A LANGUAGE OF CONCEPTS
There’s paradox and laughter in noting that I’ve been indignant and unsympathetic about my paternal side of the family claiming that having a Scots grandfather is being endowed with something special, an indication of being slightly superior. In the past few years I’ve kicked and objected, though my father was the sib most inclined to claim the clan, the bagpipes, the kilt and the highland games. My parents made a pilgrimage to the town named Strachan in Scotland — though my grandfather and family were from Kilmarnock — and so did cousins. I know of no one but my father who looked up direct Strachan relatives.
In moving to be global or at least walk with Browning denizens (who are a walking people), I pushed all the Scotland worship away. But Karma is working on me. Once I was eating a sandwich in Glacier Park on Looking Glass Pass between East Glacier and Kiowa Kamp, when a load of tourists showed up. They asked if I would take a photo of them together, a couple of newlyweds and the bride’s parents traveling from home in Calgary. They seemed eerily familiar, so much like me that they could be relatives. Their name was Strachan.
If one follows the name Strachan through literature and movies and in various professions nationally, they tend to be literate, maybe academic or in the law, and publishers or editors. They crop up on BBC. I’ve corresponded with a few. I’m not part of that world because I am rural and no longer academic. But now here I am head-over-heels for the work of Tim Ingold who is an Emeritus Professor at U of Aberdeen, Scotland. (Not a Strachan.)
All of it seems so familiar, though Ingold’s only previous book that I’ve read is called “Making,” a slender book. His books can be enormous and expensive, but my plan is to work through every hour-long post on YouTube. It will take a day or so.
Right now I’m wrestling with the toxic inversion of the Enlightenment that has gotten us into trouble. Most of the UU people are still Enlightenment thinkers with some Romanticists, mostly in California. (jokes) Excluding all emotion as part of thinking was a big mistake, but maybe a necessary way to escape religion. The scientific revolution was as sweeping and renewing as this new cosmic sea change of understanding of the world.Ingold’s “line of thought” follows deep abstract perception of the world enabled by experience rather than logic, very much like what I’ve been working on in speaking of the theology of landscape and human sensory systems as the basis of thought. I don’t know whether he would agree.
This video link is to a shorter speech. For those who can handle big words and Scots accents, it is filled with ideas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvVxhIquYoo
Tim Ingold, Creatures of the soil, reborn — The Understory of the Understory
I’m looking for a transcript. He’s concentrating on the difference between turning over the soil to renew fertility (a cycle as in Eliade’s work) or letting the dust submerge the past in layered substrate we now dig up for information. He compares the layers of volcanic dust and flood silt with thin book pages that carry information. (The automated words at the bottom of the vid are not necessarily useful.)
Naturally, this becomes another way to raise up historians, archeologists, and academics to be more logical and therefore more “cool” in both the old-fashioned and modern slang senses. He speaks of “post humanism” in the same way I’ve been using “post enlightenment”. He relates historical excavation to the ravaging of land for the sake of digging up resources. But he remains a humanist. I do not.
He speaks of a language of concepts, which is very similar to what I’ve been calling “felt meaning” which works with search engines. He’s quite blunt about the meaning of burying the dead as a return to the soil-origin, which is quite poignant in a time when we cremate — now in open air as recorded on video in India en masse.
This discussion of the value of writing is not relevant to my thoughts about moving from oral to written thought. For the indigenous people, European lines of print as such, even less than the vocabulary or grammar, were so drastically different as to be unintelligible. Another source of reflection is that the treatment of corpses among the prairie tribes was to raise the body up into a tree or a scaffold or a niche in a bluff. As a last resort the body is left on a high ridge. To them the past is always present. Don’t mess with the dead or try to get rid of them.
This is for me as powerful and relevant as Eliade has been in the past and continues to be now. It’s not the object, the “fact”, that beguiles me, but rather the experience of those thoughts. I have Ingold’s book, “Making”, which is about a grad class that actually did make things, including the much mocked basket-weaving. (A joke from a time when “California” included crafts in academic departments — in contrast to now when they are back to throwing out everything not logical and profitable). After a day right on the location of the materials, struggling with weather and resistant withes, they talk about how much their impressions have changed, what interpretations of other things are renewed now.
When fMRI scans made it possible to actually SEE the brain as it thought and the results of that thinking, there were several discoveries. One was that there might be specialized bits, yet the brain operates as a whole, flickering through patterns of connection that had been established in the past. (Rather like symphonic music.) If there is a lot of thought or experience in one subject, the area of neurons where that was stored gets bigger. If one forgets, ignores, or has new interests, the old thickening may thin. (They say the brain is “plastic” which always makes me think of children’s toys and kitchenware.)
In fact, during the first three years of life, the brain assembles a framework that is the basis of all subsequent thought. It is VERY hard to change. What are the toddlers of the world’s displaced people learning in their camps of thousands? All those people walking barefoot with their children on their hips along paths that become more and more potent as patterns.
“Making” is a slender book, but now I have “The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill” which will take a long time to digest. I’ll enjoy every minute, my brain will be recording concertoes of thought. (Ingold plays the cello.) Maybe the skirl of a bagpipe will be faint in the background.
