A few changes; The good old days; Scalping

Hi folks. Sorry for the wait (yuk, yuk, sorry for the Farmsworth). I know, it’s been a while. I’ve been hiding out. But I’m back now, and I’d like to inform you of some changes that occurred to me in deep meditation in a solitary room in Buenos Aires.

First of all, the pretentious third-person dermis of fiction will forever be removed. What you get now is pure unadulterated Larry Farmsworth, his views, his needs, his tangents and digressions. It’s a lot easier to do and a lot less pretentious.

Second, I will no longer be committing myself to a set timetable. The blog will be uploaded on the following schedule – when I feel like it.

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You know those things that suddenly creep their way unnoticed into our pantheon of underappreciated daily necessities? Things that maybe we can remember living without, or maybe our parents can remember living without, that vague sense of newness genetically passed on. I’m talking about high-speed internet access, which in the space of a few years has become a contemporary necessity. It hasn’t become so taken for granted that it doesn’t make it onto the list of necessities on your apartment hunting checklist (the list that never gets mentioned - does the place have electric light? gas? running water?), but it’s fast on it’s way. To the eyes of this jaded 23 year old, things to seem to be speeding up. Our grandparents would remember a time without cars and turn to their parents, eyes full of obsolete wisdom, to bequeath on them some patronizing phrase about the good old days. Our parents would remember what life was like without T.V., you know, when kids played outside and nerds did stuff like build toy models and radios, clad in coke-bottle glasses and high waters. And in a few years, say, at the ripe old age of 24 or 26, I feel like I’ll be turning to some young whippersnapper and say, “In my day we didn’t even know what a google was!”

I remember, vaguely, an anecdote about some woman commenting on the newly invented bicycle, something to the tune of “Man was not meant to travel at such speeds.” Perhaps man was not meant to have fingertip access to wikipedia. These days, contests of knowledge have a handy arbitrator, and I barely even bother with those long-winded, hard-headed but sometimes entertaining defenses of facts which I made up on the spot and subsequently convinced myself of their verity. Without a wiki, an argument doesn’t make sense. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thrown my hands up at dinner and said “We’ll just have to wait until we get home to wikipedia it.”

But even our more primitive amenities, the ones that don’t make it on the list, have only been around, or been around for large numbers of people, for a few hundred years at most. While chewing on that cud, you may find access to a broader, more mysterious kind of nostalgia that supersedes any concept of experienced or inherited memory, nostalgia rough around the edges yet nostalgia nonetheless, some kind of amorphous race memory haunting us as we turn the corners of centuries towards the illusion of transcendent mastery of space and time. “I wonder how they lived like that,” you might think, “chopping down trees and planing boards with a hand tool to build their own houses, cooking over a fire on the floor of your one room cottage (which consisted of a tamped down dirt.)” Ventilation system = hole in the roof. I hate white rabbits I hate white rabbits. Little Danny is allergic to wood smoke, that’s why he sleeps in the ditch by the side of the road. I’ve been told that some people still live this way in another dimension, the name for which entered our lexicon at some recent point, a strange twilight zone of humanity called the third world. Scary, isn’t it?

There are some kinds of brutalities we’d like to think we’ve left in the past, things that really take the wind out of the noble savage idea, be your noble savage a pretty white couple in a too-good-to-be-true garden, or a long-haired Apache fading into a sunset in a ghost shirt. Of course, we’ve got our variants, our isotopes of a primal violence that only seems to be limited by tool at hand. We’ve got the curb stomp. For anyone who hasn’t heard of (suppose it’s a verb) curb-stomping, it entails having your enemy open his or her mouth to bite the edge of a concrete curb and then stomping on the back of their head, most likely (I’ve never witnessed one) resulting in rapid death. The term was introduced to white suburbia by the movie American History X. At least, that’s where I found it. (By the way, Edward Norton will be playing Lionel Essrog in a movie called “Motherless Brooklyn,” as I just learned from IMDB.com. Check it out. I just finished my second read of the book, and it’s well worth your time.) We’ve got styles of shooting. Execution style. Imagine runways with emaciated teenage girls in black hoods with three ghostly holes where their sunken eyes and puckered lips show through. But no, execution style involves (if my gangster movie memory holds up) having your victim kneel before you and firing point blank into his head with a pistol, preferably of a large and destructive caliber. Safe and certain. (Was it from The Godfather part one? “Two in the head, you know they’re dead.”) We have the real life examples, their reproductions in TV, movies, and video games and vice versa. There’s street scrapping and button mashing, input correct sequence to decapitate your enemy or find the carotid artery with your switchblade, blood on the streets and on your home theater system, but what really interests me today is scalping. Maybe it’s just because there’s never been a video game called “Scalp Hunter,” where a grisly crew of ex-cons ransacks Mexico for any hair pieces they can find. Or maybe it’s because I also recently was pulled by my hair (in the best way) through “Blood Meridian,” my second McCarthy novel.

I distrust the use of the word epic as an adjective. It’s like the adjective poetic, or it’s more gangly cousin poetical, words that denigrate the nouns they modify by excluding them from the category of the noun form of the word itself, Epic with a capital E, let’s say. Poetic to poetry, apocalyptic to apocalypse, prosaic to prose. (The adjective epic makes me think of that made-for-TV movie of “The Odyssey” we watched in high school as a kind of anti-venom to the soporific effect of Robert Fitzgerald’s verse translation on a class full of testosterone jacked teenage boys.)

"Blood Meridian" is the first contemporary book I’ve read that may deserve to be raised up to the category of the noun. The externality of the bleak landscape and of the character’s themselves, wandering outcasts, gives the book a hardened, durable surface. The sonorous, rhythmic prose and idiosyncratic syntax remove the rambling storyline from the historical events the book was based on and put it in that timeless void of prehistory, forcing a gap between the ostensible narrative and it’s masterful execution as storytelling. But that’s all pretty much beside the point. The book’s already been praised and printed, is well on its way to canonization or used bookstore obscurity and has no use for my envious evaluations. What I really wanted to yammer on about was one of the quotations sitting on the first page of the novel, because it challenged several theories I have been introduced to on the origin of the practice of scalping.

I suppose that before people bothered with unearthing a more politically correct history of the US and were more concerned with justifying our sordid western expansion, scalping may have been written off as a Native American practice, a vestige of prehistory to be eradicated by the more Christian method of bullet and smallpox. This supposition was challenged by an explanation based in the pre-revolutionary war history which asserted that it was introduced to the Native Americans by the French. According to this theory, the French were in the business of paying local tribes for the amount of English they killed, measured in ears. Because the Native Americans got into the habit of doubling their profits by taking two ears instead of one, the French started demanding scalps as a form of evidence that couldn’t be duplicated simply by taking two of them from one body. Despite the obvious holes (why not just accept left ears, or right ears? Or noses, for that matter?), my budding liberalism was drawn to this explanation, most likely because it sought to redefine what was seen as a savage’s degradation as the poison of supposedly more civilized culture on an innocent race. And I didn’t think about it much after that. That is, until I hit upon this introductory quote, so here it is.

“Clark, who led last year’s expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a re-examination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier shows evidence of having been scalped.”

That’s from The Yuma Daily Run, June 13, 1982, and thanks, Cormac McCarthy, for digging it up for me.

It doesn’t really prove anything either way. But it brings up the question, and made me curious once again about the origin of removing a fallen enemy’s domepiece by drawing a sharpened edge across his forehead and applying pull force to their hairdo. Let’s see what wikipedia has to tell us about the subject and consider our homework done.

The first reference comes from that undisputed lord of historical firsts, Herodotus.

“Scalping was practiced by the ancient Scythians of Eurasia. Herodotus, the Greek historian, wrote of the Scythians in 440 BC: "The Scythian soldier scrapes the scalp clean of flesh and softening it by rubbing between the hands, uses it thenceforth as a napkin. The Scyth is proud of these scalps and hangs them from his bridle rein; the greater the number of such napkins that a man can show, the more highly is he esteemed among them. Many make themselves cloaks by sewing a quantity of these scalps together".”

So apparently scalping does run deeper than the Wild West. How’s that for killing two birds with one stone? Handkerchief and war trophy in one. Here we are in ancient Europe –

“Scalps were taken in wars between the Visigoths, the Franks and the Anglo-Saxons in the 9th century according to the writings of Abbott Emmanuel H. D. Domenech. His sources included the decalvare of the ancient Germans, the capillos et cutem detrahere of the code of the Visigoths, and the Annals of Flodoard.”

And, by far the most relevant information, right there in good old North America –

“According to ethnohistorian James Axtell, there is abundant evidence that the Native American practice of scalping existed long before Europeans arrived. Axtell argues that there is no evidence that the early European explorers and settlers who came to the Americas were familiar with the ancient European practice of scalping, or that they ever taught scalping to Native Americans. Axtell writes that the idea that Europeans taught scalping to Native Americans became popular recently, during the 1960s. This idea quickly became conventional wisdom because it fit the tenor of the times of the counter-cultural 1960s, writes Axtell, but he argues that archaeological, historical, pictorial, and linguistic evidence contradicts this notion. Certain tribes of Native Americans practiced scalping, in some instances up until the 19th century.”

But before you get too self-righteous about your civilized European ancestry –

“Both Native Americans and American frontiersmen frequently scalped their victims in this era. It is believed that contact with Europeans widened the practice of scalping among Native Americans, since some Euro-American governments encouraged the practice among their Native American allies by offering bounties for scalps during times of war.”

And if your dreams of scalp hunting have been shattered by the soft culture of peace and prosperity of the first world, you just may have a loophole –

“In Canada, a 1756 British proclamation issued by Governor Charles Lawrence offering reward for each scalp has yet to be officially repealed.”

One more quotation from wikipedia, because I love when the reference loop closes, the six degrees of separation in the information age –

“Blood Meridian, the famous novel by Cormac McCarthy, is about a group of mercenaries making a living off of indian scalps, and features the activity extensively.”

In case it wasn’t already obvious, the above quotations were all shamelessly pillaged from www.wikipedia.org. There are some cool images of scalping survivors, too.

So there you have it, spurious historical anecdotes destroyed by the unquestionable authority of Heroditus, a dead Abbot, and someone named James Axtell, who’s obsessions with the closest haircut went and go far beyond my own.

In conclusion, when the presence of modern conveniences makes you feel like a cog in an impersonal machine, or a pixel in a screen playing in the dark for the audience of space, or a node in a network, be grateful that some stinking bearded Frenchman isn’t laying siege to your homestead with the object of removing your hair from your head. With that, I’m back to the world, and remember: if you don’t know, just wikipedia it.