Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Walter, Louise, and Me: Psychogeography, Collecting, and the Organism-Object-Environment Relationship

(Note: This paper was written for a class I recently took, and the professor implied that my comparison was racist.  Should anyone ever read this, I'd love some feedback on that accusation.  The paper is also currently under peer review at Literary Geographies, who are kind enough to encourage posting of papers elsewhere.)

(Further Note: there were originally illustrations in this paper, but Blogger doesn't seem to want to publish them.  I'll add them as soon as I can figure out why.)



Walter, Louise, and Me:
Psychogeography, Collecting, and the Organism-Object-Environment Relationship
Bill Brown notes that “things reside...both at hand and somewhere outside the theoretical field” (Brown 2001: 5), much like Don McKay’s situation of nature in, amongst other works, Deactivated West 100.   Thing theory argues that “inanimate objects constitute human subjects...move them,...threaten them...[or] facilitate or threaten their relation to other subjects” (Brown 2001: 7).  We are, in essence, not simply individuals in a relationship with things, but the relationship itself.  This correlates with Zen philosopher Alan Watts’ assertion that human beings “are not so much an organism in an environment as an organism-environment relationship” (Watts 1971: 72, emphasis in original).  If this is the case, then we can surely posit a triangular relationship, that we are an organism-thing-environment relationship, that each perceived part of the relationship is constitutive of each other part.  Thing theory delineates the organism-object relationship.  Psychogeography, which I would argue is what Watts is outlining, delineates the organism-environment relationship.  What I will demonstrate in this paper is how the object-environment relationship works in disparate environmental settings, and how the three can be tied into a coherent whole.
Louise Erdrich’s narrative in Books & Islands in Ojibwe Country offers a productive intersection between the study of Psychogeography and the study of Collecting in which to begin interrogating the constitution of this triumvirate.  Her journey to the “book-islands” of Lake of the Woods highlights the different ways in which disparate peoples retain and compile the stories that help to define both their cultures and themselves.  In this paper, I would like to tease out the relationship between movement and collecting practices, and investigate the differences and similarities of those practices in nomadic and static cultures.    I will begin my investigation by offering a brief elucidation of the Ojibwe culture.  This will not of course be exhaustive, but I will highlight the nomadism inherent in the culture, and make connections to the “book-islands” Erdrich visits.  Following this I will examine more closely some aspects of pictographs, those at Lake of the Woods and elsewhere, to delineate their importance to the cultures that leave them behind.  This examination will lead into a consideration of the origins of the idea of the fetish, and its roots as a sacred object.  Consideration of the fetish object naturally moves into a consideration of the practice of collecting.  A collector assigns to the object of desire a quality of fetishistic value, what Walter Benjamin might refer to as “aura” (Benjamin 1969a: 221).  Though Benjamin claims that mechanically reproduced objects lose this sacredness, this aura, I contend that for the collector, it is not the uniqueness of the piece (though that often comes into play), but the fact of the piece as belonging to a set that imparts this aura.  The pictographs that Erdrich visits on her journey, and indeed any pictographs and their “unique existence at the place where [they] happen to be” (Benjamin 1969a: 220), could also be said to also contain this aura.  Collecting is a practice that necessitates a movement through space, but presents a very different relationship with the fetish object to the relationship of the Ojibwe with the pictographs at Lake of the Woods.  I will round this theoretical examination out with a description and consideration of my own collecting practices.  This will demonstrate that movement through space is every bit as constitutive of the experience of the collector’s fetish item as it is of the experience of the nomadic Ojibwe pictograph collection, and that these seemingly disparate experiences are simply different iterations of the organism-object-environment relationship of which we are a part.
I have to be very careful here.  It is easy to conceive that many would find my comparison of acquiring the adventures of Superman to the ancient paintings at Lake of the Woods insulting, and even ridiculous.  But we must all be careful when assigning judgment on those things upon which people invest their faith.  The epigraph on my Master’s thesis was a line from the television series Firefly, spoken by a priest, a shepherd, called Book: “It’s not about making sense.  It’s about believing in something and letting that belief be real enough to change your life” (Edlund 2002).  Book articulates here one of the most fundamental misconceptions that is made about faith, about religion.  It is not the story that is important; it is the belief in the story.  Belief is what motivates us, what drives us to be better, to do good.  Faith is belief in a story, not the story itself.  It doesn’t matter what the story is, as long as our belief in the story is strong enough to motivate a, hopefully, positive change in our lives.  I spent a full four years of my life with Morrison and Quitely’s All-Star Superman, and I know it’s not a true story.  It can’t be.  At least, it’s not true in the sense that it happened.  But it is true in the sense that I came to believe that it reveals a way of living to me.  I believe in Superman, or that particular version of Superman, not because it’s real, not because believing in a corporately-owned creation of two young men in the nineteen-thirties makes sense, but because the things I found in that story were enough to change my life in some way.  And, much as the Lake of the Woods pictographs are, the items that constitute my collection are graphic depictions of mythic stories.  We mythologize our collections.  Baudrillard says “the collection offers us a paradigm of perfection...an unconscious and triumphant discourse” (Baudrillard 1994: 8), as apt a description of the spoils of faith as I have ever heard.  So when I contrast this to Louise Erdrich’s experiences at Lake of the Woods, with the pictographs that have been a part of her culture for thousands of years, it should not be looked upon with disparagement, nor perceived as insult.  It is simply that I have found the story that is real enough to change my life and, in collecting, a practice real enough to change my life, just as so many have found the same in the painted islands in Northern Ontario.
It will be best to begin by considering the culture that produced the pictographs that form the impetus and backdrop for Erdrich’s journey.  She links the name of the people explicitly to her project, and to the book-islands, when she offers that the word “Ojibwe” was derived from “the verb Ozhibii’ige, which is ‘to write’” (Erdrich 2003: 10-11, emphasis in original).  Before this, however, she also notes that the word Ojibwe is derived from Anishinaabe, or “Anishinaabeg, which has been translated as...‘Those Who Intend to Do Well’” (Bellfy 2003: 180).  For Scholars of literature, it might not be too difficult to consider those two translations as one and the same. Travelling from the Atlantic shore, compelled by “some unrecorded disaster” (Bellfy 2003: 180), the Ojibwe eventually settled in the areas around what is now the Canadian and United States Great Lakes area.  Rather, however, than a settler culture, as the eventual European colonialists would be, the Ojibwe were, and perhaps still are, nomadic, a hunter-gatherer society “that involves the intra-annual movements of families (or other social production units), necessitating the displacement of their dwelling(s)” (Turner 2009).  In a 1941 article in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, John Myres offers this extensive definition:
...that mode of life in which a human community is enabled, through its control of domestic animals, and also through its dependence on them, to dispense with the cultivation or even necessary collecting of plants or plant food, or any deliberate interference with the natural vegetation of a region.  It also usually dispenses with any permanent abode; for such a nomad community can (and must) wander wherever its animals find pasture... (Myres 1941: 19-20, emphasis in original)
These scientific definitions are usefully inflected by considering John Tanner’s narrative in The Falcon, which gives numerous instances of how this lifestyle was carried out.  Noting an Autumn where large numbers of people in his village died, he reflects that “[a]s the winter approached, they began to get better and went, at length, to our wintering ground, at the same place where we had spent the former winter” (Tanner 2011: 51).  Important to note here is that rather than the colloquial conception of a nomad as someone, or a group, who travels without destination or base of operations, the Ojibwe nomadism was a movement between places, and often the same places year after year.  Later in the narrative, and indeed throughout the narrative, this movement is reiterated:
At this place we remained until spring, when, at the commencement of the sugar season, we went to Ke-nu-kau-ne-she-way-boant.  We applied to the Indians there to give us some trees to make sugar...but the old woman was dissatisfied and refused to remain.  We therefore travelled two days by ourselves, until we found a good place to make sugar... (Tanner 2011: 99)
We see here an example of Tanner, and the people to whom he belonged, engaging in “intra-annual movements,” movements “shaped by the availability of resources and by the social networks required for security” (Turner 2009).  Where we must turn now, in order to parse the link between the nomadic Ojibwe and the contemporary collector is the “degree of mobility...among nomadic households” (Turner 2009).  Tanner notes instances where the amount of property in his family’s possession was simply too much for the temporary dwellings within which they lived.  He says “While we lived here [near a trading house] we made a number of packs and as it was inconvenient to keep these in our small lodge, we left them, from time to time, with the traders, for safe keeping” (Tanner 2011: 91).  Similarly, while travelling, or while preparing to travel, his family would stow belongings in sunjegwun, hidden caches along their routes in “remote place[s] in the woods” (Tanner 2011: 77).  What we must take from these two descriptions of possessions in the nomadic culture is that one did not carry on a journey that which one did not need.  Thus, though the Ojibwe “had a tradition of inscription that predated the early seventeenth-century arrival of Europeans in the region” (Bohaker 2010: 11), it is unlikely, given the speed, and occasional urgency, with which they travelled, that they would necessarily carry with them the birch bark they used for writing (Bohaker 2010: 11).  Instead, some left the stories and tales of ancestors and gods, their “spiritual geography...meant to provide teaching and dream guides to generations of Anishinaabeg” (Erdrich 2003: 50) on the islands of Lake of the Woods.
In his “Indian Culture and Language” that accompanies John Tanner’s narrative in The Falcon, Edwin James makes the claim that “[w]ithout literature [meaning written literature] to give perpetuity to the creations of genius, or to bear to succeeding times the record of remarkable events, the Americans have no store house of ancient learning to open to the curiosity of the European race” (James 2011: 346).  James is of course betraying here a privileging of the written word over the oral, but also betraying a prejudice of the linguistic against the pictorial.  He later notes that “[t]he method of delineation, by which they aid the memory in retaining...these compositions [poems], exhibits, perhaps, one of the earliest steps towards a written language” (James 2011: 349).  James refers us then to this series of memory aids, and the poems that they represent. 
 
Fig. 1: From Edwin James, "Indian Culture and Language" (Kalamazoo: Hansa-Hewlett Publishing, 2011; print; 351).
These hieroglyphs are, of course, virtually identical to the pictographs Erdrich encounters, and indeed those I have encountered in my own travels.  What James fails to recognize is that these symbols encompass stories and ideas in and of themselves, and by eschewing our, or any, limited written language, also encompass ideas that cannot be expressed verbally.  I would refer once more back to Benjamin’s idea of the “aura” of a work, that quality of a work that links it with “the domain of tradition” (Benjamin 1969a: 221).  It is acknowledged that, as well as serving aesthetic purpose, pictographs and petroglyphs of ancient cultures “were produced as part of a magic ritual to ensure a successful hunt” (Janson 1969: 19) or some other real life endeavour, and indeed “there was no clear distinction between image and reality” (Janson 1969: 19).  

Fig. 2: From Louise Erdrich, Books & Islands in Ojibwe Country (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2003; print; 53).
We see this sacred quality of the pictograph enacted in Erdrich’s work.  She tells us of a man who “leans over” the edge of “a silver fishing boat” “and scoops a handful of tobacco from a pouch, [and] places it before the painting [on the rock]” (Erdich 2003: 50).  Erdrich herself offers the following thought on “the ritual of offering tobacco”:
Believing or not believing, it was all the same.  I found myself compelled to behave toward the world as if it contained sentient spiritual beings.  The question whether or not they actually existed became irrelevant...Whenever I offered tobacco I was for that moment fully there, fully thinking, willing to address the mystery. (Erdrich 2003: 16, emphasis in original)
We will return later to that first statement, that “believing or not believing, it was all the same,” but what is currently pertinent to my argument is that the nomadic culture that produced these pictographs, daubed on cliffs and islands in “an eternal paint” (Erdrich 2003: 60), left them in a place that they would always be able to visit.  

Fig. 3: From Louise Erdrich, Books & Islands in Ojibwe Country (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2003; print; 54).
As I have noted in looking briefly at ancient Ojibwe culture, both anthropologically and in John Tanner’s narrative, movement was an intrinsic fact of life for the pre-European contact Ojibwe, so the painted rocks1 of Lake of the Woods became a location to which they could return, re-read their stories and histories, and re-visit the legends that defined them as a people.
How, though, do we move from this pictographic movement through a landscape to the late-capitalist pastime of collecting?  A short consideration of the idea of the fetish will light the way.  William Pietz suggests that the word fetish derives from the pidgin word Fetisso, which in turn derives from the Portuguese word feitiço, “which in the late Middle ages meant ‘magical practice’ or ‘witchcraft’ performed, often innocently” (Pietz 1985: 5).  Feitiço itself “derives from the Latin adjective facticius, which originally meant ‘manufactured’” (Pietz 1985: 5).  Thus we can look at the fetish as a manufactured magical act, the importance of which is “its status as a material embodiment...of iconic resemblance to some immaterial model or entity” (Pietz 1985: 7).  Considering one series of pictographs, Erdrich notes that “[m]ost of the major forms of communication with the spirit world are visible in [the] painting” (Erdrich 2003: 56), visible in a manufactured aesthetic work meant to embody “[t]he lines drawn between things...between a human and a supernatural being” (Erdrich 2003: 56).  If this is the case, then surely the pictographs at Lake of the Woods are fetish objects.  They seem to conform to Pietz’s proposed definitional origins, and, as the example of the man in the silver fishing boat, and indeed of Erdrich herself, testify, their “power is precisely the power to repeat [their] originating act” (Pietz 1985: 7).  The Ojibwe who left these drawings behind, to “provide teaching and dream guides,” did so in a manner that allowed repeated use, repeated movement through, over time.  Again, as a nomadic culture, it would not be desirable to necessarily carry all fetish objects with which to invoke a higher power.  Instead, leaving those fetish objects in a central and accessible location allows for the repeated use of such objects through generations.
Erdrich’s movement through the fetish-paintings of the ancient Ojibwe is balanced by her visit to an island filled with books.  Obviously the work of a collector, the act of collecting shares numerous similarities with the paintings at Lake of the Woods.  It is simply a transference of the act of creating fetishes from a nomadic culture to a static one.  Pietz claims that “‘Fetish’ has always named the incomprehensible mystery of the power of material things to be collective social objects experienced by individuals as truly embodying determinate values or virtues” (Pietz 1985: 14).  The contemporary collector, however, experiences this mystery of the social object as a solitary practice.  Here we seem to veer away from the collective social practice, the group travel through a collection of fetishes at Lake of the Woods.  But the practice of collecting does indeed involve a movement through the world, one similar to the movement Erdrich, and her ancestors, experience with the book-island fetishes in Northern Ontario.
As with so many things in the cultural or the literary, we can look once more to Walter Benjamin.  Benjamin situates himself as a “genuine collector” (Benjamin 1969b: 59).  “How many cities,” he asks, “have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!” (Benjamin 1969b: 63).  Later in this same essay, he lists a litany of places for which the books hold memories, and through which he passed in procuring the books (Benjamin 1969b: 67), so we see how the act of collecting is intimately inculcated with a movement through, and connection with, spaces and places.  We will have to recognize here the primary difference between these two fetishistic acts: the fact of cultural difference.  As I have noted, the nomadic culture simply could not carry with it all of these reminders of stories and legends.  Instead they were left as a communal resource.  The static culture, however, and especially in the case of the collector, privileges ownership and individual habitation.  But the collection of paintings at Lake of the Woods and the collection of the solitary collector both serve very similar functions.  Neither “displace attention to the past; rather, the past is at the service of the collection” (Stewart 1993: 151).  Both the painted rocks (stones?) and the private collection bring the past into the present, be it through the “teaching and dream guides” of the Ojibwe or the recollection of the “marches..in pursuit of books” that Benjamin undertakes.  Erdrich’s journey takes place at the opening of the twenty-first century, Benjamin’s early in the twentieth, but both bring the significance of the past into the present moment, and both bring the significance of the movement that is inculcated in each collection into the present moment as well.
            But how can we link this interaction with the wild to the interaction with the urban, that which is characterized by Erdrich’s narrative with that of the collector?  Erdrich makes her journey specifically out into the wild places of Northern Ontario.  Having driven these lands myself, I can attest to the relative lack of “civilization” (a word I use with a heavy dose of irony), even along the Trans-Canada highway which carried me across the country.  Away from this stretch of road, quite literally off the beaten track, the land truly is, to our Western European heritage-inflected eyes at least, wild.  Her route takes her deep into wilderness, the wilderness of the lake, to islands upon which the only inhabitants are hundred- or thousand-year old pictographs and the spirits that accompany them, and the shades of the artists who offered up these tributes.  But where is the wild in the procurement of a comic book of Superman?
Rebecca Raglon calls narrative scholarship “nothing more than a self indulgent exercise” (Raglon n.d.), asking, for example, “Why [we would] need a narrative about a mountain ascent to contextualize an academic’s critical approach to John Muir” (Raglon n.d.).  But everything we have seen thus far, both of Erdrich’s journey to answer “a question that has defined [her] life” (Erdrich 2003: 4), or Benjamin’s unpacking of his library, his acknowledgment that “ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects” (Benjamin 1969b: 67) points to the very personal nature of the fetishistic journey, be it to visit stationary fetishes, or to bring multiple fetishes to a single location.  Both ways are movements through space, movements into place, and these movements help us to define the importance, at least in part, of the fetish object, and of the three part relationship of which fetish and environment are parts.  No less can be said for my own practices in procurement, so I will dip into some “self indulgent” narrative scholarship to demonstrate how collecting apes interaction with the wild, though oftentimes, at least in my own case, it is the wild of the city.
I shall describe my process (or, at least, my most recent process) in procuring a comic book.  If I’m to be realistic, there are two.  The first involves a public transit system.  I leave my house, go through the gate that separates my housing complex from the park behind it, and walk up the path toward the train station.  On a normal day, I pass three or four people, none of whom I make eye contact with.  I think back here to Sid Marty’s tales of encountering bears by himself in the Rocky Mountains (Marty 1999: 159-77), keeping them in peripheral vision, but not looking directly at them, not offering a challenge.  There is still this wildness in our inability to, or our decision not to, look at strangers in the eye.  I enter the station, make my way to the platform.  Some days, there is a press of people.  Here, I often think to the work of Henri Lefebvre, his rhythmanalysis, the notion that we are trained, from an early age, to navigate particular spaces in particular ways (Lefebvre 2004: 42).  In the train station there are both up and down escalators, as well as a wide stairway.  No one, of course, tries to go up the down escalator, but more interestingly, no one, or very few, try to go up the left hand side of the stairway when entering from the bottom, and vice versa from the top.  We are trained, from an early age, to acknowledge this practice, that of always moving to the right on a staircase.  Though Lefebvre contends that this is a function of society, Karsten Heuer’s Being Caribou throws a wrench into that ideological works.  There are moments in his narrative where he and Leanne Allison, his companion, decide to break off from the path of the caribou, and attempt to gain ground by taking a different route, a plan that spectacularly backfires (Heuer 2006: 167-68).  They realize that the caribou know which ways they should travel, which routes are best for the good, and for the ease, of the herd.  In a crowded train station, the choice, even the potentially inculcated choice, of which side of the stairway to take is for the good of the herd, whether we acknowledge ourselves as herd animals or not2.  The train ride itself I often find very disturbing, for a couple of reasons.  I am quite claustrophobic, and depending on the time of my trip, space can be at a premium.  I am also quite familiar with the sight of trucks full of cattle, or pigs racing down the highway, and I am all too familiar with the destination to which those poor creatures are bound.  I am far more at home in open spaces, much, I’m sure, as are those animals in the trucks.  My involuntary anxiety and fear at the press of the crowd, at the enclosure in the vehicle, hearkens back, I’m sure, to some animal in me that enjoyed the company of its fellows, as long as it knew it was not confined, not trapped, left to be wild.  So, though I am subjectively an individual, an organism, these encounters on my expedition, subjective encounters, are bound up intrinsically in the eventual prize I seek in my collecting journey, the journey inflecting the object inflecting the person.
Once I reach my stop, with great relief, I step onto the platform.  From here I am the hunter, I am John Tanner stalking through the wilds of Northern Ontario, desperate for food and shelter.  I know that this comparison seems flippant, but it is, much as with the prior discussion of faith, not a disparagement of Tanner’s, or anyone else’s, struggles. It is simply an overlay, an understanding of the wildness that we often foolishly deny that we still possess.  For many years, almost as many as I have collected comic books, I have described the drive to collect to people as a need to hunt, a need to find something vital and precious.  The need to collect is a drive for completion in many ways, something that sustains a collector.  Perhaps it is something that a non-collector, or a non-hunter, cannot understand, and perhaps that places the collector in some ways closer to the human in the wild.  That, I think, is a topic for another time.  But when I step from the train, I am no longer the animal, I am the human.  I have found my favourite hunting ground.  My body takes on a particular....feeling is probably the best word.  I know that, potentially, I am in competition with others searching for exactly the thing I am searching for, for the same sustenance to our need as one another.  This colours my perceptions of the space through which I move.  I enter the comic shop with a particular persona in place, the persona of the hunter.  I know my prey, I know its habits, so to speak, and, for the most part, I know its location.  I stalk between the aisles, again avoiding eye contact with others that I might encounter, just in case they might realize I too am stalking the prey they seek.  From here, there are two outcomes, something that recalls me to Tanner once more.  Either I find what I’m looking for, and the hunt is successful, I am sated for a time, until the need to fill that space comes again, or I am unsuccessful, and the need goes unfulfilled.  Perhaps I have stalked these aisles one too many times, I have to leave, find a new hunting ground, and let this lie fallow for some time.  So I move on, still hungry, and seek out a new place.  The collector as nomad.
            I mentioned that I have two methods of hunting comics.  The second is very similar to the first, but involves greater mobility.  I use that extension of myself, my car.  I can cover many different shops in the space of a day, and often manage to fill at least some of the requirements of my hunt.  The car, much like Marty’s horse with regard to black bears (Marty 1999: 174), makes me feel braver in my encounters with others, makes me feel like I am in some way their equal, that I have the means of either fight or flight should an encounter be unavoidable.  When Mimi Sheller notes that “driving offers many people a feeling of liberation [and] empowerment” (Sheller 2004: 230), there is also a feeling of equality.  Regardless of how much bigger or smaller we may bodily be to the other people driving cars, once we’re in our cars, we’re equal.  Except, of course, for the inevitable Hummer on the road.  I still don’t make eye contact with them.
            All of this is a very prolonged way of demonstrating that the experience of walking through nature, and specifically of Erdrich’s experience of moving through an illustrated book of the world, is not so far off from the experience of finding and having a faith, a spiritual connection, to the collection of and the character of Superman.  I state this with all seriousness, and with the knowledge that it is in some ways ridiculous.  As is any faith.  As we see in much psychogeographical writing and thought, we must acknowledge the realms of the irrational that such excursions often lead us into are not going to be completely explainable with rational language.  Heuer notes in his narrative that “old boundaries began to blur, and the caribou that had dominated one realm of consciousness slipped into another, occupying [his] dreams” (Heuer 2006: 160).  He later recollects that he had
wanted to seize this rare chance to develop other, instinctual ways of knowing...that [he] was on the cusp of something, on the edge of uncovering an innate but forgotten wisdom.  After years of only applying a rational and scientific approach, [he] was beginning to see and hear directly, rather than filter every feeling through [his] mind.  (Heuer 2006: 193, emphasis mine)
Let us recall, “It’s not about making sense.  It’s about believing in something and letting that belief be real enough to change your life.”  This, I think is an opening step toward the organism-object-environment relationship, a beginning of the realization that we are more parts of something than thing alone.
            As a final way of conflating the psychogeographical experience of Louise Erdrich, and of the Ojibwe and their collection of island fetishes with the experience of the collector, and specifically the comic book collector, I will offer one final tale.  In August of 2012, my wife and I set off across the country from Oakville, Ontario, heading for Calgary, Alberta, where I was to begin my Ph.D. studies at the University of Calgary.  On my way across the country, I decided that I would attempt to buy a comic book from each town or city in which we stopped.  By and large, I succeeded.  As I look back at these particular parts of my collection, I remember the places from which I procured them, and the towns and cities in which those stores were located.  I remember, for instance, the creaky-floored shop in Thunder Bay, about half a day’s drive from Lake of the Woods, in which I picked up a comic that outlined the magical significance of superhero characters in the Marvel Universe.  I recall the noisy punk rock shop in Sault Ste. Marie where I bought a comic featuring one of the few appearances of the character Superwoman.  As with Benjamin, I recall the cities, and the spaces between them, whenever I look at these parts of my collection.  The correlation between myself, the item, and the place in which it was procured, and more grandly, the entire landscape through which we passed during the travel, is absolute.
As a way of wrapping it all together, however, I will point to our stop after leaving Sault Ste. Marie at the Agawa Rock pictographs.  Here, on my journey across the country procuring comics, visual narratives of iconic figures, I stopped and climbed out to pictographs virtually identical to those to which Louise Erdrich travelled.
 
Fig. 4: Agawa Rock pictographs.  Photo by Tara Miller.  Courtesy of author.

Fig. 5: Agawa Rock pictographs.  Photo by Tara Miller.  Courtesy of author.
My trip in claiming and bringing home my fetish objects was detoured to a place where I could visit fetish objects thousands of years old, yet telling tales so very similar to those I love.
            As with any work of scholarship, narrative, critical, or some hybrid of the two, we finally come to the question “So What?”  Does it matter, in some fundamental way, that the movement associated with the art of the ancient Ojibwe and that associated with the act of collecting, of collecting comic books, have anything at all in common?  Erdrich pursues her journey in part to connect with a landscape.  It is a landscape dotted with the ritual objects of her ancestors, but a landscape nonetheless.  In a city, it is easy to feel isolated, to feel that there is nothing of the wilderness inside of us.  We inhabit boxes, and we work in boxes, and one of the ways we make these boxes feel less isolated is to fill them with the ephemera of our excursions.  Consider that when we wish to punish a member of our society, we lock him or her up in a box devoid of things.  We are a static culture, a culture that remains, for the most part, and unlike the Ojibwe, in one place throughout the year.  While our museums and art galleries do indeed hold auratic works of art with which we can interact, they seldom fulfill the same kind of personal connection that Erdrich experiences at Lake of the Woods.  This same connection, however, is experienced by the small percentage of our static culture who collect, experiencing, as Benjamin puts it, the “bliss of the collector, bliss of the [person] of leisure” (Benjamin 1969b: 67).  It is the bliss of connecting through our fetishes with the wider, vibrant world, of embracing the tripartite relationship of which we are only a part, and of believing or not believing, as Erdrich puts it, in the spirits that might inhabit that world, the one outside our static doors.
 
Notes
1. One might raise the question Don McKay does in Deactivated West 100 here as to whether the islands at Lake of the Woods, or the surrounding cliffs, are rocks or stones.  He claims that both the geologist and the geopoet would say that “a stone is a rock that’s been put to use...[a] rock is as old as the earth is; stone is only as old as humanity” (McKay 2005: 59).  Do the Anishinaabe pictographs constitute use?  Are the islands at Lake of the Woods rocks or stones?

2. Here I will admit that I sometimes deliberately fly in the face of such practices.  In a crowded grocery store, I will often deliberately roll my cart up the side of the aisle that seems to have been chosen as the one for the very opposite of my direction.  The consternation of other shoppers is fascinating and, if I’m to be completely honest, a little amusing.  Were we actually herd animals out on a plain, I’m sure I’d be the one relegated to the fringes of the group, ready for the wolves to pick off.
 


Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean. “The System of Collecting.” Trans. Roger Cardinal. The Cultures of Collecting. Eds.        John Elsner and Roger Cardinal. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1994. 7-24. Print.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”  Illuminations.Ed. Hannah Arendt.  Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 217-51.Print.
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