American naturalist, writer and traveler Barry Lopez (1945-2020), from whom we have already brought an impressive text in the past Invitation (Invitation), in the following essay from the book Crossing Open Ground (1978) reflects on the intertwining of inner and outer landscapes, the role of traditional storytelling in the search for a harmonious relationship with the surrounding world, but also on various forms of knowing the truth. Translated by Luděk Čertík.
One summer evening in a remote village in the Brooks Mountains of Alaska, I sat with a group of men listening to hunting stories of game-hunting and trap-setting. I was particularly struck by several incidents involving a wolverine, partly because a friend of mine had studied wolverines in Canada among the Cree, but also because I find wolverines to be extremely intense creatures. To hear about their lives is to learn about their ferocity.
Wolverines are not inherently secretive, they do not hide their lives from the eyes of man, but they are rarely observed. The extent of knowledge about their behavior is more modest than, for example, that of bears or wolves. And yet no unfounded details were given that evening. This was somewhat strange, because wolverines easily excite the imagination; they can suddenly appear in the landscape with a determination that is peculiar to them, surrounded by an aura that goes beyond their stocky proportions, and draw all attention to themselves. Wolverines are also famous for their tenacity in the harshest winters, their untamed strength. But none of these qualities led the man to exaggerate.
I listened attentively to these stories, savoring the meticulously observed details that accompanied the dramatic plot. The story that stuck with me most vividly was about a man who was hunting a wolverine on a snowmobile in the spring. He followed the animal’s tracks for several kilometers across the rolling tundra in a valley. He soon noticed a black dot on a ridge ahead of him—the wolverine had stopped to look back. The hunter caught up with the wolverine, but each time he climbed to the top, the wolverine watched him from another ridge, just out of range. The hunter climbed another climb and encountered the wolverine charging straight at him. Before he could pull his rifle from its holster, the wolverine flew over the hood and windshield and hit the man squarely in the chest. The hunter frantically wrestled with his hands to get the wolverine off his lap, and in the process, he fell over. The wolverine jumped down from the overturning machine with a quick glance and measured the man. He didn't bite or scratch the man in question. Then he backed away. The man considered reaching for his rifle, but no, he didn't.
The other stories were similar, carrying not so clear a message, but rather suggesting something from encounters with wild animals that will forever elude full understanding.
When the story was over, four or five of us left our host's house. The surrounding landscape was still visible for miles in the unfading light of the northern summer—the reddened, jagged massifs of the Brooks Mountains; the shy, willow-lined banks of the John River, flowing south from Anaktuvuk Pass, and the flat plain of the tundra that opened up with great self-evidence to the north. The stories made the landscape seem alive. It was these ochre shades, this kind of willow, this very austerity, from which the story of the wolverine grew. I felt a thrill and a deeper affirmation of what was being told. I now looked forward with pleasure to the mundane tasks that awaited me. The stories had restored purpose to my life.
This feeling, the inexplicable burst of vitality at the end of a story, is familiar to many people. The subject matter does not seem to matter much if the context of the story is intimate and the story is told for its own sake, not merely as a vehicle for expressing an idea. The tone of the story need not be solemn. The darker aspects of life need not be left out. But I believe that intimacy is indispensable—a feeling that comes from the listener's trust and from the storyteller's familiarity with the subject and his respect for the audience. This intimacy is deepened if the storyteller tempers his authority with humility, or if established phrases or at least physical settings of the story are shared.
I think of two landscapes—one outside me and one inside me. The external landscape is the one we see—not just the outline and color of the land and its hues at different times of the day, but also its plants and animals at different times of the year, its weather, its geology, the evidence of its climate and evolution. If you walk down a dry arroyo (riverbed) in the Sonoran Desert, say, you will feel the unmistakable pile and roll of sand and silt beneath your feet. You will sense the sedimentary soil loosening from the bank if you reach out your hand, and from this tangible evidence the history of the water in the area will breathe upon you. A black-headed bunting may perch on the parkinsonium—the suppleness of the twig beneath it, that precise shade of yellow-green against the milky blue sky, the fluttering swirl of the bunting’s arrival, that is what I mean by “landscape.” Inhale the scent of a creosote bush or rattle two stones together in the dry air. Notice how airy the dried droppings of a wood mouse are. Examine animal tracks covered in wind. All these elements are part of the landscape, and the relationships between them are what make the landscape intelligible. Ultimately, you don’t know a landscape by distinguishing the name or identity of everything in it, but by perceiving the relationships that exist within it—like that between a bunting and a twig. The difference between relationships and elements is the same as the difference between historiography and a list of events.
The second landscape I am considering is the internal landscape, a kind of projection of part of the external landscape into the human interior. The relationships in the external landscape include those that are nameable and recognizable, like the nitrogen cycle or the strata of Ordovician limestone, and others that are uncodifiable or ineffable, like the winter light falling on a certain type of granite or the effect of humidity on the frequency of the bubbling song of the black-headed woodpecker. That these relationships have purpose and order, however incomprehensible they may seem to us, is an evolutionary principle. Similarly, the speculations, suggestions, and formal ideas that we call “thoughts” represent a set of relationships with purpose and order in the internal landscape; some of them obvious, many of them impenetrably subtle. I believe that the shape and character of these relationships in human thought are profoundly influenced by where one is on earth, what one touches, what patterns one observes in nature—by the intricate history of one’s life in the countryside and even in the city, where the wind, the chirping of birds, the curve of a falling leaf are familiar. Moreover, these considerations are organized along the threads of human moral, intellectual, and spiritual development. The inner landscape responds to the character and subtlety of the outer landscape; the shape of the individual mind is as much influenced by the land as by the genes.
In stories like the one about the wolverine I heard in Anaktuvuk Pass, the relationship between the elements of the landscape is clearly described. It is set within a simple framework of successive events and relevant details. If the external landscape is properly depicted, the listener usually gets the impression that he has heard something pleasant and genuine—worthy of trust. I think we derive this feeling not so much from verifiable truth as from the fact that there has been no falsehood in the narrative. The narrator is obliged to engage the reader by precise choice of words, to give a coherent and catchy account of events—and to be witty.
Listening to a story brings pleasure for a variety of reasons—the onomatopoeia of the wording, a particular plot feature, or because one identifies with a character. With some stories, select individuals may experience a deeper and more pervasive sense of well-being. I believe this phenomenon lies at the heart of storytelling as an extraordinary experience among indigenous peoples. It is the result of the fusion of two landscapes. The external landscape is organized according to principles, laws, or tendencies that lie beyond human control. It is understood as an intangible whole that defies human analysis. If the storyteller accurately depicts the diverse subtle and overt relationships in the external landscape in his story and arranges them along traditional lines of meaning to give rise to the story, the narrative will “resonate.” The listener, who “takes the story to heart,” will feel a penetrating sense of consubstantiality with himself and the world.
The Navajo, and many other Native peoples, I know, believe that the land implicitly reveals a sacred order. This order is the basis of ritual. Rituals themselves reveal the power of this order. Art, architecture, vocabulary, and dress, as well as rituals, are derived from the perceptible natural order of the universe—from observations and meditations on the external landscape. And Native philosophy—metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, aesthetics, and logic—can also be derived from people’s constant attention to the manifest (scientific) and unmanifest (artistic) orders of the local landscape. Each individual is committed to aligning his or her inner landscape with the outer landscape. To succeed in this is to achieve a balanced state of mental health.
I think of the Navajo for a reason. Among their many sung ceremonies—the Way of the Enemy, the Way of the Coyote, the Way of the Red Ant, the Way of Ugliness—is a ceremony called the Beautyway. According to the Navajo, the individual components of a person’s inner life—his or her mental attunement and moral principles—are constantly falling apart. The Beautyway is partly a spiritual invocation of the order of the outer universe, that irreducible and sacred complexity that manifests itself as all that changes over time (the Navajo definition of beauty, hózhóó). The purpose of this invocation is to restore the same order in the individual who undergoes the ceremony of the Way of Beauty, to make him again a reflection of the myriad of permanent relationships in the landscape.
I believe that story works similarly. A story starts from relationships in the external landscape and projects them into the internal landscape. The purpose of storytelling is to achieve harmony between the two landscapes, to use all the elements of the story in a balanced way – syntax, mood, figures of speech – to imitate the landscape harmony within the individual. Story has the power to settle a state of mental confusion through contact with the all-pervading truth of relationships that we call “the earth.”
These ideas are naturally open to interpretation. But I believe that the observations can be applied to so-called nonfiction as well as to traditional narrative forms such as the novel and the short story, and to some poems. The distinction between fiction and nonfiction is often obscured by disputes about what is “true.” In the indigenous literature with which I am familiar, the basic distinction between narratives is that of the authentic from the inauthentic. A myth that we tend to think of as fictional or “so metaphorical” is as authentic, as real, as the story of a wolverine in a man’s lap. (The distinction is, of course, the unusual nature of myth—the conditions for telling myths are often more strictly defined than those for telling legends or folktales—but all of these narratives are rooted in the local landscape.) Disrupt this connection means doubting the story itself.
The power of storytelling to nourish and heal, to calm the troubled spirit, lies in two things: in the skillful reference to unquestionable sources, and in the listener's awareness that the narrative has not been influenced by hypocrisy or pretense. This fundamentally simple fact is, for me, one of the most impressive features of the Holocene history of man.
Today we are more accustomed to thinking of "truth" as something that can be explicitly stated rather than as something that can be metaphorically evoked outside of science and Western culture. Likewise, truth cannot be reduced to an aphorism or a maxim. It is something living and ineffable. The story creates an atmosphere in which the truth becomes recognizable as a pattern. Insisting on relationships that do not exist puts the narrator in a false light. A lie is the very opposite of a story. (I do not mean to confuse ignorance with deception or to suggest that the narrator can perceive everything that is intrinsic to the landscape. No narrator can portray a landscape completely - perception and language have their limits. But to invent something that is not in the landscape, something that cannot be verified in the landscape, to consciously establish false relationships, is not telling a story, but lying.
Due to the complex and complex nature of the landscape, it is not always possible for the narrator to fully understand everything that is contained in the story. The narrator's intention must therefore be to evoke honestly some partial aspect of what the landscape encompasses. Since different individuals understand the story at different levels, the storyteller understands that he must focus on the elementary truth—who was there, what happened, when, where, and why things happened. The story will then contain similar truth at other levels—the integrity of the primary level of meaning will be transmitted to all the others. If the storyteller carefully describes the order before him and uses his storytelling skills to amplify and emphasize certain relationships, the story may even be more successful than he himself can imagine.
I would like to conclude by returning to the stories about wolverines that I heard in Anaktuvuk Pass. After the stories were finished, I wrote down details about the biology and ecology of these animals. I sent the information to a friend who lives with the Kríji. When I saw him after many months, I asked him if the Kríji had been interested in the Nunamiat knowledge of the nature of wolverines. What did they say about them?
"You know how they are," he told me. They said, 'It could have happened.'"
With these simple words they gave The Cree people showed their own knowledge of the wolverine. They acknowledged that although they had never seen anything of which the Nunamiut spoke, they accepted the observations as accurate, not considering the narrative as a context for misleading ideas. At the same time, they maintained their dignity by not overestimating their trust in the Nunamiut, a distant and unknown people.
Whenever I recall this courtesy from the Kriyas, I think of the dignity that belongs to us when we stop clinging to truth and recognize that the best we can get of those fundamental truths that shape our lives is metaphorical—story. And most of this we will probably only recognize if we show each other the respect that the Cree showed the Nunamiut. Beyond all this—that the inner landscape is a metaphorical representation of the outer landscape, that truth is most fully revealed not in dogma but in the paradoxes, ironies, and contradictions that distinguish compelling stories from others—there are only failures of imagination: reductionism in science; fundamentalism in religion; fascism in politics.
We should care about our national literatures to the extent that they heal us and lead us to spiritual enlightenment. They can do this as long as they are written with respect for the source and the reader, and with an understanding of why the human heart has been broken again and again throughout human history. brought closer to the ground.