The World in Traditional and Modern Terms

It is a July evening in 1992, and I am driving north on Colorado Highway 71 on my way from Bent's Old Fort to Stapleton Airport in Denver. I have stayed too long and am in danger of missing my flight, the "red-eye" back to Baltimore. On the advice of the superintendent of Bent's Old Fort National Historic Site, I am taking this shortcut, a two-lane road instead of the interstate, I-25. The superintendent has assured me I can make good time this way, and he is right. As he explained, "It's a straight road with no traffic. There's one little jog about fifty miles north that tells you to slow down for Punkin Center." I've been a little high on fatigue and caffeine for hours, but I am getting a bit drowsy now, so I pull over to get yet another Diet Coke out of the trunk of the rental car.

As I step out, I am struck by the silence. There are no headlights in either direction; there are no artificial lights at all, I realize. On an impulse I switch off the engine and headlights. The stars in the night sky, seen through this dry, clear air without ambient light, are brilliant. I am always surprised in a place like this that there are so many.

I think about the meteor shower of 1833, which the Cheyenne regarded as a sign that the world was about to end. Cheyenne warriors rode about on their war ponies, dressed and painted for battle, singing their death songs. From inside the walls of the newly completed fort, the Bents and their employees watched.^[1] To the Cheyenne, as to people in all traditional societies, the heavenly bodies and their cyclical movements were the ultimate and most reliable benchmarks in their system of cultural mean-

ings. Mircea Eliade has presented a strong case that such celestial phenomena are archetypal to the arrangement of territories, cities, and religious edifices in traditional cultures worldwide.^[2] Of course, this works reflexively: Meaning has been previously assigned to celestial phenomena through their inclusion in ritual and myth. Further, by attaching their value and belief system to the arrangement and movements of the heavenly bodies, traditional peoples are linked to the eternal, the predictable; what is cyclical appears to change but is eventually proved immutable. If the connection is convincing, a traditional people finds refuge against the vicissitudes of time.

On the narrative level, the Big Dipper in Cheyenne mythology for example, is the form taken by seven orphaned children. The eldest child, a young woman, was to be the bride of the White Buffalo. The other children did not want their sister, who provided for them, to leave, and so they took refuge in the limbs of a tree. The White Buffalo sent his herd to butt the tree. When the tree was about to go down, the children shot arrows into the sky and were drawn up behind the arrows to form this constellation.^[3]

On the physical level, the stars in what we call the Big Dipper, the constellation Ursa Major, move. One can easily watch them move here on the Plains if one is outside and takes the time on any clear night (and nights are rarely not clear). But one can also watch them move back to where they were before, making a complete cycle. A line drawn through the two stars that form the far side of the cup of the dipper will connect with a star nearby, the star at the end of the handle of the Little Dipper. This star, which we call the North Star, does not move. The Big Dipper will make a complete circuit around the North Star every twenty-three hours and fifty-six minutes. As mariners in the Northern Hemisphere haste known for centuries, the North Star offers an unchanging point of reference for navigation. Likewise, in the fiat landscape of the Plains, as wide and changing as a sea, the North Star and other celestial bodies offered the Cheyenne orientation not apparent in the daylight hours.

This orientation was more than spatial, it was cultural and integral to the Cheyenne's sense of how the world was constructed. I can't help but wonder if the myth about the creation of the Big Dipper is a dreamlike reference to the relationship between the Cheyenne and the Anglos. This relationship became central to the Cheyenne way of life in the early nineteenth century. For about one-quarter of a century., while the Bent & St. Vrain Company operated their big wading post on the Arkansas River, there was a kind of marriage between the two groups. The Cheyenne were new-

comers to this land, a long way from their ancestral home. In the traditional way of looking at human life, this is something like being orphaned.

A lifetime is filled with the changes and uncertainties that come with the passing of time, while myth is timeless and therefore eternal. Myth is thus the realm of the sacred. By participating in the rituals that mold the social world—the world of human events—after the sacred, each person finds consolation for the uncertainty and unfairness in his or her life and for the knowledge that individual life must end. Against what Eliade termed the "terror of history," traditional man arrays his myths, rituals, and symbols which, he believes, provide him access to a higher reality, one impervious to the ravages of time. Eliade observed that "an object or act becomes real only insofar as it imitates or repeats an archetype. Thus, reality is acquired solely through repetition or participation; everything else which lacks an exemplary model is 'meaningless'; i.e., it lacks reality." Such "primitive" ontology has a Platonic structure: "Plato could be regarded as the outstanding philosopher of 'primitive mentality."'^[4] According to such an ontology, celestial phenomena offer the archetypes—the "ideal forms"—and all else is only a reflection of these. The world would, indeed, seem to be coming to an end when the archetypes appeared to be falling from their exalted positions.

Standing alongside the empty road, I find myself remembering a conversation I had a few years before with a very modern friend, a lawyer living in Washington, D.C., who was going through a divorce from her equally busy and competent lawyer husband. Facing life alone, she said, was like looking up at the stars and thinking that there were more stars beyond the ones that you could see . . . and more stars beyond those . . . and more beyond that, endlessly. Doesn't this describe the estrangement from a traditional system of meanings that is so much a part of the modern condition?

From a modern, existentialist point of view, as Eliade has pointed out, "the man of traditional culture sees himself as real only to the extent that he ceases to be himself (for a modern observer) and is satisfied with imitating and repeating the gestures of another. In other words, he sees himself as real, i.e., as 'truly himself,' only, and precisely insofar as he ceases to be so."^[5]

Modern man, in contrast, claims his "reality" by acting alone. He eschews a traditional basis for his behavior and takes delight in the intellectual exercise of debunking myth as illusion, portraying ritual as reactionary, and revealing the use of symbol to be manipulative. He constructs the world on his own, drawing from his "own" resources (not realizing

that they are a part of his culture). In doing so, he recognizes implicitly, at least, that this task—to create oneself, to become the American "self-made" man, for example—is daunting to all but the most adept at modem life. Traditional peoples, in this scheme, are relegated to the ranks of the unenlightened. The enlightened, it is true, must cope with chronic existential anxiety. as best they can, although they are sustained somewhat by the knowledge that this very anxiety anoints them as a member of a kind of cultural elite.

It is to this point, the point of absurdity, that modern Western thought has come. Modern man must validate his existence by proclaiming that such validation is not possible. In the post modern world, which many social critics say is at hand, all must avail themselves of the "bricolage" approach to world creation that Claude Lévi-Strauss once attributed to traditional cultures.^[6] As traditional man once picked through the ruins of a traditional world, a world destroyed by modernity, salvaging fragments and fashioning them into a makeshift universe, so now modern man must adopt the postmodern strategy of mining the debris of the world he has turned against itself.