Conserving a Culture
Pille Bunnel
February 1999

While visiting Manu in Hawaii I was deeply touched by her passion, and began a progress of reflections concerning culture. Some of what I now wish to write are thoughts she inspired then, some is the netting of those ideas into the fabric of my own passion, my concerns, and my conversations with others. I do not know how I will be able to write coherently the various nodes of thought without a map of the multidimensional landscape that they pertain to. But drawing the map would be tedious, both in the doing and in the looking. (Metaphorically, I guess that is what academic writing often attempts to do; ie. provide a detailed map of a cognitive terrain rather than inviting the reader to experience the landscape by dwelling in it and looking around for themselves.) I will begin by telling about an experience I had:

The water looked brown, cool, and turbulent. As I stood on the rocks where river and ocean met, I watched the flow and counterflow. Though the volume going to sea was great, and the flow below the rocky outcrop much faster than I could possibly counter, the waves were even greater. Each time one crashed in, the river flow would be momentarily reversed. What would I do if I were in there? Would I be washed to sea to be pounded by incoming waves, or would I be relentlessly tossed back and forth? Perhaps I would be able to catch a rock in the short lull of balanced forces and clamber out. I did not wish to try it.

But upstream it is wider. Manu intends to swim to the falls, so it must be feasible. I am a friend of water, I feel comfortable in water, I wish to go with her and am delighted when she asks. She has taken others before, but does remark that the river is more full than usual. I am glad of her reassurance that she is a life-guard; my own bronze cross was over a decade ago. In accepting the invitation, my concern is to know what to do in this unknown; so she explains the route. We will not be able to talk easily once in there.

Manu leads the way, and I follow. The water is delightfully cool, and the swim against the current quite manageable. But an unexpected, uninvited apprehension also detracts from my power - so I am happy to pause in the unexpected shallows of the middle. I wish I could see in the water! The
silt masks so much, I cannot see the patterns of flow below the surface, I cannot see the configuration of this place. This is the source of my apprehesion. Now the next stage, to the far side. This turns out to be a little frightening, as in the greatest current I am barely able to make headway... but then I slip out of its compulsion into a quiet countercurrent which gently bears me to the base of the falls. Manu is good with her encouragement; neither patronizing nor uncaring. A light touch. I think she must be a wonderful inspiration to the youth.

Now to climb up and go behind the falls. This is easy as I follow Manu's route. The rock is good, many holds, and it is neither sharp nor slick.  But passing under a corner of the falls the pounding "shower" renders the foot and handholds invisible! I must grope my way - though Manu offers her
hand I want to find the way myself. She sees that and waits. Not difficult only a little slow - so the persistent drenching by solid "chunks" of water chills me. We sit awhile and enjoy the space, I am
quietly excited, it is such a great experience to savour that I do not wish to disrupt its happening by remarking on it.

But I am chilled in the cool mist behind the falls, and hug myself into a ball. When it is time to return I am happy to do so. But the image of the great reciprocal flows at the outlet daunts me; and I tell Manu I am afraid of being washed out to sea. She says it will be easy; and I trust her fully. I know she will not give false encouragement; she is so clearly honest. And when I inquire about the depth before jumping in; I realize I could comfortably have jumped from a higher point - it is 50 feet deep!
And yes, the swim back was a quick, easy flow; and I quickly warm up on the rocks, slurping an ambrosiacal passionfruit that Manu retrieves from the tossing to and fro place. Evidently it is not as dangerous there as it appeared to me; she enters and leaves with impunity.

Afterwards I reflect on the experience. The main concern was the UNKNOWN of it. A second swim there would be very much different. Indeed I would not have done it if it were not for the surrogate experience of another.  Unless it were a true emergency; in which case I would have considered it possible and would have accepted the risk. I would not have risked the unknown danger for the pleasure of the swim. My pleasure is not IN the danger, nor in overcoming it, it is in the swim itself, in the sense of extending my existence, my knowing of mother earth, through my participation with this new aspect.

How does one find the path to such a doing? It is good to have a guide. If I had not had Manu in front, proving the do-ability, I might have paniced the moment I met the particular current which challenged me - maybe. I might have shifted my focus from following Manu upstream to reaching
instead the other shore, downstream if necessary. How can I know what did not happen?

What if one does not have a guide? One explores incrementally in a manner where the knowing is adequate to the extrapolations, the expansions of understanding one makes. This is a physical, embodied, example of what it is we, all animals, always do. We compose a texture of knowing that  is based in a vast number of unconscious "looks" (by looks I mean sensings, with all our sensorium). This texture, as the dynamic configuration of our own nervous system, naturally emerges in a manner that is coherent with all these looks. As happens in a coherent process, the texture itself arises such that extensions to this process are possible. As the whole is composed of the dynamic of our living, it pertains to the dynamic of our living. It fits.

New points that belong in the texture appear appropriately interpolated. And as we drift in any direction and extent of our indivual knowing (our niche) we can etrapolate ahead adequately. This is the undertanding that allows us to navigate newness with confidence. Then, in the actual experience, we refine the texture according to the many new "looks" such that yet another extrapolation is possible. We step into the new, but it is not an unknown. We do not step blindly. We have the biological basis for comfortably living newness. (Indeed we are well in this, and unavoidably do live each moment as new, but this is a different story)

Now, I will never again have a first swim in a river leading to a waterfall. This can only happen once. But I will have first swims in other rivers with other patterns to learn. I must take care not to extra- polate this experience too far, for I do not have the "thousand looks" and the "hundred secret senses" to ground my understanding in this domain (see also notes on "detecting regularities). I could have come to an adequate understanding for doing this if I had encountered a smaller waterfall first, or encountered this one in low flow with transparent water. It is because of the nature of composi- tion of our moment by moment existence that learning cannot be forced or programmed. However the conditions - circumstance and emotioning - for looking can be created.

To teach is to enchant someone into the making of the thousand looks with the hundred secret senses. In so doing the learner will just as a matter of living form the internal texture that corresponds to the cognitive terrain. A landscape cannot become known from memorizing the map. Teaching is not that, though in practice this is what we usually demand of students. This is not to devalue maps, a map is a good reference to have when one desires to explore a landscape for oneself. (Training is a
different matter, and often training stands for "education") And this brings me around to Manu's passion: recognizing and conserving Hawaiian culture.

Manu is clear that a culture is grounded in place, that it pertains to the ground for our existence, the place on earth where we live in a history of having lived there. I did not attempt to read her thesis during our brief visit (though I would like to, sometime) and I imagine much of what I am contemplating she has given deep thought to. But I will make an innocent look from my particular perspective; mostly for myself, but also in the hopes that whatever emerges is in some manner or other a contribution to her. I would like that to serve as a meaningful "Thank You!" for all she and her family did for us during our visit.

The task of cultural education is to create and to live the culture that the children are being invited to. To create the enchanting context for making the thousand looks with the hundred secret senses (I will write an addendum to explain what I mean with the hundred secret senses - it is not literal) What is central to a culture is the pattern of emotioning and sensing, the way of being in the world. A culture is not the artifacts of that culture; rather the artifacts are created in a manner that is consistent with the way of being. Neither is a culture the skills for making the artifacts, nor the language, nor the songs. It is not even the particular doings that an anthropologist might document. Yes, these are all pertinent to the culture, but in a different way than we might have thought.

The skills of makings and the songs and the language - all these observable aspects of the culture a in a particular way of being in a particular place in the world, they a congruent with that being. They embody, or carry, facets or aspects of the dynamic texture that is the culture. As one participates with, engages with, these various facets the texture begins to be revealed. The artifacts, the skills, are thus carriers of the way of being, sensing and emotioning and acting. I think this is particularly so in the richness of language and song; where the shaping of awareness flows with the evoked dynamic. It is not the words of the language, nor the grammar, but the compositional or poetic nature of it (and of course words and grammar provide the procedure). Since the language arises as melody of the culture, in its use it evokes the texture. Using the language composes or creates one's being in a way that is particular to the poetic texture of that language. Or said another way - the culture resides in the spaces between the words and withing the silences in the song. It is the invisible that modulates the also invisible soul. Yet both soul and culture, though intangible, reciprocally shape and are shaped by the tangible world.

This is true of any culture; but we may well prefer one to another for a variety of reasons. One culture may distance us from our ground of being, another may regard the earth and all its beings as legitimate others. One culture may reveal connection to place, another may abstract us into a  homosphere or even robosphere. And from such abstraction it is near impossible to grasp that there may be anything else. A culture simply has to be lived, lived in the thousand looks and hundred secret senses, over and over and over again. The task of cultural education is to enchant the other to make these thousand looks. To make them IN the culture, not ABOUT the culture. As I looked in the forest, not about the forest.

So when we teach the old skills of a culture, skills that predate modern technology, it is not in the desire of returning to that time, that era. These skills do not pertain directly to the circumstances that now exist. Yet doing the crafts, the arts, learning the skills, is like a patterning of ourselves. We change, literally at the cellular, the biochemical level to become beings that understand, sense, emote more closely according to the culture. (As long as we do this practice of skills IN not ABOUT, that
is as long as we bring our presence, ourselves, to the doings.) It is the dynamic of the doing, the living, which is a carrier of the texture of the culture. It is in this that we begin to be able to extend the texture, just as I described the extension of learning of how to swim in a river. One creates newness in a way that is harmonious, coherent in the pattern. And in this way one creates the culture in a way that is appropriate to the circumstances of now.

Manu said she did not know what Hawaiian culture is. I think this is wonderful - I think that if she could name it as an object to be described it would not be a culture, but only the map of one. The culture now cannot be described or expected to be anything particular. It will arise in the emotioning, the sensing, the living. It is a texture of existence that is grounded in the texture of the place it a in. There is a historical connection that is itself a harmony, I would say a beauty. There is a well being, a creativity and passion of living in such harmony that cannot be if a homogeneity over space is demanded.

Let me end, for now with a line of thought that Kathleen inspired.

I have had errands to do around town that seem to drag on endlessly as the traffic is very bad this time of year, and worse each year with increasing population. It truly is a matter of the built homosphere not being condusive to human psyche and bodyhood (a unity), and thus that which we
abstract as "health". One feels reduced to robothood as one's movement is first removed from direct physical experience by being made sensorially virtual in driving, and then even that becomes so very restricted in any sense of freedom given dense traffic.

Driving is itself a rather odd sensory motor coordination - the sensory gives the impression of speed, but the motor does not implicate the bodyhood which has a history of evolution for speed. We can do it yes, but we are not fully well in it, as we are in walking/running/swimming. I do remember supposedly amusing anecdotes of how people used to claim that the newly invented automobile was bad for humans because it made them to go at unnatural speeds. Those people had a sense of what was being altered. Nowadays children grow up taking vehicular travel as normal, and do not think to think about it. What is this progress!

Kathleen phoned me the other morning with a realization that she disliked this city living so much it made her unwell. She saw that living the pattern of this culture changed us so that we were not only a "cancer on the earth" subsuming the biosphere into the explosively expanding homosphere, but also that this living altered us at the biochemical level so that cancer as a human disease has become common. This is indeed just a mirror image of what I had been thinking of in terms of traditional, that
is older cultures that were connected to the biosphere. This culture abstracts us, removes us, from the texture of existence in which most aspects of our bodyhodd evolved. We are not fully biochemically, micro-structurally fit to live the modern technology. We become ill by living this culture without adequate opportunity for "repatterning" ourselves in loving relations, in song, dance, and story, without adequate opportunity to touch the texture of the earth in walks, in contemplation,
and in earthbased doings.

Just like human relationships cannot be lived in the abstract, but are lived in the depth of the particular, so also the relationship with earth is lived in the particular. It has to do with locale, it is specific to the texture of place. This is not trivial! We are told to think global and act local. We cannot do so, for that is all abstract from place. We must look, see, come to know the local - know its texture, know it in our bones, in our cells. From this we can imagine the consequences at the global, but we can never see the global - only know some consequences and extrapolate the rest. We expand the local texture and map it in a global. This is possible because the whole is already coherent, arisen in an intersected mutually modulating coherent history of evolution. So I say instead, know local, care global.

We are the loving animal arisen in loving relationship with each other and the earth, we are formed in a texture that fits the texture of the biosphere. This fit, this harmony, is the origin of what we see as beauty, it is also the ground of our wellness and wellbeing.

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