THE INVISIBLE PYRAMID -- A NATURALIST ANALYSES THE ROCKET CENTURY

FIVE:  THE TIME EFFACERS

The savage mind deepens its knowledge with the help of imagines mundi.

-- CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS

There are two diametrically opposed forces forever at war in the heart of man: one is memory; the other is forgetfulness. No one knows completely the nature of the inner turmoil which creates this struggle. Some rare individuals possess almost total recall; others find certain events in life so painful that they are made to sink beneath the surface of consciousness. Sigmund Freud himself learned, as he practiced the arts of healing, to dip his hands into the dark waters which contain our lurking but suppressed memories. There are those among us who wish, even in death, not a name or a memory to survive.

Once I sat in the office of a county coroner, having come there at his request. We had previously had many discussions involving cases of human identification that had come his way. Some of his problems demanded the specialties of my own field, and though I am not an expert in forensic medicine I had been glad to listen to his experiences, as well as occasionally to offer advice on some anatomical point.

When I was ushered into his office on that particular afternoon, a carefully prepared skull gleamed upon his desk. My friend looked up at me with a grin of satisfaction. "You have told me something about what the archaeologist is able to infer concerning the habits of our remote ancestors," he said. "Now I would like you to look at this specimen. The body from which it came was discovered by accident in a drained pond. It had been there for some time and was almost totally decomposed."

I picked up the skull and slowly turned it over. A glitter of platinum wire immediately caught my eye. I drew the mandible aside. "Look," I said in surprise, "this is one of the most expensive and elaborate pieces of dental work I have ever seen."

"Precisely," said my friend. "The job was obviously done by a gifted specialist, and it could easily have cost a thousand dollars. So we know what?"

"That the individual had means and took care of himself," I sparred. "Surely an identification can be made on this basis."

Slowly the coroner shook his head. "We have tried," he said, "tried hard. The man did not come from around here. He came most probably from a far-off big city. It is in such places that this kind of work is done, but which place?" -- he shrugged -- "One could spend years on such a task and come up with nothing. Our office has neither the time, the staff, nor the money for such investigations, particularly if no evidence of a crime exists."

"You mean --?" I asked.

"Yes," he said, "it was very likely suicide by drowning."

"Then shouldn't there be some identification remaining -- a wallet, a ring, something?"

My friend eyed me quizzically. "I wanted you to see this," he said, "not because skulls are new to you, but because you have always worked in the past -- with another set of problems. What you see here in this individual specimen we encounter as a single category." He tapped the magnificent bridgework with a pencil to emphasize his point. "We find a certain persistent number of suicides -- people like this one, very likely a man of wealth -- who, when they have decided to depart this life, do so with the determination at the same time to obliterate their identity.

"Sometimes they travel far before the final act is carried out. At the last, every conceivable trace of identity is abandoned. Wallets with their cards may be hurled away, jewelry similarly disposed of; it is as though the individual were not satisfied to destroy himself, he must, as this man apparently did, bury his name so thoroughly that no one will be heard to pronounce it again."

"But murder," I interjected.

"Of course, of course, we have such cases and such concealment." He turned once more to the skull. "I tell you now, however, that their number is minute compared to these." He elevated the face and looked into it as if for an answer, but the skull stared beyond him unheeding and stubbornly triumphant.

The coroner sighed once more and eased the skull back upon the desk, a certain gentleness evident in his manner. "Well," he said, "I rather think this one will have his wish to be forgotten." He fingered one of the fine wires of the bridgework. "Strange," he added. "He took care of himself -- up to the last, that is. You can see it here. But then this thing -- this shadow, whatever it was -- came on him until he was forced to flee out of the body itself. But no one, if there was by then anyone, was to witness his final defeat. He saw to it well; he had given it thought, he left us a blank wall. Except for a new drainage ditch we would not have found even this."

My friend gestured politely. "A kind of gentleman's end, don't you think?" he said. "Perhaps there was an intent to spare someone, somewhere; who knows? It would appear he came a long way for this and went to some trouble. I won't bother you with any more details. I just wanted you to know what can lurk in these little boxes you and your colleagues handle with such scientific precision. Here in this office we are forced to build a different world with the same bones." He gently touched the skull again. "They are individuals to me, not phenotypes."

"You mistake us," I countered, "if you think we are not aware of the darkness in the human mind. Have you never heard of the damnatio memoriae?"

The coroner's eyes twinkled.

"Of course not," he said. "That is what I got you in here for, to stir me up." He leaned back expectantly.

"It is a different matter from the case of your anonymous client here," I explained slowly, "and is frequently done for obscure or depraved reasons. Do you know that history is full of evidence of hatred for the past, of a desire on the part of some men to destroy even the memory of their predecessors? Public monuments are effaced, names destroyed, histories rewritten. Sometimes to achieve these ends a whole intellectual elite may be slaughtered in order that the peasantry can be deliberately caused to forget its past. The erasure of history plays a formidable role in human experience. It extends from the smashing of the first commemorative monuments right down to the creation of the communist "non-person" of today. Carthage was a victim of that animus. So was the pharaoh Akhenaton, who introduced solar monotheism into Egypt."

I paused, but my friend the coroner only nodded. "Go on," he said.

"The French revolutionists sought from 1792 to 1805 permanently to eliminate the Christian calendar. Today's youth revolt is partly aimed at the destruction of the past and the humiliation of the previous generation. Just as the individual mind thrusts unwelcome thoughts below the level of consciousness, so there are times, when, in revulsion against painful or uncontainable thoughts and symbols, the social memory similarly reacts against itself. Or, again, it may reclothe old myths and traditions in new and more pleasing garments."

I pointed at the skull upon which my friend's hand rested. "Men get tired, you see. This man in the end wanted complete oblivion -- not alone for his physical body -- he wished to make sure he lived in no man's mind.

"The masses," I continued, "can be stirred by the same impulse. There are times of social disruption when they grow tired of history. If they cannot remake the past they intend at least to destroy it -- efface the dark memory from their minds and so, in a sense, pretend that history has never been. There are plenty of examples -- the assault of Cromwell's Puritans upon the statuary in the English cathedrals, or earlier, in Henry the Eighth's time, the breaking up of the great abbeys and the reckless dispersal of their ancient documents and treasures. Even worse was the total overthrow of Inca and Aztec civilization at the hands of the Spaniards. An entire writing system perished on the verge of the modern era."

The coroner's office seemed to grow darker from an impending storm gathering outside. For a moment I had a feeling of inexplicable terror, as though both of us crouched in some cranny beside a torrent that was sweeping everything to destruction.

"What you are saying" -- the coroner's voice came from somewhere beyond the skull -- "is that to know time is to fear it, and to know civilized time is to be terror-stricken."

I nodded. The room grew oppressively dark. I felt an impulse, somewhat against my better judgment, to speak further. The skull had taken on a faintly watchful expression, as though it had in reality projected my thought. Beyond it, all seemed slipping into shadows.

"I am speaking as a gravedigger only," I said, my eyes fixed blindly forward. "But there is a paradox to all digging that only an archaeologist would understand. The best way to be resurrected is to be forgotten. Consider the case of Tutankhamen."

The coroner opened his window. The rain had begun to fall and its scent stole into the room along with a fresh breath of air.

"I know what you mean," he said, as the skull with its gleaming denture was deposited in a drawer. "Sometimes an individual, perhaps a great artist, or a civilization, has to be held off stage for a millennium or so until they can be understood. Like the art of Lascaux, fifteen thousand years forgotten in a sealed cave. In a case like that, even time has to be rediscovered. Not even discovered, but interpreted. It consists of more than the marks on a dial."

I arose and stood beside my friend, looking down on the wet pavement beneath us, where the rain was pushing fallen leaves along the gutter.

"Look," he said, waving a hand toward the street, "every culture in the world has a built-in clock, but in what other culture than ours has time been discovered to contain novelty? In what other culture would leaves, these yellow falling leaves, be said to be emergent and not eternal?"

"Evolutionary time," I added, "the time of the world-eaters -- ourselves."

We both stood silent, watching below the window the serrated shapes of the leaves as they spun past in the gathering dark.

II

"Every man," Thoreau once recorded in his journal, "tracks himself through life." Thoreau meant that the individual in all his reading, his traveling, his observations, would follow only his own footprints through the snows of this world. He would see what his temperament dictated, hear what voices his ears allowed him to hear, and not one whit more. This is the fate of every man. What is less well known is that civilizations, which are the products of men, are in their way equally obtuse. They follow their own tracks through a time measurable in centuries or millennia, but they approach the final twilight with much the same set of postulates with which they began. In Ruth Benedict's words, they resemble a human personality thrown large upon the screen, given gigantic features and a long time span.

Of these personalities the most intensely aggressive has been that of the West, particularly in the last three centuries which have seen the rise of modern science. When I say "aggressive," I mean an increasingly time-conscious, future-oriented society of great technical skill, which has fallen out of balance with the natural world about it. First of all, it is a consumer society which draws into itself raw materials from remote regions of the globe. These it processes into a wide variety of goods which a high standard of living enables it to consume. This vast industrial activity, in turn, enables the scientist and technologist to take command of business.

Scientists are not necessarily rich or the owners of business. The process is more subtle. With the passage of time and the growth of the urban structure, funds for research and development take up a far greater proportion of the budget of a particular industry. So long as the industry is in competition with others, it cannot afford to cling for long to a particular industrial process because of the fear that rival technicians will develop something more attractive or cheaper. The drive for miniaturization in the computer industry is a case in point. Thus the laboratory and its priesthood take an increasing share of the profits as they become a necessity for business survival. They also intensify the rate of social change which contributes both to human expectations and the alienation between the generations. Advertising becomes similarly important in order to encourage the acceptance of the new products as they are made available to the public. National defense is swept into the same expensive pattern in the technological war for survival.

In simple terms, the rise of a scientific society means a society of constant expectations directed toward the oncoming future. What we have is always second best, what we expect to have is "progress." What we seek, in the end, is Utopia. In the endless pursuit of the future we have ended by engaging to destroy the present. We are the greatest producers of non-degradable garbage on the planet. In the cities a winter snowfall quickly turns black from the pollutants we have loosed in the atmosphere.

This is not to denigrate the many achievements and benefits of modern science. On a huge industrial scale, however, we have unconsciously introduced a mechanism which threatens to run out of control. We are tracking ourselves into the future -- a future whose "progress" is as dubious as that which we experience today. Once the juggernaut is set in motion, to slow it down or divert its course is extremely difficult because it involves the livelihood and social prestige of millions of workers. The future becomes a shibboleth which chokes our lungs, threatens our ears with sonic booms, and sets up a population mobility which is destructive in its impact on social institutions.

In the extravagant pursuit of a future projected by science, we have left the present to shift for itself. We have regarded science as a kind of twentieth-century substitute for magic, instead of as a new and burgeoning social institution whose ways are just as worthy of objective study as our political or economic structures. In short, the future has become our primary obsession. We constantly treat our scientists as soothsayers and project upon them questions involving the destiny of man over prospective millions of years.

As evidence of our insecurity, these questions multiply with our technology. We are titillated and reassured by articles in the popular press sketching the ways in which the new biology will promote our health and longevity, while, at the other end of the spectrum, hovers the growing shadow of a locust swarm of human beings engendered by our successful elimination of famine and plague. To meet this threat to our standard of living we are immediately encouraged to believe in a "green revolution" brought about by ingenious plant scientists. That the green revolution, even if highly successful, would not long restore the balance between nature and man, goes unremarked.

Thus science, as it leads men further and further from the first world they inhabited, the world we call natural, is beguiling them into a new and unguessed domain. In a world where contingencies multiply at a fantastic rate and nations react like fevered patients whose metabolism is seriously disturbed, the scientist is forced into a new and hitherto unsought role in society. From the seclusion of the laboratory he is being drawn into the role of an Eastern seer, with all the dangers and exacerbations this entails. To shepherd the recalcitrant masses, or indeed to guide himself safely through a world of his own unconscious creation, is a well-nigh impossible task which has come upon him by insidious degrees. He does not possess marked political power, yet he has transformed the world in which power operates.

The scientist is now in the process of learning that the social world is stubbornly indifferent to the elegant solutions of the lecture hall, and that to guide a future-oriented world along the winding path to Utopia demands an omniscience that no human being possesses. We have long passed the simple point at which science presented to us beneficent medicines and where, in the words of Jose Ortega y Gasset, science and the civilization shaped by it could be regarded as the self-objectivation of human reason. It is one thing successfully to plan a moon voyage; it is quite another to solve the moral problems of a distraught, unenlightened, and confused humanity.

Men wandering in the infinitude of space and time which their science has revealed are trapped in a world of darkening shadows, like those depicted in Giambattista Piranesi's eighteenth-century etchings, the Carceri. The pictures reveal giant buildings in which the human figure wanders lost amidst huge beams and winding stairways ascending or descending into vacancy. Thick ropes hang from spiked machines of unspeakable intent. This world of the prisons is the world of man; the vast maze offers no exit.

Unlike the cyclic time of the classical world, the time of the Christian era is novel. It proceeds to an end and it has arisen through a creative act. Though science has enormously extended the cosmic calendar, it has never succeeded in eliminating that foreknowledge of the nonexistence of life and of individual genera and species which the Christian creation introduced. We bear in our actual bodies traces of our formation out of the animal remnants of the past. Thus causality plays a significant role in our thinking because we have been stitched together from the bones and tissues of creatures which are now extinct.

As our knowledge of the evolutionary past has increased, we have unconsciously transferred the observed complexity of forms leading up through the geological strata to our cultural behavior. We speak of "progress" in a rather ill-defined way, and from surveying time past we have become devotees of time future. We maintain "think tanks" in which experts are employed to play all possible games, to create models, military or otherwise, that the future might produce. We are handicapped in just one way: the future may be guessed at, but only as a series of unknown alternatives.

Some decades ago Henry Phillips of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology expressed this dilemma succinctly. "What will happen five minutes from now is pretty well determined," he wrote, "but as that period is gradually lengthened a larger and larger number of purely accidental occurrences are included. Ultimately a point is reached beyond which events are more than half determined by accidents which have not yet happened. Present planning loses significance when that point is reached.... Here is the fundamental dilemma of civilization ... there is serious doubt whether the way forward is known."

Mathematical statistics arose as a technique for achieving some insight into the contingencies of life -- that is, variable phenomena. This technique does not, however, aid us in discerning those events which Dr. Phillips describes as not yet having happened. It can, at best, inform us that the urban mass is reaching fantastic numbers and that the birthrate must be reduced. Of the end result of these phenomena, as of pollution, it can tell us little. It can only inform us that the trends which are extrapolated into the future spell disaster. Infinitesimal man is beginning to draw the macrocosm into himself, or, rather, it might be stated that through his evolutionary advancement the cosmos is beginning to reach into him. He has yet to prove that he can master the powers he has summoned up.

Man, oriented completely toward the future, suppresses his past as dissatisfying. He unconsciously resents continuity and causality; he is event-oriented. This is frequently reflected in the new motion pictures made to appeal to a youthful audience. Plot gives way to episode. The existential world of the hippy provokes sensate experience but does not demand dramatic continuity. The result is the onset of that chaos in which societal order threatens to disappear.

Thus, with the near destruction of emotional continuity between the generations, time past is vilified or extinguished in favor of oncoming uncoordinated activist time. "Make the revolution," exhorts one youngster. "Afterwards we will decide what to do about it." Another pauses merely to exclaim, "Scrap the system." With those words, we have reached the final culmination of the Faustian hunger for experience. Creative time has been obliterated in order to welcome something new in human history -- the pure and disconnected "event" that has replaced reality. The LSD trip has reached a level with the experience of the classroom. It is not a coincidence that the memory effacers have emerged in the swarming time of the spore cities. Man has followed his own tracks in a circle as great as that of the cometary visitant from space that had ushered in my childhood.

III

As an anthropologist I once came upon time wrapped in a small leathern bag -- a bag such as that in which Odysseus might once have carried the four winds. The way of  the matter was this. It was a small Pawnee medicine bundle. The bundle, among other objects, contained some  feathers, a mineralized fossil tooth, an archaic, square-headed iron nail, and a beautifully flaked Ice Age spearpoint of agate. The date of the latter was easy to identify because of its shape, which related it immediately to a long-gone mammoth-hunting people.

The warrior to whom this precious bundle had once belonged must have had an alert eye for the things his guardian spirit had advised him to seek. There was no way  of telling from this cracked receptacle what powers had been given its possessor or what had been his dreams.  They had come swirling, presumably upon demand, from that dark region which contains the past. The square-headed nail represented the man's own time, but it had obviously been regarded as too sacred to hammer into an  arrowpoint.

Most probably all this contained past in the little bundle was filled with streaming darkness and sudden emergences. For, as Joseph Campbell has so aptly pointed out, "where there is magic there is no death." I was not so  insensitive in undoing the crumbling hide that I failed to feel the shadow of an extinct animal, or touch with longing the intricately flaked weapon of a vanished day. The bundle held in my hand had been a sacred object among a people who believed implicitly in its powers and who understood the prayers and fastings through which the owner had been instructed. I was an outsider to whom the nail could never denote more than a nail, or the flaked weapon stand for more than a bygone historical moment.  I was afflicted by causality, by technological time rather than the magic of genuine earth time.

I have spoken of the time effacers in Western culture as those who would destroy all memory of the dead or, turning from the ancient institutions which have sustained our society, would engage in an orgiastic and undiscriminating embrace of the episodic moment -- the statistical happening without significance. The deliberate effacement of defeated men and broken cultures is, as I have said, an ancient act in world history. The attempt to leap forward into the future or grudgingly to accept the fleeting moment as the only abode of man is particularly a phenomenon of our turbulent era. The causes I have to some degree explored. I have not, however, paused to examine the nature of time in those simple cultures which are without causal or novel time, and where the veil between life and death wavers fitfully at best. Borders are undefined, and animals or men, rather easily exchanging shapes, pass to and fro in ways unknown to the sophisticated world.

Certainly this world of the primitive is a novel one by civilized standards, but not in terms of primitive thought.  There are several reasons why this is so. The distinctions between animals and men that have been established by biological science do not obtain in the primitive mind.  Animals talk, they carry messages, they may be supernaturals. Time itself may exhibit highly eccentric behavior. It may stand still, as it does to those who intrude into fairyland, or again, two kinds of time, the time of human beings and the time of the supernaturals, may exist side by side. This last is a phenomenon on which it would be advisable to dwell for a moment. It is highly characteristic of many peoples outside the urban swarming phase. It tells us something of the psychology of man while he still clung to the savage environment from which he had arisen.

With the Australian aborigines, for example, there are two separate time scales: that of the immediate present, the common day of ordinary existence, and, in addition, that of the period of "dreamtime" or dawn beings which precedes the workaday world. This latter epoch is a sacred, mythological era in which man was first created and in which the supernatural beings laid down the laws that have since governed him.

The past of the dreamtime, however, is not really past at all. The world, it is true, perhaps no longer visibly responds to the forces that were exerted in the time of the ancestors. Nevertheless the atmosphere of the dreamtime still persists, like an autumnal light, across the landscape of the aborigines. It is elusive, it is immaterial, but it is there. The divine beings still exist, even though they may have shifted form or altered their abodes. Man survives by their aid and sufferance. He did not come into existence merely once at their behest. They are still his preceptors and guides. They continue to order his ways in the difficult environment that surrounds him -- a countryside that has been appropriately described as his living age-old family tree.

Totemic rituals establish for each generation the living reality of man's relationship to the plant and animal world which sustains him. His occupations came from the totemic ancestors. Thus man, in his human time, subsists also in a kind of surviving dreamtime which is eternal and unchanging. Both men and animals come and go through the generations a little like actors slipping behind the curtain, in order to reappear later, drawn through the totemic center to precisely similar renewed roles in society. Sacred time is of another and higher dimension than secular time. It is, in reality, timeless; past and future are contained within it. All of primitive man's meaningful relationship to his world is thus not history, not causality in a scientific sense, but a mythical ordering of life which has not deviated and will not in future deviate from the traditions of eternity.

The emergence of novel events has no meaning to the timeless people. Sacred time enables man to escape from or, to a degree, to ignore the profane time in which he actually exists. Among the world's most simple people, we find remarkably effective efforts to erase or ignore all that is not involved with the transcendent search for timelessness, the happy land of no change. Perhaps this was what Plato sought in his doctrine of the forms -- the world  beyond reality so poetically expressed by Margaret Mead as the "world of the first rose, and the first lark song."  Perhaps at this stage of human culture man has sought psychic protection for himself by buttressing the stability of his environment. In his own fashion, he has remolded nature in mytho-poetic terms. He lives his life amidst talking animals and the marks of the going and coming of the dream divinities who are both his creators and the guardians of his days. As closely as a mortal can manage, he exists in eternity.

In this stage, in spite of numerous variations in religious practice over the world, man is basically not a consciously malicious time effacer. He is, instead, a creature to whom secular time has no meaning and no value; he is living in the perpetual light of a past dreamtime which still enfolds him. He is at peace with the seasons and, through decreed ritual, even with the animals he hunts.  Frequently he is terrified by the unusual when it is thrust too prominently before his eyes or cannot be fitted into his accepted cosmology.

This world, a world that man has inhabited for a far longer period than high civilization has existed upon earth, contrasts spectacularly with the secular domain of science. If it is illusory, we must admit that it is at the same time relatively stable. Man lived safely within the confines of nature. A few stones from the riverbed, a bit of shaped clay, some wild seeds, and a receptacle made of bark perhaps sufficed him. On a subsistence level of economic activity, the primitives had actually arrived at an ecological balance with nature. They had created another world of reentry into that nature upon a psychical level.  One might say that, like a turtle, man had thrust out his curious head just far enough to glimpse the harshness of the profane landscape and had quickly chosen to mythologize and thereby make peace with it. On a simple basis he had achieved what modern man in his thickening shell of technology is only now seeking unsuccessfully to accomplish.

Man, in other words, is not by innate psychology a world eater. He possesses, in his far-ranging mind, only the latent potentiality. The rise of Western urbanism, accompanied by science, produced the world eaters just as surely as those other less sophisticated primitives reentered nature by means of the sacred, never-to-be-disturbed time that was not, except as it developed in their heads. 

So vast is the gap that now yawns between the degraded remnants of the hunting folk and their brothers, the world eaters, that even a perceptive anthropologist of a generation ago, Paul Radin, was not prepared in the atmosphere of his time to recognize the unconscious irony in the conclusion of his book The World of Primitive Man.  After narrating many things about the Eskimo and their philosophy, including their abhorrence of overweening pride, Radin quotes the statement of one Eskimo who had been taken to New York. After gazing down into the great canyons of the streets, the wondering native finally remarked, according to Radin's informant, "Nature is great but man is greater still." One can understand the confusion of an Eskimo brought from far ice fields to peer down upon the greatest city of the world eaters. More appalling is the discovery that an anthropologist could have quoted this simple remark with approbation as a profound message to modern man. The irony is deepened when we learn that nature sends no messages to man when all is well.

If the message which Radin interpreted was sent, perhaps, like so many messages from the dark powers, it should have been read with a different emphasis. When man becomes greater than nature, nature, which gave him birth, will respond. She has dealt with the locust swarm and she has led the lemmings down to the sea. Even the world eaters will not be beyond her capacities. Sila, as the Eskimo call nature, remains apart from mankind "just as long as men do not abuse life." This is the message that a more able shaman might have found a raven to carry -- a  raven who could still wing with an undefaced warning from the country of primeval time.

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