What you see, you know. At least, you know it’s there, you can identify the object–a pickup truck, a painting, a sky, a bowling ball falling out of the sky, onto your face… How about the other way around: what you know, you see. You can’t see it there, if you don’t know what it is. If you saw a refrigerator, and had never used one, never seen one before, say it’s standing all alone in a vast plain of virgin snow, you would see a box, not a refrigerator. A box for keeping things cold? Hell, everything’s cold here!
This is all a prelude to the observation that we say « I see” when we mean « I understand.” This usage is a bit more exaggerated in French. “Tu vois où c’est la maison de Mme. Riverenert ?” you say on the telephone, trying to tell your neighbor who is on a train to Besançon, where you stepped in a pile of dog shit yesterday. They respond, “Oui,” while looking out the window. They don’t see Mme. Riverenert’s house–they’re passing a concrete factory, or a bicycle repair shop that’s gone out of business, or a shantytown–but they remember Mme. Riverenert’s house. They know what you’re talking about.
But this little blog post is really more concerned with history. The history you know determines what you are able to see in the present.
I recently saw a documentary called Rumble about the contributions of American Indians to rock music. As a film, it was a bit scattered, containing loosely-connected portraits of Indigenous American musicians, but it completely changed my perception of rock music. Indian rhythms and harmonies are fundamental to early rock-n-roll. I didn’t realize how fundamental they were until seeing this movie, but the beats and pentatonic harmonies that form the basis of rock have their roots not only in African but Indigenous American music — specifically the pulsing heartbeat-like 4-on-the-floor beat. You hear it often in early rock music. Here’s Little Richard’s « Lucille » as an example.
With respect to the harmonies, I’d often wondered why I never heard much of the more minor-key pentatonic scales favored in a lot of blues music in the various traditional African musics I’ve heard, which seem to lean more into a major-key harmony. (Admitting my knowledge of African music is cursory and there’s a huge diversity of it). But I think I have heard this type of harmony in some American Indian music. That blew my mind, because the narrative of the birth of rock music that I thought I knew didn’t include American Indians. It was always a blend of African and European (with a much heartier helping of African than European). Now I see the blend is heavy on African and Indigenous American. Now I hear that when I listen to this music. And it’s like seeing in color all of a sudden.
The non-inclusion of Indians in rock history is just a stray diode on the motherboard of the larger United States government project of erasing or at least diminishing Indian presence in its culture. This is of course something most of us are aware of, but I would say to an insufficient degree—the specifics are important, and allow for a greater degree of insight (seeing again!). That’s certainly the case with me, and my awareness of it gained some body & texture through a book called The Rediscovery of America, by Ned Blackhawk, which retells all of American history with an emphasis on Indigenous peoples. The US government’s explicit aim was to erase Indigenous culture from the country, using such horrifying tactics as separating children from their parents and putting them into boarding schools. Practices like these inspired racists of all nations, most infamously those of the Third Reich. This is something worth seeing — not because it makes white people feel bad, but because it might make them (me) see this history not as an inevitability but as a correctable injustice. If you can’t see it, of course, if you’re ignorant of it, then there’s no idea of correcting it. If the deed is done, and all Indigenous people are apparently gone, then there’s no possibility of correcting it. That is not the case. But the idea of Indian disappearance–sad, tragic, but accomplished–is one that has been effectively promoted by the US government (and surely other corporate actors in conjunction).
The impulse to erase knowledge is not slowing down. I just read, in an article in the New York Review of Books (“History Bright and Dark” by Adam Hochschild), that Ron DeSantis’s government in Florida passed a ban on teaching African-American history, among other subjects, on the basis of protecting citizens from feeling “shame.” This shame seems to me the same as the feeling of becoming aware of something for the first time — it’s the growing pain of knowing. And what a shame it is to deny kids that feeling, to pull them away from reality, direct them towards a life that doesn’t match up to reality.
Now a bit of a « hard right turn. » The last thing I read recently that I’d like to mention is a book of poems by Clint Smith called Above Ground. It’s not related to Indian history, and though it has some pertinence to African-American history, that’s not what I’m interested in here. It’s more about fatherhood, and raising young children. Many of these poems seem to have a project of finding the majesty in homely parts of homemaking — for example, crumbs falling on clothes or pushing strollers. These are things I’ve experienced, and that are currently coming to an end for me, now that my daughter has been out of diapers for about a decade. But these poems made me think back to those early days and wish I’d been able, like the narrator of these poems, to see more of the beauty in that time of life. I don’t mean to praise or criticize his poetry at all, though sometimes it did strike me as beautiful, and tears came. I just mean to say that it has something really admirable about it, which relates to the historical subjects above, which is seeing something intimately—something that might be a pain in the ass even, something that might make you embarrassed, or something that reaches the depths of cruelty and violence—and knowing it. To be clear, there’s nothing beautiful about genocide and slavery, but there is a beauty in using words precisely, there is beauty in not being afraid, and there is beauty in doggedly searching for beauty. That’s what I saw in Clint Smith’s book: a way of seeing that by paying a deep kind of attention to things you might want to ignore, makes, rather than finds, beauty.
So Ron DeSantis and his folks – I understand it. They’re trying to make reality what they want. That’s sort of what I’m arguing for too. But reality, though it may be constructed by each of us, is much more beautiful when made by seeing, not by looking away. Even, or maybe especially, if it hurts.