North-3 Text-3

"In other words, even the earth and nature have their psychic function as well as their terrestrial ones, and one may serve the earth and be on the ground (or beneath it) in more ways than one, i.e., through psychic activities, and not only through natural ones."
J. Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld. New York, 1979.

J. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge, MA., 1988

P. Kingsley, “Common Sense: A Interview with Peter Kingsley.” Parabola, Spring 2006.

"wherever it is used, the mask manifestly announces the incarnation of a mythical personage (ancestor, mythical animal, god). For its part, the costume transubstantiates the shaman, it transforms him, before all eyes, into a superhuman being." M. Eliade, Shamanism. New York, 1964.

"Back then, he mentions, one shaman regularly commuted back and forth to the village of Kugluktuk, four hundred miles east. 'How did he get there?' I ask. 'He flew...like a bird. But our missionary soon stopped all of that.'"
J. Waterman, Arctic Crossing. New York, 2001.

Shamans' masks from the Arctic Circle hang in temperature-controlled museums, crystals secreted in crusty fissures. The pulse of drums on which spirits galloped to the Otherworld, are harnessed by bells calling The People to church. Magical flights are flown by bush pilots on featherless wings, and healers, once paid in caribou meat, now bill the government. Yet, rain winds its way down through primeval horizons, rivers rise and fall, trees flare, blacken, and split open, when lightning strikes at the height of lengthening summers, dropping hot seed-cones onto re-fertilized ground.

In Spring plants continue to blossom, and for (Empedocles), we humans are plants: human plants. Actually we are seeds and have not yet become plants. We have not budded yet, have not yet started to open and blossom. We have the potential to become full human beings but the potential has not been realized. And I find this amazing and terrifying, that someone 500 years ago–someone who was laying the foundations for all our philosophical and scientific disciplines–said we’re not yet human, because glaciers, shrunk to puddles, will someday display their long blue-white fissured faces again, and dazzling icebergs rise from the waves of cooling seas.

                  Pursuing two fishers, chased caught
       looked upon with Owl's eyes the two
       disappeared, wheeling upstream.

        Behind the smokehouse traps
        seemed to embrace flesh only,
        daring not to look see find.                     Glancing further than from what
          his trance was hunting he crossed
          the river, and buried his bones.

Caves of Paleolithic Art, asymmetric as an shaman's mask, are stumbled into, high water marks of Modern Art lost beneath fields of chthonic earth central to an understanding of how these social groups that invented anthropology and modern art have appropriated exotic things, facts, and meanings. (Appropriate: 'to make one's own,' from the Latin proprius, 'proper,' 'property.') It is important to analyze how powerful discriminations made at particular moments constitute the general system of objects within which valued artifacts circulate and make sense for forty thousand years. Without loss, there is no discovery and what is discovered, is who we are.