We live in the shadow of dragons. HBO’s House of The Dragon reels in millions of viewers every Sunday. The generation who hid from their tormentors playing Dungeons and Dragons in the basements of their youth are calling the shots in the boardrooms of multinational tech companies and teaching their kids to pilot half-elven druids with 20 sided dice. In the past few decades the fire breathers have emerged from their banishment in children’s stories and role playing games to pop culture hegemony, a level of fame perhaps unmatched since they were regularly invoked in Medieval meadhalls over kegs of ale. The fantasy revival that began with Peter Jackson’s screen adaptation of the Lord of the Rings trilogy a quarter century ago brought orcs, elves and dragons back into the limelight, and well into the third decade since the lords of fantasy broke loose from the shackles of the nerd dungeons we remain in their thrall.

A half a century ago, one woman wondered aloud why Americans in particular seem to have such an aversion to the beasts. For those whose childhood dreams of dragonslaying persisted into adulthood, Ursula K. LeGuin probably needs no introduction. Widely regarded as one of the best sci-fi/fantasy stylists of her era, her most lasting legacy is perhaps her refusal to be pigeonholed as a genre author simply because she chose to paint her worlds with sorcerers and genderfluid aliens instead of sad businessmen and lonely housewives, and to insist that such a literary distinction speaks to a deeper problem at the heart of our culture. In her essay “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons,” LeGuin takes aim at those dim, unimaginative bean counters who fear the dragon not for its savage fury but because it is a potent manifestation of the boundless, childlike freedom of the unconscious. They have learned, as she writes, “to repress their imagination, to reject it as something childish and effeminate, unprofitable, and probably sinful.”

LeGuin wrote this essay in 1974, at a time when the 60s radicals with tattered copies of LOTR tucked into their rucksacks were headed into a redoubt under the cultural backlash that propelled Nixon to the White House and the strong, silent majority of the Greatest Generation was still firmly ensconced in the halls of power. Though LeGuin herself was born in 1929, she would become a cultural icon for the generation that came behind her, her anarcho-feminist leanings far more suitable to the 60s radicals than those of the “upright, responsible citizen….who is afraid of dragons, afraid of hobbits, and scared to death of faeries.” In her essay, she saves most of her fire for the men of her era, those who value literature and art only insofar as it can buttress their wealth or act as a vehicle for social control. We can all probably visualise the antiquated stereotype-the Puritan ethos, the rigid composure. In some ways, she could be describing my grandfather, a man descended not from Puritan stock but stoic Midwestern farmers who emigrated from Scandinavia to plough the cornfields of Iowa, a man for whom the Weather Channel was by his own admission the highest form of entertainment (Did he ever dream of the Geats who fought beside his Danish ancestors, of the poets of the meadhalls who sang of Beowulf slaying his dragon? I regret that I never thought to ask him).

Of the men of my grandfather’s generation who weren’t cut down in the war, many lived to see the 21st century, and some might have lived to see the rise of a world whose imaginative fictions were slowly given over to the talons of dragons. They’re almost all gone now, those dreary Puritans LeGuin pitied and mocked. If she were writing this essay today, she might find that conservative men of America are still afraid of dragons, but mostly because they expect to do battle with them. The repressive stoicism that buried the haunt of the trenches in a bottle of bourbon and house in the suburbs has been replaced by a new kind of masculinity, and with it a new kind of warrior. A generation raised on video games and wreathed in the anonymity of the internet, their marble avatars call over time to the country of myth and to the legends of Ancient Greece and Rome. In place of the wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus we might imagine them weaned at the tit of the dragon herself. It would seem that the “upright, responsible citizen” of our time has undergone a metamorphosis.

But in 1974, LeGuin was railing against an onslaught of conformity, the drab and bloodless patriarchy that produced “the artistic sweatshops of a society that is profoundly distrustful of the imagination.” She locates the antithesis of this condition within “fairy tale, legend, fantasy, science fiction and the rest of the lunatic fringe.” What, then, would she make of this:

I think it’s fair to call Elon Musk a lunatic, but on the fringe he is decidedly not. With all due respect to Gary Gygax and JRR Tolkien, having the richest man in the world go to bat over your legacy in the face of the woke outrage of the week does not bode well for LeGuin’s theory that fantasy is an anathema to the machine.

The titans of industry are playing a different game now. Quite literally, they are the dungeon masters that the men LeGuin calls out in her essay would have mocked as effeminate children. Men whose net worth, as it turns out, could not hold a candle to the dragon hoard of Elon Musk today. Are these disparate generations of conservative men cut from the same cloth? Is the pursuit of such obscene wealth any less destructive whether by the hand of an old money aristocrat or a techocratic fantasy nerd? And would Tolkien have felt any different, imagining Smaug in the skies as the bombs fell over the trenches, if he knew that in the future they would be guided by the “Gay Space Facism” of a company bearing the name of his dreaded Palantir? We live in strange times indeed. Perhaps our grandfathers were right to fear the dragon.

LeGuin always had a keen eye for the directions of cultural headwinds, and like any good sci-fi writer, she didn’t predict the future so much as offer a potential template for its makers. She has clearly left her mark on the imagination of progessives with her egalitarian dreaming, conjuring utopian anarchist moondwellers and worlds where what passes for male and female shift as readily as the tides. It is ironic, then, that here her admonishment of the the conservative minds of the 70s would be obliquely echoed by the propaganda of the Bush administration:

They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons because they are afraid of freedom.

So what is she really trying to say here? Is the eternal cultural warfare we find ourselves in truly reducible to some kind of Manichean struggle between imagination and freedom on the one hand and pitiless negation on the other? Will the gates of utopia finally be sprung once a critical mass of children are fluent in the elvish tongue of Sindarin? LeGuin herself would no doubt find that prescription too simple, but it would be tempting to read her thesis at a remove of fifty years and say that she woefully misdiagnosed the problem. And that in the end encouraging young men to dream of dragons was not the panacea that was promised.

But perhaps it is what is created by the wild growth of freedom and imagination that is really what’s at stake. Though she never says so explicitly, I think what she’s advocating for in this essay is the edification of the human spirit by the wonders of fantasy in such a way that it bends the dreamer towards compassion, through a process of integration:

I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult child is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child, and that if those faculties are encouraged in youth they will act well and wisely in the adult, but if they are repressed and denied in the child they will stunt and cripple the adult personality.

A child who survived might one day “slay the dragon” in a way that makes Jordan Peterson proud, without severing the nurturing and feminine forces of imagination that shape the dreamer. Or, they could ride the dragon all the way through the fertile chaos of the lunatic fringe as the tricksters who drive culture and creativity have done since time immemorial. Both result in personality archetypes that many, including LeGuin, would see as beneficial to a healthy society.

A dead child, whether deprived of all fantasy by repressive denial or indulged in the doom spiral of technology, will forever chase the void. The endless scrolling through reels of porn, mindless obsession, violence and the barren pursuit of temporary pleasures. Escapism in its most banal and toxic form. These are the vectors that serve the interests of men like Elon Musk, whose dark arts rival the arcane secrets of the Tombs of Atuan.

LeGuin was a mother herself and the author of over a dozen children’s stories. She knew full well the kind of magic that anyone who lives for very long in an imagined worlds is capable of conjuring, and its enormous benefit to the human soul. In her Earthsea fantasy series, her protagonist begins as a child afraid of his power who must learn from his hubris; he must vanquish and integrate the dark shadow of himself before he can rescue a young girl trapped in the dungeons of repression and help to heal a world that has lost its magic.

LeGuin died in 2018, far enough into the zenith of the fantasy revival and the nadir of the internet age that she could probably see where both were headed. In her later speeches, she seemed to hammer home alot of the arguments she was making in 1974:

I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom

Hard times have come. An estimate of the number of dead children haunting the bodies of adults living in a simulacrum of imagination would yield a staggering result. It’s safe to say that if she was here today she would say the dreamers of the fringe have their work cut out for them.

Tough to say what she would have thought about Gay Space Facism, though. Can’t get much closer to the edge of the lunatic fringe than that.

Some things last a long time. The oldest DNA so far retrieved from a mammal comes from the tooth of a Siberian mastodon who lived a million years ago. Otzi the Iceman, Tolland Man and a handful of other unfortunately murdered bog bodies come to us so well preserved that we can read their tattoos and examine the contents of their stomachs to discover what Neolithic and Iron Age people ate for their last meals. And there’s no telling how long all of the crap we’ve generated will outlast us. That vinyl siding falling from the soffit over your garage will probably float in space for a million years once the Grok X Space Laser goes rogue and decides to obliterate the planet.

Our myths and legends don’t degrade as quickly as ancient DNA, but neither do they come to us as well preserved as ice mummies and bog bodies. Whether recorded in long dead languages on papyrus scrolls or passed down through the tongues of bards and rhapsodes, our oldest stories encode the cultural memories of our ancestors as living, breathing traditions. Changing a little with each telling, they are at once vital imprints of a people’s struggles and folkways and a malleable template for navigating the murky labyrinths of an unknown future. To each generation the clue is tossed, and if we’re lucky we can use that ball of string to weave another layer into the tapestry that will be handed down to our descendants. There is always a natural conflict here between the poles of progress and tradition, and there is no hard law that determines how that eternal struggle is resolved. We could dust off that old chestnut from Gustav Mahler, about how tradition is “not the worship of the ashes, but the preservation of the fire.” Or if you like, take it from the tongue of a more modern poet. Describing his visions of Jesus, the rapper Nas said, “I picture him standing with diamonds on him/ a little different from the way my mommy saw him.”

The newest trailer for Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming Odyssey adaptation has the ash worshippers pretty riled up. Not only does it have an actual rapper in it, but the actress playing Helen of Sparta is a black woman, and there’s some speculation that Achilles, that paragon of ancient masculinity, might be portrayed by a trans man. All of this consternation naturally means that there will be no shortage of targets for the pitchforks, and besides Nolan himself, the biggest and perhaps most predictable of the villains so far is one Emily Wilson, whose recent translations of the Odyssey and the Iliad have been widely lambasted as woke revisionism by the right, and from whom Nolan seems to have taken inspiration for his film.

Wilson’s 2018 translation of the Odyssey was mostly well received among classicists and pointy-headed intellectuals, but some of the crusty old guard and a lot of the younger and newly energized online right were none too pleased with it. The biggest criticisms were by and large that she flattened and over simplified the poetic artifice present in other versions, and that she interjected 21st century feminist politics too often into her interpretations of some of the text. The controversy really kicks into gear with the very first line:

Tell me about a complicated man.

Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost

When he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,

And where he went, and who he met, the pain

He suffered on the sea, and how he worked

To save his life and bring his men back home.

He failed, and for their own mistakes, they died.

They ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god

Kept them from home.1

A complicated man. It’s a divergence from previous translations, which typically interpret the Greek polytropos more literally as “many-turning” or “much-turning” but to the haters in the crowd, she might as well have just called him problematic. And to be honest, some of the critiques of her plainspoken modern verse are fair. It does at times seem a bit bland when compared to the grandiloquent voicing of other translations. But Wilson’s goal, in her own words, was to evoke a Homer that “does not speak in your grandparents English, since that language is no closer to the wine-dark sea than your own.” While she is an accomplished classicist with a great deal of reverence for the work, she admits to “creating a new and coherent English text, which conveys something of that (Homeric) understanding but operates within an entirely different cultural context.”2

Muster the legions, men! An entirely different cultural context? What would Homer say about that? We could pick up on Wilson’s intro to find out:

Now goddess, child of Zeus,

Tell the story for our modern times

Find the beginning

Ah. It would almost seem as though the need to update the verse to the sensibilities of the next generation was baked into the poem from at least the time it was first set to the page, by none other than Homer. But perhaps we shouldn’t take Wilson’s word on that to be gospel, given that her bona fides as a godless communist have been well established already. Let’s see what the venerable Robert Fitzgerald had to say, from his 1961 translation:

Of these adventures, Muse, daughter of Zeus,

Tell us in our time, lift the great song again3

Here the poet instructs the muse to tell us in our time, not for our time. The distinction is subtle but important. Moving on, here’s Robert Fagles on the subject:

Launch out on his story, muse, daughter of Zeus,

start from where you will-Sing for our time too4

Fagles’ translations of the Odyssey and the Iliad are widely considered to be the standard for modern versions, and his is probably the closest to Wilson’s. Here I should point out that I personally do not have a fluency or understanding of the language of Homeric Greek, nor do I have any academic training in the classics. So take what I say here with a grain of salt. But having read all three of these translations and bits of a few others, I’m of the opinion that Homer, if such a person ever existed, understood that their audience existed at a great remove from the Bronze Age tumult that spawned the tale set to the page sometime around the 7th century BCE. And that that oral tradition was very likely molded and reshaped itself like a ball of clay pulled from the bottom of a long and winding river whose headlands will be forever out of reach. If the material was thought to be pliable then, when iron swords began to replace bronze spears, it should remain just as malleable to us in a time when the pace of progress moves faster than the bolts of Zeus.

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But what about the looming spectre of third wave feminism that threatens to castrate and defang the masculine heroics of men like Odysseus and Achilles? It is this, more so than the simplicity of Wilson’s verse, that really seems to get under the skin of the rightist. Online, the grievance mongers have come for her with full force. Popular Youtuber The Critical Drinker has devoted a series of reviews and panel discussions to bashing her, with one of his guests calling her a “shithead.” One poster was incensed with the depiction of Minoan women on the cover, citing it as proof of her woke agenda. While there are plenty of valid criticisms of her work, these attacks are so extreme in their exaggerations that one might assume that some of them are confusing her with Madeline Miller, whose novels reimagine the Iliad’s Achilles and the Odyssey’s Circe as queer and feminist icons, respectively. A lot of these attacks are almost completely based on vibes, and I’d bet that many of her most vociferous assailants haven’t read a single translation of the work, let alone hers.

To get a true sense of how woke her translation is, we should turn to its most “problematic” passage, near the end of the poem. When Odysseus returns home and slaughters the suitors who have plagued his house, he instructs a slave loyal to him to point out all of the serving women who slept with the suitors, who he then summarily and viciously executes with the help of his son, Telemachus. To us moderns, it seems a cruel and brutal punishment (at least I hope it does), but one that would probably seem fitting to the ruling class of Ancient Greece. Most translations paint the women as willing partners to the dead suitors, but Wilson does not:

Take out the girls,

between the courtyard wall and the rotunda

Hack at them with long sword, eradicate

All life from them. They will forget the things

The suitors made them do in secret,

Through Aphrodite

That Wilson’s Odysseus would think to specify that they were raped does strike me as a bit odd, even if that were the case. “Through Aphrodite” does a lot of lifting here, leaving vague how much coercion comes from the suitors and how much from the gods. But it does seem like she is editorializing a bit, perhaps feeling the need to highlight the lack of agency for women in Bronze Age Greece in a way that comes off a sounding a bit forced compared to Fitzgerald, who makes no such a case for the women:

Take them outside, these women,

Between the roundhouse and the palisade

And hack them with your swordblades till you cut

The life out of them, and every thought of sweet

Aphrodite under the rutting suitors

When they lay down in secret

The text does specify that it was only twelve of the fifty enslaved women who betrayed the house of their master. It stands to reason that those dozen could have done so willingly, albeit as victims of a terrible circumstance, in an effort at self-preservation that I personally would not stand in judgement over. Or, it could be that they were forced, as was so often the case in ancient times. Wilson could have done here as her predecessors have, but given that she is tasked with telling the story for our modern times, I don’t fault her for highlighting the lack of agency available to these women. 5But the idea that her text is rife with these injections of contemporary values isn’t really accurate either. Many times in her translation she upholds the often patriarchal language and values of the characters, only explicitly shying away from “importing contemporary types of sexism” into the text, such as calling the enslaved women “sluts” as many other translations have done.

What Wilson has crafted here is a unique and decisively modern work that stands in contrast to many prior versions. It’s not for everyone, and that’s fine. I personally prefer Fagles’ version, which splits the difference between a slightly more modern tone and style while maintaining some of the artifice that evokes a different era. But Wilson’s work is wonderful in its own way-she has a keen eye for succinct language, such as the phrase “find the beginning” in her opening lines. And her use of iambic pentameter makes the verse flow with a musicality that helps move the story along, even if the style can feel a little dull at times.

All of this brings us back to the looming spectre of Nolan’s upcoming film, which doesn’t hit theatres for a few months but already has launched a war of memes and words to rival the hosts of Troy. It’s too dark and grimy, they say. Telemachus used the word “dad.” Those are Viking longships and the armor is not period appropriate. And a black woman as Helen? That face could NEVER launch a thousand ships! Blatant racism aside, some of these criticisms have a degree of merit. But the worst of them are rooted in a concern that seems to come up a lot these days: that the works of fiction that have always belonged to and been crafted for white men are no longer solely curated for their singular enjoyment.

Who does the Odyssey belong to? The works of Homer belong first and foremost to the cultural traditions of the Mediterranean world6 that spawned them, but given their place in the foundations of western literature, they belong broadly to all who are inheritors of the epic swagger of those ancient poets who first breathed them into life. In our modern, globalized world, we too rarely swap our stories around the fire ring; we are beholden to bards whose epics come down in a flash on the screens and are backed by the coffers of multinational corporations. If this movie fails, as it very well might, it will owe more to the shallowness of our commercialized world than the inclusion of races and identities that may not have been the first choice of the rhapsodes of another era. The fixation with aesthetics and identity is a common grievance for the right, who would prefer their epics locked in some idealized and racially homogenous past that validates their cultural biases. That this should come at the cost of sacrificing the actual themes and morals of the work in questions strikes me as a bit sad. The Odyssey is fundamentally a work about the importance of xenia, the ancient custom of hospitality given to pilgrims and migrants and expected from them in return. We all must walk this road; it should belong to all of us. If casting a beautiful woman named Lupita Nyong’o as Helen helps to reach a broader audience, that is a victory for the work itself.

It would of course be rash to sit in judgement of a three hour epic based on one trailer, but there are things about it that give me pause. The vernacular used therein is several degrees further tilted to the modern than even Wilson’s verse. And I do wonder if the dark and gloomy pallet of the film is appropriate for a work that I’ve always imagined soaked in the Tyrian purple of the sea snail and the wild foam of the waves that break on the ships caught between Scylla and Charybdis. If Nolan is reading Wilson, he should be keen to tell the story for our modern time. I’m not sure what kind of audience he has with the muse, or if she’s gone and left him in disgust. But if she’s listening, perhaps the dark patina that swallows his films is one she might find appropriate for a world that sneers in disgust at the strangers gathering on their shores, and would rather worship at the altar of the ashes then allow the fire to live and breath, and warm the hands of the weary traveller.

On the walls of a cave in Lascaux, France, unknown hands pressed crushed charcoal and ochre onto the primitive canvas some 15-20,000 years ago. Sealed in their tomb for millennia, they waited until the 20th century to be seen by human eyes for the first time since the ending of the Last Glacial Maximum. By random chance a boy looking for a lost dog uncorked a golden age of creative flourishing, a gallery eons in the making. When Pablo Picasso first saw the graceful silhouettes of dancing aurochs and cascading horses, he is reported to have said “We have learned nothing.”1

Although the veracity of the quote is dubious and quite likely a fabrication, it’s not hard to imagine the old master saying such a thing. We stand on the shoulders of giants; we are shaped just as much by the dreams of our ancestors as the detritus of their achievements, piling up like so many stalagmites on the ruins of history. To get a glimpse of the visions that haunted his predecessors would have been a powerful sight for someone like Picasso. The feral grace of the line. The sublime ease with which they showed the dance of the bulls in the depth of the field, inventing the use of perspective thousands of years before the Renaissance. Perhaps the art of painting reached its zenith on the walls of a cave in Paleolithic Europe. Perhaps their prayers and visions invaded our dreams long before some intrepid explorer ever moved an uprooted tree and revealed to us the roots of our artistry.

It’s strange to consider that painting may have peaked at a time when humans had scarcely even gained a foothold on the top of the food chain. The works of our Aurignacian and Magdelanean ancestors are notable mostly for the lack of them. Great halls of bulls and horses, but vanishingly little of the human form, outside a few surreal portraits and a multitude of hand prints. In the lost dictates of their cosmology they may have thought of themselves as small fish in the sea of creation, with only the slightest foreshadowing of the vaunted legions that would come to dominate the globe. If there were wars of conquest in the Magdalenean era, we don’t see them on the walls of Lascaux.

And yet, hidden within his apocryphal musings, Picasso may have intimated something else in his theory of our ignorance, something more troubling. A biblical understanding of violence marks Cain as the progenitor of murder, but the study of prehistory puts a much earlier vintage on the arts of war. From Homer to Cormac McCarthy, writers and philosophers have endeavored to push the date of its inception further and further back in time. In Blood Meridian, McCarthy’s iconic antagonist Judge Holden makes clear the author’s central thesis, in the midst of a lecture to the men he leads on a campaign of scalphunting and plunder

War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting the ultimate practitioner.

Many millenia after Lascaux Cave was sealed off and the old masters long gone, the acolytes of the art of war were forging their way to the mastery of the rough trade heralded by Judge Holden. In that great expanse of time the people of Egypt, Assyria and Mycenaean Greece fueled their empires with the twin engines of writing and war. The Bronze Age Collapse shook the nascent civilizations of the Mediterranean to their foundations. In the years after the collapse, the rhapsodes of Greece emerged from their ruin and spun the stories that would become the Iliad and the Odyssey. Art and violence are powerful catalytic forces. If the visual mind awakened deep in a Paleolithic cave, the strange symbols cribbed from Phoenician sailors rekindled Aegean civilization and birthed the soul of poetry from the crucible of war and apocalypse.

The Atreidai built their reign on a cycle of violence so great it reshaped the spirits of vengeance themselves. Hounded by the fates for the murder of his mother and her lover in retaliation for that of his own father, Orestes ran from the Erinyes until Athena herself was forced to intervene, breaking the cycle of violence that had claimed his forbears from Agamemnon to Atreus. It had claimed the life of his sister, too. When his father roused the Achaeans to make war on Troy, to avenge the insult to his brother Menalaus and ransom back his stolen bride, Agamemnon wagered the lives of his children, his wife and his own fate, a debt that would be paid in full.

For a famously warlike people, the Achaean warriors met the call to arms with great reluctance. When the bloodthirsty king came looking for Odysseus in Ithaca, the man of many turns feigned madness, breaking character only when Palamedes threatened to break the bones of his infant son under the blade of the plow. When they came for brave Achilles, who claimed in the Iliad that “no Trojan spearman ever stole my cattle,” the warrior is said to have masqueraded as a woman in the halls of King Lycomedes. In another time and another war, the comedian Aristophanes wrote of how the women of Athens and Sparta staged a sex strike to force an end of the Peloponnesian War. It would seem that the arts of draft dodging and creative war resistance are nearly as old as the institution itself, whatever its antiquity.

Having drafted a proper army to restore the honor of his aggrieved brother, Agamemnon’s fleet lay idle in the doldrums off the coast of their homeland. For the killing of a sacred deer, the warlord would need to pay the goddess Artemis with his own blood. The seer Colchys tells him that it is only through the death of his firstborn child that the vengeful goddess will call it even and raise the winds to send them off to foreign lands. The life of his daughter Iphegenia is weighed in the balance of his lust for war and it is hers that is found wanting. When Aeschylus relates the details of her sacrifice, even the chorus averts their eyes to the killing.

His debt paid, though not in full, the warlord sets sail for Troy. In his crimes against the citizens of Troy we see the barbarity that shapes the conquests of history, and in his trespass against his own child the ravages of war on the souls of those who wage it.

When the fighting is over, the war comes home, riding on the crimes of its generals. Agamemnon returns from overseas freighted with the lion’s share of the spoils of Troy and the last in a long line of unwilling concubines, this time the doomed Cassandra, a prophetess cursed by Apollo with the gift of foresight destined to be dismissed as the ravings of a lunatic. Despite her warnings, her captor is blind to the dangers. While he raped and pillaged his way around the walls of Troy, his wife Clytemnestra and her lover were plotting his demise. Murdered in his own bath, his death is an atonement for his sins abroad and those he had brought upon his own family. The pursuit of war brings him little besides vanity and plunder, and in the end the debt swallows his home and claims his own life as final payment. To paraphrase Malcolm X’s famous critique of imperialism, chickens will always come home to roost.

The tragic downfall of Agamemnon’s house would ultimately break the cycle of violence and provide the philosophical underpinnings of the movement for Athenian democracy. It is only through the weariness of the Greeks to the constant churning of strife and blood feuds that Athena is moved to transform the Erinyes, those ancient seeds of vengeance born of the severed scrotum of Ouranos, into the Eumenides-the good mind, the bringers of democracy. It is tempting to see this kind of metamorphosis as proof of the utility of war, of the regenerative power of destruction to act as fertilizer for the fruits of democracy and progress. For the Greeks, it may have seemed a steep but fair price to pay. Mired in darkness as they were, they had grown tired of the toll of vengeance, left with nothing but grief and debt from the foolhardy pursuits of their leaders.

For our people, it is the weight of history that saddles us with each new conquest. Mired in darkness as we are, we pray to crueler gods than Artemis and Zeus. In our time, it is war that endures. It fuels the fire of progress that swallows the light of the stars and apes the genesis of the sun itself, so bright it burns shadows into the earth. Like handprints cast onto the walls of caves, thousands of years ago.

We have learned nothing.

Somewhere, lost in the brushstrokes of his latest masterpiece, George W. Bush must be feeling wistful. He is no longer the dominant villain of the 21st century to the American left, and it’s not even close. The post-9/11 security state he helped create, so feared by the progressives of that era, has metastasized into an absurd Orwellian nightmare under Trump. At home and abroad, the regime of his Republican successor can’t even be bothered to hide the extent of their trespasses. A Project for a New American Century, indeed. Things are different now. The rise of American fascism, the end of the democratic experiment, and WW 3 are all on the table. Stakes is high.

It didn’t feel quite so dire, back in Austin in 1999, kicking around in the days when Bush was just the governor of Texas, and buildings hadn’t begun to be knocked out of the sky by airplanes. To me and my friends, the United States was the primary antagonist of a capitalist system that was slowly sucking the world dry. Some of us thought we could do something about it, riding high on momentum of the WTO protests in Seattle that had just wrapped up when I rolled into town that fall. Some of us were a little more nihilistic, just hanging around in the park until Food Not Bombs showed up to feed the miscreants before shuffling off with our rucksacks to make enough cash at the Plasma Center to get drunk that night. Whether our country was ripe for anarchist revolution or just a hopeless carcass to leech off of long enough to live out our youth in all of its restless glory didn’t seem to matter too much. We were living on the margins, and we liked it that way. There was a raging fire in some backyard just about every night, no one I knew had a real job or any inclination of finding one, and the nights stayed warm enough most of the year to ride out with the Texas wind in your hair on a salvaged bike. If you needed a change of luck you jumped a freight train or stuck your thumb out on the road. We all knew that things were fucked, and the whole system would come crashing down at some point. Some of the more serious activists would wax prophetically about how it might go down, and what we could do to make that happen. If Mumia dies, fire in the skies. But to a lot of us, it all seemed far off and fraught. If the Panthers and the Weather Underground couldn’t get it done, what were a bunch of kids who couldn’t stay sober past noon gonna do about it?

There was one cause both of these factions could agree on, though. One place where the barbaric drunken punks and the strident political activists could come together in the pursuit of a common ground that crackled with the promise of real autonomy. It lived in a garden shed in the backyard of a boisterous woman known to everyone as Reckless. A few turntables and a couple microphones and a bunch of amps fed into a tangle of chords running to a concrete slab a couple yards away that housed the mythical transmitter of Free Radio Austin, salvaged from a raid by the FCC earlier that year. The story of how all that went down seems a bit hazy and apocryphal to me at this point but by the time I got on the scene the small pirate radio station was the wild hope of every anarchist in Austin, an upstart in a sea of corporate media, and a middle finger to the Bushes of the world.

The programming was all over the map. Everything from black metal to bizarre sea shanties to hip-hop and all points in between. Anyone who went through the proper channels could show up with a stack of records or just spit for an hour or two. There was nothing standing between the broadcaster and the audience. Although the political programming was reliably far left, Reckless herself would later go on record with the press that they wouldn’t stop a Nazi from signing on, at least in theory.1 This might seem out of pocket to your average leftist today, but the rumors are true-the suppression of free speech so favorable on both sides of the spectrum today was once an anathema to the radicals of a quarter century ago.

Owing to this, Free Radio Austin had a big target in its back from the FCC and presumably the burgeoning conservative power well on its way to the White House that shared the city with it. I can’t say for sure that Bush was behind the machinations to shut down FRA-which happened twice, both times at the hands of the FCC-but in the run up to the 2000 election the fringe radicals and misfits that made up the leftist community in Austin were starting to feel the heat. After the second and final time the station was shuttered, the cops busted a party for the Yellow Bikes Community Project at a local coffeehouse. Myself and a few friends were arrested when a full squad of cop cars bulrushed a guy peeing against a fence in what was a pretty obvious stakeout. The ensuing scuffle was full of the kind of chaos you might expect from such an encounter, and the message was pretty clear to all of us: we have our eyes on you.

I doubt I would recognize East Austin if I went back there today. Perhaps the Bush era sweeps were the harbinger of the change that was coming for everyone, everywhere. The post-9/11 rise of the technocrats and their stainless steamroller flattened the vibrant idiosyncrasies which used to give cities like Austin their charm. And perhaps the heyday of Free Radio Austin was a portent of a dark undercurrent in air as well, as the analogue signals gave way to the digital age, and the democratic promise of flipping the dial to find an anarchist wingnut spouting philosophy was subsumed in an endless sea of algorithmic opportunity. An ocean so vast and deafening in its scope that only the loudest and most bombastic could be heard, or allowed to be heard, over the roar of the waves.

It’s kind of a strange irony that Alex Jones cut his teeth on the edges of the same community that gave birth to FRA. For all I know he may even have sat in front of the microphone in that dingy shed and teased out a trial run of his crazed elocutions that went on to make him a household name. I never crossed paths with him back then, but I knew people who did, and though he was a far cry from the latter day Rush Limbaugh he is today, most of my community would have held his views at arm’s length even then. Around the peak of his popularity, a friend told me that she went home one day to find her entire family sitting in front of a laptop in rapt attention to one of his sermons. That it felt like Orwell’s Two Minute Hate had finally come to life, in her living room. But as our discourse has grown more fragmented and exponentially augmented by spiraling divisiveness, even his most unhinged ranting is starting to feel quaint in comparison to the bile that spills out of social media by the second these days. In the late 90s it felt like the keys to some grand democratic uprising were to be found in giving voice to the voiceless, and all that was needed to get over the hump was to take back control of the airwaves from the corporations that served as its gatekeepers. Now, the gates have long since been blown off the hinges. Anyone can start a podcast (they even let me have one), and with a little effort and minimal cost one can instantly broadcast their views to anyone who will listen. If you would have told me that in 1999, I would have said that sounds like progress. But in practice, it has served as nothing more than a piece of pig iron loaded onto the gas pedal of our collective shuttle as it heads straight for the precipice.

I don’t need to remind anyone of the kind of blistering psychosis that has come howling out of the internet in the last decade, particularly in the last year. We’ve all seen the Tweets, the Truths, the Notes. The callous disregard for human life coming from people who in the same breath promote their virtuous Christianity or egalitarian Marxism. The ease with which the sheltering anonymity of the online world allows the user to lambast the other, and the ready chorus of sycophants who will come to their aid as long as the assailant is one of them. The more of it you consume, the easier it becomes to imagine the only solution is to eradicate the people who could allow this kind of venom into their hearts. After the assassination of Charlie Kirk we watched as the online right by and large declared that the left was wholly unredeemable in the wake of some sporadic celebrations of his death. That we could not live side by side with them any longer. To myself and many others this was a frightening manifestation of tribalism taken too far, a warning that things were spiraling fast. When Rene Good was murdered by an ICE officer a few weeks ago, the reaction of many on the right was a similar ghoulish shadenfreude, and in the days after I started to understand at last how those same people might feel that they just couldn’t live in a country with people who thought of their fellow citizens like that, because this was how I now felt about them. For me, this was a frightening and sobering revelation. As my friend put it, ‘It’s like Radio Rwanda on every channel.’

Radio Rwanda, or more precisely, Radio Television Libre des Milles Collines, was the infamous propaganda arm of the pro-Hutu militants responsible for the 1994 genocide which claimed the lives of some one million Tutsis. In the years following the Rwandan Civil War, the station played a pivotal role in deepening the enmity between the two groups, a division rooted in an ancient factionalism deliberately exploited by the German and Belgian colonial powers during the periods of their respective dominion over the country. The station was used to broadcast a steady stream of hate speech against the Tutsis, with false criminal accusations and calls for violence so numerous that it earned the nickname “Radio Machete” after the weapon most synonymous with the gruesome massacres that were unfolding in the country.

Societies that aren’t about to start killing each other in internecine conflicts don’t normalize the spread of this kind of hate speech in the public sphere. But that is precisely what we’ve done. I’m not saying that we have or will embrace the kind of genocide that occured in Rwanda in the 90s, but the man behind the microphone is here, and the bodies are starting to pile up.

It doesn’t do much good to sit here and say we all should have seen this coming. And in truth, we didn’t suffer from a lack of warning so much as a learned helplessness, a hypernormalisation of it all. It was on every channel, and we became inured to the dangers. Still, I can’t help but feel a bit wistful myself. What we wound up with was a sinister inversion of the thing many of us were striving for. In the days of pirate radio, you could come across some random lunatic blasting out of your dashboard on the interstate, like a siren song. It might have been beautiful or deranged or both. But we were tied to the mast then. Now that the whole ship has gone and thrown the wax from their ears into the sea, those rocks are coming fast, and we’re not ready for them.

Sometime around 850 years ago, a family gathered by a fire on the banks of the Onon River, in the land that today borders Mongolia and Russia. They were hungry, living off of what wild grasses and roots they could forage and what fish and small game the river could provide. Since her husband’s murder, Ho’elun and her family had been abandoned by their clan. With winter soon arriving, it must have felt to the woman that the men who killed her husband had dug the grave for her and her children as well. They were a hard people living in a hard and unyielding land, but she knew that it would take more than cunning and resourcefulness to survive the bitter winds that blew down onto the steppe from the north. To emerge from the winter with all of her children would take more than just survival. Ho’elun would have to give them something to live for, a force to give meaning to the dark nights ahead of them.

Her people had known these lands for generations. It was said that they sprung from the union of a gray wolf and a roe deer on the shores of Lake Bakal. Eleven generations after that fateful union, a woman was born whose story would shepherd her people from the frozen Siberian wastes into the light of history. It was the wisdom of Alan the Fair that Ho’elun imparted to her children in the felt walls of their yurt on the banks of the river, as the cold winds howled down from the north.

She admonished her sons for quarreling over what little food they had, for behaving as those who have not “any friend save your own shadow, any whip but your own tail.” Instead of fighting amongst themselves, she reminded them of the lesson Alan the Fair gave to her sons when they found themselves in a similarly fractured union. Giving each of the boys a single arrow, Alan the Fair had advised them to break it, which they easily did. But when she presented them with five arrows bound as one, none of the boys could break it. Channelling the spirit of her ancestor if not her exact words, Ho’elun might have told them, “If you brothers remain of one mind you will be like the arrow shafts when they were bound together, no one will be able to break you.”1

It was a lesson that seems to have been wasted on half of her sons, for Temujin and Khasar were of her womb but Bektar and Belgutei were born of their late father’s union with his first wife. As such the eldest brother presented a succession threat to her children by blood in addition to his constant bullying, and the two younger sons conspired to kill him. It was an act that would grieve their devoted mother but one that would galvanize the efforts of Temujin to rise to heights of power unrivaled by any in the history of his people. And in the end, the boy who the world would come to know as Genghis Khan must have taken to heart the greater message of Alan the Fair’s teachings, for the conquests of the Mongol Empire that would shape the contours of the modern world could only have been possible under the guidance of a leader who understood the power that could come from the union of all of the disparate tribes, bound together as one.

The parable of the five arrows is an old one and like most ancient stories its origins are debatable. The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy used the five arrows to represent the strength of their people in a similar, perhaps independent parable, while the spread of the tale throughout Eurasia could have had its roots in an earlier iteration from Aesop’s Fables. Like any well travelled meme it comported itself to those who could best utilize the power of its symbolism, for good or ill. In Iron Age Etruria the first archaeological evidence for the fasces symbol emerges sometime in the 7th century BCE, in a sinister inversion of the motif of a bundle of rods as a symbol of unity. The Romans would adopt the bundle of rods bound upon an axe as an expression of imperium, of the terror of such an artifice wielded as a weapon, and its legacy would form the basis for the fascist movement evoked by Mussolini in the 20th century.

When the feudal systems of the Middle Ages were slowly displaced by the ascension of capitalism, a force every bit as powerful as the Mongols, the people left in its wake eventually realized that under the power of capital they would be easily crushed if they could be divided but by banding together they might have a chance to better their lot. Some of the first unions to emerge in England made use of the banded arrow symbol, along with the motto “Unity is Strength.” When they were serfs, the peasants who toiled for subsistence under their wealthy landlords had everything to lose by joining with others of their station in revolt. Unless they could muster an army powerful enough to overcome the lords and their well armed knights, they would be would be out in the wilderness, where they could be shattered like so many solitary arrows. Once the Industrial Revolution commenced, the descendants of those serfs were no longer bound inextricably to the land and they finally had something they could withhold from their social betters: their labor. They would be subject to violent reprisals for daring to band with their fellow workers, but the demands for dignity that arose from the collective struggles of miners, textile workers and laborers in the last two and a half centuries have proven to be an effective foil to the onslaught of rapacious capitalism.

Today we stand at the threshold of a new social order, stitched from the utopian dreams of a new kind of industrialist. Its ascension threatens the hard-fought gains of the labor movement and heralds the coming of a novel form of serfdom, termed “techno-feudalism” by the Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis. A world of Uber drivers, Zoom isolation, and a partitioning of the work force into disparate and largely powerless subcontractors. A bunch of fallen arrows on the battlefield. The Khans of commerce would have us believe that if the shaft of the arrow is strong enough, it will find its mark, and the one who sends it could rise to the top of the heap of wealthy entrepreneurs and would-be conquerors. Perhaps the dreams of serfs were colored by fantasies of kingship and magical thinking as well. Tales of heroism and rags to riches are an important part of our inherited folklore, but the ones that have the most utility are always the stories that remind us of the ways we are bound to each other.

We need those stories, perhaps now more than ever. When Mussolini resurrected the fasces from the time of Roman imperium he was rousing a ghost of a human darkness that is never more than idle, a terrifying projection of our tribal nature that only requires the kindling stroke of a demagogue to whip the fires of domination to life. In the years following the ascent of fascism in Europe those who resisted again turned to the potent symbol of the joined arrows for their banner. Today the Three Arrows are most commonly associated with the Antifa movement mostly known for brawling with far right knuckleheads on the streets of Portland and Seattle, a symbol that gained further notoriety when it was found on the casings of one of the bullets used by the man who murdered Charlie Kirk. Whether they come by it honestly or not, it’s probably safe to say that the modern American antifascist movement has a public relations problem that marginalizes their effectiveness as a foil for authoritarianism. If theirs is the most compelling story we can tell in the face of demagoguery, working people are in real trouble.

I’ve managed to scrape together a pretty decent living working with my hands and a career of relative dignity as a union carpenter. I’m no Genghis Khan or even a marginally effective activist, but I believe in the dignity of labor, and I take my responsibility in the lineage of tradespeople just as seriously as the practice of my craft. Whether we are aware of it or not, anyone who’s a part of the dwindling union membership of the American workforce is fording our way into a future of precarious waters. The corpse of the Great Society and the radical reforms of the labor movement have been picked pretty clean by generations of scavengers, mostly of the Republican variety, but joined of late by the private equity vultures of Wall Street who make up the brass of the Democratic Party. Unions, once a formidable threat, are now among the last of the nuisances standing in the way of multinational corporations. Those who claim to read the tea leaves say our days are numbered. But if we’re going down, we’ll go down swinging. Throw a rock on a union jobsite and you’ll hit the hard hat of a guy who’s probably no fan of Karl Marx or even Bernie Sanders but would raise hell if you tried to take his pension, benefits or union wages. Too often the debate around unions and labor gets framed in ideological terms, but when you get down to it, anyone will put up a fight if you try to take food out of their mouth.

A few years back I found myself working on a big hotel and casino project in Washington. Like a lot of jobs these days, it was straining under the weight of its top heavy administration, running over budget and on overtime. Towards the end of a long shift one of my coworkers came barging down the hallway where I was working and told me we were walking out. Rumors were flying that the contractor had cheated some of the guys on our crew out of overtime pay, and my foreman was locked in a tense standoff with one of the supervisors. It felt electric and dangerous and kind of exciting, like in the moments before a fight breaks out. As we were all standing around I walked up to the guy who had instigated the walk out, a soft spoken family man and no one’s idea of a labor agitator. I asked him what had happened and he shook his head and said “I’m not asking for anything except what’s mine.”

Sometimes, you don’t know what you have until someone tries to take it from you. The guys on the casino job got their overtime, it had only been an administrative oversight, but the hits are going to start coming harder and faster for most of us. The standard of living our ancestors fought for is being ground into dirt before an alliance of wealthy barons from both political parties. The power that me and my union brothers felt in that moment arises from the same source as the struggles of our forebears in the labor movement and the ancient message woven into our fables and parables. Unity is strength. But effective solidarity and leadership are hard to come by these days. In truth it often feels like whatever remains of the labor movement and the anti-authoritarian left are little more than divided tribes on the steppe, fighting over scraps before the coming winter, as the armies of a techno-fascist Temujinian horde mass on the horizon. There’s probably not much hope we get out of this without a reshaping of our planet whose path of devastation would shame the great Khan himself.

The fight is on our doorstep, whether we want it or not. Ho’elun never asked for any of it either. The same husband callously murdered by a rival band was the man who claimed her as his bride by attacking her wedding caravan and stealing her away from the man she truly loved. The fates had been cruel to her. But facing the dire prospect of watching her children starve, she knew that by imparting upon them the wisdom and dignity of their ancestors, she could give meaning to the struggle they were facing. And the hope that at least that might give them a fighting chance. They were her children, and she owed them that much.

A fighting chance seems like a lot to ask for in this day in age. We’re facing down an asymmetrical war waged by the wealthiest cohort of scoundrels the world has ever known. But it’s our story too, and it’s not over yet.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

So goes Arthur C. Clarke’s famous adage, just as salient today as it ever was. For most of us, it’s all arcane sorcery from the controlled use of fire to the invention of artificial intelligence. The first coppersmiths of the Neolithic period were probably seen as magicians of the highest order for their ability to transform rough stone into smooth, shiny copper daggers and awls. The later introduction of arsenical bronze hardened their wares and poisoned these smiths in heroic doses, cursing them with physical afflictions that would have left no doubt that they were possessed by a mythic, alchemical power. But these craftsmen were inheritors of a far older and more primal art- the seminal development of the word. Language itself is a form of magic, involving a strange kind of alchemy all of its own, the metaphorical and recursive layering of concepts that can be imported into the minds of other humans and through the power of story be imparted down through the generations. This is no less than a form of time travel, in its own way.

It would take thousands of years before the oral traditions, fused into the palaces of memory of poets and shamans, would find their true immortality. It is only in the last 5000 years of our time on Earth that the first written language appears, and with it the beginning of recorded history. The first known inscriptions from Mesopotamian Uruk are nothing spectacular, mostly just debt letters and business transactions. But it wouldn’t be long before storytellers and priests from Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean began to set the ancient tales of their heroes and gods onto the written page, giving us the Epic of Gilgamesh and the epic cycle of the Trojan War commonly attributed to a poet named Homer. If we were to stretch Clarke’s adage a bit here, we might say that the time machine was invented in the Bronze Age.

I never made it far enough in school to be assigned The Iliad or The Odyssey. Every few years, buried under the debris of the culture wars constantly erupting on college campuses, we hear of some starchy old professor at an elite school mounting a crusade to save the works of the classics from the scalpel of progressive ideology as it reshapes the curriculum and pedagogy of these institutions. Having little more than a short stint in higher education myself I’ve never really had a dog in that fight, but intuitively I’ve always had a sense that any works that remain intact from that long ago have an intrinsic value that is impossible to ignore. This is probably just as true for recipes and debt ledgers as it is for works of literature every bit as complex and beguiling as any we could dream up today. And while their utility as foundational texts for modern literature makes them indispensable to the young student, the deeper and darker themes of grief and hardship that may be lost on those readers will hit much closer to home the older and more seasoned the student.

For those unfamiliar (spoilers ahead), The Iliad is one of the oldest surviving works of Western literature. Together with The Odyssey, it tells the story of the decade-long war between the Achaeans (Mycenaean Greeks) and the Trojans, its brutality and majesty, and the devastating toll of war on all who had the misfortune to fall within its path. It is a tale so old that some have even speculated that it reflects a more primitive iteration of our consciousness, its characters at turns plagued and assisted by the powerful gods that appear to them as real and terrifying as the visions of a modern human suffering from psychosis.1 We should bear in mind that while the poems were composed in their written form at least eight centuries before the birth of Christ, they come from an older oral tradition stretching back into the Bronze Age, to the time of the Mycenaeans. For us to attempt to fully understand the thoughts and beliefs of a people over 3000 years behind us is probably futile. Perhaps the gods were real, or real enough to them that their presence marshalled the forces of reality so vividly that it augmented their thoughts and visions. They were an ancient people bound first and foremost to the wheel of fate, which was beyond the ability of even the father of the gods to control.

It is into this strange world and its pivotal conflict that the modern reader is thrust, in its penultimate year, as the morale of the Achaean soldiers is sagging under the weight of the years of fighting and the gods shared by the dueling belligerents have come down decisively on the side of the Trojans, all due to the pride and greed of their leader Agamemnon. Deprived by Apollo of his own concubine, in a rebuke to his best warrior he has stripped Achilles of his prized spoil of war, the slave woman Briseis. The poem begins2

Rage-Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’s son Achilles

Murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses

Hurling down to the house of death so many sturdy souls

Great fighters sons, but their bodies made carrion

Feasts for the dogs and birds

And the will of Zeus was moving to its end

Begin, muse, when the two first broke and clashed

Agamemnon, lord of men and brilliant Achilles.....

It’s a passage that begs to be read aloud. To be transported from the 21st century to a time of endemic blood feuds and suffering but also of clear and rapturous beauty, and the timeless wisdom of those who are ultimately the progenitors of all of our literary traditions. For all of its allure, it is a place few would choose to live. Although the relentless violence and total war of Bronze Age Greece has faded little in its intensity and savagery, there are at least vast pockets of the world where fate has spared it for some of us in the modern era. For veterans of war and those with the misfortune to stare down the barrel of their guns, the world of The Iliad may not seem so distant. For the rest of us, perhaps, it is that much more important of a journey to make.

If The Odyssey is the ancestor of the cinematic, sprawling creations of more modern storytellers like Tolkien or Dante, The Iliad is the forebearer of the bleak and blood soaked prose of writers like Cormac McCarthy. 16,000 lines of poetry, all of them haunted by the mechanistic slaughter of humans under the weight of war and the often cold and merciless gods who drive its engine. Its characters do at times appear to lack volition. Their commanders are men like Agamenmon and Achilles, Hector and Priam, prideful in their search for glory and vengeance. All the same, they are yoked to the will of the gods and and the unyielding wheel of fate with a kind of fatalism that makes it tempting for the modern reader to see them as fodder for the gods, only slightly higher in station than the cattle sacrificed by the hecatomb to those same rulers. And yet their humanity still shines through the darkness in the pages of a poem almost 3000 years old. The gore and gristle of the war machine are paid in full throughout the body of the text, in such awful detail that at times the reader can be bogged down by the sheer inhumanity. We become inured to it, but we are rescued from this tedium by the growth of its most memorable character, his self actualization only possible in the mind of the reader by our immersion in both his wanton cruelty and his palpable vulnerability in the face of such enormous loss.

Emily Wilson begins her acclaimed translation of The Odyssey by referring to its eponymous protagonist as “a complicated man.” It’s a fitting appellation for a fascinating character, but by far the most dynamic and complex hero penned by Homer is the doomed and murderous Achilles. Readers of both poems can find much to love in the adventures of Odysseus, his wits and determination guiding him home from Troy in the path of cannibalistic giants, sea monsters and wrathful gods. But if Odysseus speaks to the hallucinatory terror of the veteran’s mind and his difficulty returning home, Achilles brings the reader into the searing pain of grief and the heart of the war. And perhaps the poem’s greatest accomplishment is forcing the reader to enter the mind of the conflict’s most hardened killer, to walk with him as he turns from headstrong hero to spiteful heel and finally emerges as a figure that perhaps we can all understand as a universal soldier, a deeply flawed and wounded soul, born of the gods but all too human in his grief.

A goddess who conceived her son with a mortal man, Achilles’ mother Thetis uses her influence with the gods to aid her son in his one man war with Agamemnon, but she knows that she cannot shield him from his fate. As a sea nymph born of the ocean deity Nereus, she is given the foresight to see the fate of her son, a burden no parent would ask for, but one that she nonetheless bestows upon Achilles. Realizing he is bound to either a long life of peaceful anonymity or a short one marked by violent death and imperishable fame, Achilles chooses the latter. It is no choice at all for the headstrong son of a god, but knowing the means of his death deepens his brooding fatalism, heightens his arrogance and gives him no tolerance for the petty grievances of the warlords he is forced to fight for. Paradoxically, this godlike awareness gives Achilles a rich humanity-he is keenly aware of how the Trojan War is being waged solely on behalf of the vanity of wealthy kings at the expense of the spearmen on the front lines3

How could any Argive obey your orders,

Freely and gladly do your sailing for you

Or fight your enemies full force? Not I, no

It wasn’t Trojan spearmen who brought me here to fight.

The Trojans never did me damage, not in the least

They never stole my cattle or horses, never

This sentiment would be echoed thousands of years later in the protests of Black Americans who refused to die fighting men who in their words “never called me nigger.” Achilles is of noble birth, but he’s channeling the frustrations of grunts and enlisted men down through the ages, of the class war at the heart of every clash of armies. Here, we see some of the dynamic writing that makes him such an iconic character-one minute he’s a working class hero giving voice to the voiceless, the next he’s nursing his wounded ego while the rest of his men fight and die without his help, the cause of the “countless losses” suffered by the Achaeans in his absence.

I’ll leave it to the Homeric scholars to decide if Achilles’ solidarity with his men is genuine or merely another weapon to be used against his rival Agamemnon. But it’s clear to any reader that of all his Myrmidon squadron he has a deep and genuine love for his brother-in-arms Patroclus above all others. Raised together as boys in the lands of Thessaly, they fight and revel in the spoils of war together, sharing a common bond and sleeping under one roof with the women they keep as enslaved concubines. Although the Greeks of the Classical era thought of them as lovers, there is little to no evidence of this in the Homeric texts.4 Instead we are given a portrait of male friendship that is once deeply moving and strangely alien to our modern sensibilities. Much like their perception of the gods, the dynamics of male affection must have been far removed from our own, and though their friendship seems at times vividly homoerotic it could be that we have no way of conceptualizing the bonds of affection formed between men on the battlefields of the ancient world. And in some ways, the two men complete each other. While Achilles pouts and conspires with his mother to bend the will of Zeus towards the massacre of his own men so that they realize they are lost without him, it is Patroclus who pleads with him to rejoin the battle. When even the sage advice of Odyseus and Nestor comes to no avail, Patroclus begs his companion to lend him his armor, so that he may strike fear into the Trojans. Achilles relents, and having “become” the man he most loves and admires, Patroclus meets his end wearing the arms of his companion, at the hands of man-killing Hector outside the gates of Troy.

Book 18, titled The Shield of Achilles in Robert Fagles’ translation, captures the raw emotion riding on the news of his death as it crashes like a wave into the camp of Achilles.5

A black cloud of grief came shrouding over Achilles.

Both hands clawing the ground for soot and filth,

He poured it over his head, fouled his handsome face

And black ashes settled over his clean war shirt

Overpowered in all his power, sprawled in the dust,

Achilles lay there, fallen….

Tearing his hair, defiling it with his own hands,

And the women he and Patroclus carried off as captives

Caught the grief in their hearts and keened and wailed,

Out of their tents they ran to ring the great Achilles,

All of them beat their breasts with clenched fists

Caught the grief in their hearts. As if it were a plague set on a weakened host, a flame on a box of dry tinder. The imagery at play here is so richly evocative, so stark and authentic. We feel the weight of the ocean as it comes bearing down on Achilles, as he calls to its depths for his mother

Achilles suddenly loosed a terrible wrenching cry

And his noble mother heard him……

And she cried out in turn. And immortal sea nymphs

Gathered round their sister, all the Nereids dwelling

Down the sounding depths, they all came rushing now-

Glitter, blossoming Spray and the swell’s Embrace,

Fair-isle and shadowy Cavern, Mist and Spindrift

Glimmer of Honey, Suave- and-Soothing, Whirlpool, Brilliance,

Bounty and First Light and Speeder of Ships and buoyant Power

Gift of the Sea, Eyes of the World and the famous milk white Calm…..

The silver cave was shimmering full of sea nymphs,

All in one mounting chorus beating their breasts

As Thetis launched the dirge: “Here me, sisters,

Daughters of Nereus, so you all will know it well-

Listen to all of the sorrows welling in my heart!

I am agony-

Mother of grief and greatness- O my child!”

Anyone who has ever felt the sudden rupture in the fabric of the world that accompanies the tragic death of one so loved will know at once the torrent of emotion unfurled in these lines. They all came rushing now. Fagles’ decision to translate the names of the Nereids from Greek helps to personify the myriad of emotions that consume the aggrieved, at turns overwhelming and soothing. We are swept up in the wave of sorrow, reaching thousands of years and thousands of miles to swallow us into its depths. And as grief can sometimes be, it is beautiful, and comforting in its strange power. In a poem that hums with a virulent masculinity, here we succumb to the vigor of feminine rage that accompanies the burden of the loss. The enslaved women, keening and wailing, beating their chests. As if in an echo of solidarity with their earthly counterparts, the nymphs of the sea answer back, beating their own as they mount the dirge for Patroclus. And for Achilles, whose time is now close at hand.

The die is cast, and Achilles and Thetis know his vengeance will consume his life and those of all who stand in its path. His mother parlays a favor from the god Hephaestus to forge anew his shield and armor, and the doomed Achilles sets in motion the surge of violence that will ultimately raze the walls of Troy and bring about his imperishable fame. He goes to meet his fate doing the one thing that he does better than any man on earth, and by the time he reaches the gates of Troy he has killed so many men that he tests the anger of the river god Scamander by choking his waters to the brim with Trojan dead. Even the death of man-killing Hector who took the life of Patroclus does not sate his bloodlust. Achilles mocks him as he lays near death and gloats that he will deny him a proper burial. He sacrifices twelve young Trojans on Patroclus’ funeral pyre. Three times he drags the corpse of Hector, preserved under the aegis of Apollo, around the tomb of his dead friend. The rage that eats at him will stop at nothing, until it finally consumes his life.

We never see the death of Achilles in the pages of The Iliad. This facet of the tale, along with the fabled Trojan Horse and the sacking of the city, comes in fragments throughout The Odyssey and a series of later works that make up the Homeric cycle. The book ends with the pleading of Priam, King of Troy and father of Hector, for Achilles to allow the grieving father to return home with the body of his son. It is no easy task, to enter the camp of a man bound by a singular rage and ask that he return the bounty of his conquest. For a moment it seems that his anger will once again win out and the king will die helpless at the feet of his rival, but in the end Achilles relents. Priam is an old man, the father of fifty sons, one whose foolish pursuit of Helen brought the war to his gates and another whose body he is forced to bargain for with the man who killed him. He appeals to Achilles as a father who loves his sons, and he begs him to summon the empathy to think of his own father and the loss he will feel at the news of Achilles’ own death, which all can now see written by the fates. Achilles finds his humanity within his own vulnerability, and sends Priam away with the body of his son and the promise of a truce to allow for his burial. But both men are broken by their loss. “I have endured what no one on earth has ever done before-” Priam laments, “I have put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son.”

Hector, breaker of horses. Swift-footed Achilles and Agamemnon, lord of men. From the stallion lands of Argos to the fields where men win glory. From the wine-dark sea to the earth that feeds us all. These Homeric epithets evoke the wondrous imagery of a time long gone, but to the poets and rhapsodes who kept the tale alive through the Greek Dark Age they were an indispensable mnemonic tool. And so they remain, remarkable little time machines that can take any reader of the modern era tramping down the path to the age of heroes, when life could be short and brutal but lived to the hilt. As we peer into the darkness of an unknown future, we walk into a new kind of wilderness. One in which the barren seas could ring the shores of an earth that no longer feeds us all, and we are sustained in mind and body by the whims of machines, a strange magic colder than the will of Zeus. That these poems still draw breath is an immeasurable gift. Read them now, while they still carry the scent of the tears and the black earth that Achilles tore in his grief. If we can keep some measure of that humanity within ourselves, then perhaps, if the poems remain, there will still be those who can hear them and feel their weight on the unknown shores that lie ahead.

My daughter is Irish Catholic on her mother’s side. In the summer, her eyes shed their hazel and gleam like emeralds. Handed down on her maternal line are the stories of ancestors who might have made the Atlantic crossing at the Bridge of Tears, leaving behind them the place Shane McGowan called “the proud land of our fathers.” When she was born we settled in Chicago, an American hub for much of the Irish diaspora, in a small apartment on the backside of the elevated line in the Pilsen neighborhood on the city’s southwest side. It was given its name by the Czech immigrants who first settled there before being given over almost completely to first, second, and third generations of Mexican families, selling elotes on the street corners and fresh corn tortillas from the tiendas that line 18th St. from Ashland to Western.

We arrived there on the wings of gentrification in 2011. I didn't know much Spanish, but my next door neighbors were kind enough to help me brush up on the basics whenever I greeted them at the door to my apartment, and they doted on my newborn child as much as anyone would when we loaded her in the stroller for walks around the neighborhood. I had lived in Texas for a few years and worked in the trades around a decent amount of Mexicans, but nothing could have prepared me for how deeply invested my new neighbors were in the celebration of the 4th of July. I remember descending into the darkness and the muggy midwestern air and thinking I had walked into the middle of the Tet Offensive, so overwhelming was the barrage of fusillades and firecrackers, M80s screaming by over the thrum of Tejano music blasting from cars and laughter of children. When the smoke lifted and the dawn blazed over that slice of the city it was like a warzone, nothing but spent mortars and empty bottle rockets everywhere. If the mark of a people's patriotism is measured in their exuberance for fireworks, no one is more patriotic than Mexican-Americans.

The declaration of patriotism has long since fallen out of favor in the left wing circles I travel in. Indeed, its rejection amounts to a shibboleth of sorts, one that marks you as a member of a tribe formed in opposition to the larger culture espousing militarism, racism and imperialism. And it's hard to deny that the dissemination of these ideas have been a part of the founding myths of this country from the beginning. When I was younger I looked at the punk and anarchist subculture that I gravitated towards as a kind of tribal community, one that could replace the larger American culture I was seeking to reject. But tribes and peoples are always bound by their connection to the land that raised them and the stories that unite them. The post-1960s social justice movements have no shortage of compelling stories, but you’d be hard pressed to argue that they have any real connection to the land. Those kinds of roots are measured in much deeper scales of time than a few generations.

When the First Peoples crossed the Beringian land bridge at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, they found a world that many archaeologists say was ruled exclusively by mammoths and other megafauna. But there may have been a scant human presence here already. There are footprints in the sands of New Mexico going back at least 10,000 years before the arrival of the Clovis people. What happened when those two groups met, if they ever did, will be forever a mystery. But perhaps it was the first clash of indigenous versus immigrant in a land whose future would be shaped by such interactions. The Clovis people who made the crossing over Beringia witnessed the demise of most of the Ice Age megafauna, most critically the horse. In the world they had left behind the children of their mutual ancestors would come to master that animal, enabling a pastoral way of life and arguably facilitating the spread of their genes and their language in a wave of conquest across Eurasia that would only be rivaled thousands of years later, when their Spanish descendants emptied from colossal vessels on the shores of Mexico and rode those same horses roughshod over the civilizations of the Aztec and the Maya.

The rest of the European world soon followed, but they were not alone. When the first African slaves arrived on the continent it closed a loop in human evolution, the people indigenous to the continent of the first human footfalls brought as chattel to the place of their ultimate mainland extent. The slaves arriving from Africa in the ensuing centuries kept their Yoruba spiritual traditions and merged them with Christian faith of their oppressors, blending medieval European harmonies with their work songs. Through a tragic marriage of those expressions, the blues was born. When the Scots-Irish immigrants settled in Appalachia they learned the ways of the land from the Creek and Cherokee tribes that had hunted there for millennia, and eventually found a new instrument imported and played by African slaves upon which to sing the ancient ballads handed down from their Anglo-Celtic ancestors. On the gut strings of a banjo, country music was born. And somewhere in the shifting borders between Texas and Mexico a descendant of the Aztecs picked up an accordion brought by a Czech or Polish immigrant, giving us the Tejano and norteño ballads so ubiquitous on the streets of Pilsen today. The American cultural horizon that came to dominate the 20th century was heralded by music that grew from the seeds of these exchanges, the marriage of tragedy and circumstance, immigration and indigeneity.1

In the summer when I walk into my garden and smell the musk of the tomato vines I am reminded of how my childhood memories are colored by a land whose fruits and beasts would have been wholly alien to my Scandinavian ancestors. The land shapes the people, and the people shape the land. For better or worse, through freedom and slavery, genocide and upheaval, this is the struggle that defines the identity of America. Whether we were born here or came as adults stowed away in the trailers of coyotes, we are citizens of a land that since achieving independence has never had a king, and for many years had amorphous borders shaped by the restless urges of lawless settlers and nomads. Strange that the descendants of those pilgrims now insist on a rigorous devotion to laws of citizenship to decide who gets to stay here, to decide which families are ripped apart by masked men on street corners following the orders of an increasingly authoritarian government.

I have a friend who came here illegally as a child. His family was not far behind him, and although he is now a naturalized citizen, his father is not. Facing the possibility of an untimely encounter with the law and potential deportation to the gulags in El Salvador, his father made the decision to live out his golden years in the country of Mexico that he left 30 years prior. He won’t be able to help his neighbors in America with handyman projects or fish on the weekends or work the harvests as he has every year since arriving here. He’ll be back in Mexico, unable to see his grandchildren grow up. Does anyone really think we are a stronger and more prosperous nation because of these disruptions to the lives of hard working families?

In the grand scale of history, America is a young nation, and still little more than an upstart on the world stage. The Irish people forged their identity over thousands of years and multiple migrations. As told in the Book of Invasions and later confirmed through ancient DNA, the prehistoric waves of immigration to the Emerald Isle joined people of radically divergent genetic populations. And yet, their blood and culture and stories and struggles combined to shape the people we now think of today as Irish. For all we know, the ethnogenesis of the people we call American is still evolving. My daughter's children and grandchildren will have to forge their own link in that chain. I can’t predict how that will look in a few hundred years any more than the Neolithic farmers of the British Isles could have predicted the change in their grandchildren’s features brought about by riders on horseback from the Eurasian steppe. And while I share the desire of some of my more nativist countrymen to safeguard the traditions of their ancestors, we are fortunate as Americans to have watched as those forces shaped us in historical time as opposed to the depths of prehistory, and to know that what emerges from the meetings of disparate cultures is not always the erasure of the former. Our collective taste for risk taking and adventure is reflected in our bastard tongue and our twisted strands of ancestry and culture that fuel the inherited mythos of our own exceptionalism, and in a strange way, that brings me great pride. Somewhere within this tangled web of contradictions we might find an antidote to our sense of rootlessness, a connection to the land and the stories it has inspired. To be an American is to know that the same blended heritage that brought slavery and militarism and Trump signs and fireworks2 also gave us the civil rights movement and blues music and all of the wonderfully idiosyncratic expressions of our cultural horizon.

Not that there’s anything wrong with fireworks. I love those too. But probably not as much as the Mexicans do.

Cape Disappointment. It's a strange name for such a beautiful place. Shielded on the east by a bluff that shrouds the view of Astoria and a giant suspension bridge connecting Oregon and Washington, one can walk along a narrow peninsula and stand at the mouth of the Columbia River as it empties into the Pacific and see it as it might have looked a thousand years ago. It's impossible to be inured to the sheer power of the place, the meeting of the greatest waterway of the Pacific Northwest with the largest ocean in the world. A treacherous array of sandbars and shoals manifests as a series of standing waves, making it one of the most dangerous bar crossings in the world for sailors. The “Graveyard of the Pacific” gave fits to the earliest European mariners who tried to gain entry. In 1782 a British fur trader named John Meares and his crew tried in vain to find the legendary river but were unable to navigate the shoals, naming the mysterious bodies of water that vexed them Cape Disappointment and Deception Bay. A few years later, an American vessel called the Columbia Rediviva finally made the crossing, becoming the first mariners of European descent to do so, giving the river the name it still carries today.

But the river had known many names before that. In the Kiksht tongue of the Upper Chinook people it is called the Wimahl; in Sahaptin, Nch'i-wana; and to the Sinixt people farther upriver in Canada it is called Swah'netk'qhu. All three terms roughly translate into English as "the big river". The big river has sustained the lifeways of countless tribes over the millenia. Before contact, its waters were so thick with salmon during spawning season that by some accounts it was impossible to see the river for the fish. And as the story of the peopling of the Americas becomes clearer to scientists it is thought that the Columbia River could have been a bountiful refuge for the first peoples of this continent as they made their way down the coast when the glaciers still dominated most of the interior. Of the many rivers that empty into it as it winds down from the Canadian Rockies to the Pacific, many still carry indigenous names. But the big river is saddled with a moniker ultimately derived from the Italian explorer who sowed the doom of the way of life the first peoples of America maintained for thousands of years, the final blow of a conquest that began on the shores of Hispaniola and ended when Lewis and Clark reached the mouth of the Columbia centuries later.

That the big river bears a European name makes it something of an anomaly. While settlements often have names reflecting the ones who built or conquered them, natural landmarks are quite linguistically conservative, sometimes bearing names thousands of years old, and none more so than rivers. Prior to the revolution in ancient DNA, the study of place names (toponyms) was one of the most useful tools for linguists to understand migrations of people and the conquests that often left little traces besides the mysterious remnants of their languages left on the landscape. Several Eurasian rivers spread over thousands of miles have similar names that are all cognates ultimately derived from the Proto Indo-European root *dʰenh₂. The Don, Danube, Dnieper and Dniester rivers probably all derive from this ancient word for river or flowing water, the latter two coming from the Indo-Iranian Scythian language meaning "the near river” and “the far river”, respectively. In Britain, the subsequent colonizations by the Romans and Anglo-Saxons wiped out almost all traces of the native Celtic tongues from the vocabulary of modern English, but there are fragments of their legacy left in the ancient names of rivers, hills and towns that remain. Today there are numerous rivers that derive their name from a Common Brittonic word for river, something like abona, that gave us the names of the various Avon Rivers of the United Kingdom. It's not hard to imagine how this could have happened. A colonial force that would have relied on the indigenous people for labor or tribute would probably have learned that keeping the old names for landmarks and rivers would simply have been easier than imposing a new one, like in the case of the River Avon, which literally means River River.

None can say for sure, but if we were able to peel this linguistic onion all the way back, we would probably be unraveling layer upon layer of words that simply mean river or mountain or sea in a succession of languages long dead and gone. It's one reason why the current fixation on land acknowledgements is rather fraught - the colonists who displaced the indigenous inhabitants that survived into the historic era were almost certainly replacing a people who had done the same to their predecessors in ages past, if only on a smaller scale. Though his ideas are outside of the academic mainstream, linguist Theo Venneman has proposed1 that the “Old European Hydronymy" that seeks to boil down those same waterways to their oldest and deepest roots may hint at a corpus of some ancient and forgotten language spoken upon the continent before the arrival of Indo-European tongues. That we will probably never know the language of those mysterious builders of enduring megaliths is all the more reason that we should work to preserve what remains of the languages of those ultimately displaced by their descendants, their ancient tongue perhaps hidden somewhere in the names of the European conquerors now etched on the mountains and rivers of America.

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Donald Trump likes to refer to himself as a student of history. I’m not sure how much he's immersed himself in the study of historical linguistics, but I'd be surprised if he didn't see a bit of Alexander the Great or Hernan Cortez in himself when he looks in the mirror. Those men secured their immortality by conquering the peoples of unknown and unspoiled lands and placing their names and those of their kings on landmarks that had been known for millennia by nothing more than their geographical features. Trump fits squarely within the lineage of those men, but he faces the limitations imposed by their tremendous accomplishments as he seeks to supplant them. Unless Elon Musk can make good on his promise to colonize Mars, there's a vanishingly small amount of real estate left that doesn't already have the stamp of conquest on it by now. This reality probably just looms just as large as mineral rights and geopolitical strategy in the administration's push to claim Greenland, and to conquer Mt Denali and the Gulf of Mexico by linguistic fiat. Kicking ass and taking names, and owning the libs while he’s at it. The tyrants of the Bronze Age had their cuneiform tablets upon which they recorded the names they had razed from the map, ours have Twitter.

But of course these kinds of linguistic shenanigans are hardly unique to the far right. Where they seek to purify the savage landscape of the demonized other with the civilized nomenclature of the west, the left sees its strategy as restorative, a way of bringing justice to the vanquished. Their arena is not the ancient waterways and mountains so sacred to those who live close to the land but the schools and institutions that bear the names of the same slave holders and colonists responsible for their dispossession. And as the left has gained dominance over those institutions, they've set their sights on reclaiming some of the landscape as well. Denali, known in Koyukon Athabascan as “the great one”, kept its native name for untold generations, until some intrepid gold miner slapped the name of Mckinley on it a hundred years ago. In the last ten years the ascendant left managed to restore its rightful appelation, and in the blink of an eye and a turn of fortune the mountain was saddled with the same dead president’s moniker yet again.

It's a truly headspinning and utterly ridiculous turn of events, and it may seem at times like so much political theatre, but no one should deny the power that names have to shape the ways that we relate to the land and its people. Who ultimately has the right to decide what ancestry is reflected on the maps that we use to make sense of our world is a nebulous question, complicated by the interwoven identities and inheritance of people on both sides of the colonist’s blade. Since at least the 1970’s there has been a grassroots effort to restore the name once given by various tribes of the Northeastern Woodlands to the whole of the land in place of the one given for Amerigo Vespucci, to trade the name of a conqueror for the name of a creation story. Turtle Island. In one version of this ancient tale, Sky Woman is banished by her vengeful father and cast into a world that is little more than a primordial sea, landing on a turtle’s back. Muskrat and the rest of the animals come to her aid and bring earth from the bottom of the sea to help seed a new land on the turtle’s shell. Perhaps a people whose ancestors travelled across an immense ocean and found themselves in a strange and bountiful land could find some resonance within such a metaphor. And though we have all been Americans for some time now, the European colonists were themselves descended from a people who once lived closer to the land, before they began to name their waters for disappointment and deception and their mountains for their dead kings and presidents. Restoring the name of the country we all must share to one that has deep roots in the natural world could be a step towards what Braiding Sweetgrass author Robin Wall Kimmerer calls becoming “indigenous to place”, and perhaps a way for America to live up to its own mythical self-image.

But it's unlikely to happen any time soon. The country doesn’t seem to be in much of a healing mood these days. When asked to defend his decision to strip the ancient name from Denali’s peak, Trump offered the following:

President McKinley was the president that was responsible for creating a vast sum of money. That's one of the reasons that we're going to bring back the name of Mount McKinley, because I think he deserves it.

For gold and glory. Hard to find a more blunt declaration than that for the true ambitions of those at the helm of our country. We are in many ways returning to a norm that has dominated most of recorded history, and one where democracy and egalitarianism no longer seem like ideals worth pursuing. Perhaps the most salient lesson that can be derived from an excavation of centuries of toponymic turmoil, to misquote Thucydides2, is that those who wield power draw the maps of our world, while the weak must scratch out a living upon a land where they have little ownership or agency.

If that seems less than certain, just pull your phone out of your pocket, open Google Maps, and type in “The Gulf of Mexico”.

A scheme is not a vision

And you never have been tempted

By a demon or a god

-Leonard Cohen, The Story of Isaac

He had eaten them all. One by one, brother and sister alike he devoured as soon as they emerged from their mother's womb. He had deposed his father for the same crime, emasculating Ouranos with his stone sickle and casting his testicles into the sea when the sky father had imprisoned his brothers in Tartarus. Now Cronus was sovereign, and he feared the children he had he sired with his sister Rhea. For the way of the world is one of violence and retribution, and the father can never be sure that his children will not become agents of the very injustice he has labored to destroy. He would swallow the children whole, and make them part of him, his body their prison.

The sixth child was kept hidden from him, stowed away on the Isle of Crete, and when the time came for his mother to deliver the infant to his murderer she instead handed her husband a stone swaddled in cloth. When the Titan requested that she nurse his offspring one last time, she feigned suckling the infant, and the wasted milk was spent into the primordial sky and became the Milky Way.1

The child would be known as Zeus, and would one day free his siblings from their confinement in his father's entrails so that they could take their place in the Olympian pantheon. Once he had banished his father, Zeus took his place in the grand cycle of violence and retribution that is passed down unbroken from fathers to sons, from legend to myth. Zeus broke the cycle by refusing to destroy his children when faced with the prophecy, swallowing his pregnant wife instead. This misogynistic transgression may symbolize the first careful steps onto a brighter path, but from Agamemnon to Abraham, our oral histories and religious traditions reflect an inheritance of the madness of fathers sacrificing their children to curry favor with the gods or defy some prophecy. Perhaps with each generation it gets a little better. Perhaps one day the sons of tyrannical fathers will not grow up with the threat of violence woven into their swaddling clothes, waiting for the day when they are strong enough to take their place atop the cycle. And perhaps in the struggle for primacy inherited by our distant ancestors there was some utility in this Hobbesian fairy tale, our collective distaste for tyranny being at least as old as the institution itself. But whatever bulwark our modern democracy and rationalism may provide against the ascent of these demagogues and god-kings, they are never more than a few steps behind us, lurking in their pulpits and halls of power, waiting like a virus for a chance to colonize whatever host will afford an opening.

They all called him father. To some, his confidence and zeal from the pulpit combined with his miraculous healing powers made him seem like a god made flesh. In the two decades that Jim Jones led the congregation of the People's Temple, he would often tell his followers that he was whatever they most wanted or needed him to be. But by the time the flock had reached the Promised Land, deep in the Guyana jungle, most of them simply called him “Dad”. For whether by blood or adoption or simply on the merit of their membership in the church, Jim Jones regarded all who were loyal to him as his children. He had led them from the segregated towns of Indiana to hills of Northern California and the streets of San Francisco, captivating all who fell under his wing with a marriage of fire breathing Pentecostal sermons and soaring Marxist rhetoric. Like Zeus he had a righteous anger for the sins of the fathers and cast himself as the central deity in a pantheon built on the egalitarian ethos of the civil rights movement, but the shape of his dream was cloaked in a profound rage and insecurity that owed more to the filicidal misdeeds of the Titans of old. And in Jonestown, thousands of miles from the American ghettos and liberal arts colleges that incubated his followers, the man they called father would betray the dreams of his people with all of the primordial malice of his mythological forefathers.

Jim Jones was born in 1931 in Crete, Indiana to a disabled veteran and a strange and singular woman with messianic delusions. His father was largely helpless and mostly unemployed due to an abrasion of his lungs from exposure to toxic gases in the trenches of the Great War, and so it was left to his mother, who by many accounts possessed little maternal instincts, to raise the precocious child who displayed a natural intelligence and charisma from an early age. Owing to public sympathies over the boy's precarious home life, a few local women took pity on the young man and welcomed him into their homes and their churches. Though his mother may have offered little in the way of nurturing, she did instill in him from a young age a sense of his promise and purpose, a burgeoning force within him that would soon find an outlet in the various churches he would frequent with the surrogate mothers of his small town. He quickly immersed himself in the study of religion and history, and though young Jim Jones made friends with the other boys, bonding over imagined military conquests and battles, he eschewed sports because he could not stomach losing any contest. Instead, he would often enlist his friends to stage funerals for dead farm animals, occasionally even setting traps for strays in the neighborhood in service of his hobby.

By the time he was a young man, he was certain that he wanted to become a preacher. The Pentacostal tradition was in full swing in the early 50s in Indiana, and Jones would regularly be found in attendance at the big tent services where manic sweating preachers would allow the spirit of God to pass through them as they healed and comforted the sick. The theatrics must have appealed greatly to him, but he also understood the immense power that these men possessed, and in short order began to take the steps to build a congregation of his own. A perceptive and questioning soul, Jones felt a great sense of outrage at the institution of segregation and resolved from early on to cross racial lines and extend a hand to black parishioners as he began to build his church. He became an ordained minister in the Independent Assemblies of God and became affiliated with the Latter Rain movement, before founding the People's Temple in 1955 in Indianapolis, with a fully integrated congregation.

We will never know how much of Jones' anti-racism was a manifestation of his personal morality or merely the opportunistic scheming of a man who saw a chance to swell his ranks with the marginalized. But it is fair to say that few people played a bigger role in integrating and promoting the cause of racial equality in 1950s Indiana than Jim Jones. He applied the same sleight of hand techniques that he used in his healing ceremonies to the careful manipulation of appearances and alliances among the political leadership of Indianapolis, marshalling the numbers he had amassed among his poor black followers with the influence and air of respectability earned by his status among the white clergy to force the integration of local restaurants and clubs. And when one of his clergy was facing a financial hardship or a racially motivated hassle, Jones was there to help them out in ways that the black clergy were often not positioned to. He leveraged his natural charisma with techniques borrowed from the black preachers he observed during services to convince his followers he commanded the word of God from the pulpit, often amazing them with carefully staged healing rituals, and behind the scenes he used his growing political influence to materially impact the lives of the poor whites and blacks who made up the bulk of his congregation while casting a wide enough net to ensnare the young college educated whites who were passionate about working for civil rights.

He would soon outgrow Indianapolis, and in the days following the Cuban Missile Crisis Jones became increasingly concerned with the threat of nuclear war and the importance of finding a safe haven for his flock. Shortly after becoming ordained by the Disciples of Christ he decided to move the church to California. They made their first landing in the small town of Ukiah, a white working class logging town nestled into the Redwood Valley about three hours north of San Francisco. Jones brought many of his followers across the country to join him as pilgrims in this new land, and the diverse congregation immediately made the locals take notice. In the mid 60s, Ukiah was little more than a backwater rural outpost, and most of the black members of the Temple were viewed with great suspicion and discrimination, so much so that they took to calling their new home “Redneck Valley”. But the aim of the Temple was to capitalize on the growing power of the civil rights movement and the cultural revolution that was taking place just to their south. The Temple kept a foothold in Ukiah but soon began to make connections in the Bay Area and further down the road, eventually reaching Los Angeles. By the end of the decade, Jones’ flock numbered in the thousands with new recruits from the ghettos of the big cities, but the leadership of the church was made up almost exclusively of white college kids attracted to his increasing insistence on the importance of "Apostolic Socialism". Jones began to talk less about the Christian "Sky Father" and more and more centered himself as the divine manifestation of a righteous, materialist mission to transform the world through teachings more akin to Mao than Jesus.

The idealism of the 60s counterculture gave way to the bitter struggles of the 70s. The assassinations of the Kennedys, Malcolm X and Medgar Evers, and the riots that followed the killing of Martin Luther King gave an opening to the reactionary forces that propelled Nixon to office with a mandate to restore order. COINTELPRO infiltrated many of the black radical and anti-war movements of the era and pushed them to extinction or deep underground. But the People's Temple soldiered on, outwardly reflecting a kind of compromise between the Christian message of equality offered by King and the radical doctrine of groups like the Weatherman. Internally, Jones was becoming increasingly despotic and unhinged. He had from the beginning insisted on unfailing loyalty from his followers, but many of them balanced this with an appraisal of his charitable work and commitment to social justice and deemed him an effective if narcissistic leader for their movement. But as his influence grew among politicians in San Francisco, the spotlight on his behavior did as well. Jones had married his high school sweetheart Marceline Baldwin early in the days of the temple, and the two of them formed a powerful tandem, raising several adopted children and one of their own in addition to acting as the spiritual mother and father of the Temple. But now he set his sights on the younger women who increasingly formed his inner circle, and one by one began to take them as mistresses, sometimes deliberately leveraging their relationship to emasculate and control their husbands, forcing them to get divorces and in one case name Jones as the legitimate father of their children. He became just as addicted to amphetamines as he was to the sexual domination of his congregation, limiting himself mostly to the pretty young white women but sometimes to the men as well. Whatever or whomever Jones wanted, he got. And when his behavior prompted the defection of incensed former partners of the women he stole or parents who were increasingly concerned about the welfare of their children living communally within the Temple's compounds, he would often force them to sign blank confessions which he assured them would be amended to reflect whatever terrible behavior he chose to assign to them if they betrayed him or spoke negatively about the the Temple.

The climate of fear that pervaded the Temple began to result in more and more defections, some more high profile than others, but Jones buttressed the growing media attacks with his connections within the San Francisco political machine. He had formed alliances with prominent Bay Area politicians like Mayor George Moscone and Assemblyman Willie Brown, and was appointed head of the San Francisco Housing Authority. Jones knew he could not hold off media scrutiny and scandalous whispers forever, but part of his message had always been a kind of messianic persecution complex, and he was eager to cast any bad press as another manifestation of the fascist white power structure. As the betrayals and defections mounted, Jones returned again to his dire predictions of the onslaught of a nuclear war. To this end, Jones eventually decided the Ukiah compound would not provide sufficient shelter from these potential catastrophes and mounting persecutions, and in 1974 purchased a plot of land deep in the jungle of Guyana just south of the Venezuela border. The country, in addition to being the only English speaking nation in South America, was also in the midst of shaking off the shackles of colonialism in the form of a socialist republic, and was eager to bring the Temple in as a bulwark against its border dispute with Venezuela as well as potential chess piece in negotiations with the US. By 1976, a sizable portion of the Temple had emigrated there and cleared enough land to begin subsistence farming. In June of 1977, Jones himself left the United States and took his place among the pilgrims scraping out a living in the jungle. He would never return.

Temple defector Deborah Layton, who escaped from the cult just a few months before the tragedy of November 18, 1978, later wrote about a return trip to the jungle twenty years later and the shock of viewing what remained of the settlement from the air. Layton had arrived initially as did most of the pilgrims by boat along the Atlantic coast before a long and treacherous river expedition to the remote settlement. Seeing it from the air, for the first time she realized how incredibly isolated it was, and became aware of "the true evilness of Jones' decision to choose this outpost in the middle of nowhere, 250 miles from civilization”.2Adding to the isolation of the settlement was the realization that the land was barren and would not be able to sustain the collective needs of its new residents. Jones hid this condition by posing the new settlers with bountiful harvests of luscious fruits and vegetables in abundance, trucked in from the shelves of markets in the closest towns, to provide the illusion of paradise to those not yet sold on the idea of a jungle commune. Some of the first pioneers later would say that the collective joy of working with their temple brothers and sisters was a beautiful struggle, one that affirmed their utopian visions and dreams of a better world. But for the vast majority of the new settlers, the experience was more akin to the nightmares that many of their ancestors had endured under slavery a century earlier. The pioneers worked long, arduous shifts in the fields on little sleep with nothing more than rice and water, and their free time was often occupied by grueling meetings and lectures from Jones about the need to become more socialist, more selfless, like he was. Even in their working hours he stole their time and attention, broadcasting his increasingly unhinged sermons and provocations over the loudspeaker into the fields. Slowly any sense of normalcy or autonomy was stripped from his congregations, they were too tired to argue and too frightened to trust one another with any misgivings. Jones had made it abundantly clear that his spies were everywhere.

It is impossible to understand the last days of the Temple without placing the events in the broader context of Jones' descent into madness and the steady erosion of any kind of ‘normal’ reality that was occasioned by his skillful manipulation and coercion. Jones' dominance over the will of his followers happened slowly, and like the sailors on Melville’s Pequod they would have been too consumed by the mechanics of their daily survival to properly assess the danger posed by their own monomaniacal Ahab. The struggle sessions that had become increasingly common in the years before the move to Guyana now took a much darker turn. Those suspected of treasonous behaviour, or even simple misunderstandings, were often brought before the congregation and physically and verbally assaulted by everyone in attendance. Children misbehaving were locked into dark wells and sensory deprivation boxes that simulated being buried alive, and everyone was on alert for late night struggle sessions that would often come when they were at their most exhausted. One of these infamous "White Nights" commenced with a dire proclamation of the imminent assault on the commune by outside forces. Jones told his flock that their time was at hand, and produced a vat of punch that he announced was laced with poison, and exhorted everyone present to drink. After a few terrified minutes passed, Jones told them it was only a test, but that the day would soon come when all would be asked to lay down their lives for the cause in an act of revolutionary suicide. If there was any doubt that Jones had assumed the mantle of an all powerful deity, one who wielded the lives of a thousand souls locked in the jungle, this was an abuse of authority that could have been ripped from the pages of the Old Testament, not unlike the Biblical father demanding a cruel test of loyalty from Abraham. He had once offered a vision of compassion and justice inspired by the message of Jesus to the downtrodden, buttressed by the manifestation of the earthly justice of socialism, but in the end his vision recalled the great pagan offerings made at the temples of the Aztecs or the cannibalistic rites of Neolithic Europe, of a people turning on themselves in the service of a dark and implacable god. There was nowhere to run, and no one could hear their lamentations even if they were brave enough to speak them.

In the last days of the People's Temple there was one man who heard the call from the jungle and marshalled his considerable power to come to their aid. Ironically, the arrival of US Congressman Leo Ryan and his entourage of reporters and former Temple members would not bring emancipation for most of the followers but would set the wheels in motion that would lead to the deaths of almost all involved, including Ryan himself. Galvanized by the growing reports from defectors of human rights abuses in Guyana, Ryan arrived in Jonestown on the morning of November 17, and with an NBC camera crew and a handful of reporters and defectors eager to reunite with their families began to conduct a series of interviews with Temple members in the process of a highly staged tour of the compound carefully managed by Jones and his inner circle to present an image of a highly functional utopian commune. Initially, the ruse seemed to be effective, but by the morning of November 18, over a dozen people had secretly confided in Ryan that they wanted out. It was the last straw for a drug-addled, isolated and completely delusional man who saw himself as a god and a prophet of doom, and Jones felt the time was at hand. He ordered the murder of Ryan upon his return to the airstrip, and as he and his crew made their retreat from the jungle they were ambushed by Temple guards who opened fire, killing Ryan and some of his entourage. Facing the consequences of this violent reprisal, Jones ordered all of his people into the pavilion where the night before all had gathered to a grand celebration of Jones' vision, and ordered everyone present to commit “an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the acts of an inhumane world”.

There is a 45 minute recording of the final moments of the People's Temple, the infamous "death tape" that Jones made as the vats of cyanide laced Flavor Aid were opened and a phalanx of armed guards was assembled to ensure that all who were present would comply with the order. Because of the tape, we know that the children of Jonestown, a third of the 907 victims, were the first to die. Jones can be heard exhorting his followers to not be afraid, and to die like true socialists, to take their place in history among the ancient Greeks who went by way of poison. At one point, Jones can be heard arguing with a woman he calls “mother”, who many speculate to be his wife Marceline. She would die along with the rest of her Temple family, including some of her adopted children. Much like Rhea, she had made arrangements to save her only biological son, Stephan, who was away with his adopted brother and some of their friends at a basketball tournament. By some accounts he tried valiantly to stop his father’s plan, but although he was no Zeus, the tragic ending of the People’s Temple will be remembered in history with a surreal terror seemingly ripped from the fulfillment of some ancient prophecy.

I've had a personal fascination with Jonestown since I was young. My own parents were 60s radicals, and I was a little over a year old when it happened, the same age as many of the children who were later found bloated and buried under the bodies of their parents in a mass grave outside of the pavilion. Perhaps if circumstances were different and my parents were hippies of a different sort, I might have been one of those children. I do feel a deep connection to those who died that day, and even as a parent I can't bring myself to judge those who stood by as their children were sacrificed. It was madness, and all of those who died were fed into it like the hapless children swallowed up in the dark deeds of an older and stranger world.

Outside of the first few minutes, I have never been able to bring myself to listen to the death tape. To do so for me would seem an act of voyeurism and a denial of the dignity of all those who were sacrificed on the altar of one man's vanity and obsession. In my readings of the memoirs and stories of the survivors and the hours of footage captured over the years by Jones himself and the camera crews who arrived on those last days, I see people who were not entirely unlike my parents and their socialist comrades, or the people that I gravitated towards in my youth during my search for utopias in anarchist communities at the turn of the millennium. The Temple welcomed anyone, the poor and the marginalized, criminals and college dropouts, people from all walks of life who were in some way wounded by society and thought they had found a fellowship that would help them to have a hand in the creation of a better world for their children. Much of the morbid fascination around Jonestown is centered around the grotesque images of the dead in colorful cultish garb clutching their children to their bloated corpses, of the feverish struggle in those final hours captured on the death tape. I won't deny that this brush with madness is captivating, but to me the most poignant manifestation of the tragedy in all of its complexity is found in the celebration in the pavilion on the eve of the massacre. The clip begins with a shot of Jones in an exchange with his interlocutors while the Temple house band, the Jonestown Express, plays a cover of Earth, Wind and Fire's "That's the Way of the World".

It's hard not to be captivated by the spectacle, given the knowledge of what would transpire there the very next day. The band plays an uptempo version of the funk ballad, the plaintive horns echo the haunting refrain by the singer, Deanna Wilkinson, of a line that stands as a grim portent of the tragedy

We've come together on this special day

Sung our message loud and clear

Looking back, we've touched on sorrowful days

While the future disappears

Wilkinson was a woman who had endured an abusive childhood and was loved and accepted by the Temple in spite of her open homosexuality. Her performance channels her own sorrow, hope and struggles with great pathos, but it's tempting to speculate that she understood on some level the gravity of the events that were unfolding before her, that she and the rest of her band were the curtain call on a grand social experiment that had gone horribly wrong. Behind her is a sign bearing a reworking of the famous quote from George Santayana,

Those who do not remember their history are condemned to repeat it

By sunset on the next day, she and her band, along with almost everyone else who had given their lives to the promise that they could break the cycle of subjugation and injustice would perish within sight of those famous words. Alone under the banner was the body of their mad god who took the coward's way out in the end, dead from a single gunshot to the head.

From deep in the mists of prehistory to the horrors of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the struggle to realize our collective egalitarian and utopian dreams is always bound by the dangers of personality cults. It’s tempting to draw comparisons between Jones and our current American president, as some former Temple members recently have. Indeed, if a left wing analogue to Trump were to emerge from our present moment of political chaos, they would probably bear a striking resemblance to Jim Jones. Much of the political rhetoric from his nadir in the 70s would not seem out of place in some online screed from today’s anti-racist activists. But whether by incompetence or a structural aversion to the concept, the American left has in recent years failed to coalesce around a central demagogue, ceding the fraught pursuit of this ancient pastime to their rivals on the right. Figures like Trump and Elon Musk have all of the trappings of a Cronos or Jim Jones, right down to their unquenchable egotism and thin skinned pursuit of unfailing loyalty from all around them. And their rise to power has been made possible by legions of followers who are willing to overlook their personal shortcomings by rationalizing that they are acting in service of a greater good, much like many of Jonestown’s idealistic socialists.

Will we again invoke Santayana’s words in the aftermath of some fresh tragedy brought on by those who drank the Kool Aid of our current regime, headed by a vainglorious tyrant with access to weapons far deadlier than cyanide? We will never know the darkness from which the mythology of the ancient Greeks emerged, but from the same chaos that spawned Cronos eventually emerged a seminal form of democracy, the art of which our own society seems to be rapidly forgetting. If we are indeed headed back into a collective embrace of demagoguery, we should do so fully aware of the dangers that we are walking into, for we have been there before. That’s the way of the world.

We preach the gospel of our lord and savior Jesus Christ.

The woman seated behind me as we board the plane is young, blond haired and brimming with limitless conviction. The sincerity in her voice is unmistakable.

Our mission is to bring the gospel to the most dangerous places on earth, and to those places that are mostly unreached. And, well, Japan isn’t too dangerous, so….

Unreached. The young missionary sleeps soundly as the plane descends through the clouds over Honshu, out of the briny darkness over the Pacific and into the impossible brightness of Tokyo, shining with the authority of the sun. I am lost in my thoughts as we descend on the metropolis, thinking of the ancients of this land, those who hunted and fished under the shadow of Mt Fuji before the arrival of the Children of the Sun. The Jomon stalked the wilderness of primeval Japan for thousands of years, Ice Age foragers whose ancestors migrated across the sea before the rising waters flooded the land bridge again. Little is known about them besides their intricate pottery and strange dogu sculptures. Isolated and unreached they were, until a few centuries before the time of Christ, when a new people came from the west. The Yayoi brought rice farming from the Korean peninsula, new hierarchies and a more formalized version of the animist Shinto religion.1 They would conquer and assimilate the indigenous people of the land and eventually forge the ethnogenesis of the Yamato, the people we now think of as the Japanese. Later migrations from the continent would bear missionaries bringing the teachings of the Buddha. The Himalayan stepchild of the Vedas would entwine with the Shinto traditions in a lover’s knot, each maintaining their sacred ways. In the time of the samurai, the gospel of Christ would finally arrive in the Land of the Rising Sun, carried on merchant ships from the distant seas of the west, and partly out of concern for the influence of these savages and their strange religion, the archipelago would isolate herself again and remain unreached until the Meiji restoration of the 19th century, roughly two centuries before the time of the missionary sleeping over my shoulder as the plane touches down in brightest and most populous city on Earth.

We wander the streets of Tokyo on a fresh December night. Accustomed to the raw bustle and filth of the American and European metropolises I am unprepared for the relative serenity that greets the visitor to the capital. The streets are impeccably clean, the roar of the traffic a silent murmur of electric cabs gracefully merging with the streetlights as revelers stumble towards midnight. Even the drunks here rise and fall with the ancient cadence that pervades the modern symphony of clean lines and curated streets. New York City pulses with a reflexive choas that you can feel under your feet even in the still of the night, here there is only stillness and the weight of centuries.

Boarding the bus to Fujikawaguchiko the next morning. The mountain is hidden under heavy cloud cover when we arrive at the lake. Wandering past a small gas station, we can see her enormous flanks that hang snow covered beneath the clouds. If the peaks that form the pacific Ring of Fire are a pantheon of geological majesty then Mt Fuji is their sovereign, mightier than Zeus or Indra and more perfect in her symmetry than Apollo or Ishtar. On a clear day I can count two or three of Fuji’s distant relatives from the skyline of Portland. But she is unique. Each time her form emerges from the clouds I am overtaken by how perfect the mountain is, how impossibly smooth and symmetrical. I can’t stop whipping out my phone to take snapshots, a profane tool for a sacred task.

We wander through irrigation canals feeding backyard rice paddies on the outskirts of Lake Fujiyama. As night comes in the smoke rises on the lake and we stumble in the dark towards a nondescript suburban duplex, waiting there with strangers for the old couple to flip the sign outside their garage and welcome us into their night kitchen, transformed into a small and tidy noodle house. We dine on udon and grilled pork, sashimi and seaweed, nestled into the corner of a formica bartop next to a curtain and a pile of newspapers separating us from the private world of our hosts.

Winding through the mountains on a bus weaving in and out of view of the great volcano. We depart from the shadow of Mt Fuji along the Nakasendo road, where the samurai Musashi tested the sharpness of his blade on so many nameless challengers. Pulling into an old railway station at Narai-juko, an Edo period village of tidy shoshugibon clapboard houses, the former workshops of woodworkers famous for their hand crafted combs. A light snow is falling and the mountains rise in the distance, the road emptying before us like some western thoroughfare for dusty gold panners in a high plains outpost somewhere in the Dakota territory. A well preserved relic of the time of the shogunate, in my mind I picture armored samurai astride their horses replacing the frontiersman of my country, summiting the desolate peaks of another distant sea.

We stumble in from the cold onto a small rustic noodle house and sit at a small wooden table beside a frosted window. Woodsmoke and warm tea, a kind woman takes our order. I glance at my phone and the modern world breaks the spell in a fit of cruelness.

Have you talked to anyone from Baltimore today?

I am already running a list in my head of who could it be as I step out into the cold. From across the world on a familiar voice comes the news. They found her dead in her apartment. That’s all he knows. We were together once, a lifetime ago, when sharing a smoke at the window of her bedroom half naked to the cold was romance. I tell my wife and we sit in silence for a while. Before we left the states, another estranged friend of mine had taken his life. Still processing the loss of one and newly haunted by another troubling ghost. Walking back through the wide avenue, passing a Shinto shrine. I wash my hands in the well by the Torii gate and make an offering to foreign gods, wondering who hears the prayers of the gaijin for the passage of souls from another land.

Hiroshima. I expect to be engulfed by the grief and sadness of this place. The heaviness is there, but the light is all around. It is Christmastime in Japan, and the streets are lined with beautiful western style holiday lights and decor, the children running joyfully through the streets. Perhaps some of their great grandparents were the same ones who brought water to their children’s lips as their flesh ran from their bones, on the day that the apocalypse came. A man departs from the bus and walks through the gates of a small Shinto shrine set into a row of clean white masonry office towers. He sets his briefcase down, dutifully cleanses his hands in the fountain and mounts the staircase to perform the rites of saisen before departing for the business of his day. Perhaps it is the seamless integration of the sacred into the beating heart of modernity, the remarkable resilience and social cohesion of the Japanese, that enabled the rebuilding of a city that endured such an unspeakable tragedy. There are trees along the thoroughfare that survived the holocaust and now stand adorned with simple placards amidst the garlands and Christmas lights, not far from the A-bomb dome still preserved in its half demolished state, a stoic watchtower. I leave the museum shaken. I walk the streets and look up from the river to the sky where the bomb fell. It is difficult to describe what that feels like.

Dining on okonomiyaki in a small family restaurant on a cold night in Bezin. We wander aimlessly in the fog past abandoned pottery kilns where the famous Bezin ware amphorae were once fired. Fog hangs over the narrow streets and lifts to reveal the entryways to secluded shrines, temples that wouldn’t look misplaced in the jungles of my childhood mind imagining the otherworld of the east. We are looking for a museum dedicated to the eponymous pottery of this city, and happen upon a nondescript potter’s studio with the famous earthenware neatly displayed in the windows. Thinking we have happened upon our destination, we stroll through the open door, uninvited, but quickly realize our error and depart unnoticed. I think to myself that in most of the cities of my homeland, this kind of trust in strangers would be unimaginable. Anyone could waltz out of there with a handful of priceless pottery, but of course in Japan, this would never happen. Shopkeepers routinely leave their stores unguarded by none other than the powerful social bonds that hold the island together as a realm of honor.

We spend a few days in Kyoto and Nara. Ancient temples, top shelf carpenter porn. They are everywhere, monuments to the skill and tenacity of those craftsmen who would shame the average American housewright with their prowess. The sun goes down on the city through the glowing of the eaves of an 8th century Buddhist temple, Kiyomizo-dera, and as we walk down the stone path under the light of the stars and the cool evening chill I imagine I’ve descended into Rivendell, every branch and leaf illuminated by the earthbound starlight rising from the cool mist of the fountains. December has a romance here unglimpsed in the west.

On our last day in Kyoto we visit a Buddhist temple tucked into the hillside. The grass and moss have claimed the myriad of faces that rise from the escarpment by the temple gate, smiling women and stern-faced old men standing witness to the onslaught of time. Within the gates of Otagi Nenbutsu-ji they sprawl across the wooded sanctuary like the sentinels of Angkor Wat or the stones of Carnac, but on closer inspection the illusion of the antique is broken by the intrusion of the modern. Some of the statues strum guitars and sport clothing not unlike the tourists taking their pictures. The entire edifice dates back to the 70s, an art project spearheaded by a visionary monk during the restoration of the Temple. He commissioned over a thousand of these arhat sculptures to be made by common people, reflecting their joys, struggles and mundane concerns and hobbies. The forces of time and nature bearing down on these monuments to sublime grace, engulfed like the red cedars that fall in their midst but preserving the unique spirit of their creators in the permanence of stone, they seem to capture the essence of this land. Captive by the slow march of time and isolation, at first glance a monolith of mystery forbidding to outsiders, but somehow both within the context of stern traditionalism and without it at once, modern and ancient, sacred and profane.

Returning to Tokyo on the last leg of our journey, we meet an old friend of my father’s, an American expat living with his Japanese wife. Over dinner for my wife’s birthday, I ask her to help me understand the tension between Shintoism, Buddhism, and even Christianity among the faithful of her country.

People here don’t really make so much of a big deal about it

The gist of her response gives some creedence to my observations about the people of this country, that it is not so much what one believes as much as the adherence to the fabric of the religious tradition that is stitched into the folkways of Japan. Two weeks as a tourist in a foreign country does not afford me with anything more than a superficial understanding of a religious tradition whose roots could possibly reach into the upper strata of the Stone Age. I realize that I have only scratched the surface of rich and complicated blend of religious thought, although it is clearly very different from the American god who travelled from Eurasia to the New World swallowing pagan deities along the way, ascending to the summit of the world’s religious order. There is something older and perhaps more harmonious at work here.

It’s become fashionable for the wellness gurus and namaste evangelists of the secular west to describe themselves as spiritual, not religious. If pressed, they might offer a nod to Joseph Campbell, something about the inherent truth of each of the world's religious traditions, the primacy of the metaphor over the metaphysical. That the problem with religion lies not in the prayers and yearnings of the faithful but the edifice of social control built up around these belief systems and the utility of enlisting their inherent doctrines in the service of violence and subjugation. Fair enough. But just a few weeks immersed in another system of ritual and thought has affirmed my suspicion that the inversion of the new age mantra could have some merit as well. Shintoism and Buddhism seem to have enemeshed themselves so deeply that they are said to have become folkways as much as religion. I will not go so far as to say that the people of Japan are religious, not spritual, but that their worship is grounded like the mosses and tendrils that cover their shrines, that weave the roots of deep time into practices mystic and mundane. Cohesion. Trees that stand together in the forest are shielded from the wind. They grow tall and straight, their roots moor them firmly to the earth. I envy those trees and their deep roots sometimes. Too often I feel uprooted and planted alone on the shores of distant, windy sea.

I wasn’t raised as a part of any religious tradition. I have only recently become aware of how long I have been searching for one. The religious instinct is so old that it’s very likely hard wired within us. Even with the rise of the secular society we seem incapable of shedding the archetypes associated with the ancient ways that began with cave paintings and bone talismans thousands of years ago. Perhaps religion, be it ancient animism or a well-travelled Near Eastern savior cult, is the best way thus far that humans have truly rooted themselves to the earth, so that they could freely cast their gods into the sky.

But many gods now walk the earth, and no herald of true north among them. Only the sun that rises at the dawn of their creation, and from the east to west it ranges.

A triangle is a bad motherfucker.

That’s a nice lttle bit of carpenter folk wisdom that reflects our longstanding affinity for the almighty shape, so useful as a proof in Euclidean geometry and fundamentally sturdy due to the fact that each of its sides support the other two.  Anyone who has ever built a pair of sawhorses or rigged up a sagging overhang with a sturdy corbel knows this. Pythagoras knew it when he devised his famous theorem, which carpenters still use thousands of years later to square up walls and decks. Buckminster Fuller knew it when he designed his famous geodesic domes by stitching together a series of triangles. And undoubtedly the unknown builders of the pyramids and ziggurats of Mesoamerica, Egypt and Mesopotamia knew it as well. But for some reason the ubiquity of these impressive monuments in equatorial societies throughout prehistory seems to be vexing to an increasing number of armchair archaeologists when based on their obvious utility alone. The presence of these structures in seemingly disparate cultures must imply the existence of a pyramidal priesthood that formed the vanguard of an ancient high civilization, one whose existence were it to be uncovered would upend the entire basis of our current understanding of the arc of human progress. These theories range from outright racist conspiracies to more nuanced and complicated ideas that may merit serious consideration, but they all stem from a controversial idea known as hyperdiffusionism: the idea that similarities between diverse cultures across the globe can be explained by the influence of a single prehistoric civilization or cultural horizon.

Humans are meaning making creatures. We can’t help but look for patterns and connections in virtually everything we see. This type of thinking is probably wrapped up in the mechanisms that enabled us to develop language and build coalitions from disparate groups,1 to create meaningful works of art and design, and is present in the strands of the great tapestry of human religions across the globe. It also lends itself quite easily to paranoia, distrust, and conspiracy theories. We feel powerful when we think of ourselves as part of something larger and more orderly than random scatterings of stardust and debris, and this can be of tremendous psychological benefit to us, but it can also lead us endlessly searching wormholes for connections that aren’t really there. For as critical as it may be for us to build structures of meaning in our lives, it is important to realize that a great many things probably are random, and beyond our ability to control or comprehend.

The idea of cultural diffusion in and of itself is an old one and mostly uncontroversial. The biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term meme to describe the vector for transmitting cultural knowledge that formed the counterpart to the biological vector of the gene. Beginning with the development of language, which likely only happened once and had both a genetic and memetic component,2 we humans began to differentiate ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom by spreading our cultural knowledge as rapidly and prolifically as our DNA. The deeper we look into our past, the more fascinating and complex the picture becomes, and it seems clear that many of our shared memetic practices are the result of both distinct cultural diffusion and random happenstance that is to be expected from a species with the ability to combine intelligence, physiological advantage, and group dynamics to stumble upon root concepts. The invention of the bow and arrow, agriculture, the development of writing and possibly the controlled use of fire were all innovations that developed independently several times, some of which were arguably forgotten and rediscovered at various points in the history of our species. The closer we look to the dawn of written history, the easier it is to find meaningful and verifiable connections in the transmission of language, religion and culture. The disciplines of archaeology and linguistics evolved to their current form largely within the last two centuries, and both have helped to shape the contours of the otherwise amorphous darkness in which most of the human story lies. 

In 1786, a British magistrate working in India noticed a peculiar similarity between the legal documents composed in Sanskrit and several European languages in which he was fluent. In an oft quoted speech, Sir William Jones laid out the beginnings of the theory of a mother tongue for these languages that would eventually be known as Proto Indo European (PIE):

The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident

Although he was not the first to make this argument, his influence brought the field of historical linguistics into the realm of the sciences. PIE is a reconstructed and hypothetical language, there are no written records that could confirm its existence. But so robust is the written record of ancient languages ranging from Vedic Sanskrit to Hittite and ancient Greek that scholars can reverse engineer the progression of the language and combine these methods with archaeological and mythological evidence to hypothesize the existence of a proposed ancient society that broke apart sometime in the late Neolithic and diffused their language, culture, and religion from India to Ireland. We have epics like The Iliad and religious texts like The Rig Veda, both thousands of years old but whose corpus hints at mythological and cultural similarities that reflect a much older shared oral tradition. And in the last decade, ancient DNA has further clarified the genetic relationship between all of these cultures. Though not technically an example of hyperdiffusion, tracing the origin of what is today a worldwide language family and cultural complex to a single hypothetical tribe in Stone Age Eurasia does share some of the mechanics inherent to the theory. There is still considerable debate about the specifics of PIE, most notably the proposed homeland, but there are relatively few scholars today who would deny the validity of the argument altogether the way that the scientific community has come together to combat some of the more outlandish claims made about widespread cultural diffusion deeper into the Stone Age.

These naysayers today will most likely enter the arena to square up against the current heavyweight hyperdiffusion champ, the one and only Graham Hancock. Hancock rose to prominence with 1995’s Fingerprints of the Gods, which elaborated on pseudoscientific claims from the 19th century about the lost civilization of Atlantis whom he posits could have played a role in the dissemination of agriculture and building technology from the Fertile Crescent to the Americas and beyond. While the details of his argument have evolved over time, they are based on a theory that some kind of cataclysm at the end of the last Ice Age was the harbinger for an advanced group of missionaries to spread their knowledge around the world to the hunter gatherers who were present at all of these disparate locations, hence the strange similarities between them. I remember reading it about 20 years ago and being fascinated by his spectacular claims and compelling command of the narrative. It was probably one of the first popular science books I ever read about prehistory and in many ways I owe my love for the deep past to opening its pages many years ago. In the time since, most of what I’ve learned about prehistory has served to disabuse me of the notion of a Pleistocene high civilization, however. And in the past decade, Hancock has taken his theories into mainstream discourse with multiple appearances on the Joe Rogan Experience and his Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse, the second season of which was recently released.

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I won’t go into a full counterargument to this theory here. Many professional scholars and online enthusiasts have already done so (I like this one, by the excellent Youtuber Stefan Milo). But to be brief, in watching both seasons of Ancient Apocalypse and some of his appearances on Rogan, it becomes pretty clear that Hancock has little to no archaeological, linguistic or genetic evidence to back up his claims, and almost all of his argument rests upon a selective reading of diluvian mythology and oral histories. Great cataclysms and world altering floods are well represented in our mythological tapestry, and could be a reflection of ancient disruptions in the Ice Age or more localized floods and disasters. These stories are often fascinating in their similarities-I’m a bit of a Jungian myself, so I’m attracted to the idea that our rich and complex religious traditions could all draw from some ancient wellspring that permeates our dreams and folklore. There are many theories that use mythology to speculate about our ancient interrelatedness, such as the idea that dog domestication in Eurasia led to a founding myth connecting dogs and the afterlife that spread across much of the globe. A sense of wonder and exploration is fundamental to any student of prehistory, and oral histories are an incredibly valuable tool, but without the use of supportive evidence they form an unstable podium from which to lecture the world.

Given Hancock’s remarkable rise to prominence and the adversarial tone he has taken with the scientific community, it’s no surprise that the debate has become contentious, and the accusations of racism and victimhood that define our contemporary political discourse have spilled over into this one quite seamlessly. While I don’t think it’s fair or helpful to call Hancock a racist, there is a strain of Western chauvinism and perhaps even racism associated with the theories that he draws from.3 And there is a way in which the manipulation of oral histories he has used to support his claims can be quite insulting to the legacies of the indigenous cultures he has used as pawns in his argument, intentionally or not. I found this particularly striking in Episode 2 of the most recent season of his Netflix show, in which he visits the remote Pacific island of Rapa Nui. 

Hancock has taken great pains to include the voices of indigenous communities in his documentary, and while I think this is laudable, within the space of a single episode he demonstrates how even with this intention the pressures of confirmation bias can rapidly twist the scope of his claims into a work of great insult to such communities. Marveling at the incredible craftsmanship of the great Moai statues that define the island and its people, Hancock concedes that while the available genetic evidence confirms that the Rapa Nui people are of Polynesian descent and only inhabited the island within the last millennium or so, the existence of some sort of ancient cataclysm in their oral histories is evidence that the statues are much older than that, and conveniently places their construction somewhere around the time of the end of the last Ice Age based purely off of mythological conjecture. He maintains that the horrors of slavery and colonization the Rapa Nui endured could have erased or altered their oral histories, leaving a gap in their knowledge, but he is playing fast and loose with the timeline, throwing in some evidence for the presence of bananas on the island 3,000 years ago that still gets him nowhere near his target dating. The more parsimonious reading of the myth is that the established dating is correct, yet he is willing to accept as gospel an interpretation that pushes the date back by an order of magnitude. The Rapa Nui represent the last wave of the conquest and settlement of the Pacific that their ancestors began sometime in the last 5,000 years at the earliest. If the statues were made when Hancock claims, there would be no reasonable explanation for their oral histories to connect with a period thousands of years before the ethnogenesis of their people. Either he is deliberately interpreting the story in a way that favorably backs up his claim, or he is implying that the Rapa Nui people are not only too primitive to build these monuments but also can’t be trusted to remember their history. It just doesn’t hold up to me, and if we look deeper into his theories they are rife with this type of cherry pickling and confirmation bias.

Hancock has made millions off of his books and his documentaries, so there is obviously a huge audience for his theories. We should always approach the past with a skeptical eye and a spirit of curiosity, and there is a place in our culture for polarizing and charismatic figures to shake up the orthodoxy from time to time. We are living in a time of groundbreaking discoveries about our prehistory and the timeline of our past is in a state of constant flux as more and more data becomes available. And while I think most of the data provided by new technologies like aDNA have done more to buttress the orthodox viewpoint about the development of agriculture and large scale human settlements than to denigrate it, I would not be surprised if future discoveries upend one or more of the theories that Hancock has attempted to dismantle. At this point he has not produced the evidence to support such claims, however, and even seems to backtrack on some of his positions in the face of new research.4 I love a grand paradigm shattering theory as much as the next guy, but the Joe Rogan Experience is not the same thing as a peer review journal.

In his writings on Substack about ancient snake cults and the spread of the bullroarer as an example of diffusion, offers a theory that does not necessarily rely on advanced civilizations as the vector for the spread of ideas and technology but instead posits a much deeper origin, back to the development of language and the dawn of human consciousness. As such he offers what may be a more parsimonious model for monomyth and shared cultural artifacts as well as a valuable insight on the nature of the debate:

Let it be said that diffusion does not presuppose a single invention or racial superiority. All that needs to hold is that it’s easier to share an idea than to invent it, and you get significant diffusion. This could be regional or even worldwide if the data support it.5

If the data support it. Cutler’s theories are intriguing to me and certainly warrant further discussion. But even the ubiquity of bullroarers in cultures seperated by great oceans and several millenia is not enough to quiet the endless debate about diffusion vs independent invention. Modern societies that still use bullroarers in ceremonial contexts often have similar taboos about the involvement of women, as Cutler points out, but this could be a reflection of very ancient gender archetypes and not evidence of diffusion. I personally find Cutler’s argument more compelling than one that suggests independent invention, but it seems to me that even with far more evidence than Graham Hancock is equipped with, it is difficult to prove diffusion. It is a vexing and perilous undertaking, and in the end we are trying to know things that are perhaps unknowable. I think it’s worth the journey, though. What lurks in the hearts of our ancestors who dwell beyond the boundary of historical reckoning is cradled in its own opacity, divorced from us by what Werner Herzog referred to as the abyss of time.6 We won’t ever be able to cross it, but when we shout across the precipice, perhaps it is more than just the echo that returns from the void.

I would not be as passionate about the deep past if I did not truly believe that every culture on earth is a unique facet of the creativity, resilience and innovation that define the human story. There is a sublime mystery at work in our language, our consciousness and our spiritual yearnings that probably does draw from some ancient primordial wellspring, in my opinion. I want to spend the rest of my life learning more about that, and I realize that there are some parts of that story that science will not be able to answer. And I think that is beautiful, because in that search we may continue to create myths and stories that inspire future generations the way the oral histories of Rapa Nui or the Eleusinian Mysteries of the Greeks compel us to go searching for ancient symbols and connections today. Meaning making and pattern recognition is bound up in the very substance of what makes us human, but so too is the creative impulse. And so it is fundamental to upholding our dignity as human beings to give the unknown innovators of ancient cultures their due without invoking the presence of a messianic messenger each time we see breathtaking works from those our priors may have deemed too primitive to create. When we sleep on the ability of those “simple hunter gatherers” to create vibrant and dynamic cultures on their own, we are falling for the bigotry of low expectations. And we shouldn’t do that.

They were some bad motherfuckers too.

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Vectors of Mind

The Bullroarer: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

“No ethnomusicologist, I think, would stand for plurigenesis as regards the bull-roarers, which even in decorative detail are often alike and are used for the same purpose wherever and whenever found.” ~Jaap Kunst, 1960…

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2 years ago · 15 likes · 5 comments · Andrew Cutler

It’s worth reading this whole piece if you’re interested in the diffusion debate, which the author weighs in on several times here.

There’s a woman that I think of from time to time. She is beautiful, despite the trouble in her mind that haunts her features. Her hands are rough and her eyes are wild, her gaze fixed on the horizon. The world around her is changing fast. Each night she lies under the constellations and worries about how she will find enough food for her children when the sun rises again. She lives at the mercy of the elements and her leaders in a place that has been plagued by war for most of human reckoning. It has gone by many names. Canaan's Land. Palestine. Israel. But the woman who walks the wilds of my imagination belongs to a people thousands of years older than any of those whose names come down through history. They are known to us as the Natufians, and they lived at the temporal margin of the Holocene, in the liminal twilight between the time of the forager and the time of the farmer, between the nomadic ways and those of their sedentary descendants who would one day raise the walls of Jericho. 

Her people have lived off of this land for generations, stalking mountain gazelles and harvesting the wild plants of a region that was a thriving woodland in her ancestors' time. Far beyond the borders of her realm, the world-devouring glaciers are on the move again, for the brief interregnum between the Last Glacial Maximum and the Younger Dryas is coming to a close, and though her people know nothing of the encroaching ice the drought that they have wrought is hardship enough. Already the wild rye and lentils are going scarce, the gazelles fewer in number and the nagging hunger in her belly a portent of strife to come. But she is a dreamer, the heir to a lineage of wise women who have watched and listened to the plants as they drop their seeds to the earth.

You see this one? Her grandmother’s voice is clear in her mind as she gathers the dried seeds from the ground.

These are different. They do not shatter as they fall from their mother’s husk. Those are the ones to keep sacred.

No one believes that the spirit of the plant can be tamed by human hands. All the rituals of her people are done to curry favor with the wild, restless spirits of the hunt. It has always been this way. But as she gathers the seeds, carefully choosing the ones that her grandmother showed her, the ones that don’t shatter as they fall from the husk, she is weighing the gamble in her mind. To break with years of tradition is to risk incurring the wrath of the gods and the ire of the tribal elders. To do nothing is to risk starvation. 

She breaks the dry earth with a flint blade, making a valley for the seeds that tumble from her hands. As she tills the rough soil, an earthworm slips through her fingers. She carries a bowl made from the skull of a small child, and within it a small reservoir of water from the creek near her camp. She douses the buried seeds and cuts a gash into her hand, rubbing her life force into the ground as if sealing the tomb of someone she dearly loved, and she pleads with the earth to carry them safely on their journey. The worm turns. She feels the stirrings of the soil, and she smiles. Her gift is well received.

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We could call her Natufian Eve, a nod to those who think the Biblical fall from grace is an allegory for women’s role in the development of agriculture. Our Eve is a symbolic character, an amalgamation of a myriad of actors and a seminal process that can only be partially understood by archaeologists. But if I had to guess, I’m partial to the theory that agriculture may have initially developed out of “a glimmer in some hungry woman’s eye” as the late Barbara Ehrenreich mused in Blood Rites, her study of human warfare. If we operate under the hypothesis that Natufian men did the majority of the big game hunting, women would have likely filled the foraging niche, so it follows that they would have had the knowledge of plants necessary to become the first cultivators. If it is true that a woman was the first to unlock the secret of the grains that would forever shape the course of human history, she would have done so without any idea of the monuments, statecraft and glittering skyscrapers that would follow in the wake of her discovery. Like all true innovators, she had broken with tradition, and was likely met with little more than scorn and superstition for her efforts. To a hunter gatherer accustomed to living day to day from the bounty of the earth based entirely off one’s skill with a spear and knowledge of edible plants, the idea of investing time and labor into a project of delayed gratification may have been a hard sell for our young dissident. And even if the choice was made to sow seeds in the spring and return periodically within the confines of the hunting season, the switch to sedentary agriculture probably took thousands of years before it truly became a viable means of sustenance. She would have died without having any way of knowing where the wheel she had set in motion would wind up, and perhaps for all her efforts the forces of drought and starvation took her life and the lives of her children before she could derive any reward from her labor. The heart may be a lonely hunter, but for the dreamer it reaps a lonely harvest.

The first seeds may as well have been the first bricks in the walls of Jericho, then Çatalhöyük and Uruk, then Babylon and Rome. The entire edifice of civilization, the great Leviathan invoked by Thomas Hobbes, is built on the foundations laid by those nameless and forgotten cultivators. The spread of agriculture enabled numerous migrations and civilizations. From the first farmers to colonize Europe to the Bantu migrations in Africa, the demographic advantage inherent to farming would always prove devastating to the foragers these migrants displaced, often forming an unintended tandem with the pathogens that came with their domesticated animals as well. In the heat of the kilns that fired the pottery required to house the grain surplus of their yields they found the flame to temper blades of copper, bronze and steel. In turn these weapons would be used to fend off the marauders attracted by their grain and livestock. And in a society bound by the harsh calculus of Malthusian economics, the women of these settlements would have been vulnerable targets as well. In this way, the radical innovation of our female protagonist may have led not only to the development of organized warfare but to the perpetual subjugation of her half of the species as well. As the lonely harvest begins to bear fruit, it yields a bounty of regret as well.

Hobbes took his titular metaphor for the apparatus of the state from the Leviathan of the Bible, a great serpent descended from older Semetic and Mesopotamian myths. Perhaps the nascent worm made its first stirrings in the dry soil of the Levant, at the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution. It was a massive epochal shift for our species, but it was not the first, and it would not be the last. In our current era of exponential growth, it’s easy to forget that for hundreds of thousands of years the stone tool industries of our ancestors changed little. Around 50,000 years ago, the Cognitive Revolution arrived on the heels of the development of language and symbolic thought, witnessing the advent of sophisticated cave paintings and the demise of our only remaining hominid rivals, the Neanderthals. After the Last Glacial Maximum, the Agricultural Revolution would soon follow, but the speed of these developments pale in comparison to the onslaught of change that has come in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. In the span of a few centuries, the Leviathan that awakened when the first seeds were planted in the ground would grow to encompass the whole of the world with its tentacles of steel and concrete, filling the seas with its plastic entrails and choking the skies with the plumes of its great volcanic towers. We now live in a world of unmitigated innovation and growth. And as the landscape erupts with strange and novel structures, so too do the hearts and minds of her inhabitants mutate under the strain of these developments. Changes to mores and customs that once took centuries now can occur in a single generation. In this context, it is easy to understand why the charge “you don’t know your history” is so often levied against the young. The vessel of our progress moves at such great speed that the firmament vanishes rapidly beneath us, and as such the forgotten terrain becomes a fertile ground for the reactionary.

Like the conservative Natufian elders, the neo-reactionaries call themselves traditionalists. They occupy a slice of the broader global movement of a right wing ideology that has emerged in the last few decades. Although among them there is something of a heterodoxy of viewpoints the common refrain that emerges from their project is a rejection of modern progressive and woke ideologies and a return to traditional values, although exactly how far back and according to whose tradition is a matter of debate among them. They are an ancient breed. Once, they might say, humans could move no faster than the speed of the swiftest horse. Now we colonize the skies in machines that humble the gods, and so they raise their fists and shout at the clouds. Our pursuit of progress has corrupted us, leaving us blind to the dangers we have conjured into being. And perhaps on that point they are right.

For without tradition, we walk into a future of completely novel challenges and dangers. Much like our brave Natufian, the innovators of our time offer a vision of the future that is radically different from prior contexts of human evolution. Where the Industrial Revolution divorced us from the natural sleep cycles of day and night, the digital age has further married our minds and bodies to the strange dreaming of a hyperconnected global network that erodes our creativity and punctures holes in the social fabric that once was stitched together by the myths and traditions of our ancestors. Where the Agricultural Revolution entrenched the sexual division of labor that metastasized into the shackles of patriarchy, in the span of just a few generations the thousands of years of archetypes surrounding the male and female experience that have guided much of our cultural practices are rapidly dissolving, reflected in our language and our social mores. It is worth noting that there is substantial variation in the way traditional cultures across the world view gender roles, and there are many positive developments associated with shaking off some of the rigid hierarchies of the archetypes we have inherited in the western tradition. But the willingness to abandon the utility of gender entirely or embrace a transhumanist future where humans cede the authorship of their future to machines seems inherently risky, much in the same way that our ancestors could not possibly see how the impacts of their decision to plant a few seeds in the ground would lead to the innumerable catastrophes of the later Holocene. 

And yet the scales of equality do seem to be heavily weighted in favor of change, and moved by the steady drumbeat of progress driven by the creative impulses of those who refuse to be shackled by the constraints of tradition. To abandon this drive entirely would have consigned our ancestors to the relative safety of the trees that graced the African savannah millenia ago. For better or worse, we will always be consumed by the Promethean fire that leads us into the future. And those who would seek to move us backwards often do not seem to spend much time contemplating how such a thing would even be possible. It has been said that the past is a foreign country, so it is perhaps a bit strange that a movement sometimes defined by its inhospitality to outsiders would want to transplant our society to a place where we cannot even speak the language. The desire to return to an idealized mythical past often works in tandem with disastrous forms of social engineering, and if the road to the future is blazed with unknown dangers, the road to the past is clearly marked with pitfalls well defined by the tragedies of the 20th century.

We have wandered far from the path out of the garden, and all roads seem to lead straight into the steel jaws of the Leviathan. The great migrations taken by the countless descendants of the first farmers are no longer available to the children of the earth, and so each generation becomes more closely tethered to the neural networks of the digital otherworld. Perhaps the darkest fear that is evoked by the conquest of the next frontier is that it will require us to relinquish much of what it means to really be human. Regardless of the scale of alarm that one feels is appropriate in the face of an approaching singularity, the erosion of human agency evokes an existential crisis that is hard for us to ignore.

And so it is that the rhetoric of our era draws once again from the well of apocolyptic imagery with which end times evangelists of all stripes shade their rantings. Tear down the walls of Jericho, God told the Israelites. Chant down Babylon, goes the defiant anthem of resistance. The Agricultural Revolution was the greatest mistake in the history of our species, says the famed historian Jared Diamond. From Bible bangers to Rastafarians to stuffy intellectuals, the fruits of the first farmers seem to make a powerful symbolic target for malcontents. In hindsight, creating a world devouring serpent probably was a bad idea. Perhaps progressives and traditionalists can agree on that much at least. We’re all stuck in the belly of the beast, and we don’t know where it’s going. If we were to do the famous time machine thought experiment all over again, maybe we’d agree to go all the way back to Natufian Eve and take her out instead of Hitler.

But I do feel for her. It’s lonely work, being a dreamer.

By hammer and hand do all things stand

-Gustav Stickley

There’s a video that’s been making its way around social media recently. Maybe you’ve seen it- a big burly gentleman in a neon safety vest and a hard hat is seated at a piano in a public library, performing Lou Ni’s arrangement of Bach’s Prelude No.2 in G minor. It’s a moving and impassioned performance, but it’s probably safe to say the viral nature of the clip owes a great deal to the novelty of a construction worker with paint splatters on his work boots intruding upon the hallowed halls of the well heeled.

@mudbug_a.m.r#piano #work #music #beautiful #fyp #fypシ #edmonton #alberta #canada

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What a talented young man, why is he wasting his gifts on a construction site? This was the gist of a handful of the responses when I first saw it on Instagram. And I suppose it’s a fair question, although it clearly speaks to a certain bias that permeates our society. Are we so socially stratified that only the elites can taste the rarified air and appreciate the work of the maestros while the rest of us have to huff paint fumes and listen to Kenny Chesney all day? Or for that matter, would a college professor who enjoys getting out the power tools to work on his deck on the weekends be subject to this kind of logic?

I think it’s pretty clear that these commenters meant well, so I won’t heap too much scorn on them. When I showed the video to my coworkers on the jobsite at lunch and talked about the reaction, most of them just shrugged their shoulders and said he probably makes more money doing this than he ever would playing piano. Which is probably true, given the scarcity of meaningful jobs in the arts. But it’s also true that those of us who work with our hands for a living are a varied lot, and anyone worth their salt in the trades takes tremendous pride in their work, notwithstanding whatever passions we might pursue in our free time. 

Carpenters, masons and laborers are among the longest tenured practitioners of their craft of any profession on earth, and in an era where many people could hardly explain the parameters of their job to someone outside of their field, the simplicity and satisfaction of an honest day’s work in the trades is more than enough to even out the downsides of long, dirty hours under often stressful and dangerous conditions. Perhaps it’s possible that our aforementioned pianist knows this to be true, and pursues his trade with a passion that approaches his love for the works of JS Bach. Or, maybe the money is just better than teaching piano. Either way, I’m grateful to call him one of my own, and I’m happy to see that most of the reactions to his performance praised the dignity of his chosen occupation as much as the command of his instrument. 

I’ve been working construction for around a quarter of a century, a little more than half the time I’ve been on this planet, but I backed into the trades pretty reluctantly at first. I was the type of guy who could barely out wrestle a cordless drill when I first walked onto a jobsite. I also had ambitions to play music for a living, although my guitar playing never got into the same stratosphere as my fellow tradesman in the video. I was sick of toiling away at restaurant jobs and a friend put a paintbrush in my hand and told me if I could stick around long enough I would have a skill to fall back on if the music thing didn’t pan out. Ten years later I had a child on the way and I realized that the thing I had been doing to fill in the gaps between DIY music tours and drinking binges was now my best option towards providing a stable future for my family. In the years that followed, I got sober and also got a lot more serious about devoting myself to my chosen occupation. 

In the days of the guilds of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, aspiring carpenters would apprentice themselves to a master builder in their area to learn the basics of their trade before leaving their home to travel to other regions so as to receive a robust education. It is from this tradition that the terms apprentice and journeyman made their way into the lexicon, and in the world of trade unions, these titles are still commonly used today. But although I am now a member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, I didn’t start my journey there. I “apprenticed” to a drinking buddy who, rest his soul, was far from a master carpenter but was kind enough to take me under his wing when the real estate boom of the early Bush years was in full swing. We had a small operation flipping houses for a local realtor, and the work was pretty menial and pedestrian. I learned the basics from him but picked up some bad work habits that took a while to shake. It was after my daughter was born that my journey began in earnest.  In Chicago I worked for a contractor who was as fastidious with his well honed chisels and planes as he was in his dedication to the upright bass that he played in various jazz ensembles. He taught me a lot about traditional woodworking and turned me on to the writings of the late Larry Haun, who as a framer in post WW2 California was part of the generation that revolutionized the building trades. I read about how he and his brother would frame a house from the foundation in a day with nothing but a Skil saw and their tool bags. When I moved to Portland, I found work with a carpenter who was a descendant of that lineage, and through a decade of work and friendship with him, I finally shed the baggage associated with my unorthodox and ramshackle introduction to my profession, and at the behest of a mutual friend, I joined the carpenter’s union just before the pandemic in 2020.

Growing up, my dad was a socialist who worked in various union jobs from the steel mills of Sparrow’s Point in Baltimore to the Norfolk Southern Railroad where he retired. But even though politically I’ve always been pretty supportive of unions owing to my upbringing, I shared some of the biases that a lot of my more conservative coworkers had towards them. Join a union? Fuck that. Pay all that money in dues and you still gotta ask permission from a shop steward just to move a 6’ ladder? This is a common misconception heard from many who prefer a more cavalier approach to the job. No one wants to be burdened down by bureaucracy and hard hats when you can feel the wind in your hair two stories high on a wall plate raising roof trusses. Unless, of course, you’re like my old friend Lee who lost most of his hand when it got tangled in a crane hook lowering those trusses, or one of the many men I’ve known who have countless broken bones from miraculously surviving tumbles off the side of a roof. 

Construction work is, of course, inherently dangerous. This is just as true today as it was for the unknown craftsmen who raised the great pillars of Stonehenge and the blocks of quarried granite at the pyramids of Giza. The various building trades are heavily represented in the top ten most dangerous job lists that proliferate around the internet today. It is also one of the most exclusively male professions, and perhaps owing to this has one of the highest suicide rates of any occupation (men are up to three times more likely to die by suicide than women). Some may shrug their shoulders at this and say that’s just the way it is. It’s a dirty job but someone’s gotta do it. But part of the reason I joined the union was because if anyone is going to make the profession safer and more welcoming to people from all walks of life, it’s probably gonna be the people who gave us the weekend. The unions that emerged in the wake of the early labor movement have had their problems, to put it mildly. But they still fundamentally represent the interests of the working class to ensure that we are not stripped of the safety and dignity that our profession deserves. And, despite the claims of some conservative commentators that unions are immoral, the collective safety and prosperity of labor can be achieved without sacrificing any of the values and work ethic that make construction what it is. I challenge anyone who thinks unions militate a culture of laziness or entitlement to spend some time on a union construction job in America in 2024. We work in dangerous conditions on a tight schedule, sometimes over 50 hours a week, only stopping for lunch or if we encounter a safety risk to one of our brothers and sisters.

Owing in part to the sustained propaganda campaign against them that has thinned their ranks, unions are trying to attract a more diverse membership to the professions they represent than was the status quo in those industries a few generations ago. The days of the ironworker perched on an I-beam catcalling to women on the street are on the way out, and as the saying goes, this ain’t your grandfather’s jobsite. Women are still pretty sparsely represented on most jobs, but their numbers are growing. One might think that this could lead to a fair amount of reactionary pearl clutching on behalf of men who fear that they are being replaced, but I have not found this to be the case. Pretty much anyone who can deal with the loud, chaotic and boisterous atmosphere of the job site is welcome there. These days, Latina laborers yell down the hall to each other in Spanish, and Ukrainian carpenters hurl insults at their Russian counterparts in both languages over the constant rattle of cutoff wheels screeching through steel studs. It’s a wild and unruly place, but there is a unique harmony to it. I’m not suggesting my industry is some sort of egalitarian paradise, but in a time when people are constantly losing their minds over online echo chambers and microaggressions, I’m grateful to work in a profession where Let’s Go Brandon stickers can coexist with Pride decals on hard hats without too much friction. We are inescapably tribal beings forced into global villages with one another. But when everyone shows up to work in a pretty dangerous place with the same goal to make it back home safely to their families, there is a transcendence of our differences that can feel pretty powerful.

And sometimes, we don't all make it home. Recently, a tragic accident took the life of a sister with the ironworkers local at a high school where I was working. She was a young woman who took tremendous pride in her profession, a vibrant and energetic soul who was well liked by everyone on the jobsite, and most tragically, the mother of a young son. I can’t describe how it felt to walk back into that building after the mandatory shutdown to pick up my tools and get back to work knowing someone had lost their life carrying out the business of their trade just days before. A sadness hung over that place and everyone in it that I won’t soon forget. And no one who worked on that building will ever forget her, even if we only crossed paths briefly in a dusty corridor. 

We’re putting the finishing touches on the high school now, and in a few weeks the first cohort of kids will walk through the doors of a building where hundreds of tradespeople poured countless hours of sweat and labor into the doors and the wiring and the millwork, and one woman sadly lost her life. I don’t know what kind of memorial they have planned for her, but I hope that one day her son can walk the halls of the place that is literally held together by the craftsmanship of his mother, and perhaps take some small comfort in the weight of her achievement.  And I know that her spirit will live on in the legacy of her work, like those of the untold souls down through the ages who lost their lives raising the stones of ancient monuments and the massive concrete dams that hold back the waters of our great rivers. We are part of a lineage of men and women that have served as a pillar of societies the world over since the time of crude stone axes and shelters built from mammoth bones on the frozen tundra. Warriors and poets, athletes and pianists, shit talkers and churchgoers alike.  To place myself firmly in that lineage is what makes it possible for me to get up every morning before the sunrise and go to work again. Nothing can erase the tragedy of losing one of our own, but knowing that we are all part of a multigenerational struggle to build the future means that perhaps her death was not in vain. May it be a future where all things stand on the dignity and complexity of those who helped to raise its walls and columns, and one in which the sacrifices that undergird them are given the honor and respect that they deserve.

I haven’t read Hillbilly Elegy. On a recent trip to the thrift store I almost added it to a haul of cheap paperbacks I had picked out but decided not to at the last minute. Maybe on some level I would have felt slightly embarrassed to look the blue haired ultra-Portland cashier in the eye as I handed over the money. Isn’t he kind of….fash? I like to think I’m above that level of self stigmatization, but it’s 2024, and I live in one of the most liberal enclaves in America.

I would like to read it though. After hearing of Vance’s nomination, I wondered if the book would still be sitting on the shelf, collecting dust, or if it would have been taken out of circulation by some zealous culture warrior, viewing it now more than ever as an actual implement of the poison being secreted by the Christian fascists who want to bring about an Atwood-level dystopia. I remember when it came out a lot of my leftist friends went out of their way to denounce it and point out that people interested in the white working class should really just be reading Marx, or Noel Ignatiev, or at least Barbara Ehrenreich. 

But even though I haven’t read it, and I don’t share the author’s paleoconservative ideology, I’m willing to believe that his concern for the poor white working class of America is genuine. He did come from that world, raised out a broken home by his grandmother, and I have no reason to think that his embrace of Trumpian populism is not a logical extension of that concern, conveniently packaged in a way that also happens to be increasingly palatable to the Ivy League blue bloods that he so loathes but to whom he is most certainly beholden on some level, being a Yale man himself.

Years ago, on tour with my band, we somehow got a gig at the Yale Women’s Center. It was a small and sparsely attended affair in the basement of said institution, there couldn’t have been more than five people there, but since it was funded by Yale we got a $200 guarantee. We ate well that night, living it up on the streets of New Haven where one has to step over the comatose bodies of homeless drunks and addicts in between the many bars and restaurants that cater to the well heeled future leaders of the American empire. This was around 2004, when Bush was president, and I remember a drunken visit to the black doors of the Skull and Bones society, where me and my bandmates took turns showing our backsides to the famed incubator of warmonger presidents, our country then embroiled in the Iraq war, and the Abu Ghraib scandal fresh in the news. Vance wouldn’t have been among the student body at the time, but I wonder what his impression of the opulent decadence of the place would have been, coming from the lineage of Scots-Irish Appalachian folk, those who have had the boot of the business class on their necks since the days of the company store, the brutality of the Pinkertons, and the Battle of Blair Mountain. 

By the time he got to Yale, it was a different America from the one presided over by the aforementioned Skull and Bones protegee. Barack Obama was president, and the wheels of the Tea Party revolt were already in motion. I understand that Vance was making connections as much with lefty intellectuals during this time as he was with the world of the venture capitalist conservatives, but I wonder if he saw the writing on the wall, even then, of the coming of Trumpism and the political realignment that relentlessly undergirds our culture today.

I saw it, but not until the wheels had just about run us over. I bought my first home in 2014 in a rundown stretch of southeast Portland, where the homeless epidemic that has now overwhelmed the city was making its first iterations. A liberal friend from out of town remarked of our new neighborhood that it “looks like Sons of Anarchy down there.” I liked it. I worked construction and I could set up shop out in the backyard and run my Skil saw all night without worrying about offending fancy neighbors. It reminded me a little bit of the working class neighborhood in northeast Baltimore where I grew up. There was a chop shop behind us where guys would fix up old cars and burn trash and tires while they cussed each other out in a vernacular that would horrify most liberals (there was a salt and pepper pair who relentlessly shouted N-bombs at each other, in a way that can sometimes be agreed upon by poor folks of either color but which runs afoul of the current racial zeitgeist). I didn’t mind the brashness or or bravado but I did get into it with them on occasion about the trash fires-our neighbor was an older woman confined to a wheelchair who needed to breath through a tank and I tried to appeal to her health concerns to get them to stop, with mixed results. She was the type of woman whose ancestors might have rubbed shoulders in the coal mines with those of Mr. Vance’s back in the eastern mountains. She was a kind woman who had obviously had a tough road behind her who was living in a dilapidated moldy sponge of a house with her daughter and two granddaughters in the trailer behind it. My daughter was close in age to the girls and when I would walk over to their yard to bring her home for dinner I was always a little shocked by the how raw it was. There was a lot of trash piled up and hordes of flies circled the inside and outside of the house. There were two pit bulls in the yard that seemed chill but could turn on you in a heartbeat. But they were good people. In 2016, she was the first to put up a campaign sign, and she had a Bernie placard in her yard before I had ours up. Our neighbors across the street had a truck with a bunch of Trump stickers, so there were a lot of interesting conversations to be had between all of us. It’s strange to say so now, but in the days before Trump won and the pandemic further polarized the country it seemed like it wasn’t so difficult to have those conversations. Our Trump supporter neighbor conceded that if the Orange One was not in the race, he would probably be supporting Bernie. 

Of course, we all know how it turned out. And because we seem to be stuck in some sort of horrendous time loop hell bent on repeating our arduously fraught computer simulation, we find ourselves headed straight for a repeat of 2016, this time with Mr Hillbilly Elegy himself on the ticket and the Democrats taking another stab at running a female candidate, this time a woman of color, against a man they call the end of democracy, in a battle of identities sure to act either as confirmation of America’s virulent racism and misogyny or the power of the woke Illuminati to rig the election. Either way, it is the working people of America who will continue to suffer, who will continue to be asked to sacrifice blood and treasure to oversea wars, and who will continue to be degraded by racism and classism while being told that their candidate is a champion of said identities based on hollow proxies of identity and showmanship.

If I could break the fourth wall of our juvenile computer simulation and voice my displeasure to our capricious overlords, it would go something like this: We, the majority of Americans of all races who are stuck holding the leavings of the obscenely wealthy techno-feudalists who are ruining our beautiful country and driving wedges between us, deserve better than this. My neighbor, a poor white woman helping to raise her grandchildren in the failing health of her waning years, was probably not so different from the “Mamaw” who JD Vance is so indebted to, but she also is not so different in many ways from the black grandmothers in West Baltimore who are raising generations of children left orphaned by the drug war and the incarceration of black fathers. If women hold up half the sky, it is poor women of all colors who form the base of the triangle, while Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton seize the limelight as they chip away at the glass ceiling.

Donald Trump on some level transcends this kind of elite performance, effectively wielding the illusion of authenticity in service of a dangerous personality cult, a movement that has now ascended to the realm of the mythic after his shockingly cinematic defiance of death in a hail of bullets. A man who survives such an attack in view of millions is someone who will appear to his followers as a warrior, so we could understand his pick of Vance in that moment as a fevered stab of vengeance at the priestly class who he believes work against him and who his followers now call his failed executioners. It’s another chapter in the compelling narrative that Trump has constructed to illustrate his rise to power, so it’s fitting that he chose a writer to help spin the tale of his return to the throne.

Perhaps I will one day read Mr Vance’s memoir. But I hope he does not become vice president in 2025. I don’t hold out a lot of hope that Kamala can outrun the callous careerism of her past and assume the mantle of a true champion of the working class. As Cornel West would say, “We may have been born at night but we weren’t born last night.” West himself would no doubt appreciate the parallels between our current moment and the attempts of his beloved ancient Greeks to hold on to their fragile democratic experiment. Amid the monarchistic yearnings emerging on the right and the stale reupholstering of Obama-era optimism that the Dems continue to adhere to, I am reminded of a quote from the anarchist philosopher Hakim Bey1

In sleep we dream of only two forms of government- anarchy and monarchy. Primordial root consciousness understands no politics and never plays fair. A democratic dream? A socialist dream? Impossible.

Its not hard to imagine that quote being written by the likes of Steve Bannon or Curtis Yarvin, actually. The thinkers and strategists of the right seem to understand better than their counterparts how to translate politics into the language of mythology, even if the substance of their promises are no more tangible than scant remnants of the fables they recreate. The tepid and reluctant embrace by the Democrats of their upstart progressive flank has resulted in some small policy victories for working people, but in an era of fear and uncertainty, pathos often triumphs over logos. And since no reasonable person can imagine an anarchist revolution taking place anytime soon, we are left with the choice of defending the dreamless corpse of the democratic experiment or surrendering to the feverish visions of fascist demagoguery offered by the right. Between the two, I will make no secret of my preference for the status quo at this current juncture, but given the ways that the Democratic Party has conducted its affairs in the last few decades, I would not fault you if you chose a different path.

Just don’t be fooled by the promise of solidarity from these would-be monarchs. For while the drab and bloodless bureaucrats may offer little to lift the spirits of the people as they dole out our meager rations, the benevolence of kings is never more than the stuff of dreams.

Let the stronger man give to the man whose need is greater; let him gaze along the lengthening path. For riches roll like the wheels of a chariot, turning from one to another.

-The Rig Veda, 10.117

Riding all night on a gravel train headed east through the sprawl of Houston and the falling sunlight and the eerie stillness of the shotguns clustered on the edge of the train yard deep in the fifth ward. Stratus and I. With the rising sun we find ourselves abandoned by the engine on a siding by a giant culvert miles from the interstate.

Hitching a ride through the sundown towns in the back of a U-haul driven by three good old boys and in the back no cargo but two shirtless boys laughing as they smack each other to raise the welts on their skin. They ask where we are headed.

We’re going to Mardi Gras.

We’re going to Mardi Gras too. In Galveston.

The truck stops on the side of the interstate and the door of the U-Haul is flung open. Eastbound to Vidor. We stick out our thumbs but no one will stop for us.

A young professional in a nice car. Takes us all the way to New Orleans. A week of drunken madness wearing clothing made from garbage and getting into fistfights with strangers. Accordions and three-card monte, jousting tall bikes and circus punks. Whiskey dreams slowly entombed in amber. You can forget everything here. Walking down Elysian Fields. 

Back to Texas in the back of a pickup truck shivering through delirium tremens. A family of three in the panhandle headed to Texarkana. A strange man in a nice car headed to Little Rock. 

Would you like to stay in my hotel room? I’ll get some beer. 

Just drop us on the riverfront. We can find our friends there.

A kind and gregarious trucker from El Salvador buys us dinner at a Chinese buffet in a strip mall on the way to Memphis. He buys shirts at the mall to send to his sons back home. The great pyramid on the skyline is sinking into the Mississippi, he says.

Sleeping on a stack of plywood in the rough frame of a construction site. Scrambling into the darkness as the lights of a pickup illuminate our bedrolls. 

It's better if we split up. Two guys in the Deep South aren’t getting picked up. I’ll see you in Winston.

A heavyset trucker stops for me. Headed to Spartanburg where he offers to pay me $50 to help unload the freight. We share the narrow bed of the cab after the job is done and he snores through the night.

Caught in a deluge outside of Winston-Salem. Waiting out the rain soaked to my skin under an overpass. A county work truck packed with a road crew of older black men. 

We saw you standing there and doubled back. It’s nasty out.

They are drinking tall boys and crack one and hand it to me.

Want to come party with us later?

Thanks, I’m good. You can let me out downtown by the jail.

We make friends with a woman in Philly who offers a ride to Detroit. Cirrus and I explore the caverns of an abandoned train station. The ghosts of high society still haunt the ruins of the terminal stripped bare to the spartan graffiti and crumbling plaster. The women in their finery and the men hauling leather suitcases. Lurking in the detritus of America at the turn of the millennium.

A lesbian couple on the way to a methadone clinic in Lexington lets us ride in the back of their pickup. Later that night we see them in a grocery store as we’re buying beer and wave as we both depart to altered states.

A trucker from the Caucasus Mountains drives us through the Midwest. His English is poor but he likes to pick up hitchhikers to keep him company.

In my country we find a cold stream and put a table in the water and we sit with our bare feet in the current and drink Vodka. It’s very nice, you can drink all night like this.

We meet up with some travelers in Lawrence and sleep by the Kansas River sweltering and killing mosquitoes. We load into the van with all of our gear and our dogs and make for the cornfields of Iowa like a band of Neolithic migrants.

A month camped in the soybeans by Noble Lake. Work is from sunrise to near dusk and we bath in the warm silky water of the Missouri River in the fading sunlight. When we break camp we head for the mountain states. 

A woman in a moving truck with a cooler full of Budweiser in the cab going all the way across Nebraska. A confederation of crusty travelers spots us outside of Denver and offers a ride all the way to Portland. Waking on the floor of a strange house.

We make for the South Portland trainyard and catch out on a grainer just south of the yard by the golf course where we board the train just as the sprinkler comes on and the rail cop arrives.

Riding the rails through the Cascade Mountains and the hidden clearcuts that lash the ancient forests. Thundering past waterfalls and mountain lakes and sacred landscapes of the Klamath tribes whose legends speak of the eruption of Mt. Mazama thousands of years ago. We are all itinerant wanderers on the earth bound by the whims of our great host. America is only her most recent visitor.

Busted in the yard getting off the train in Klamath Falls. I show the bull my Kodak camera and tell them I’m just a harmless rail enthusiast.

A lumber truck winds through the gauntlet of ancient redwoods notched into their trunks for the passage of the machines hauling off their kindred. Crossing into California, the driver tells us how many revelers wander into the headlights of his truck on summer evenings high as kites spilling out of their woodland raves like so many lost children. 

Wandering high as a kite through the Avenue of the Giants. Among the trees that have witnessed the rise and fall of the Pleistocene migrants who first walked these lands only to be beaten down by scions of an ancient ancestor who crossed the whole of the world to conquer them. 

A man approaches us in a gas station outside of Ukiah. If we have money for gas we can ride with him to Petaluma. We offer up what little change we have and hop into the van. 

He cranks the radio each time he speaks as if to deliberately obfuscate his words.

We should carve out the hills and put the face of Jesus up there.

Radio silence. He makes a sharp turn up a gravel road and I reach for my knife, ready for it.

I’m just trying to walk on God’s grass.

He rolls a joint in the driver’s seat and offers it to me. I can’t refuse.

People been known to put stuff in their weed around here, you should be careful.

Just take us back to the 101, man. We don’t want any trouble.

No trouble. You think I’m poor? It’s not all poor around here. Your dog is a filthy animal.

A sigh of relief when the door slams and we’re back on the road. The feeling of being trapped is hard to shake. We stick out our thumbs. If there is somewhere a god who looks after travelers we have surely run afoul of him.

A tall and imposing white trucker with black beard like a Bronze Age chieftain. Bearing down on the Arizona desert with the full weight of an ancient pedigree of road warriors from Yamnaya steppe herders to the scalp hunters of the Glanton Gang. The lineage that shaped the Western world. There are no more endless pastures or buffalo to slaughter and in America today those ancestral yearnings give way to dashboard crank and Nazareth on the tape deck and the AC at full blast.

In the words of Gary Snyder, there is no other life.

Too stir crazy to sit still in Austin, we leave for Halloween in New Orleans. Hastily packed wigs and sequins in an army rucksack. Sleeping under the stars outside of a truck stop with the light of the moon casting a pale filigree over my dark companions. Across the great expanse of the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway sharing secrets in the back of an Econoline driven by a silent family. 

A young couple in a nice car scoops us on the other side of the bridge and takes us all the way to New Orleans, even though it’s not on their way. They have just seen a movie called Pay it Forward and they’re eager to practice the philosophy of reciprocity.

Darkness on Decatur Street. Blind drunk in a bar I raise a flask to my lips in front of the bartender who scowls as she tells me It’s not so much what you’re doing but where you’re doing it. The Big Easy is a lawless place where the cops who don’t like the look of a kid can lock him up and charge him with “leaning with intent to fall.” The land that care forgot.

Picked up outside of New Orleans by a pair of old men driving an off duty cab. Their Cajun patois is so thick we can’t make out much of what they are saying. They tell us they just robbed a bank. We laugh it off, pretty sure they are fucking with us. By the time the sun has set we are stranded in the swamps outside of Baton Rouge. Imagine trying to sleep here. Step off the road to piss and your foot is in gator infested waters. In an act of desperation we try to hitch in the darkness and get picked up by a trucker carrying a mechanical pallet in a work van. He’s already aggressive by the time we hit the border challenging other truckers in big rigs on the cb. Napoleon complex. We stop several times in several truck stops to fight phantom truckers that never appear. I’m in the front seat trying to keep him awake and sane. He keeps dropping hints that he would be open to uppers if I had any. The election is in two days and I ask him who he’s voting for. 

Well, you gotta go with Bush. Whole country’s going to hell right now.

The first year of the new millennium passes. Leaving Texas again, this time for good. Somewhere in the Deep South I am standing on the roadside and a woman throws an envelope from the window of a minivan. Scrambling to fetch it, thinking it is probably money or Christian literature. Inside is a ten dollar bill and a pamphlet concerning the impending judgment of God upon the idolatry that has gripped America. 

In an anarchist enclave just outside of Asheville. We spend the night drinking with old friends and wondering when the cancer of capitalism will devour the world. In the morning a stranger shakes us awake from our bedrolls.

The World Trade Towers are gone and a plane just hit the Pentagon.

Perhaps America has overstayed her welcome.

*

Ghosti. An ancient proto-word with roots reaching back to the Eurasian steppe whose corpus contains the seeds of the English guest and host. A primordial reciprocity, inherent in our language if not our customs. The tradition of welcoming the stranger and breaking bread with him in the hope he may one day do the same is an old one that stretches back through time and across many cultures. The Greeks of The Iliad went to war with Troy not so much for Helen’s beauty as for the violation of the guest rite undertaken by Paris’s betrayal of the custom. Such an insult cannot stand. 

I am grateful to each and every human who has sheltered me and shared the hospitality of their vehicle on the great highways of the American countryside, even the crazy ones. If I could ever repay their generosity, I surely would. A world where the stranger is welcomed without reservation or precondition would probably be a better one. If we were all better angels, perhaps. For hospitality carries with it some degree of danger. I am reminded of a story from the road of a woman who picked up a hitchhiker without reservation since her son also traveled in this way. The man murdered her and dumped her body in a ditch. 

Perhaps the ancient world was not burdened with the specter of the anonymous psychopath, back when it was small enough that one’s word was sufficient to ensure that reciprocity would be upheld. Today the borders of America teem with migrants from the global south, and politicians and pundits rail against the dangers posed by the unimpeded approach of the stranger. Families fleeing the disasters of the post-imperial world and taking their chances on the rails of La Bestia and entrusting their children to dangerous coyotes, all for the hope of a better life. Are we so sure that it is only right to close our lands to these immigrants? Would the benefit of incorporating those who would go to such lengths to protect their families not supersede the desire to preserve whatever vestige of an American “identity” still persists in the 21st century? It is not an easy question, for borders are an ancient human tradition as well, but perhaps it could be framed in a way that did not manifest such hostility towards the stranger. 

I was lucky to travel what remained of the wilds of my country in the days before 9/11 reshaped the political landscape and the ubiquity of the internet rewired the contents of our minds. I walked those highways without so much as a cell phone. I was young and reckless in those days but I feel that I have been shaped in no small part by hitching my wagon to the whims of the fates and trusting the kindness of strangers. The people who stopped for me on the road represent our better angels, be they immigrant truckers who spoke little English or conservative Christians who would not spare a single word in the pursuit of a soul they deemed worthy of salvation. Perhaps today an act of kindness is worth more than it was in the ancient world, for it is bestowed upon someone with whom you will likely never cross paths again. 

I am now and have always been a fierce critic of the greed and violence that have haunted America from the very beginning. But I love my country. Its soil is stained with the blood of conquest and it is largely inhabited by the mean and ungrateful who would sooner kill the stranger than help him out of the wilderness. Yet angels walk among us whose souls rival the beauty of the land. Stick your thumb out on the highway and you might find them.

They came from the mainland, crossing the treacherous waters of the channel in reed boats, carefully laden with their wares and livestock, the likes of which were wholly alien to the shores of the great island that lay before them. The narrow crossing was the penultimate stage in a journey that had taken countless generations and thousands of miles, from the Anatolian highlands at the fringes of the Near East all the way to the western edge of the continent in Ireland. By the time they had reached the shores of Brittany, they had become a seaworthy people, their route into Europe tracing the coast of the Mediterranean for millenia, slowly sowing the seeds of the continent with their new gods and language among the indigenous hunter gatherers, until finally meeting with another branch of Anatolian migrants who had made their passage up the Danube River. Here, facing the white cliffs of Dover, these two streams of travelers would combine their traditions with those of the nomadic hunters who had made the region their home since the end of the Ice Age. Here, the long vanished gods of a long vanquished people would be given offerings on the shores of the Atlantic, ancestors would be buried under great stone dolmens in a syncretism of the indigenous burial traditions of the hunters and new ways of the strangers from the east. And here, amassing like clusters of neurons against the synaptic barrier before bursting through the gap, these people would ford the crossing and forge the culture that would bring a new way of life to the British isles, a way of life immortalized in the greatest relics that today form their legacy, the iconic megaliths of Stonehenge, Avebury and countless others.

It could have happened this way. Or, perhaps not. The greatest advances of archeology, genetics, and linguistics can only peer so far into the abyss of time, and though we have learned much more about them in recent years, we fall prey to speculation and projection when we attempt to hone in on the lives of ancient peoples. Boats rot at the bottom of the sea, and languages and gods of people that left no written records can only be glimpsed in the fragments of their legacy that may have survived their conquest and woven themselves into the tongues and cultures that survive into the historical era. But if our curiosity is what compelled us to seek out distant seas and diverse landscapes, it is that which also compels us to understand our history, and the scientific method is only the most recent tool that we have in service of this pursuit.

Lebor Gabála Érenn, or the Book of Invasions, is a Medieval Irish text that details the settlement of the island in prehistory. It tells of six distinct waves of migration that shaped the Irish people, beginning in 700 BCE. Among them were the Tuatha Dé Danann and the Milesians, the latter deposing the former when a powerful druid named Amergin summoned a great wave to ferry his people to shore despite a supernatural storm dispatched by the island’s inhabitants. The Tuatha Dé Danann surrendered to Amergin and his people, just as their predescessors the Fir Bolg had surrendered to them. As part of a bargain with the Milesians, they were banished to the Otherworld, the realm of faeries and gods in pagan Ireland, a place said to be reached by the numerous passage tombs and dolmens that rise from the land. The Milesians, who many believe represent the Gaelic people, were the last wave of settlers written of in the book. It is likely they who brought the Irish language to the island and it was their descendents who made the Tuatha Dé Danann their gods and kept the founding myth alive for many generations until it was cemented in writing. While most historians regard the text as apocryphal, it remains possible that it reflects a long standing oral tradition handed down for centuries, the details and chronology of which were tailored to fit into the Biblical view of the world proscribed by those who set these legends to paper. Just as Homer’s claims of the mythical city of Troy in the Iliad were only validated by modern archaeology, it is the bones of ancestral Europeans today that have reopened the debate about the veracity of legendary claims of ancient migrations. The last decade has brought about stunning advances in the field of ancient DNA research, and in 2014, a groundbreaking study1 proved that the ethnogenesis of modern Europeans resulted from three prehistoric waves of migration by Mesolithic(12,000-6,000 BCE) foragers, Neolithic (6,000-2,000 BCE) farmers, and Bronze Age(3,000-1,000 BCE) pastoralists. It would seem that the Irish bards were in the ballpark on the number of migrations, and just about right on the time frame, give or take 10,000 years.

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The journey of our ancestors from their primordial homeland in Africa to their eventual dispersal to the farthest reaches of the world is nothing short of astonishing, a story so unbelievable that it is not just from adherence to dogma that many religious faiths find it difficult to swallow. But for those who endeavor to understand the mysteries that centuries of scientific research have uncovered, it is a tale every bit as miraculous and spellbinding as the origin stories of the Ojibwe, the Saami or the Irish.

From the Straights of Gibraltar2 that bridge the gap between Europe and Africa to the vast Siberian tundra that carried the first people towards the Beringian land bridge, the contemplation of the grandeur that awaited these pilgrims stokes the imagination and occupies a special place in our collective psyche. The religious scholar Mircae Eliade3 has suggested that ancient peoples likely viewed all of their activities as manifestations of the sacred act of the creation of the world, and this may have been true for the countless generations of hominins who ventured forth into the new continent, but it is important to remember that these same people had spent thousands of years honing their crafts and diversifying their languages in the equally primal and no less spectacular environs of Africa. We will never know what caused these migrants to cross the waters into a new land, but for all we know it may not have occurred to them that a threshold of any great consequence had been crossed at all. Perhaps a tribe of people felt the spark of divine providence and followed a charismatic leader across the waters with the promise that they too would be as gods in this new land. Or perhaps they were doing what their ancestors before them and countless descendants later are still doing- fleeing drought, famine or persecution in the faint hope that the untrodden grass before them would cover their tracks and lead them to better fortunes.

Europe has been home to hominins going as far back as Homo Erectus, and there is evidence of Neanderthal occupation of  Britain going at least as far back as the Emian Interstadial Period4 that preceded the last Ice Age, when the north was warm enough that hippos swam in the waters of the Thames. But by the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, with most of the British Isles still locked in glaciers a mile thick and the subalpine regions of France and Spain providing a refugia from the cold conditions, Europe was still a sparsely populated wilderness. The Neanderthals were long gone, and soon the changing climate and melting glaciers would mark the end of the mammoth hunting tribes that had persisted there for millenia. The Aurignacian and Magdelanian cultures who hunted big game would be remembered for their incredible cave art on the walls of Chauvet and Lascaux, respectively, but they would leave little trace of their bloodlines in the DNA of modern Europeans. The people who would replace them likely migrated from the southeast, and practiced a way of life predicated on fishing, foraging and small game hunting, a Mesolithic economy reflected in the design of their microlithic spear and arrow points, a departure from the larger blades of their predecessors. These people, known to archeologists as Western Hunter Gatherers (WHG), ranged from the Balkans to the British Isles, which were at this time still connected to the mainland by a land bridge known as Doggerland that now lies submerged beneath the waves of the North Sea. During this time the Thames and the Rhine both shared the same watershed, the rivers and coasts teamed with Atlantic salmon and waterfowl, and the forests and grasslands were thick with red deer and aurochs. The cultivation and production of hazelnuts was a vital part of their economy, the harvesting and processing of which could have also functioned as a gathering point for disparate tribes to trade goods and arrange marriages. Strange headdresses made from deer antlers provide evidence of a shamanic religion, and large deposits of shell middens on the coast were covered with great slabs of stone under which bodies were covered with ochre and interred. The genetic evidence would suggest that these people likely had much darker skin than contemporary Europeans, and that they were mostly blue eyed, a controversial finding that shocked many laypeople. So rare is this phenotype today, and so radically different was the economy and ecology of that distant world, that it paints a vivid picture of what geneticist David Reich refers to as “the lost landscape of human variation.”

But the world was changing rapidly as it slowly emerged from the ice, and the land would undergo a change no less radical than that of her people before it would take the form that we know today. Sometime around 8,000 years ago, a massive glacial fissure off the coast of Norway unleashed a tsunami that would bury what little landmass of Doggerland had not already been consumed by the rising tides of the North Sea. This dramatic restructuring of the landscape would be a harbinger of another massive upheaval that was already making waves in the Mediterranean and making its way up the Danube corridor: the arrival of a strange new people and a way of life that would change the face of Europe.

The transition from foraging to farming among human societies is undoubtedly one of the most pivotal developments in the history of our species, and it is clear that this innovation evolved independently in several locations, disparate from one another by thousands of miles and in some cases thousands of years. But it is generally accepted that it happened first on the plains of the Levant, by a people known to us as the Natufian culture, over a few millenia following the period of rising temperatures and increased rainfall after the last Ice Age. This development has often been characterized as a Faustian bargain, one that allowed for a substantial increase in human population but which exacted a punishing toll in the form of grueling labor and an increase in malnutrition and disease. As settlements grew in size, the competition for arable land increased with it, and soon the nascent revolution would radiate from its source in every direction. By the time the farmers had reached the Anatolian highlands, they were building towns that were starting to look strangely like proto-cities. The ruins of Çatalhöyük on the Konya plain of modern day Türkiye, uncovered in 1958, seem almost dreamlike in their archaic structure. There does not appear to be any type of public architecture, only an Escher-like maze of honeycombed mudbrick houses, with the tops of the buildings serving as a public thoroughfare and most of the homes accessed from ladders on the rooftops. Inside, the walls were plastered and painted with murals of hunting scenes, ominous vultures, and what some have speculated may be the first map and the first landscape painting. The role of the ubiquitous “Goddess Figurines” found in many of the dwellings has been hotly debated, their purpose has been cited as evidence of a matriarchal society or simply dismissed as a form of ancient pornography. They buried their dead under the floors of their homes, and often kept the skulls of their ancestors on display, plastered over and eerily decorated with human features outlined in ochre.

The Mesolithic foragers of the Danube region in what is now Serbia were probably among the first to encounter these immigrants who began their journey across the Bosphorus, slowly colonizing the Aegean with their strange customs and domesticated sheep, cattle and pigs. The Iron Gates region of the Danube provided a rich and stable fishing economy for the foragers, who were wealthy enough to put down roots at a place called Lepenski Vir, where stone idols of bizarre fish gods decorated homes built in a trapezoidal shape to mimic a sacred mountain on the north bank of the river. Sometime around the mid 6th millennium BCE, the skeletons of the locals begin to show genetic evidence of admixture from a distinct new population, with a recent origin in Anatolia. This gene flow apparently went in both directions, as settlements also appeared in the archaeological record that were materially linked to a novel farming economy that also showed admixture from WHG populations. The newcomers were likely fairer skinned, with dark hair and brown eyes, and since they brought domesticated animals with them they may have also brought pathogens to which the indigenous foragers had no immunity. Could this exchange have played out in a similar fashion to the tragic destruction Cortez brought to the indigenous kingdoms of Mesoamerica? At this early stage, there is not much evidence of mass violence between the two groups, but it is clear that the continued progress of the farmers exerted pressure on the foragers, forcing them towards the coast and areas that were not suited to farming.

While one group of farmers made their way into central Europe, navigating the inland waterways, another group with whom they shared Anatolian ancestry took the coastal route along the Mediterranean, until both groups eventually converged around the Paris Basin in the 5th millennium.  Both groups are known by their distinct pottery styles, the former as the Linear Band Ceramic (LBK) and the latter as the Cardial Ware culture. The LBK settlements brought with them a type of longhouse construction, incorporating burials under the floor of the house in a custom that probably originated in the Near East. On the other side of the continent, the Caridal Ware culture practiced similar traditions but seemed to be slowly incorporating more of the burial traditions of the Mesolithic foragers into their culture, who buried their dead under great slabs of stone and mounds of shells on the shores of the Atlantic. 

Beginning on the shores of Brittany, monumental burial mounds and stone menhirs began to appear. This novel form of architecture was accompanied by an increase in grave goods, often in the form of jade axes imported from the Alps, suggesting extensive trade networks, social mobilization and the emergence of new forms of heirarchy.5 Genetic studies from the Paris Basin shortly before the emergence of the monuments does indicate admixture between the two streams of farmers, and to a lesser extent the Mesolithic foragers. The archaeologist Barry Cunliffe has proposed6 that this new burial tradition could be a reflection of a synthesis of the traditions of the farmers and the foragers, perhaps a harbinger of a new religion. And as their numbers began to swell, the lure of the distant island, sometimes visible through the mists of the channel, must have begun to pull their intrepid leaders under its sway.

This nameless and forgotten realm would soon encompass all of the British Isles. From Brittany to Normandy, ships were launched towards the last frontier of the Anatolian farmers, and from Wales to Ireland to the Orkney Archipelago the migrants sowed seeds of Emmer wheat and barley, their jade axes ringing out in the forests where the hunters had reigned since the retreat of the glaciers. By the middle of the 3rd millennium BCE, stone and timber circles and henges had replaced the causewayed enclosures and passage tombs of their forefathers, sometimes sprouting from the earth in the same places that had been sacred to the Mesolithic foragers whom they replaced. It was at this time that the main phase of Stonehenge was constructed. Over the course of the 3rd millenium, the builders of the world’s most famous megalithic circle moved immense boulders from as far away as Wales to be joined with locally quarried Sarsen stones, aligning the stones with the solstice and aligning the joints of the pillars with horizontal capstones in a way that has no parallel in the work of their contemporaries. But this shift in architecture may too have heralded a new religious awakening, perhaps rooted in a sense of desperation, like the Ghost Dance of the Plains Indians in America thousands of years later. The climate grew colder, the poplultion dwindled as the old farming systems were largely replaced by pastoralism, and a new wave was rising on the English Channel, this time in the form of riders from the Eurasion steppe.

The nomadic pastoralists who rode in from the endless grasslands of what is now Ukraine and Russia gained momentum as they swept across the Pannonian plain, taking brides among the farmers there but eliminating almost all of the male lineages from the genetic record. This hybrid group is known to archeologists as the Corded Ware culture, from the woven impressions on their pots, but thanks to recent genetic evidence, they are now known to be an offshoot of the Yamnaya culture of the Eurasion steppe who almost certainly brought the Indo-European languages to the continent,7 and who were probably among the first people to domesticate the horse. By the time they reached the British Isles, they had already absorbed or eliminated much of what remained of the Anatolian farmers, creating another hybrid culture known as the Bell Beakers, for their cermemonial drinking cups. By the end of the 3rd millenium BCE, the graves around Stonehenge begin to show evidence of novel burial rites and of great cheiftans interred with stone wristguards and bronze daggers and jewelry. And whether by disease, warfare or marginalization, the available genetic evidence from the period shows an almost total replacement of the farming lineages8 that had persisted in Britain since their arrival a thousand years before.

It is not known what language the Anatolian farmers spoke. Given their ultimate origin in the Near East, and the possibility of a scattering of ancient loanwords in Celtic and other Indo-European tongues, it has been speculated that they may have spoken a language distantly related to the Semitic family. Today, the only language in Europe9that may predate the steppe migrations is that of the Basque people in Spain and southern France, who speak a language of unknown pedigree and antiquity. Could the Basque tongue be a living relic of that ancient time whose only earthly witness is the massive stones interred in the soil over the brief period of their reign? The lineage of the Indo-Europeans persisted through the Bronze Age and into the historic era, so it is their gods and languages who remained for the first Greek and Roman historians to write about. But like the Tuatha Dé Danann, the forgotten farmers and the foragers who came before them linger at the edge of our consciousness like glimpses of a half remembered dream. They live on in our myths, in the margins of our languages and our genes, and in the sacred monuments that still serve as gateways to the distant past, the Otherworld of forgotten gods.

On a recent trip to the UK, I had the chance to visit Avebury, a remarkable megalithic site on the chalk downs just up the road from Stonehenge. Avebury is roughly contemporary with its more famous neighbor, built over a few centuries in the mid 3rd millennium BCE. It forms a sprawling complex of ancient long barrows, causewayed enclosures and great avenues, and what remains of the largest megalithic stone circle in the world. Today, many of the stones are gone, and the circle itself is interrupted by a quaint Medieval village that was plopped down in the middle of it in the Early Modern Period. There are gift shops, museums and throngs of visitors from all over the world, some dressed as fairies and sorcerers cosplaying amongst the stones as neopagan revelers dance and drum. As I wandered among the stones that had stood for 5,000 years and marveled at the construction of the enormous ditch that rings the circle, I found this intrusion of modernism and manufactured nostalgia to be slightly irritating. I kept trying to find opportunities to get a picture of the stones that would evoke their timeless power, and no sooner had I accomplished this than a woman in fairy wings or a family or five would stroll right into the shot, ruining the effect and increasing my annoyance. Within a few minutes of careful strategic brooding, I realized how ridiculous my irritation was. These monuments were meant to be experienced collectively. We will never know what motivated the Neolithic builders of Avebury to move thousands of tons of earth, with nothing more than antler picks and ox shoulder shovels, and to move the great pillars of Sarsen from their quarries to where they have stood now for millennia. We may never know for sure if this was some great communal feat of civic engineering and social cohesion or the frenzied labor of slaves coerced by some deranged warlord under pain of death. But when we look at the remarkable continuity of design and purpose of these monuments, from their nascent beginnings on the shores of Brittany to the tip of Scotland, it is clear they represent something of incredible collective significance. For a people who journeyed thousands of miles across a strange and forbidding wilderness, in a time when the tribe was one’s only bulwark against the forces of starvation and strife, joining these stones to the earth was a signpost, a powerful expression of tribal and religious identity. We stand now thousands of years from where they stood in time and light years removed culturally from the mores and values that shaped those voyagers and in turn shaped the land they colonized. And yet, their work remains, and standing in the ring of stones, with people of all walks of life from all corners of the globe, the faint echo of their voices can be heard, calling over time to us, perhaps asking us what we are building that will last another 5,000 years.

Identity is a powerful concept. History is rife with tyrants and conquerors using the forgotten “us” of the deep past to mobilize their people against a demonized “them” in the present. No one who pays any attention to the headlines needs to be reminded of how easily this type of thinking lends itself to atrocity. Who knows how far back we would need to travel to find a time when such tragedies did not persist among our species in some form? Such a time and place there likely never was. But that does not mean we should turn our backs on our history, and deny ourselves the wisdom of its traditions. Just like the first farmers in the Levant thousands of years ago, we have crossed a Rubicon where we may be potentially outflanked by the fruits of our experiements. The planet is warming again, the sea closing in much like it did for the ancient hunters of Doggerland. The world is changing all around us. If the future seems uncertain, the study of our history at least affords us with a periscope to peer through the murky waters of the past, where we can take some comfort in the hazy picture of our ancestors, gazing up at the same distant stars as us, struggling to navigate the rising tides and wondering what will become of their legacy.

To tell their story, shrouded though it may be in myth and projection, is to honor that legacy. To trace their footsteps is to walk in the dreamtime of the ancient world and to find our shared identity in the well of memory. And in the struggles and triumphs of their time, we may find some kinship with those of our own.

There’s a place in the Olympic National Forest where the trees seem to grow out of thin air. Sitka spruce, Douglas fir, and Western redcedar. They are legion in the Pacific Northwest, and here in this protected sanctuary, a grove of them stands together, a druid circle of gnarled roots that would seem to be waiting for Tom Bombadil to come and address them in one of Tolkien’s famous soliloquies. If you were to stand on your head, you could fix your gaze upon the inverted crown of tendrils and imagine the mythical Ashvattha, the sacred world tree of Hindu cosmology, whose roots are in the heavens and whose branches descend to earth, but whose form knows no beginning or end. 

It is a magical, transcendent place. When my daughter was very young I took her to see them and she nestled herself within the cave of roots, safe and secure beneath the towering spruce that stands, somewhat incomprehensibly, atop a void that was once filled by another of their kind but whose remains have long since been devoured by the forces of time. A nurse log, so named for the maternal gift surrendered by her massive trunk, which in death gives rise to a host of mosses, flora, and fungi, trapping the high annual rainfall and creating a nutrient rich seedbed. Here, tiny communities thrive and flourish, squirrels forage and scatter seeds, and eventually one or more seedlings puts down roots into the corpus of decay to begin their ascent to the crown of the canopy, firmly moored to the ephemeral ecosystem below. As with all things that are alive, the years become decades, the decades become centuries, until finally the work of time and rot is done, and nothing remains but an empty space where the one who raised the tree once laid in repose.

Perhaps you can see where I’m going with all of this. The young seedling will rise among the canopy until the time comes to take its rightful place on the forest floor, and begin the cycle anew. We humans share around 50% of our DNA with trees, and perhaps early on we took after our distant relatives in our funerary traditions as well. The rite of excarnation, or sky burial, is an ancient custom practiced all over the world throughout our history that still survives today in some places. The act of leaving the corpse of the deceased to the elements, as an offering to the birds and the beasts, is not unlike the gracious sacrifice of the trees. In Tibet, where it is still practiced today, the sky burial is viewed as the last gift of the departed to the physical world that so nourished them in life. Aside from the sanitation issues that would obviously preclude the widespread adoption of such a practice in the United States, this seems like a fairly reasonable bargain to me.

I first moved to the Pacific Northwest about a decade ago. My mom had just died, and I was newly sober and trying to find my footing in a new place. I brought a meager collection of tools and mediocre carpentry skills from the east and sought work in the trades. Those same trees that thrived for millennia in a cycle of decay and abundance produced some of the best building timber in the world, fueling the great postwar housing boom that cleared much of the ancient forests and revolutionized the building trades. Many of the second and third generations of those builders were still framing houses in Portland when I showed up. I got on with a small crew doing historic preservation work, and quickly struck up a friendship with one of the guys. He was about my age but he’d been swinging a hammer since he could walk. Growing up on his dad’s framing crew they learned to drive 16 penny nails with two strokes of the hammer. One to set the nail, and one to send it. This got the better of him on one occasion when a nail caught him in the eye, leaving one blue orb glassy and bereft of a pupil. This deformity gave him an ominous presence, like some wild Odinic berserker. He’d done six years in prison, and he could intimidate just about anyone if he felt he needed to.

I liked him instantly. I’d been in the trades long enough to have crossed paths with a lot of ex-cons, but he didn’t really fit the stereotype. Over the better part of the decade we spent working together, I got to know him as an extremely intelligent, kind and creative person who often seemed troubled by the image many people had of him. We were from different backgrounds. He was from a big, fairly conservative and deeply religious family. I was an East Coaster from a small family of “godless communists,” one of his sarcastic epithets for me when I did anything that he didn’t like. He was a big time trash talker, a guy who liked to use words like scumbag and asshole as if they were verbs.  We shared an irreverent sense of humor, and for the most part, we worked well together.  

After a few years of working on the same crew, he started his own business, and I jumped ship to work for him.  We remodeled houses and built custom furniture in his parent’s garage. Over coffee sitting shotgun in his van I was privy to some great conversations. We talked about the usual stuff- our families, work, and football. He also told me a lot about his past and his time in prison. It was clear that he’d earned his scars from a lifetime of fighting demons both literal and figurative. We bonded over our shared commitment to sobriety, about how people can change for the better, and how having children often incubates that change. Because I had so much respect for him, I gave a fair hearing to some of his thoughts on politics and philosophy, which were a bit more conservative than mine. I found him to be a deep thinker and a voracious reader and learner, and our conversations often seemed like Socratic dialogues fed through the life experiences of a couple of dirtbag carpenters. I learned a lot from him, not just in the art of efficient workmanship but how to constantly question one’s valences and assumptions as midlife encroaches. He helped me navigate some pretty dark periods of my life. For the better part of a decade, he was my boss, but in many ways my closest friend as well.

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That kind of arrangement can be difficult, however. The stress and frustrations of running a small business could sometimes find an easy target in his only full time employee, and I thought it might be better for the friendship if we severed the work relationship.  I joined the carpenter’s union a few months before the pandemic, drawn in by the promise of steady work and full benefits. He was gracious about it, wished me well, and I figured after a spell we’d reconnect. I got married during the early months of Covid and settled into isolation like most of us did in that difficult time.  Sometime during this period, his demons finally got the better of him. In the space of a year he was on the street, having lost almost everything he had worked so hard to build in the decades since getting out of prison. I saw him and talked to him sparingly over the next few years. To my deep regret I didn’t try hard enough to help him get back on track. I felt powerless as the forces of addiction consumed him, and I knew just how difficult it would be for him to pull himself out of that pit. I tried in vain to get on his wavelength, but it was fraught. He had been through too much. Just before this past Thanksgiving, I got a text from a mutual friend that he was gone.  

By the time we reach middle age, many of us have felt the pain of losing someone we really love. In the last decade, I’ve grown accustomed to it. I lost my mother, then a host of friends fell to the ravages of drugs and mental illness, or both. Each time I have suffered, but I have also experienced an awakening of purpose, a commitment to honoring the legacy of the fallen, and a flourishing of my own spiritual and emotional growth. I say this not to detract at all from the tragedy of death and the often cruel and capricious way it is meted out. Each life is of immeasurable value, but with each loss I’ve begun to understand the paradoxical value of death as well. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of my mom, and I wish more than anything that she could have lived to see her granddaughter grow up. But her death was the driving force behind my journey to sobriety, which has allowed me to be a much better father. I have often thought of this as her final gift to me, not unlike the sky burials of our ancestors, or the fallen cedars that line the forest floor, the seeds of renewal in a garden tended by the dead.

In our grief there is an inheritance of these regenerative forces. To live is to grow, to thrive and connect with the life that surrounds us, and then to surrender in one way or another to the inevitable reshaping of our being into whatever comes next. We cannot escape this destruction, but we can benefit from an understanding of the reciprocity that is inherent in the cycle of life and death. And as we begin to heal, we are returning nitrogen to the soil, and allowing for new growth.

When my friend died, I didn’t find the space to grieve until I attended his memorial service. There, his ashes on the table, arrayed with pictures of him and his children, and all of his family in attendance, I was flooded with emotion. I cried as I listened to the testaments to his life and legacy and all of the sorrow, love and rage that comes with losing someone so tragically. I silently punished myself for not doing more to try to help him in his time of need. Mostly, I simply mourned for my old friend. Listening to his family talk about the ways he shaped them from the time they were children, I was reminded of how profound of an influence he had on me as well. 

Perhaps in another time, he would have been a warrior or a chief, given a proper ship burial or entombed in some kurgan on the endless steppe, his memory kept alive in bardic verse. I’ll remember him best in the crude poetry of my fellow carpenters, cursing under our breath when a nail splits a board, and the camaraderie that grows among flawed humans working dead trees into stairs and planks, fit to bear the feet of our children and grandchildren.

I don’t know what becomes of our spirit when we draw our last breath. It is part of the great mystery. But I believe that, whether on the tongues of poets or the tongues of beasts lapping at our bones, a part of us lives on. The winds of time will blow through our remains until all that is left is the shape of the form that once was, preserved in the legacy of our descendants and our deeds, gone from the world but strong enough to carry the next generation, like vanishing nurse logs, until the cycle begins again. We are passengers on that journey, from seed to crown, from the bones of men to the mouths of birds, on our way to the roots of the tree that knows no beginning or end.

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taboo deformation

noun

1. (linguistics) A modification of a word or phrase by way of euphemism to avoid a taboo (as in the case of a minced oath or due to the belief that mentioning a dangerous creature's name may cause that creature to appear).

(from Wiktionary)

“All of these concrete metaphors increase enormously our powers of perceptions of the world about us and our understanding of it, and literally create new objects. Indeed, language is an organ of perception, not simply a means of communication.”

-Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

The Old English epic Beowulf tells the story of a brave warrior who defeats a horrible beast and becomes a hero to his people. Yet he himself was named after a creature whose epithet was too terrible to utter aloud: the bear. Beowulf simply means “bee wolf,”1 a euphemism for “the brown one,” whom the Germanic people feared and respected more than almost any other animal. Old English is a branch of Germanic on the family tree of Indo-European languages, and linguists have reconstructed an ancient root for the word bear, the Proto Indo-European (PIE) *h₂ŕ̥tḱos, from which comes the Greek arktos and the Latin ursus. But something happened to the word on its journey from the Eurasian steppe (where the speakers of PIE likely originated) to the frigid northern lands of Scandinavia. The nomadic herders who colonized those lands, the hardy progenitors of the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings, seemingly developed such a high degree of fear and superstition around “the brown one” that they stopped using the word that their ancestors had used to describe this creature and instead settled on bera, which likely derives from the Proto-Germanic word for brown. Their distant relatives who settled the warmer regions of southern Europe didn’t have to deal with the bear menace as often, and, having no need for the euphemism, kept the old word instead.

People practicing ancient or traditional lifestyles the world over tend to adhere to strict taboo avoidance. For many of these cultures, taboos make up the mores and folkways that anchor the individual to the group, a line drawn in the sand and a strong link in the chain of social cohesion. We moderns, we civilized folk, have much less need of these taboos because we made up a bunch of laws that are backed up by the threat of incarceration. Growing up in a secular family in 20th century America, my only concept of taboo breaking involved something filthy or raunchy. It never would have occurred to me that to utter the name of bear or a wolf would be kind of like Harry Potter speaking aloud the name of Voldemort. But that’s life in the modern city for you. When your food comes from the frozen aisle of the supermarket and the only animals you see are captive or domestic, it’s hard to have anything but an abstract idea of the relationship we humans have had with predators and pack animals over the past two or three million years. But for those who stalked their prey on the plains and forests as their grandfathers had since time immemorial, these kinds of taboos were both sacred and functional. The Paleolthic cave art of Lascaux and Chauvet offer a glimpse into the deep antiquity of our ancestor’s reverence for animals, one could speculate that these elaborate frescoes of ochre and charcoal are the remnants of our earliest religious impulses. Just as the Iron Age Israelites developed a prohibition against writing the name of Yahweh, it could be that an ancient shamanistic tradition persisted through the millennia that contributed to a similar taboo against speaking the true name of those totemic beasts.

And so people developed ways of referring to these animals that made creative use of words, the act of so doing reflecting perhaps the even more ancient role of metaphor in the creation of language (or, as Cormac McCarthy put it, the idea that one thing can be another thing). I’m drawn to the idea that language itself is a way of seeing, an instrument just as vital to our perception of the world as the five senses. Try for a moment to imagine the first utterances of our ancestors to emerge from the primordial womb of grunts and gestures. Although it very likely involved no small amount of grunting and gesticulating, the first speakers to elucidate in some clear fashion a comparison between one thing and another were crossing a threshold of profound implications. They were the first alchemists, the first true magicians. For while many other animals have complex systems of communicating with one another, we humans use our words to see. We do not simply agree on a sound to signify the approach of a lion, we warn our children of the obsidian daggers in her mouth, elevating the innate defenses of our nervous system from the biological to the mythical. From there, it’s not difficult to see how everything from Beowulf to Beyoncé is built upon this simple edifice. The superstitious barbarians who referred to a bear as a “bee wolf” also called the ocean “the whale road” and a warrior a “feeder of ravens.” These kennings are illustrative and beautiful to read today but they also remind us that language is the shared inheritance of many generations of problem solving, and the offspring of these experiments are often wonderful in unexpected ways.

What is the legacy of this inheritance today? For better or worse, our proficiency with metaphor has enabled our species’ stunning rise to world dominance. The historian Yuval Noah Harari has said that it is our ability to create “fictions” such as mythology and money that seperate us from other mammals and allow us to create dynamic social coalitions.2 And what is a fiction but an outgrowth of a simple metaphor? Our ability to create new meta-concepts with our words has allowed us to shape the world in ways the first speakers could never have imagined. From superstitious taboos to shamanistic rituals, we began to separate ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom word by word, concept by concept, until the natural impulse of territorialism found a foothold in mythological concepts that embraced the dominance of one group over another, culminating in the atrocities witnessed in the 20th century. We have evolved from hunters who held monstrous beasts in fearful reverence, constructed elaborate taboos around the menses of women, and posted the skulls of their neighbors on pikes at the borders of their lands. Today most of us live with little or no connection to the land or its traditions, and for many the strongest taboos of the present era involve the repudiation of the subjugation of women and of prejudice towards our neighbors. And yet, we are still stuck with the frustrating persistence of “othering” our fellow humans, and the horrible suffering this behavior engenders.

There are clearly many taboos that are difficult for us to talk about openly and honestly nowadays. We live in a time of increased sensitivity and a fear of the power of language to shape impressionable minds towards some of the darker impulses of our nature. In Ursula LeGuin’s classic fantasy novel A Wizard of Earthsea, the young protagonist practices a form of magic that is predicated on knowing the true name of all things, a concept that has deep roots in many religious traditions but also emerges in subsequent works of popular fiction, such as the aforementioned Harry Potter novels. To know or obscure the name of a thing is to either unleash or restrict its power. Perhaps this is just as true for us today as it was for our ancient forebearers. Language and mythology have incredible power to unite and divide us. And as the edifice of religion is slowly stripped away, we have constructed new secular taboos that are equally powerful, and often manifest themselves in the regulation of language.

I’m not here to poke the bear, or add to the meaningless provocations of outrage for which the internet is now known for. We are in the grip of a culture war that is itself a harbinger of a great paradigm shift, the outcome of which will not be decided by the utterance or avoidance of forbidden words. If the internet was intended to unite us in a new Tower of Babel, as some have claimed, it has failed miserably in this quest. And yet, technological advances in archaeogenetics have given us a plethora of tools to understand the richness of the our past in ways that have never seemed possible before. If these tools are utilized in the service of humanism and pluralism instead of nationalism and militarism, perhaps we can reverse engineer the tower, and imagine what it was like when we all spoke the same tongue. To be a human in the 21st century is to bear witness to the strange, terrifying and beautiful lineage that has marked the emergence of homo sapiens since we first began to use language, myth, and religion to sculpt the world around us. Metaphor is the thread that binds these things. Perhaps, through an examination of the importance of symbolic culture in the ascent of our species, we can use this primordial instrument to name and understand that most wretched of beasts: ourselves.

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