Prologue and Apology
It seems to me that a deductive logic system is among the colder ways to approach reality. It is the extraction of principle from physical. It is, by definition, not reality at all.
I don’t know if there’s any truth to such schemata, at least in the sense that the poets and mythmakers find truth.
Misguided though it may be, it probably doesn’t matter anyway, so here goes nothing.
Walking in Idaho
Two men, of whom I was one and Alex was the other, went for a long hike from the Yellowstone Plateau across the Island Park Caldera and across Idaho and Montana’s Centennial Mountains. It was the first of a nine part trek that leads through Central Idaho’s wonders to the deepest river gorge in North America, Hell’s Canyon. It’s called the Yell-to-Hell.
It was a long hike and had some bizarre effects.
For the first 4 days from the Yellowstone Plateau into the Centennials, in stretches along various high points, we saw Sawtell Peak encroach. Each time we saw it and its spaceship-shaped radio tower, it was closer. And each time we saw it, we had felt and moved exactly in the shape and feel of what lay between ourselves and the last time we had seen it.
Then one day we walked up and over it, and it was behind us, and we stopped seeing it, unless we turned around. At that point we knew and had felt all the rises and drainages between Biscuit Basin in Yellowstone National Park and Sawtell Peak. We had stretched and grown to match the land that had remained, to our eyes, constant and unchanging.
The same growing and stretching happened as we followed the Centennial crest all the way to Interstate 15. We saw the coming and going of Taylor Mountain. Then of Table Mountain. And we saw the perpetual coming of Scott Peak in the Beaverhead-distance and even Diamond Peak in the Lemhi-beyond.
Our minds kept catching up to our eyes, and all we had to do was travel the miles through the landscape. Rise and fall with it, and smell and eat the flowers. Wash in the streams and knock its dirt off our pants before getting into our tents.
Our minds grew, and therefore our selves grew. But why? Or maybe, how?
The Parmenides Axiom
Parmenides was an ancient Greek philosopher. As such, he belonged to a class of people who never visited the mountains or sagebrush steppe of Idaho. On any exhaustive list of the properties of the great ancient Greek thinkers, Has Not Visited the Snake or Salmon River Watersheds should be a met criterion of inclusion.
Or at least, Bertrand Russell makes no mention of such a western visit in his chapter on Parmenides in The History of Western Philosophy.
Parmenides was an old man when Socrates was a young one. He was an influence on him, and on Plato. He held a rather bizarre belief: that there is no such thing as change. There is no becoming nor passing away. He said it like this:
The thing that can be thought and that for the sake of which the thought exists is the same; for you cannot find thought without something that is, as to which it is uttered.
And Bertrand helps us understand like this:
The essence of the argument is: When you think, you think of something; when you use a name, it must be the name of something. Therefore both thought and language require objects outside themselves. And since you can think of a thing or speak of it at one time as well as another, whatever can be thought of or spoken of must exist at all times. Consequently there can be no change, since change consists in things coming into being or ceasing to be.
Sounds made-up. But Parmenides went to all that trouble to think it up, so we’d better take it seriously anyway.
The Parmenides Axiom: There is no past or future, or any change at all.
The Barry Lopez Axiom
In May of 2017, months before the two-man hike, I had the joy of escorting a friend around Idaho. She is from Spain. Her experience with the western part of the continent had been slight. We only had a week, and she arrived to and departed from Boise, which limited our options.
We spent two days in Boise, then drove to Stanley to look at the Sawtooth Range at the tippy top of the Salmon River watershed, then went south through the Wood River Valley, and skirted the Snake River Plain along Crater’s of the Moon. My friend felt real fear there, walking in that hellish and beautiful landscape of creepily contemporary lava flows and eerily ancient lodgepole pines, tortuous or tortured (it was hard to tell from the paved path).
We continued the drive along the point of concavity where the Snake River Plain stopped being a plain at all, and headed southeast from Arco, hurtling headlong down the heart of the void. In the passenger seat, the Spaniard shrunk into herself, spoke rapidly, gesticulated incoherently, and collapsed into an all-too-real attack of anxiety at the vastness of the empty space. Nowhere she’d been that is traditionally ‘flat,’ even flyoverly so, could have prepared her for the thin-air high-desert flat and vast that is southeastern Idaho.
In Yellowstone National Park, our last stop on the tour, which features the headwaters of some of the streams and small rivers that eventually join forces to become the mighty Missouri of lore, it snowed while the sun shone down. She saw geysers and mud pots for the first time. She was amazed at the size of an American bison, but somehow not so interested in the mother grizzly and her two cubs.
Back in Boise after an all night drive from Yellowstone to get her back for a predawn flight, I thought at how strange her week was. How she’d seen landscapes and skyscapes and waterscapes that she could never have imagined. I wondered about all such -scapes that I haven’t experienced and don’t even know how to imagine, how I’m unaware of what I’m missing.
I thought about what Barry Lopez said:
The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of an exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genes.
What shape is my mind? I who grew up experiencing such emptiness, such cold brightness, such high waters, such exposed stone, such twisted oldgrowth?
The Lopez Axiom: One’s mind is the same shape as its exterior landscape (to the extent that it interacts with and pays attention to the landscape).
The Leslie Marmon Silko Axiom
Leslie Marmon Silko is among a group of very battered peoples who have a beautiful parity between their exterior and interior minds, to speak Lopezly, and between the mind in their heads and the mind in their blood. Her genes, or blood, speak of the same land that her experience with the external landscape does. She is an indigenous American.
Those of us who carry different landscapes than our current exterior ones in our blood, would do well to listen to the things that people like Leslie Silko have to say about this land.
Here’s one from Almanac of the Dead:
The old ones did not believe the passage of years caused old age. They had not believed in the passage of time at all. It wasn’t the years that aged a person but the miles and miles that had been traveled in this world.
The Silko Axiom: There is no time, only place, and movement through it.
Shaping the Shapes of Things
Some people in the know seem to believe that there is no time, only place. And only miles traveled in and through that place, or exterior landscape. And as we travel through a place, our mind takes its very shape for our own.
The shapes of trees tell the story of the interaction between water, sunlight, and wind of a landscape.
Now we have three shaping elements of our own, three axioms that shape our reality just as the wind, water, and sunlight do that of a tree.
The Parmenides Axiom: There is no past or future, or any change at all.
The Lopez Axiom: One’s mind is the same shape as its exterior landscape.
The Silko Axiom: There is no time, only place, and movement through it.
Conclusion
With all of this in mind, if one were to remove the tops of our skulls after our Centennial crossing, one would find a topographical map of that region, blurry and incomplete due to our short, if intense, passage there.
As we experienced each new watershed and rise and fall of the land, our selves grew commensurably, and time finished disappearing. We became the land we remembered because it was inside of us, just as it was outside of us.
We traded the time we brought into the hills for the rise and fall of the hills themselves.
And as we moved, we no longer moved at all, despite the miles accumulated.
A Better Conclusion
And besides, the hills told me so.
See for yourselves:
An Aptly Timed Footnote
If you happen to be reading in a place where time still exists, please consider taking action to stop the Kilgore Project, a gold mining project in these very Centennial Mountains. The current deadline to contact Diane Wheeler with the US Forest Service at dkwheeler@fs.fed.us with your plea that the mine project be halted is February 9, 2018.
Come read “#Kill the Kilgore Project before it kills our grizzles” for more time-sensitive information and a sample letter you can send to Ms. Wheeler.
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