The House Culture Lives In
"Tradition is not the worship of ashes. It is the preservation of fire." - Gustav Mahler
It is easy to idealize the past and to keep things locked in the old forms of how it was. But every culture must somehow wrestle out the twin impulses of tradition, with its conservative, fetishizing, don't-change-much approach and innovation with its wild urge to change everything, to ferment and foment, and experiment constantly. Every culture threads that needle, which sews together the regalia it wears, differently.
And it's clear that he is speaking of fire and warmth in this because ashes serve many life affirming purposes too from feeding the soil to giving us the basis for soap. Ash has been used in the sacred ceremonies of many cultures. It is not the detritus left over from the 'real' thing of fire. It's another someone, alive in his own way.
But if we were to imagine fire as the living one we are trying to foster and coax out of the wood, as those who make fermented drinks try to coax the fermentation from the liquid in just the right way, then I think the statement stands.
The ashes will not keep us warm on a cold night. They won't provide light to us.
I think what Mahler pointed to was that the point of tradition is to foster life. It's a living something and any of its structures that exist must serve life.
*
I'm in Northern Alberta speaking with a farmer who practices what's known as Holistic Management. I tell him what I've heard about the bacteria and mycellial networks in the soil.
"That's true," he says. "But it's not the first thing you need to do."
"Oh? What's that then?"
"You need to get the mineral balance in the soil right. If you don't get that the bacteria and fungal networks won't thrive."
"And what's the relationship between the life in the soil and the mineral balance?"
Without pausing he says, "It's the house they live in."
*
I'm in Calgary and my friend who is driving me to my workshop this morning at a sweet little venue in Kensington which, along with Inglewood and Bowness, is the only redeeming feature of this corporate oil and gas town.
I ask her how her work is going. She's of European descent but does a lot of work with young people in Indigenous Communities around Alberta. I asked her how she went about her work to support the young people.
"Well, I find that it's important to pull aside the older kids and say, 'Look, all those younger kids are looking up to you. They will want to do whatever you do.' And this often straightens them out. They often change immediately because they know it's true. They see themselves in this position of leadership. And then we have to bring the elders in too and find ways to honour them, have them tell their stories."
I shake my head. My instinct would have been to talk to them directly about colonization and the terrible history of what happened to their people. I'd want to remind them of the preciousness of their pre-conversion ways. I confess this to her.
She shrugs, "Most of them are Christian now."
Somehow I imagined that no living culture could thrive until the colonization was dealt with. I would have gone in focusing on the content and here she was helping to set up a context. I would gone in wanting to talk about the legal histories and here she was setting up the latice work upon which the culture could grow. I would have talked about freedom and she helped them build a framework, an architecture.
*
Robert Bly wrote a book called The Sibling Society. In it, he makes the case that modern culture has largely lost its vertical axis. The horizontal axis is everyone your age and rank in the culture. The vertical axis are those who are older and younger than you, those who came before you and those who will come after and those who might have more rank than you in certain things and those who have less - the hierarchy of the culture.
What we are left with is what he called The Sibling Society in which everyone goes to school with only people their age and in which intergenerational relationships are scarce and respect for elders and all those who walked before us and reverance for the young and all of those who will walk behind us is largely absent.
In its own way, the book makes the case for the need to re-establish the vertical axis.
It might be the center pole of that Big Tent of our days.
Without it there's no house to live in.
And culture needs a house to live in.
*
In the old story of Parzival and the Holy Grail we find Parzival (a name that means 'young fool') stumbling across the Grail Castle. The land is ailing because the king is wounded and ailing. But the Grail castle is a palace of delights. Everyone is partying while the land is ailing. And no one seems to be asking anything much of the king who lies there suffering. In his first vist, Parzival chokes.
He is supposed to ask the question.
His coming was prophesized. But he, following his mother's advice to not ask too many questions, says nothing. The next morning the castle is empty and he spends the next twenty years searching for it again and being yelled at by those older and wiser than himself for his failure.
When he returns, a humbled man, there is the king, still ailing. And he asks him a big question. Now there are a few different versions of what he asks the king but it seems to me that the question itself isn't the thing. It could be almost any big question. But it has to be the kind of a question to which a younger man needs an answer - an answer he can't seem to come to on his own.
*
I was speaking with a friend whose life's work is about helping people to heal their guts and the culture in it.
I asked her if she ate a lot of sauerkraut and kimchi and the like. She shrugged. "I used to. But once you heal your gut and get the culture right you don't need it as much."
And I think about this farmer, so knowledgable about soil, and how he'd said the same thing. Once you've got the mineral balance right and the culture is set, it self perpetuates itself without a lot of labour for you. You just have to make sure you don't kill it.
*
Stephen Jenkinson, author of Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble. In it, and when he speaks, he makes the case that elders are not self-made. That one can't, or at least properly shouldn't, announce themselves as an elder anymore than one should announce one's self as a shaman. Nor does it seem fitting for older people to get together and form an Elder's Club - each annointing each other as elders. It seems that the architecture of it, or the chance that any architecture appearing at all, might come from this: young people make elders.
But that's too barely laid out. After all, if that were true then the bringing together of the old and the young (a miracle in this modern culture) would catalyze some chemical chain reaction and boom! You'd have an elder in your midst. But, of course, even on those rare occassions when the old and the young are together, this is not a given.
So, to render it more deeply - it might be that it's the need of the young people for the old, it's the sorrow of young people, their overwhelm and lostness and their willingness to ask something of the older ones in their midst that lays the table for wisdom to finally appear. The heartbreak of younger people might be a precondition to the medicine of older people, unsure that they have anything to give at all, appearing.
Stephen Jenkinson writes, "The elder proceeds as if he or she is needed, rarely with any invitation to do so, that lack of invitation being as close to authorization as he or she is likely to get. The elder proceeds as if the sorrowing insignificance of the younger ones is all the prompt that is necessary or likely. That inarticulate sorrow and the poverty that beggars and mutes it is what makes the case for elders in our midst."
And once I recall him saying, "The fundament of elder hood is not your capacity to be one it’s your capacity to have one in your midst. The whole event of elderhood is in the recognition. Elders don’t make elders. Young people do that. You don’t just get to name yourself one. The default striving of older people is to get respected which is covering the poverty. They are waiting, not for each other, but for young people. Young people create elders by seeking them out. When a young person looks at you in this way, it does something to you. The ultimate consequence of kids not seeking elders is old folks homes."
Culture needs a house but, when we put all of the old people in a house together, away from everyone else, this is the ending of culture.
Might the day come when instead of this, we take a knee next to some older ones and say, "Old timers. You have seen so much and grown so tall. Would you be willing that we might plant ourselves next to you, in the shade of your branches? And hidden from the Sun as we are, might you feed us a little of the abundance you've gathered under the soil? The Sun is too glaring. It's too hot. It has tempted some of us but they grew too fast and died to young. Will you be the forest house under which we might grow that there might be a chance for a forest again?"
*
So there it is, the young people hitting their knees and the older people, seeing this and proceeding as if their appearance matters now, those are the two sides of the mighty arch leaning against each other and held together by that keystone of community. Or maybe the elders are the foundation stones on which both sides of the stone gate are stacked, the masons finding they could get no solid foundation on the soil. I don't know.
But I imagine Parzival standing there, bereft and bruised by the decades and I imagine the king lying there with his own decades of suffering. And no one has asked anything of this king and his suffering and so no wisdom has appeared. Suffering does not automatically becomes wisdom until someone asks something of it. And something is rarely asked for until it is needed.
Perhaps unknown to him, Parzival is reconstituing the vertical axix of culture. He is, with his undoneness, helping to encourage that old, sturdy beam into standing again so that the canopy of culture might be draped over him once more, or, perhaps for the first time - the king, become an elder, finally the central pole in the Big Tent of our mutual lives.
Culture needs a house to live in.
*
It's easy to look at our ancestral cultures and turn what we find into archetypes in our head.
It's easy to fetishize it as something that happened back there. Or to try to recreate it exactly as it was.
But I think what is needed is living culture, now.
I think this world needs cultured humans desperately and the living fire of culture will not come from worshipping the ashes of bygone days and weeping that it isn't so anymore.
The ash of our ancestral cultures won't keep us warm. The ash heap continues to grow - and has its own utility but fire must be made anew in every generation and fire needs wood or coal - those are the houses that fire can live in.
Fire must be made fresh and, if there are coals of our ancestral lines that have been smoored but not extinguished, then they must be gently blown upon and given the tiny shack of new kindling, and then sticks and until, if we are lucky, that fire lives on in its regal, bonfire hut in the center of our nights, keeping us warm.
Culture needs a house. Might it be that we build it.