Star-Stories and Oral History
The Pleiades, Memory-Thread, and Ancestors' Ways
Barry Lopez: “Stories do not give instruction, they do not explain how to love a companion or how to find God. They offer, instead, patterns of sound and association, of event and image. Suspended as listeners and readers in these patterns, we might reimagine our lives. It is through story that we embrace the great breadth of memory, that we can distinguish what is true, and that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair in the midst of the horror that dogs and unhinges us.”1
The story of the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades, running away from the man or men of Orion,2 is so universal that some people— astrophysicist Ray Norris among them— think it might be 100,000 years old.
Ray Norris interviewed by Sharon Brettkelly on Radio New Zealand's The Detail - Matariki's Link in a Chain of Star Stories
Siblings, hearken unto me! The world of science and the world of myth are both real, but they are not the same kind of real. They have different flavours of truth; different rules. Rationalism and magic are compatible, not opposed. They are complementary: equally necessary for healthy functioning. Too much myth-without-science and people fall down the rabbit hole. Too much science-without-myth and people wither into cold arrogance. The space between the two worlds is fertile territory: that’s where I believe we must try to reside.
Oral history was the most advanced information-storage and -transmission technology of humans for millennia. It was science.3 When individual and group survival depend upon it, transmission of accurate knowledge across long periods of time is imperative. In a world without the written word— that is, the whole world until quite recently— songs, chants, and stories were the most effective means of information transmission. Rhyme, rhythm, and plot are all oral history devices that aid accuracy of memory.
As a folk singer I'm familiar with memory techniques, with how it feels to pull the mind-string of a song.4 Some of the great athletes of memory— like the Rajasthani bards who can recite a song that lasts for a week of nights5— say that learning to read harms a person's capacity for memory. Maybe literacy-saturation from an early age is the source of modern people's lack of understanding of that other kind of knowledge, the kind that is carried in the bone house, as the Anglo-Saxons called the skull.6 Or maybe that particular historical / cultural hubris is the fruit of the Enlightenment-lineage propaganda that privileges black lines on a page, like these I’m making now, over living breath. Well, we can’t unlearn our letters; but we can try to decolonise our minds.
The stars are dead, but they are also alive: cold campfires of a distant people, glowing bodies. We see them with our naked eyes. They move in a certain dance, a timed movement, every night and every year. They are real, and so are the ancient stories people have spun to explain their ways. It’s easy to imagine them, those old story-weavers, lying around their campfire of a long dark night spinning yarns about the stars. Those ancient people are our common ancestors: we are the twigs to their roots.
Nō reira, Mānawatia a Matariki! Happy New Year! Let’s toast with these small star-cups I found last week in a Levin op-shop.7 Let’s drink to the spilt breast-milk of our galaxy, the Milky Way; and let’s drink to the living river of blood and song that connects us to our ancestors, the honoured Dead.
Furthermore… Lopez: “The range of the human mind, the scale and depth of the metaphors the mind is capable of manufacturing as it grapples with the universe, stand in stunning contrast to the belief that there is only one reality, which is man's, or worse, that only one culture among the many on earth possesses the truth.
To allow mystery, which is to say to yourself, There could be more, there could be things we don't understand, is not to damn knowledge. It is to take a wider view.”
(I highly recommend reading any or all of Barry Lopez.)
I’m not enough of an astronomer to know, but I guess that in places in the world where Matariki / Pleiades moves across the sky rather than just peeping over the horizon, Orion moves after her… Northerners? Tell us.
Science = knowledge. https://www.etymonline.com/word/science
(Fun fact: it has the same Proto-Indo-European root-word as shit.)
That’s how it feels to me: that the song is a thread of words that I draw forth like a fishing line, each word leading to the next. If the thread breaks I fall back on working backwards from the next line I can remember: that’s where rhyme comes in as a clue. Also, the song has a kind of superstructure, a plotline, a map— which I also see as shapes. (That’s why narrative ballads are far easier than list-songs, which have to be rote-learned.)
During the chorus— if there is one— there’s a moment to think, as the brain is back in familiar territory. In that breathing space of less-concentration there’s time to think of the next verse. That’s why so many songs have repeated patterns built into them, so the singer can fall back on them to fill in time if they forget where to go next.
In a call-and-response song like a shanty, the space of time to remember or improvise a new verse is as long as a sentence: the response, when other people briefly take over the singing. (In something like freestyling the rapper might make noises like uh; yeah; uh-huh, to buy a tiny snatch of time to think.)
Many of these singers of high renown are blind, as Homer was. Blindness and bardry are a time-honoured combination.
I read of one Indian bard who said the song is a pile of pebbles that he picks up one by one, each pebble a verse.
Hat-tip Martin Shaw
Three dollars each. The old lady at the counter grumbled at me for finding such a bargain.
"I guess that in places in the world where Matariki / Pleiades moves across the sky rather than just peeping over the horizon, Orion moves after her… Northerners? Tell us."
Yes! First the Pleiades rise over the horizon, then comes Taurus, then Orion.
In the Greek myths, the Pleiades were put in the sky to rescue them from Orion's attentions, then when he too was put there, he was placed so that he would be always chasing but never catch them. There's also a connection between the Pleiades and bees, and between the bees and the bull. Alan Garner's novel Thursbitch weaves these threads in some astonishing ways.
Lisa O'Neill's song Old Note, as played in her Tiny Desk concert. She says "It's about how we communicated before we started writing things down. We call this orality. And all our indigenous cultures communicated all the information they needed to know about the environment, the astronomical information, the land, the plants, the insects and animals around them, and even when each person came into the world; it was all communicated through this map of music..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hMxG92KTGE