needles will sew your foot to the dark river.
In SKY/MAP, Kate writes: Myths seem like guide books or instruction manuals to me.... They are instructions on how to see our connections among one another and the land we live on. She also says, There is no separation between the mounds and myth. The mounds are made from myth, surrounded by myth. Our ancestral urge to make sense of things, to shape our experience into stories must be linked to the atavistic urge to shape the earth with our hands, to dig, pile up and pat dirt into a mound of meaning.
Kate speaks of becoming "obsessed with the stars and the universe" after her step-father's death. After my mother's death when I was still a young man, on clear nights I would sometimes drive out to the cemetery where her body was buried. I would go and lie down on her grave. On my back, I smelled the earth, felt cut grass prickling and the air flowing over me, listened to insects singing, distant dogs barking, cars dopplering by, and looked up at the stars that my mother's closed eyes would see if they could see anything. A few years ago when my grandmother died at age 90, she was buried in the same cemetery. After the graveside service for Grandma was over. I walked over and laid down on my back, on my mother's grave, and looked up into the deep blue sky, decorated with a few wisps of cirrus cloud. (My family is used to this sort of thing.)
As Kate says, many of the Native American earthworks were burial mounds. Some of the mounds on the Arkansas River near Spiro, Oklahoma contained burials, and one of those, called Craig Mound, contained over 600 burials. Craig Mound was publicly looted for its rich trove of grave goods in the 1930s, until the state forced the looters out, then it was excavated and by archaeologists from the University of Oklahoma, with the help of the WPA. The present mound is a reconstruction, what was left of the original pushed back together, more or less. The Spiro site is the only one I have visited in person. Not impressive to the eye, you have to walk around until you can feel, or imagine you feel, a power placed there in the dirt long ago by many hands. The Spiro site is now a State Park and closes before sunset, but I'd like to lie on my back on top of a mound on a clear night, to see their stars, and the spaces between their stars, the stars the long dead people mapped their myths on. Surely, some of our stars are the same, and some of our dark spaces, too.
[This post © 2005 Dana Pattillo]
5:29:26 PM 
|
|
