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Essays |
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Where For Art Thou, Shanindar?
I am not a Jungian. It's not a philosophical rejection, I'm just too
lazy to do the work. And I've been monitoring teenage sons for a decade
now, so I've developed erratic and inadequate sleep patterns that cause
a hard to shake morning stupor. But I remembered one of my dreams a few
nights back and I cannot let go of it. In my dream, soldiers had peeled
back the ocean waters in order to prepare the ocean floor for an
imminent onslaught of bombs.
It is difficult to do justice to how disturbing this image is. Picture
documentaries in which Alaskan natives are butchering a whale. Cutting
through layers of epidermis and blubber, folding back a long rectangular
flap of skin, revealing the interior musculature. Picture one of the
current crime lab dramas where scientists recreate whatever assault has
occurred. not in the good old fashioned way, with blood and guts
spraying out of bodies. But in the new way, in surgical mode, where the
camera travels inside the body to show a bullet ripping through tissues
and organs, arteries exploding, blood flooding up an esophagus. Picture,
if you can stand it, the Earth itself being skinned. This is what they
were doing in my dream. Men and women both. I am an equal opportunity
dreamer.
By the time I stumbled across the scene, the troops had cleared a swath
of seafloor as far to the south as I could see, and they were busy
working to the north of where I stood on the shore. I could see where
the waters had been folded back on themselves, held in place by some
force I could not fathom. They were completely still and utterly silent
as if they had been embalmed in a living photo. Between my feet and the
immobile waters lay a perfectly uniform pattern of flat fist-sized
cobblestones that fit together like a singular slate. They were empty
and dark, dark auburn brown. There was not a trace of sand, or seaweed
or bone or shell or coral. No trash, no footprints, no foam. It was damp
like a freshly hosed off sidewalk, but not puddled. Wet as if the ocean
could not stop oozing itself to its surface. Wet as if it was weeping
through the pores of the rocks.
I was born a landlubber, but the ocean is a place imbedded in my soul by
my parents through regular southern sojourns during a childhood spent in
the Mid-West and teen years in New England. It is a place I explored
with relatively little constraint. In family picture albums my toy raft
and I are but a dot on the distant horizon. God knows what my parents,
bless their hearts, were thinking. "Look, Fred, how brave our little
girl is to go so far out in the sea by herself."
The ocean is the place where I held a jellyfish on a dare, where I
scraped the skin off my back in the breaking waves, boiled it off my
forearms in the baking sun. It is where I first watched teenagers party
around a bonfire, dancing through shadows while I kicked up phosphorous
sparks from the sand. It is where I first ever felt truly alone and yet
wholly at one with the world. Standing on a pier, staring into the
incomprehensible depth and expanse of power before me, I pondered how
time could have no beginning, and I believed that it could have no end.
The ocean is the place I still go in my fantasies where I am an old
woman obligated to nothing but her own pleasures and survival. It is the
scene that pounds behind a poem I wrote for my father. It is the place
where I mix the sands that he gave me with the sands I found on my own
as an adult after his death, and where I saw him once, walking toward me
along the water.s edge while I poured old memories into new waves. He
and I alone in the wind, our hearts beating to the rhythm of the
incoming tide.
In my dream, there is no surf, no pounding heart, no sound. Even the
troops running their inscrutable cleaning machines along a disappearing
coast are mute. I, too, am dumbstruck. A young soldier approaches me and
issues a warning that I cannot hear. I ask him for an explanation of the
desolation around us but I cannot understand his words. I focus on the
movements of his face as if I can lip read his soul. His mouth becomes a
cave that is all I can see and I try to put my own words in it: no, no,
no. I know where they are going next. I know what is around the corner.
It's a sacred place. I ask the soldier if they are going to fold back
this place, this heart of the sea, and even though I put my words in his
mouth, he nods his head at me: yes, yes, yes.
Eight thousand years ago, the village square took shape. Eleven thousand
years ago we began to farm. Fifteen thousand years ago we were still
painting caves. The Upper Paleolithic cultures splashed onto the earth
somewhere around thirty thousand years ago, during a period of time that
was marked by exuberant advances in tool complexity and a population
mobility that lit the spark of regionalism. Which eventually became
nationalism. Which eventually inspired the production of weapons of mass
destruction. Quite an evolutionary jump from burin chisels and fish hooks.
But forty thousand years ago was the opposite of war. Forty thousand
years ago, at a place called Shanindar Cave, an elder Neanderthal laid
down to die and became the impetus of an obscure but crucial
archaeological double-take. Prior to his death, the increasingly erect
bones of our ancestors had revealed to our learned scientists that we
had truly become two-leggeds, and our scholastic attention shifted to
the skull. The logical assumption was that since we had begun to walk
upright, all significant findings would be cranial. But the bones of
Shanindar debunked this notion. The old man's wounded skeleton marked
the discovery of humans who, for the first time, survived into old age
despite critical injuries such as blindness and loss of limbs. A
crippled Neanderthal fellow who couldn't work, walk or keep up was an
economic liability who threatened everyone's survival and before
Shanindar, such unfortunate souls died young. Abandoned by the tribe.
Often as mere children. But for the first time, forty-thousand years
ago, at a place that is now known as IRAQ, man.s humanity to man was
born when we began taking care of our disabled kin. In my dream, I see
Shanindar Cave in the soldier's mouth.
Even in my sleep, I am cognizant of how few of us there are in this
nether world where I've landed, and these others who are with me, I want
to resent them, but I don't. What I feel is larger than hatred or
hopelessness. I want to dislike the young man who bears the message I
don't want to receive, but I am acutely alone and there is a strange
comfort in his presence. I think I may be at the ends of the earth. Or
perhaps at its beginning. I am a child again, standing in the middle of
an infinite pier, and I don't know which way to walk.
The soldier wants me to evacuate but I can't tear myself away. I look
past his blue eyes out to the stilled waters. Beneath their stony
surface something still pulses. Something that wants to live. I walk
across the cobblestones and no one stops me. I stretch my arms over the
frozen water and hold myself against it. My body completes a circuit and
an aqueous current moves up from the rocks. Through my feet, through my
legs, through my gut like a liquid bullet ripping a forensic swath to my
heart. Tears rise in my throat and pour from my eyes, salty like the sea
and silent as bones.
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