TOO LONG FOR TWITTER, PART ONE

(Agate Beach at Patrick's Point; photo by Neil Mikulenka)

In 1978 or 1979, I first went to Patrick's Point State Park near Trinidad in Northern California. It's one of those spots where I instantly felt connection to the sacred. Later I learned it was, indeed, an ancient gathering place for the Yurok people, with whom I have some sort of inexplicable deep connection. Their name for it is Sumig, which was translated to me roughly as the place where the spirit of dolphins went to die when human beings began to populate the earth.

I returned to Sumig as often as I could, and had lots of wildlife/nature experiences there. It's where I also developed a consuming fear of sasquatch. But the story I want to tell today is about when I went with my friend Mary, who had come to visit me in San Francisco from Texas. Mary was/is deeply spiritual, beginning as a Christian Scientist and proceeding through a number of ideologies, including rebirthing and Sai Baba. Each of her new belief systems was authentic and fascinating as she embodied them.


Our second day camping at Sumig, we went for a hike along the cliffs, intending to walk down the extremely steep trail which led to driftwood-stacked Agate Beach and, if you went on along the strand, to Agate Lagoon. Halfway down the switchback trail, we looked out at the Pacific and saw three or four California Grey Whales directly approaching the surf off the beach.

We stopped to gape and wonder what was happening. Only ten yards off shore, one of these whales turned parallel to the waves and began rolling in the wash, seemingly helpless in the surf. I cried out "Oh g*d no, they're beaching themselves!" and began sprinting down the trail. Mary followed on my heels, with her camera.

A few other bystanders had gathered on the beach, and had come to the same conclusion. I stood there in agony, unable to bear the prospect of watching these magnificent animals die before my eyes -- no doubt because of some human-induced interference with their normal function. I turned to Mary and said "I'm going to save them."

"What do you mean?" she asked in alarm.

"I have to try to communicate with them" I said, unbuckling my overalls. "If I put my hands on their side and send images via energy transference, maybe I can get them to swim back out to sea."

Mary had a fit, declaring I would instead be crushed beneath them, I was insane to think I could mind-meld with a whale. But I kept stripping, taking off my Vasq boots and asking Mary to look after my small black dog, who was shivering in the cold wet wind. The other bystanders took a few steps away from me but watched avidly. Mary finally gave up trying to talk sense into me and got her camera ready.

I had stepped into the frigid water, wearing only my Rubyfruit Jungle t-shirt and a baggy pair of cotton underwear, when we heard shouting from the trail. It was a park ranger, running our way at full speed. I stopped and returned to the relative warmth of the sand. When he reached us, he was out of breath and had to lean over, gasping, for a minute before he could speak.

"The whales -- they do this -- they're not beaching" he said, staring at my hairy legs. "There's a steep underwater bench right there, rocky. They come in to scrap off their sea lice."

Mary had to sit down, she was laughing so hard. I began donning my overalls. The park ranger asked "What the hell were you about to do?"

I didn't answer, but Mary told him with what I felt was unseemly pleasure. He laughed, but also took down the number of our campsite. He said every time the whales came in during their migration to use the local facilities, as it were, he had to rush for the beach to keep visitors from going bananas. He added that I was the first to think I could wade out and save them.

Maybe it's a lesbian thing. There's an unnatural preponderance of us among marine biologists.

That night, over our campfire, Mary and I had a long, not-quite-acrimonious fight about our respective approaches to nature. I was carrying with me everywhere a set of guide books that I'd bought, to not only birds and trees but berries, ferns, shells, a walking library. I was forever stopping to (1) use my asthma inhaler and (2) look up the name of whatever I had just seen. At that point in my life, and in particular as a lesbian-feminist, naming was an act of power I could not stop myself from performing as often as was possible.

Mary felt I was missing out on the moment, on experiencing nature as it presented itself, without names or scientific background. She thought someone who believed they could talk with whales through their palms might try ditching the guidebooks and commune with salal berries on a more primal level.

We were both right, of course. It needn't have been the argument that it was, except we were both at a time in our lives when our approaches to things had distinctly diverged, we loved each other and wanted to be together, and we were not quite old enough to let the difference sit as a richness in our connection.

A few years later, my mother died and I came into a deeper comprehension of Mary's approach to the world. Some things make no real sense, even named, and you have to accept them as is.

But the power of naming is still important for us to retain, to not relinquish this power to those who use it to maintain the imbalance which all but blinds us. Language is the tool we use most often to convert information given to us by our senses into metaphor, and our brains only learn through metaphor. I think dreaming is our nightly sorting time, when our brains feverishly hold up everything we experienced that day and says "Now what does this remind me of?" before stashing it away in a drawer of memory. (Well, several drawers of memory, since every experience gets divided up into many bits that only our individual synapses know how to reconstitute again into a single memory.)

Thus, I just spent three hours creating a series of names for the fish eaten by characters in my current sci-fi novel, on a waterworld where English is no longer the dominant language. Because names matter, the words we use shape how we see things, like it or not. And having acknowledged that, I can try to move beyond the terms to an imaginary landscape where the names lose relevance again.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.


[N.B. The first poem I wrote after my mother died is titled "Naming", and it's much better as a journal entry than poetry. But if you want to read it, it's here.)


[Cross-posted at Group News Blog.]

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WOMEN AT THE START OF HUMAN TIME

(Once a Month, photo by Margaret Kalms)

The first writing in the world was numbers, not letters: Hatch marks and eventually cuneiform to keep track of the cycles of objects in the heavens, calendars, and from there to counting grain and other life essentials. Once these literal marks became symbolic, it was inevitable that we would make the quantum leap to symbols for sounds as well. We are the only species on the planet to have created written language, some time around 6000 years ago.

As humans, we had spoken language for many tens of thousands of years before that, and oral communication before clear language emerged. But it is with language which can be rendered into symbols that we see the emergence of what we can recognize as human culture: Agriculture and domestications of animals, the ability to live in one spot instead of traveling in bands, larger population centers, permanent care for disabled and elderly, organized community education of children. Each technological advance has provided the foundation for another atop it, until we arrive, more or less logically, to modern day.

The unanswered question is how did we cross the divide from primate consciousness into human consciousness: Who first made hatchmarks, and why?

Modern studies of how the brain works have revealed that all human learning involves metaphor. On a rudimentary level, when we encounter something new which needs interpretation, we do the equivalent of the Sesame Street singing game which goes "Which of these things is not like the other?" We compare and contrast, using metaphor. This occurs in at least three of the main languages used by humans -- verbal, mathematical, and musical. When we find a similarity, we link the new thing to the old, a synapse is formed, and we have the basis for retaining memory of the new thing so we may continue learning about it.

We actually cannot take in information and render it as a retained abstract in any other way.

Thus, to understand how the first humans took such a strikingly different path from all other life on earth, we need to imagine what they were experiencing, seeing, contending with to make that first leap -- and it needs to be common to every culture, every region, because this did not happen on one place only. Many different groups of humans were counting in prehistory.

One counting object does reliably appear in numerous early human cultures: Sticks, bones and stones marked with lines which add up to 29.5 days.

(Incised limestone ‘calendar’ from Wadi Jilat 7)

What does that number suggest to you? Yes, it's the lunar cycle. But it is also the average menstrual cycle of an adult woman.


(Menstruation, by Judy Clark, 1973)

In Judy Grahn's book, Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created The World, the foreword by Charlene Spretnak states:

'Grahn focuses on the meanings of separation in cross-cultural responses to menstruation. She first considers the origin myths of many cultures and notes that a high proportion of them begin with an undifferentiated space/time, an era of chaos and indeterminate form, from which creation occurs via separation: the separation of land from water, of earth from sky, of rivers from oceans, of mountains from plains. Grahn speculates that the foundation of so many origin stories -- a time of undifferentiation -- may be an extremely resilient reference to early humans' "crossing of the great abyss" from primate consciousness to the eventual development of conceptualizing, abstracting human consciousness. For this to occur, consciousness had to become externalized, that is, linked with events outside the human in ways that led to apprehension of patterns and concepts. Grahn believes that this pivotal development must have occurred in relation to females' dawning awareness that their 29.5-day menstrual cycle of bleeding was in rhythm with -- and hence related to -- an external object, the white moon in the sky. The resultant consciousness, which she calls "the menstrual mind," became externalized and displayed, particularly because of the necessity for females to teach their discovery to members of the group who did not menstruate. Males learned the metaforms, Grahn's term for various expressions of menstrual logic, such as principles of separation, synchronic relationship, and cyclical time. Eventually the males extended the meta forms, rearranged them, and mirrored them back to the females, creating what Grahn sees as "an ongoing dance of mind between the genders."'

(Venus of Laussel Wall Relief, prehistoric lunar goddess circa 22,000 BC)

In other words, our ability to symbolize the world and all human development which has followed from that ability began with our linking the cycles of women to the cycles of the moon. "How is this thing like another?" The primal, and ultimate, metaphor.

In her first chapter, Judy writes:
'One word recurs again and again in stories of menstrual ritual: taboo. The word comes from Polynesian tapua, meaning both "sacred" and "menstruation," in the sense, as some traditions say, of "the woman's friend. " Besides sacred, taboo also means forbidden, valuable, wonderful, magic, terrible, frightening, and immutable law. Taboo is the emphatic use of imperatives, yes or no, you must or you must not. Taboo draws attention, strong attention, and is in and of itself a language for ideas and customs.

'But it is not only in the nineteenth century accounts of tribal peoples that we find menstruation hedged with rules. The word "regulation" is linked to menstruation in European languages in the same way "taboo" is in Polynesian (though without also meaning "sacred"). In German, menstruation is Regel, in French regle, and in Spanish las reglas. All these words mean "measure" or "rule" as well as "menstruation" and are cognate with the terms regulate, regal, regalia, and rex (king). In Latin, regula means "rule." These terms thus connect menstruation to orderliness, ceremony, law, leadership, royalty, and measurement.

'Ritual, from Sanskrit r'tu, is any act of magic toward a purpose. Rita, means a proper course. Ri, meaning birth, is the root of red, pronounced "reed" in Old English and still in some modern English accents (New Zealand). R'tu means menstrual, suggesting that ritual began as menstrual acts. The root of r'tu is in "arithmetic" and "rhythm"; I hear it also in "art,” “'theater," and perhaps in "root" as well. The Sanskrit term is still alive in India, where goddess worship continues to keep r'tu alive in its menstrual senses; r'tu also refers to special acts of heterosexual intercourse immediately following menstruation, and also to specific times of year.

'While in Latin menses, meaning "month," means the menstrual flow, in Scottish mense meant "propriety, grace." The family of words that revolves around the English word "menstruation" includes mental, memory, meditation, mensurate, commensurate, meter, mother, mana, magnetic, mead, maniac, man, and menstruation's twin, moon.'

(Placenta burial jar, 1150-1200, Korean Koryo period; stoneware with celadon glaze)

I was reminded of all this cultural connection when I read an article at The Raw Story last week which declared "Japanese researchers say menstrual blood can be used to repair heart damage. Scientists obtained menstrual blood from nine women and cultivated it for about a month, focusing on a kind of cell that can act like stem cells. Some 20 percent of the cells began beating spontaneously about three days after being put together in vitro with cells from the hearts of rats. The cells from menstrual blood eventually formed sheet-like heart-muscle tissue. The success rate is 100 times higher than the 0.2-0.3 percent for stem cells taken from human bone marrow, according to Shunichiro Miyoshi, a cardiologist at Keio University's school of medicine, who is involved in the research."

Why am I not the least bit surprised?

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Judy Grahn's book is available to read online at Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created The World.

In response to Judy's book, a number of people are exploring what she calls "metaformic theory" and have a multi-genre, multi-disciplinary online journal studying it at Metaformia. Their introduction states:

"We think the world needs fresh new approaches to questions of the origins of culture, why humans differ from animals, why we are the marvelous, amazing, terrible, peculiar, cruel, kind, dangerous, and occasionally constructive beings that we are. So in this Journal we introduce Metaformic Theory because it is a new approach, one of several in the arena of menstruation and culture, but the one calling for the broadest changes in the way we think of human origins and processes through which we, and our ancestors, have attained the culture that surrounds us.
"We want to engage in a dialogue with and about theorists of consciousness."

They state that "Metaformic Theory is important because:

1. Metaformic Theory returns women to a crucial place in cultural origin stories, in our histories, in our rituals, in our religions, and in the ordinary and extraordinary everyday things that billions of women do all over the planet—so women can again identify themselves as being part of culture creation in major, leading, and centralizing ways.

2. Men are not displaced from a crucial role in cultural origin stories by this theory, nor are they demonized. The cultural contributions of men, as with women, are put into the perspective of ritual, and so both sexes have a better chance of understanding each other.

3. Evolution is postulated as a different shape than the vertical line of “progress” that so inevitably de-humanizes various groups while privileging others. Grahn’s theory holds that evolution is constantly braiding; beginning in the shape of horizontal strands consisting of the “parallel” rituals of each gender, which are categorically different from the rituals of the other gender. That is to say, women and men bleed differently, much of the time. As the strands of ritual elaborate into cultural forms, the sexes lose track of what each other is doing. One begins, historically, to become more elaborate than the other, with a consequent imbalance that affects everything. As part of this dialectical tension, “crossover groups” of various kinds, and in particular transgendered peoples, help to effect the bringing together of the ritual strands, into what can be imaged as a “braided” form, that allows a more balanced flow of evolution.

4. Menstrual theories teach that synchrony is a primary basis for evolution, women’s solidarity and intelligence, rather than our isolation, weakness or sinfulness, are emphasized. Women can help each other lose the shame and confusion of not knowing where we fit in as culture movers and shakers, and become engaged, active participants. This encourages and enables women to, for example, intelligently struggle to gain a full measure of control within institutions that affect them related to health and our bodies, motherhood, sexuality, the economy, marriage, education and children’s welfare, religion, government, science, the military, the welfare of the planet, and so on."

(Woman Words, poster by Margaret Kalms)

Hat tip to Doc Wendel for sending me The Raw Story article, which he thought might be significant to me because he remembered Myra singing "The Bloods" in Ginny Bates: 'Learn about your cervix and what's in it / There's a new day dawning when you got the bloods again' (from The Berkeley Women's Music Collective).

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