(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
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.
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