On the Welcoming of the Unexpected Guest
The might of aither chases it into the sea, sea spits it out onto solid ground, earth spits it up into rays of the radiant sun and sun hurls it into the whirlpools of aither. One receives it from another, then another from another, and they all hate it. This is the way that I too am going, an exile from the gods and a wanderer, placing my trust in mad Strife.1Translation by Peter Kinsley
—Empedocles
On December 27th, 2023, I published an essay in The Dark Mountain Project called “At First, There Were Eight.” This was a companion piece to “Entering the Tunnel of Time in Cappadocia,” which went up on December 28th, 2022. Coming a week or so after the winter solstice in both years, both essays were panoramic views of world destructions, with hints of a larger cosmic context and hopes for cultural renewal. These were the first and last essays in my book The Preexistent Race Descends. If asked whether these essays were pessimistic, I would say they were written at a turning point, at a time when the trees have withdrawn their sap into their roots, before new growth has appeared. I would say that they were characterized by what Yeats called “tragic joy.” If the screens that monetize our vision are destined to go blank, why not take this as an opportunity to see with other eyes?
Beginnings are not that different from endings. The east is not actually separate from the west, and it’s possible, from a great enough distance, to view the seemingly flat earth as a sphere. As I’ve come to understand it, just as both essays are simultaneously present in the book, the future, to some extent, may already have occurred. We just don’t see it yet, even as we’ve moved into it through the reading of this sentence. Similarly, 99 percent of the past may not yet have taken place. There are worlds within worlds still waiting to be discovered. The one moment in which we live continuously slips by us, as does our relationship to the ground beneath our feet. If we’ve lived 10,000 times, to what culture do we belong? We may have farther to go than we think to define our true identities.
In the essay, I had attempted to explore our relationship to deep time, or really, to the high peculiarity of time itself, to the forces, both external and internal, that keep us from looking very far beyond our stage-set, that assure us that the most up-to-date of building codes were followed, that our indifference to the extent of our lost history will protect us. How wonderful it would be if this were true. How beautifully gradualist is our geology. How linear is our progression from Lascaux to social media. Yes, how miraculous such an arc would be. If only social media were not the ritual desert of our ghost dance.
I was lucky enough to receive a comment—somewhat accusatory—from a reader called Larissa. In spite of certain misunderstandings, I was, nonetheless, grateful. Since I first began to publish online essays, in 2007, in Reality Sandwich, I’ve done my best to respond to any comment on my work. These were the wild west days of the internet. Arguments could be heated. Exchanges of comments on an issue would sometimes stretch into the hundreds. The strength of disagreements would be moderated, however, by a sense of curiosity, by the excitement of being able to communicate with people half a world away.
I learned to let no source of conflict go to waste. If attacked, I did my best to flow with my opponent, to treat even the stupidest criticisms of my work “as if” they might be true. Through such exchanges, I became more aware of my flaws, and I got better at revision. I learned to welcome each seeming enemy like an unexpected guest.
Now, sadly, even in the most literate and well written of comment sections, there often seems to be some unspoken agreement to toe the party line—without, perhaps, even knowing what this is—to valorize the “Us” and demonize the “Them.” At a time of converging crises, when so much is demanded, when we must stretch our vision to the breaking point just in order to imagine and survive what will come in the next 20 years, we often seem to be shrinking rather than expanding, regressing to the thrill of schoolyard taunts, retreating to the faux-safety of the in-group. This reflexive strategy is, perhaps, a small-scale illustration of our relationship to time itself. When overwhelmed, when we are in the grip of traumas we don’t acknowledge to exist, it’s easier to focus on the foreground than the background, on the clickbait of the day. Pay no attention to the ocean as it floods the New York subways. There is a perfectly good target on that shadow over there.
My own approach is best described by the Roman playwright Terrence, who writes, “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto,” or “I am a man, thus nothing human is alien to me.” So, in spite of our divergent views, I was glad to hear from Larissa, that she had taken the time to read and respond to an admittedly nonlinear and challenging essay, even if this response came as a series of insinuations. I’d hoped to open up a space where real dialogue might occur. Was this no more than a pipe dream? Life is short. My patience is long.
Ever since I published that first piece in Reality Sandwich, I’ve been very much aware that my gnomic style and love of paradox can make my arguments hard to untangle, that certain readers might assume I’m saying the opposite of what I am. And, indeed, this way of moving is at least partially intended as a test of the reader’s sensibility, as a provocation, as the opening of a rift between the surface and the depth of the reader’s mind. So, I can hardly be upset with Larissa when she writes,
Some of the approach here is skating very close to pseudo-archaeology, which is itself often closely aligned to white supremacist movements and the far right, who claim that ancient knowledge is deliberately hidden. Disturbingly, and I am sure quite the opposite from what this writer wants to say, those who follow pseudo-archaeology will deny the intelligence of people of color in building early civilizations, and will also call upon their version of the ancient past to support misogyny, racism, homophobia and transphobia.
Since there is nothing in the essay that even hints at “misogyny, racism, homophobia and transphobia,” I must admit that I was puzzled. Returning our focus to archeology, there are certainly plenty of proponents of “alternative archeology” who might claim that the Giza pyramids were built by “ancient aliens,” or whatever. There may be some whose political viewpoints differ from my own. On the other hand, if any mainstream archeologist had predicted, in 1985, that a site such as Göbekli Tepe—dating from 11,000 to 8,500 BC—would be unearthed in the next ten years, that the length of what we take to be “civilization” would be doubled, and that other excavations, of even older centers, would soon follow, they would have seen their funding dry up and would have been bounced from their position at whatever university they taught.
And any amateur who might have made a correct prediction would, almost certainly, have been labelled as a “crank.” Without heaping any undue praise on amateurs, they have, at times, dared to say things that the experts were too timid to suggest.
Grateful for the chance to probe my attitudes and to welcome a new guest, I responded,
Hi Larissa,
Thanks for taking the time to read and think about and comment on the essay. I suspect that we might disagree on less than you imagine. My writing style does leave me open to a wide range of both interpretation and misinterpretation. This is, to some extent, by design. My background is as a poet, essay writer, artist, and spiritual explorer, and this essay—which may be closer to a prose-poem in certain parts—is intended less as a series of linear arguments than as a memory prompt, as a cosmological catalyst, as a deliberately ambiguous challenge to each reader to probe the edges of their vision. Such boundaries are cultural as well as personal, of course. Just as we can’t stare directly into the depths of our own subconscious, our view of the landscapes of deep time may also be partially or wholly blocked.
As I write in part two of the essay, “For whatever reason—force of habit or peer pressure or deep-seated ancestral trauma—archeologists will tend to regard a potsherd as hard evidence while dismissing a myth out of hand, even if this myth is supported by geological data and echoed by dozens of similar myths from around the world.” While archeologists, like other academics, may be subject to particular types of peer pressure, sometimes intense, we are all, I think, subject to the force of habit, to felt but unacknowledged ancestral trauma, and to hard limits on our ability to see, simply by being part of the present moment, by the media’s scattering of our attention and blunting of our intuition—by being who and where and when we are.
You write, “There is room in archaeology for both the typological experts who might be more ‘fact’ oriented, and those of us who follow more interesting interpretative paths.” And, “There are jealous gatekeepers in all academic disciplines, but increasingly archaeologists work with local communities, First Nations peoples and other people embedded in a culture to interpret findings from all angles.” There is nothing in either of these statements with which I’d disagree. Far too often, though, until quite recently, there has been an obsessive focus on the minutiae of methodology, on the classification of material objects, and a disregard of the traditions of local communities and the knowledge embodied in ancient myths and texts.
For example, while the Mayans, Hopis, Hindus, Yoruba, Ancient Greeks, and many other cultures speak of previous ages and vaster time cycles and previous world destructions, few archeologists have approached such stories as more than colorful fantasies. If this were not the case, in 1963, when the topmost layer of Göbekli Tepe came to light, archeological surveyors from the Universities of Istanbul and Chicago might not have dismissed the site as rubble from a Medieval graveyard. The site was then more or less forgotten for 30 years until excavations began in 1995. As Heraclitus says, “If you do not expect the unexpected you will not discover it, for it is not to be searched out and is difficult to apprehend.”
Even after excavations began, when the true age of the site became clear, there was still a reluctance to wrestle with the implications. With the length of what we take to be “civilization” having doubled overnight, the general tendency was to refer to Göbekli Tepe as the “world’s first temple,” rather than asking, “What else might we have missed?” Since then, Karahan Tepe, Nevali Cori, Cayonu Tepesi, Cafer Hoyuk, and a dozen or so other sites have been unearthed, some as much as 2000 years older. I say this not to insult the discipline of archeology or the integrity of its practitioners but rather to call attention to the sheer amount we have forgotten.
And this brings us to Heinrich Schliemann and the discovery of Troy (or, as you say, some earlier city underneath it). I didn’t intend to argue that Schiemann was a hero or that his methods of excavation were sound. Since modern archeology more or less began with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 and Lord Elgin’s theft of sculptures from the Parthenon in 1801, it would be shocking if they were. No, as with the other figures and events cited in part two of the essay, my point was that amateurs, farmers, hunters, shepherds, people renovating their basements, random passersby, and accidents had more to do with our unearthing of the distant past than is generally acknowledged. If Schlieman was significant, it was because, unlike most of his more educated contemporaries, he was foolish enough to take Homer at his word.
***
Sadly, this was the end of the discussion. My counter-prompt went unanswered. I wasn’t able to open up a space for the sharing of perspectives, yet just as the east is not actually separate from the west, my critic and I are joined without our knowing it, by a sphere’s occult geometry, without our especially wanting this connection to exist. We both stand upon a stage-set far more fragile than it seems. The pulse of a larger cycle joins our inbreaths and our outbreaths. The deep space that waits to open, that suggests we reassemble the full scope of our attention, the space of Empedocles’ aether, in which each of the four elements has cancelled out the next, that space doesn’t care if we click “like.”
In the face of the catastrophic global changes that each day become more visible—our race to pass the 1.5 degree rise in temperature that was said to mark a climatic point of no return, the opening of shipping lanes through the Arctic, the exhaustion of petroleum reserves, the depletion of the rare earth elements that allow our smartphones to work, the drying up of rivers and aquifers and the desertification of farmlands, the burning of the Amazon, the imminent flooding of coastal cities, the self-separation of the uber-wealthy from the rest of Earth’s population, the archonic takeover of our brainwaves and culture by AI, our inability to agree on anything and total failure to take action—in the face of these eruptions from the subconscious of the time-cycle, do our differing opinions on prehistory really matter?
I would argue that they do. I would speculate, as well, that there is more than the policing of theories and the guarding of academic privileges that too often keeps mainstream archeologists from seeing farther than they do. Among the many possible reasons, one reason would seem to be preeminent. There is one reason that best accounts for the reflex accusations and straw man arguments these archeologists tend to launch at their opponents—fear. Do mainstream archeologists conspire to keep our deep history hidden? Who knows? There really is no need. Archeologists are only human, and we humans don’t like to contemplate the inevitability of our deaths, let alone the rearrangement of all that we hold dear.
On some level, just because we are connected, we all know much more than we believe ourselves to know. Our memories are physical and psychic as well as intellectual, and they extend beyond our ability or desire to retrieve them. As I point out in “At First, There Were Eight,” the very word for world in Hebrew, olam, means “hidden,” as well as “eon; time conceived as a concavity,” and “beyond the curve of the horizon.” We are not disturbed by looking at a photo of the Earth, that wonderous blue-white spheroid. We accept that the Earth is not flat and that this “flatness” is what we can see of the skin of a curved body, yet we stubbornly cling to the idea that time is linear, that our ancestors were more childlike, and that all past cultures were test runs for our own. For if they were not flawed, why aren’t they around now?
On some level, in our nerves and bones and muscles and in that part of what we are still rooted in the aether, we can sense that our future may be tied to our deep past, that these are as intimately connected as I am to my critic. If endings are not that different from beginnings, if we have lived, perhaps, 10,000 times before, if we are still, in some space beyond our recklessness, the occult stewards of the cosmos, we may nonetheless have good reasons not to probe beyond our fear. We may much prefer to keep our vision clouded.
Notes
↑1 | Translation by Peter Kinsley |
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