Welcome to Primitive Ground. Our topic is spirituality in a living, cultural context. Our focus will be ancient, and indigenous world views– both in themselves, and as they live on in us. I begin with a story.
Barrio Bubble World
I was formed, like so many Mexicans-in-America– or Italians, or Poles, or Irish– in one of those always vanishing, always forming ethnic neighborhoods of great richness, depth and insularity. Our immigrant parents or grandparents came to this country full of hope for a better life for themselves, their families, and their cultures. Their little villages each and all grew and flourished, for a while. Oh, these little bubble barrios!
My home barrio was El Sereno. We had a main street, a Rosco, a Market Basket, a mercado, a tiny church and my tiny school. But a rich tapestry lay just beyond Atlantic Boulevard. The great and happy, fruitful melting pot bubbled along, its sounds and smells luring us out. For food, there were breakfast burritos and Der Wienershnitzel, Original Tommy’s Burgers, and tacos del Tio and of Korea. Music could be of the Mariachi, of the Canyons, or something new– Linda Ronstadt with her de la frontera-fused folk rock, the mariachi fusion of the “Lonely Bull.”
Great mid-century America seemed to me, growing up in vast and bright and sunny Socal, to be itself a string of overlapping barrios. Villages Anglo and black, yellow and brown, stretched out in every direction like water beads on a spider web of roads, or glowing lights on a tangled Christmas string.
Foothill Boulevard, A Street Made of Towns
The greatest such string I knew was “Foothill.” This miles-long American Graffiti Boulevard snakes around the blue green foothills of the mighty purple San Gabriel Mountains, in the shadow of the Angeles Crest National Forest. You can cruise Foothill from Sunland to Pasadena, all the way out into the San Gabriel Valley. My parents had fallen in love with and in these foothills. My grandfather had once sought the healing air of Tujunga, in a vain effort to save his young wife from “consumption.” When I was young, we moved in and out of El Sereno, and up and down Foothill Boulevard. All of it was home, all of it, America. Purple mountains’ majesty lay at our backs, a shining sea glimmered in the distance, all above vanishing, orange-fruited plains.
American Dream
Beyond my world lay, just out of reach, the great and dangerous American dream. Dangerous—well of course! Broader America, where her cultures roiled, was world of the Other, the stranger unknown or never knowable.
I met bad cops who’d run us out of their neighborhoods if we stayed past sundown, or in broad daylight once when the car I was road-testing was a bit too tattered. I read about how nasty sailors once beat us up, singling out the flashy clothes we wore. Who knew you could get pounded for dressing like star Jazz musicians? My neighbor in El Sereno told me how narrow men in grey suits with starched shirts kept “Mexicans” out of their Baby Bells. And how that changed when– well, that’s another story.
Woe upon woe—but woeful? No! No healthy, sane person would deny there was racism and classism in the mid-century, as there is today. But as Nietzsche helped me to see in college, sometimes divine things can– or maybe they must– grow organically out of great evils. In a word, jazz! Or rock and roll! Or gospel! That most Mexican thing of all, Mexican bread, was itself a melding of old world French baking with traditional Mexican cooking. We celebrate at Cinco de Mayo our battle against the French at Puebla. But what endures? We horked their bread recipes, made them our own, then set up shop all over the Mexican north. Sadness and bloodshed, then yum. Life finds its way.
A Castle with Spirituality Treasures
Maybe a world, if it really is a world, needs an edge you can sail over. Maybe in a hostile world, building walls helps to demarcate what’s outside. And the keep you craft deep within helps awaken the sense of treasure, valued and timeless, that lies within. Bit by bit through hardship, castles are built, turrets raised, secrets stored.
Something even more precious than pan lie within those high stone barrio walls: the very old, even ancient shards of two very old, even ancient cultures and their spirituality, the Spanish and native Mexican/Indio. Elders on both sides of my family handed down these shards, in some ways unchanged for centuries or more, in some ways made new. Legends and myths, ghosts stories and monsters and cures, rituals and rites, dichos and dreams and their coded wisdom, living lessons passed from old drying lips. Such treasure would rest in great wooden chests inside of our little barrio bubble world.
These to me were the most precious and mysterious things of all.
Travel Blanches the Barrio Bubble Boy
One day, my immediate family left LA. We crossed the country along old Route 66. Passing through Winslow Arizona, I heard Thunderous Divine Voices. Near Washington, DC, at the outer edge of the Mason Dixon line, I had encounters of a more demonic kind. I met the harder edges and profound strangeness of a darker, a more hostile America.
These encounters, too, deeply affected me. Master chefs plunge fresh foods into boiling water to harden outer surfaces and lock in more subtle flavors and textures. Just so, this new Anglo world blanched the barrio bubble boy. The trauma of an Other world with very different values and standards, and different forms of evil, sealed me into my way of life. And intensified my struggle to preserve and understand what lay deepest in me.
(The Owl of Minerva flies at dusk— but can take flight earlier, as soon as hunting season opens.)
Despite the physical and spiritual danger– or because of it?– I grew to love this life of adventure. We continued to move around the country following the path my father charted through politics and activism. I drifted in and out of my old barrio and Foothill worlds, blanched again and again. And so the mysteries I carried with me deepened as I grew.
Learning as Travel
My life at college was a continuation of these travels. In spirit and mind, I traveled to ancient Rome, Greece, Japan and China. Meanwhile, the Divine flashed spirituality at me from all sides: in the full depth and fury of first love; the terror and wonder of strange religious experiences and fits of clairvoyance; and impossibly prophetic and significant dreams. To sort out and handle, and live through these white hot wonders, I began meditating. It was full and rich time– is the half-full glass way to put it.
My “learned” understanding grew, but my sense of mystery about the most ancient, most primeval, most primitive things deepened. I had a strong inner tendency, in food, drink, action and thought, to be drawn to these things. I book-studied the oldest cultures through original source materials on native American and Latin America societies and folklores, but my spade turned. These were dry records of mysterious things whose deep appeal I felt, yet still without meaning or sense.
Finding the Primitive Ground of Human Spirituality
After college, I sought my way in the world. I raised a family and continued my studies. My travels carried me to worlds where folklore and legend still lived and breathed. I amassed rare, local texts, and experienced very old forms of spirituality, and ritual life, first-hand.
One day, not so very long ago, I was living near the mighty blue Pacific ocean, in the midst of my adventures in the world of action. Driven by forces beyond myself, we were getting ready to move. In this swirling chaotic time, I finally got around to serious reading about ancient cultures and spirituality in a set of related fields known as religious studies, comparative religion, and history of religion. Suddenly new ideas and connections roared across my mind like a fire wind-blown over dry grass in East LA foothills.
These were not mere fragments, but masses of materials. They were accompanied by sympathetic commentaries and theories. These last, I traced backwards to once towering, but now obscure, figures in Western philosophy. I began to understand why, and how, these ancient ideas about, and practices of, spirituality were still alive. In hidden corners of the earth. In me. And in the world all around. I had set out in search of Something. I had finally found sacred, primitive ground.
Story’s over. Onward, to the four columns (or “blogs”) that will hold up this world I aim to craft.
Spirituality In Ideas, and Spiritual Ideals-in-Action
This column, Primitive Ground, directly explores ideas about ancient religion, culture, and spirituality. My approach is “philosophical,” in two ways.
First, it is “philosophical” insofar as using direct, non-fiction content show you what’s hidden in front of you, without your being misled, confused, or distracted. I will try shine a light so bright, that it might at first hurt to see. The pain and difficulty of seeing is light shining in. So get ready to dilate.
Second, it is “philosophical” by discussing a feature of the structure of these columns, hidden like anti-sway bars on a roadster. Philosophy, and anthropological/cultural theory, work behind these pages so as to make the parts hang together as a connected whole. Behind these pages— so they don’t make what’s happening any less clear, or too technical. This special kind of unity aims to provide a way of looking at things– a world you step into just as with a novel or a movie, or when traveling on an adventure.
Rite Thinking explores these ideas as ideals in action, in rites and rituals of every kind. Some forms of spirituality are contemporary: Easter egg hunts, Santa Claus rituals, Halloween tricks and treats, ghost stories, seances, numerology, astrology, and so on. Others are ancient: the I Ching, harvest festivals, bonfires, initiations. Others still lie hidden in our daily lives. Our theme is learning how to hear rituals when they speak their minds to us. That is: we’ll discuss what these rites and rituals mean. We approach forms of spirituality as special ways of thinking-in-action.
Latino Spirituality, and Spirited Travels
The final two columns look at these same ideas and ideals, and these same actions, concretely– in my own life.
Mestizaje is about my own cultural background, that of a Chicano, or Mexican-American, or Hispanic, or Latino– or as my brother would say, as a “Meso-Hispano-Lat.” (I prefer the term Meso-Latino-Hisp, but I’ll address this heated dispute betwixt two brothers in a future post). We’ll explore mestizaje— my mestizo culture of the native Latin American/Spanish/African– from the standpoint of what might be called absolute culture: how what is deepest, most important, and most timeless, arises out of what is most specific to a time and place.
Strange Travel Adventures is a blog to which I will post only periodically, and focuses on my own past and current travels. Think early Anthony Bourdain, suffused with even more depth– or depending on your taste, even more excessive nerdiness. Travel itself should always be an “adventure” in the original sense: an exciting or remarkable experience, an undertaking involving unknown risks. Travel done right, that reaches the primitive ground of travel, is a journey to the world of the strange Other. Encountering the Other shocks us; it forces growth. The more adventurous, the stranger, the more truly travel in its most primitive sense– the better.
As if that weren’t enough, these columns express a further, even more audacious hope.
An Audacious Hope
Religion in the modern age is too often a tool of division. Within and among Western cultures. Of the Western against non-Western. Of science against religion, religion against spirituality, religion against secular ethics. Not only in thought– but in deep, deadly division in deeds.
From the standpoint of these older pictures, this is a strange and tragic state of affairs. For millennia, religion and spirituality suffused human culture. Art, religion, ethics, and science– yes, even science!– coexisted in a harmony made possible by how culture was conceived and practiced. Even now– as I’ll try to show you– these old ways of looking at religion and spirituality shine brightly, guiding us in a higher direction, even if we’re stumbling blindly. Oh, what a strange spectacle we are!
I’m trying to hold up our messy, fractured, broken world to a light, at a certain angle. To catch its inner fire. Thereby to illumine a path to order and joy, through a crazy and chaotic world. This is my hope, in these fallen times.
Are you a seeker after spiritual or religious truth or meaning, whether formally “religious” or not, atheist or not, young or old? My only prerequisite is that you’ve descended from our common spiritual forebears, namely, human beings, so that you stand, as do I, upon the same primitive ground. Martians, Venusians, and macaques– you just won’t get it. But the rest of you, please read on. And enjoy.
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