Littourati News: Literature Genre Map

Maps don't have to be representations of physical spaces.  Maps can locate places in all sorts of spaces.  Here is a map of genres, which places various novels in space according to their types.

Click here to see Book Country's Genre Map.

Michael Hess

Blue Highways: Stonehenge on the Columbia, Washington

Unfolding the Map

I feel like this post might ramble a bit, but I think LHM was really trying to make sense of time and space and put it all together in the context of his trip.  I don't think he expected to run into a replica of Stonehenge in southern Washington, and frankly, I didn't expect that we'd have such a thing either.  I mean, I know that there is Carhenge, made out of cars, and there is a henge made out of old refrigerators. But a full replica?  That's pretty cool.   To see where Stonehenge on the Columbia sits, see the map - be sure to zoom in with satellite mode to actually see it!

Book Quote

"A little before sunset, in the last long stretch of light, I saw on a great rounded hill hundreds of feet above the river a strange huddle of upright rocks.  It looked like Stonehenge.  When I got closer, I saw that it was Stonehenge - in perfect repair....

"....In truth, the circle of menhirs was a ferro-concretehenge, but it was as arresting on its hill as the real Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain."

Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 9

Stonehenge on the Columbia River, near Maryhill, Washington. Photo by Gregg M. Erickson and in the public domain at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to site.

Stonehenge on the Columbia, Washington

There is an awful lot of self-reflection on the part of LHM in this chapter when he finds Stonehenge on the Columbia.  It affords us a good time to do some reflection as well.  I'll give a short synopsis of what LHM reflects upon.

When he finds this Stonehenge, quite unexpectedly, LHM is first struck by the convergence of past and present, which happened to him once before at the Navajo petroglyphs of Hickison Summit.  He remarks that this Stonehenge was built by a Sam Hill to commemorate the sacrifice of American doughboys in World War I, and how some graffiti on the monument gave it a kind of historical authenticity even though it was simply a mask of another more authentic monument far away.  He finds a Polaroid of a naked woman posing by some of the stones...her pendulous-breasted pose in the fading light hearkens to something more primal and elemental.

LHM then discourses on time.  He discusses how when we look at the stars that we look into the past, and speculates that when a telescope is built that can look back to the beginning of the universe, astronomers will be looking at the beginning of time and at the matter that now makes up the human race.  The original Stonehenge, he says, was an attempt at a time machine, one that could take the starlight - straight out of the past - and use it to predict future seasons and astronomical phenomena.  He begins to connect all that he sees around him in the universe and concludes that to escape his ego, that narrowness of now, and achieve concord or union with all things he has to reach outward - to embrace the past and the future.

I remember having this sense of things interconnecting in, of all places, New York City at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There, in a wing all its own, is the reconstructed Egyptian Temple of Dendur.  This temple was given to the United States by the Egyptian government because it was to be submerged by the waters of the Aswan High Dam and because the United States had assisted in rescuing other sites of archeological significance.  One thing that captured my attention when I saw it was the grafitti on the temple.  One in particular stood out - an inscription by a man in the 1800s who was from Brooklyn.  I can imagine that, in the middle of the African desert, the man who carved his name into the temple in the 1800s thought that it would remain there in perpetuity.  Instead, his name ended back up in New York City three generations later.  I laughed at the irony of it all, a cosmic irony that shows that nothing in our world is permanent and fixed even when we "build it to last forever."  I realize now that the places that I've carved my name, physically and in the virtual world, will also fade over time and that any remembrance of me might also end up being a delicious bit of irony if it survives at all.

I am also struck by how the original structure of Stonehenge, in England, was built as somethat that was functional.  We are still trying to decipher the exact function of Stonehenge, but theories include an astronomical observatory, a religious center, a place of healing and a place of burial.  However, nobody quite knows.  Regardless, it did perform a function, and in its longlasting mystery gained prominence as the last remnant of a millenia-long-dead and unknown culture.  In a way, it serves as a gravestone for that culture it represents, and its mystery is the epitaph.

On the other hand, the Stonehenge on the Columbia was built specifically as a memorial.  It has no other function.  There is no mystery.  It was never used as an observatory other than those who, like LHM, looked out at the stars and pondered the mystery of time and space from within its concentric circles.  It is not used to predict planting and harvesting seasons, or to foretell eclipses.  We have much better ways for doing those functions now.  Nobody brings themselves or their loved ones to Stonehenge on the Columbia for healing, unless somehow the hope of the founder in establishing the memorial somehow has some healing effects on long-standing and vanishing pain from the First World War.  Sam Hill, who built the monument, was mistakenly told that the original Stonehenge was used as a sacrificial site and he wanted to memorialize the young men of Klickitat County, Washington who were sacrificed to the god of war.

There are many places of past function that have turned into monuments.  Almost every monument we are left with once had function.  Yet, I have to wonder if the functional structures that we have built today, our modern buildings of concrete and steel, will one day become monuments.  Just as the pyramids rise above Egypt, will our Empire State Building and Sears Tower, or their remains, become tourist sites for tourists trying to capture a dead culture.  Just as we read about the Alexandria Lighthouse, which was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, will people in the future be awed when they learn about the Golden Gate Bridge, a monument to our civilization's current and maybe past greatness?

I've never heard of a monument turning back into something functional in other ways.  That was before I went to the Star Axis in New Mexico.  It is a work of art being built into the side of a mountain.  Aligned with the axis of the earth, it allows one to walk through past alignments of the Earth with the stars, and future alignments also.  Because the Earth wobbles on its axis, the North Star of the time of the Egyptian pyramids was a different star, Thuban, than our North Star today, Polaris, which is different from the North Star of 10,000 years from now, Vega.  I wonder if after our civilization is dead, and if there is a time when humanity enters a period not unlike the Dark Ages when knowledge is not widely disseminated as now but is perhaps kept alive by small groups devoted to learning, if this huge sculpture will become functional and serve a purpose other than as a sculptor's long-envisioned project?

If we look to the past, we can certainly take pride in our accomplishments as a civilization.  We see where we've come from and how we've progressed.  But we can also possibly see our future in the past.  Civilizations die, and are replaced by new civilizations, just as if we gaze into the cosmos, we look into the past and see our future in the stars that have been born and have died before our star and world existed.  We live in the now, and think it will never end, but all that seems permanent will fade.  As LHM says, our present will become our past and our future will become our present, and try as we might to fight it, change renders all impermanent.

Musical Interlude

One of the funniest scenes in the mock-documentary, or rockumentary, called This is Spinal Tap is the scene where the titular band performs their song Stonehenge.  I am putting the full version of the song here, but if you want to see the scene in the movie where the band's grandiose plans to have a giant version of Stonehenge lowered to the stage end up hilariously wrong, look at this YouTube video.

If you want to know more about Stonehenge on the Columbia

Columbia River Images: Stonehenge
Images of Columbia River Stonehenge
Legends of America: An American Stonehenge in Maryhill
Wikipedia: Maryhill Stonehenge

Next up: Maryhill, Washington

Blue Highways: Caddo Mounds State Historic Site, Texas

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapToday's post is a contemplation of time and space, brought about by William Least Heat-Moon's (LHM) own musings as he continues through Texas in Blue Highways.  As he says, Black Elk looked from a great height and understood more than he saw, but LHM says he sees more than he understands.  We all feel like that sometimes.  Click on the thumbnail of the map to see, if not understand, our place in time, space and our own mental geography as we continue our journey.

Book Quote

"The sky turned the color of chimney soot. A massive, squared mound, quite unlike the surrounding hills, rose from a level valley; it had been the central element in a Caddoan Indian village a thousand years ago....

"....The aura of time the mound gave off seemed to mock any comprehension of its change and process - how it had grown from baskets of shoveled soil to the high center of Caddoan affairs to a hilly patch of blackberries. My rambling metaphysics was getting caught in the trap of reducing experience to coherence and meaning, letting the perplexity of things disrupt the joy in their mystery. To insist that diligent thought would bring an understanding of change was to limit life to the comprehensible.

"A raw scorch of lightning - fire from the thunderbird's eye - struck at the black clouds. A long peal. Before the rumble stopped, raindrops bashed the blackberry blossoms, and I ran for Ghost Dancing. Warm and dry, I watched the storm batter the old mound as it worked to wash the hill level again."

Blue Highways: Part 4, Chapter 1

A Caddo burial mound at Caddo Mounds State Historic Site near Alto, Texas. Did William Least Heat-Moon contemplate this mound? Photo by Dana Goolsby at http://www.texasescapes.com. Click on photo to go to host site.

Caddo Mounds State Historic Site, Texas

Time is always a mystery to me.  It's a dimension that seems to mock my comprehension of the universe and how I understand it.  We live with time.  Time moves constantly, forward without stopping, and we are all subject to it.

I understand, at least on an intuitive level, space.  I don't exactly know what constitutes space, but I realize that we exist within space.  I spread my arms and realize that I take up space.  I understand that even where I seem solid, I really am a collection of cells and molecules and atoms.  There is space between my constituent building blocks that can be penetrated by particles that are small enough, and so space permeates me.

I understand movement within space.  I remember my basic physics that tells me that an object in motion will stay in motion until it encounters friction from other objects.  I understand that everything moves within space, from the galaxies, stars and worlds to the basic atomic structures that form everything that we know.

But time is incomprehensible to me.  Don't misunderstand, I don't spend a lot of energy worrying about time.  But every once in a while, such as when I'm presented with a musing or some other reason to contemplate time, I still come back to the same questions.  What really is time?  Why does it constantly move forward?  Can anything stop time?  Is there one time, or are there many times moving in parallel?  Once a certain time has come and gone, is it completely over, or does all time exist at once and do we only comprehend our own experience of it?  Why is it that physics seem to indicate that time travel, or something approximating it, is only possible to the future but not to the past?  I understand that there are paradoxes if one were to go back in time, the "if you kill your own grandfather would you cease to exist?" problem.  But why does the past sometimes seem as if we can almost touch it, and the yet the future is always such a mystery?

I often wonder if, in large or small ways, I affect time, or if it is simply a machine set in motion and I am nothing to it.  When I sit down to watch a football game and things start going bad for my team, I wonder if events might have been different had I not watched at all.  In other words, was there a time and event crossroad occasioned by my choice to sit and watch the football game, or did it matter at all?  Do my choices intermingle with others' choices and if so, do some have more influential choices than me that affect future time and events?  Or are future events set and we careen toward them with no chance of altering them even if we knew what they were?

I have stood in historic spots like the Caddo Mounds that, as LHM says above, give off "an aura of time."  I have stood in those spots and felt the past surround me and permeate me.  I have even felt a connection with the past.  A year or so ago, I was standing outside a Norbertine retreat center near Albuquerque, in the desert on the gentle slopes of a mesa near the Rio Grande.  The silence was overwhelming, except when an occasional breeze rustled the native grasses.  Suddenly, I felt a distinct thump.  I'm not sure why there was a thump - maybe I had startled a rabbit and it had thumped a warning or, maybe it was something more metaphysical.  The sound startled me to attention, and I looked around.  There, just about a body length away from me, was a potsherd.  It was the fragment of a pot used by the Indian dwellers of the area in a time long past.  There was no telling how old it was.  It sat there, white with a small section of the pot's design painted and still seemingly vibrant and alive.  I bent down and picked it up and examined it, feeling its texture and marveling at the bit of design.  For a moment, I felt connected to that past.  I wondered if, in that same spot some unknown number of centuries ago, someone using that pot also heard a thump, looked around, and felt my future presence.

If you want a sense of the past and the present colliding, go to Rome.  It is a living museum of the past, and you cannot walk into the Colosseum, with the sounds of Rome's traffic swirling around you, and not be instantly transported back to ancient Rome.  You can almost see, vivid and vibrant in front of you, a newly constructed Colosseum, its benches filled with spectators watching a fight between a tiger and a prisoner, or a mock sea battle being staged on the flooded arena floor.  At a gladiatorial contest, might a Roman patron suddenly sense the presence of an Ohio tourist in our present day standing beside him at the entrance to the arena, both observing what they can see and imagine, just for a moment before the feeling vanishes and the patron hurries to his seat to see the next battle and the tourist hurries to catch his wife who is already moving toward the Forum?

I think much more about time now that I am in my middle age.  I wonder when my life will end and time will stop for me.  I think of civilizations that have come and gone and will rise and fall.  I wonder if time will eventually run down and stop, like a slowing watch that needs to be wound.  Does the eventual end of the universe, whether that constitutes a big collapse or instead, the speeding of matter into a dispersed nothingness, mean that time itself will finally meet its end?  I sit and wonder, and in that moment of wonder I am connected through time and space with all that was, is and will be.  I am connected with all of those before and after me who have sat and will sit in wonder and contemplate the same mystery.

Then, like LHM, I go and resume my own journey through time and space as I comprehend them.

If you want to know more about Caddo Mounds

Texas Escapes: Caddo Mounds
Texas Historical Commission: Caddo Mounds
Texas State Historical Association: Caddoan Mounds
Where in the Hell Am I blog: Caddo Mounds
Wikipedia: Caddoan Mounds State Historic Site

Next up:  North Zulch, Texas