Today is the
600th anniversary of the battle of Agincourt and, somewhat to my
surprise, I find my feelings and thoughts surprisingly complex. It’s not the facts of the event themselves,
or the facts of the literary and cultural consquences,
“…Then shall our names,
Familiar in
his mouth as household words-
Harry the
King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and
Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
Be in their
flowing cups freshly rememb’red
This story
shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin
Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this
day to the ending of the world,
But we in it
shall be remembered-…”
Nor is it a
desire to pass some kind of superfluous judgment. Rather, it’s a desire to see all of it, and
correctly understand the connections. At
its root is the basic human will to reason out how the world, how the universe,
works.
Some days
ago I found myself standing on a small remote promontory in the Southwest overlooking
a quiet pastoral valley, almost a glen that was subtly, autumnally
beautiful. It was also, not so long ago,
the site of a massacre, in which two dozen men and women and fifty children
were ruthlessly killed early one evening.
It’s an event I know very little about.
Yet, I found myself deeply emotionally affected. It was as if there was something now in the
place itself.
I still don’t
know what to make of my reaction. I’d
had such experiences a very few times before, at Omaha Beach and at the Dachau
Concentration Camp for example, but on each of those occasions I was more than
conversant with the history.
Near the end
of a fireside conversation in Chaco Canyon a week or so before, Philip
Tuwaletstiwa recommended I search out a book by the cultural and linguistic
anthropologist, Keith H. Basso, Wisdom
Sits In Places. Steve Lekson, who
was sitting with us, strongly concurred.
Though my “to read” list is particularly full at the moment, (mostly
with Arthuriana), I made a note to do so.
Their combined and strong recommendation was something I couldn’t
resist.
Basso’s book
begins as a narrative of an innocuous project to develop a map of Apache
place-names in the area around Cibecue, Arizona during late summer months when
he traveled with three occasionally recalcitrant and ironic but always witty
Apache guides. It soon becomes apparent
that both they and he are after much more elusive and dangerous game than a
sheet of paper with a large scatter of phonetically accurate aboriginal
labels. He is studying and they are
trying to teach him how different kinds of narrative, including history are
developed, recorded and used in Apache culture.
Not surprisingly, it is very different from the traditional western
post-Enlightenment traditions. What is
surprising, to me, is how pragmatic, efficient and rational it is.
As I read
Basso, I couldn’t help but think about his ideas in an entirely different
context: computer science. Here is a trivial, inaccurate but sufficient
model of a modern computer for my sequel:
a computer is large sequentially numbered set of mailboxes (memory
locations) and a robot (the CPU) who can retrieve information from those
mailboxes and do a limited set of things with the contents, such as move it to
another mailbox or perform an arithmetic operation on it. Of course, almost none of the information we
use in life fits that structure, therefore so much of the work of any computer
program (the recipe which the robot follows to continue the metaphor) is
mapping, structuring and manipulating data.
These days, after decades of research and experimentation, people generally
follow a set of reasonably good practices, however, there was a time when the
world was a bit wilder, when deep, philosophical questions, such as the
difference between a thing and the symbol which stands for it found concrete
expression in the way a computer program worked. Sometimes the most pragmatic of computer
programs could also be seen, quite reasonably, as a philosophical experiment. More often than not, the core issue was “referencing:” when should one block of information point to
another. At one extreme, one might try
to avoid referencing all together: imagine putting everything there is to know
about a place or a subject into its name.
At the opposite end the information could be so fragmented that the
information becomes apparently invisible:
all you see are pointers, or pointers to other pointers even pointers to
other recipes to construct the information you need.
One narrow,
but useful way to look at Apache narrative, history and place-naming is through
the formalism of information architecture.
Almost immediately, it’s apparent how well-designed it is, how naturally
it suits the culture’s needs.
Most
interesting is how the information is structured to make culturally productive
use of the imaginations of its individual members. Obviously, I find myself wondering how the
western historical tradition can and should be informed by its model.
Which brings
me back to that sodden Friday in 1415 and its manifold references and pointers. We know so much. We remember so much. We have the words of the greatest dramatist
in the language to help us see his vision of it. But I’m not sure our rich, unruly set of
pointers, and the implicit values therein make best use of our understanding
and imaginations.
“…We few, we
happy few, we band of brothers;
For he
to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my
brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day
shall gentle his condition;
And
gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think
themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold
their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought
with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.”
