IDEAS/TAPESTRY VISIONS AND VOICES
IDEAS/TAPESTRYVISIONS AND VOICESPaul KennedyI’m Paul Kennedy and this is Ideas.my host, Cliff Speer, promised. The pictographs, asthey’re known to archaeology, are prominent along arock face that’s part of the Churchill River system.“They’re hard to get to and rarely seen,” he said.“Where there is no vision, the people perish” — thisquotation from the book of Proverbs in the OldTestament is at the nub of tonight’s program, astarting point for the first of a two-part series.With a canoe lashed to the side of our Beaver, alegendary bush plane, we literally flew off into thewild blue yonder — rivers, lakes, lots and lots of blue— clipping along a few hundred feet over the tops oftrees and barefaced rock that makes up theCambrian Shield. An hour or so later, the planedescended upon Hickson Lake, a location heldsacred by some Woodland Cree and known to thefew natives who still remember as a ‘place of power.’Many Canadian artists have had ‘visions,’ mysticalmoments which led to important innovations in themaking of their art. The painter Lawren Harris calledhis “the logic of ecstasy.”He spent almost 40 years making ‘non-objective,’abstract canvasses, squiggles of brightly colouredgeometry — paintings rarely exhibited now. They’reinvisible to most Canadians. Looking at them, it’s asif Lawren Harris, honoured member of The Group ofSeven, never made those cherished paintings of ournorthern landscape.I’ve been joined by a few other paddlers. There arenine of us in all.Bonnie HamiltonI’m Bonnie Hamilton. I’m from the La Ronge area. Iwas raised in the Lower Foster area, and I’ve alwaysbeen interested in coming here.So, where did these impressions come from?Wilderness can be a state of mind. And Harris mayhave drawn his inspiration from the rivers of theimagination, the streams of consciousness known toFirst Nations people. A landscape filled with spirits.He may have painted exactly what he actually sawthere. His ‘abstractions’ may, in fact, be the shadowscast by the spirit world.Don HillBonnie is a First Nations Woodland Cree. She’s alsoa storyteller in the oral tradition. Her impressionsspeak to the spirit of the land.Bonnie HamiltonI always feel in awe when I see paintings or artifactsdone by people long ago, because I feel that theyare threads to our past. In Cree, rocks are animate,rocks are alive, and so rocks give off an energy. Italso makes me very grateful. I’m always astoundedat what they’ve done. And it’s a thought-provokingarea Tonight, the host of Tapestry, Don Hill, invites you ona journey into the dreamland of “Visions & Voices,” ajourney from rock paintings made before memorybegins to the abstract art of our time.Don HillWe’re surrounded by magic, invisible forces.This broadcast, for instance: where is myvoice coming from? But if you turn off thetechnology, the receiver, where does theDon HillThe repetitive beat — paddle in, paddle out — istrance-like, and it would be easy to lapse into ameditation were it not for the pull of the vistabeckoning on the horizon. Paddle, paddle, paddleover more open water. Then we veer off into achannel. On the left flank, a cliff-face rises straight upfrom the water. The right shore, not as vertical, yetequally spectacular, looks like a natural cathedralsetting. Yes, the whole place has a ‘churchy’ feel toit. Hardly a sound, other than the wind, an occasionalsquawkfromadistantraven.story go?Sound effects: Interior of bush planeDon HillI’m flying.The summer of 2000: I was invited north of latitude55 to a remote rock art location in northernSaskatchewan. “The Indian paintings are ancient,”1
IDEAS/TAPESTRYVISIONS AND VOICES“There they are, on the left,” my companion points,breaking the silence.more powerful, like a medicine man, you could sendyour dreamspeaker to do battle for you, like, let’ssay, against another medicine man or againstsomebody who was not nice to you in some way. It’ssomething sort of unsaid.Sketched in a red ochre, 2 to 3 feet above thewaterline are simple, childlike depictions of animals,people, the sun and perhaps the moon. Faded bytime and weather, some of the pictographs aren’tmuch to look at, but to someone in the know, theseare images of the spirit.Tim JonesBasically, you’ve got art that’s standing up literally inspace. It’s not buried. You can’t excavate it. You’vegot very big problems with dating and so on. But it’sout there. And what do you do with it? How do youreconstruct what happened when that particular setof paintings or that set of carvings was made.Tim JonesMy name’s Tim Jones. A number of possibleexplanations have been posited for the creation ofthe rock art of the Canadian Shield.Don HillTim Jones is careful not to label the rock art with aspecific interpretation. He has to be. Within theacademic discipline of archaeology, the professionhas only grudgingly acknowledged pictographs as amarker to the divine, and they continue to be asource of controversy.Don HillTim is the executive director of the SaskatchewanArchaeological Society. He’s also the author ofseveral technical papers on rock art.Tim JonesThe most likely origin or reason for the creation ofthe paintings has to do with spirituality and the use orthe creation of the paintings by shamans, peoplewith special skills, special insights and usingmedicine in the broad sense of the word.Tim JonesA lot of the world’s rock art in the past has beenexplained away as ‘hunting magic,’ sympatheticmagic. It’s an old notion that comes actually fromEurope from some of the first studies of the cave art,when it was discovered late in the last century. Thatwas one of the main hypotheses that developed, andit’s really stuck around for a long time, and itshouldn’t have.Don HillOver a quarter-mile stretch are dozens ofpictographs, most of them congregated alonggallery-like faces of rock. The majority must havebeen painted from a canoe because they’re onlyaccessible by water. There are images on the ledgeshigher up, but only a handful.Bonnie HamiltonI have not tried interpreting them in any way. I reallylook at them in awe. And I think of what reality couldhave been for them at that time and what my realityis now. But there’s a few that are still carried through,like the theme of the Thunderbird, women, men,animals. Those themes carry on throughout ourlives, and so it’s sort of a thread to the past, but it’salso a curiosityAll of the paintings are in red ochre. They could behundreds, perhaps a thousand years old or more.Their true age, Tim tells me, has been disguised by athin film of mineral deposits, which coat and protectthe images during spring runoff. It’s not even clearwhat the pictographs are all about, although BonnieHamilton recognizes some universal theme.Tim JonesSome of the animals they’re depicting are realanimals, if you can call a stick figure of a moose areal animal. But others are definitely not somethingthat you would see unless under certain specialcircumstances.Bonnie HamiltonIt was a man changing into an animal. I don’t knowhow to translate the Cree word, but it’s Bawaganak,and I thought that it was his helper. They come toyou in your dreams and help you and give youstrength. That’s what I felt those were. And there’stwo of them on the rocks that I found, but they werefar apart, and they look pretty neat. If you were muchDon Hill2
IDEAS/TAPESTRYVISIONS AND VOICESSouth African archeologists David Lewis-Williamsand Thomas Dowson first proposed that aboriginalrock art found in locations around the world weremade by shamans in an altered state ofconsciousness. Writing their dreams upon the rockmarked the outcome of their vision quest.Don HillEntoptic images are geometric shapes: zigzags,wavy lines, visual dits and dots and crosshatches,like a grid for a game of X’s and O’s. They’re part ofthe brain’s underlying architecture for sight.Kevin Callahan is a graduate student at theUniversity of Minnesota. His Masters thesis was onshamanism and Native American pictographs andpetroglyphs. Pictographs are found painted over therock, and petroglyphs carved into it. I called him upat his home in Minneapolis-St. Paul.Dave WhitleyNow, the circumstances under which those aregenerated commonly would include a trance, analtered state of consciousness or a hallucination, ablow to the head, a migraine headache perhaps. Wecan generate them if we stare at a bright light andclose our eyes and then press our eyelids. We willsee those geometric patterns.Kevin CallahanIt was very important for someone who was on avision quest to remember the dream, because it wasa gift from the other world, and it was part of thepower. So when you were gaining power by going ona vision quest and gaining information, you had toremember it. As everybody knows, when you wakeup from a dream, you tend to forget it unless youwrite it down. So there’s some indication that thepetroglyphs were quickly pecked out in order toremember both what was in the vision and also thespot where it was gained and where that powercame from so that, if you were going to go back tothat spot to have a contact with the other world orspirit world, that you could go back to the spot whereyou had that vision.Maureen KorpThe other thing that truly is universal are theexistence of phosphenes or photisms.Don HillMaureen Korp teaches art history and religiousstudies at Carleton University. Dr. Korp has visitedrock art sites around the world.Maureen KorpAnd those are those little squiggles and the lines andthe dots and things that you find in a hypnagogicstate, which is where your brain is as you’re about tofall off to sleep. Your eyes are closed, and you’reseeing these little, bright splotches. Sometimes, notall the time, but sometimes. Or if you’re not wearingcontact lenses, you could do this right now: closeyour eyes, and press very lightly on the eyelid, andyou’ll see exactly what I’m talking about. Thosesquiggles show up everywhere. They show up onpottery, they show up in embroidery, they show upon the walls of Lascaux. The question is, what dothey mean? But the form itself, that’s the humanbeing making it.Don HillIf it’s true that the images are depictions of what theshaman actually saw during trance, then much of itlooks like ‘entoptic’ imagery.Dave Whitley‘Entoptic’ is a Greek word, and basically it means‘within or behind the eye.’Don HillDave Whitely is a professor of archeology at UCLA.He’s the leading authority on California rock art.Dean RadinI think it’s quite clear, if you look at indigenousdrawings and just ancient drawings, going back tocaveman days, a lot of it is imagery which simply,naturally seems to flow out of the brain in alteredstates. So it is not surprising to me that some images— certain swirls, certain boxes and so on — areconsidered archetypal, because they’re actually asDave WhitleyAnd it refers to the fact that, in certaincircumstances, our optical system and our brain willgenerate imagery internal to itself, will interpret thoseas being things we’re seeing. But we’re not reallyseeing them in the outside world. They’re in ourbrain.3
IDEAS/TAPESTRYVISIONS AND VOICESarchetypal as you can get. They’re coming out of theneural structure of the body itself.In the second stage of trance, cartoon-like figuresappear, animated in some instances, pulsating as ifalive.Don HillDean Radin, author of The Conscious Universe.You’ll be hearing more from Dr. Radin and Dr. Korplater in the series.“The third stage is somatic,” says Kevin Callahan.“Your body stretches out of shape as you start to flyaround or dig deep into the ground. You can morph.Extra fingers or toes show up. You might even turninto an animal, like a wolf or bear, feel your wholebody change. And it all seems very real,” Kevin said.Our canoes slip silently past each pictograph, frompanel to panel, until we come alongside a large crackin the rock, a geophysical fault, which frames an archin the cliff face. It’s like a small grotto but largeenough to shelter one canoe. Yet I am not alonehere. From the inside looking out, a pictographoutlines a solo paddler in another vessel, the bowpointing out from the rock toward the channel, as ifheading out of a portal. Dave Whitley Here, along the channel near Hickson Lake innorthern Saskatchewan, several of the pictographsremind me of the ‘shapeshifters’ Kevin described.Bonnie Hamilton Bonnie HamiltonI felt it was a person coming out of the animal andchanging back to a person. I don’t think of it as ashapeshifter. I think of it more on a mental plane, notphysically changing but mentally changing. I think byhaving upawogon you have the power to be able tomove but using your brain. That’s what I tend tothink.Dave WhitleyNative Americans actually are quite specific aboutthe cracks. Quite simply, they’re the doors to thesupernatural. When the shaman went into a trance, itwas said the cracks would open up, and he wouldwalk in. One of the results is, we do sometimes findofferings that are probably prehistoric in age thatwere left in these cracks. The cracks wereessentially the doorway. You leave an offering in thatcrack, and it’s like leaving a present on the doorstepof the spirit that’s inside.Don HillOver the years, I’ve visited several ‘rock art’locations, recorded my travels on film and video. Theremarkable thing about pictographs and petroglyphsis how similar they look around the world. Theentoptic imagery appears to jump between cultures,even when distance and chronology have deemed itimpossible for civilizations to have had contact witheach other. It’s like some kind of strong magic hasbeen invoked. The same visions arise, and the samestory remains to be seen again and again.Don HillEveryone left an offering along the ledge, our canoeshugging the cliff face on the waterline. Cliff Speerlaid out a pouch of tobacco. I set aside three stones,purple amethysts from northern Ontario. One of themslipped out of my hand, fell into the depths. The loudsplash kind of startled me.Modern science verifies this. Medical research hasdetermined all human beings have commonexperiences in altered states of consciousness. Thecontent of the dream-like states may differ, but theprocess of human perception in trance is the same.The sound here has a tightness to it. The waterlapping between the canoe and the wall of the rockgives off an odd ‘splooshing’ sound — a peculiarecho.Repetitive sounds, prolonged rounds of drummingand chanting are known to induce trance. The flickerand dance of shadows from a fire. Deep breathingtoo. It’s said the rock paintings will speak to thosewho ‘listen,’ reveal its secrets to those who can ‘see.’Kevin Callahan is expert on the rock art ofMinnesota.Kevin CallahanI think human beings are, generally speaking, wiredsimilarly in terms of our neurology. The experimentsthat have been done by the medical communityindicate that there are some common patterns to4
IDEAS/TAPESTRYVISIONS AND VOICESwhat we all perceive as we go through the stagesinto deeper altered states of consciousness.Kevin CallahanThe depictions could be of things that were seenduring altered states of consciousness. The mostcommon instructions would follow something likethis: they’d say, “You should go out to the visionquest site and stay awake for about four days.”During that time period, you would smoke tobacco,fast and pray and so forth.Some people, however, are better at going intoaltered states than others, and those people tendedto become shamans.If you ask people around you that you know whatexperiences they’ve had with things like encounterswith unexplained phenomena, frequently thosethings can be explained through the medical model.But most people who actually experience thembelieve they’re real, because their senses tell themthat what they’re experiencing is real. I can’t really bedisparaging in any way of people who believe thatthe experiences that they’ve had are real.The medical studies that have been done withcollege students have indicated that, after four daysafter intense concentration and staying awake, thatthey would see things like people that weren’t reallythere. They’d see the room break up into tiny littleparticles and start shimmering. So the instructionsfor the vision quest pretty much parallel what medicaldoctors have found when they’ve had subjects gothrough sleep deprivation.There’s a lot of research on this that indicates thatsometimes people firmly believe something to betrue which an independent observer watching themwould indicate is not true. For example, in the MiddleAges, witches believed that they flew onbroomsticks, and that was a result of atropine whichwas ingested through the skin, and there werepeople standing right over them who watched themthroughout the whole process, and they could notconvince them that they had not gone flying on abroomstick, even though they had been standingover them from the beginning of the process ofentering altered states until they came out of it. It’stwo views of the same experience: one from theoutside and one from the inside.Don HillIt also sounds like a pathology.Kevin CallahanIt isn’t a pathology. What it is is, the altered state ofconsciousness is like a waking dream. In your brainstem, it’s like a light switch that goes on and off, andif you can toggle that so that you’re conscious whileyou’re dreaming, you have the equivalent of ahallucination or a waking dream.This has been used by other modern artists. Forexample, Salvador Dali is an example of someonewho would have an assistant wake him up when hewent into rapid-eye-movement sleep or the period ofsleep when you’re dreaming. And when he wouldwake up, he’d be having a waking dream. He’d behallucinating. And then he used those images in hisartwork.Don HillTim Jones Tim JonesIn the rock art of Texas, for example, and southernCalifornia, there’s some unbelievable polychromaticart that archaeologists have shown is really directlyconnected to taking of substances that causehallucinations. What the people are depicting thereare actual visions or things that they’re seeing in reallife, so to speak, really colorful things that you’reseeing right before your eyes.Don HillKevin Callahan.We need to stay awake to dream, to remember, tobecome aware of the shadows of the spirit.Before the advent of photography, the visual artswere preoccupied with making faithful depictions ofthe landscape. They called it ‘representational art.’Realism captured by a simple snapshot liberatedpainters to look elsewhere. And by the late 19thDon HillAre these rock art depictions are what the shamanactually saw?5
IDEAS/TAPESTRYVISIONS AND VOICEScentury, the canon of Western art was beginning tolook quite different. Things began to blur.Impressions became paramount. Stimulants, likelaudanum and absinthe, were the potions of choice,and some of the artwork began to reflect thosechoices.we modern-day Americans and maybe Canadianswant to connect, but that rather the realm of mindand imagination is divorced from physical, touchable,positivist reality that we’re talking about here.But I do think that Kandinsky believed that there wasan important spiritual underpinning possible in artand that an artist who wanted to could access someof that information. In fact, he talked about thecoming age in art when the spiritual could be madevisible and that this is the real task of the artist, to tryto make visible that which might be only partiallyperceived now or invisible and that this was theuntouched realm that artists could have access to.He thought, through such stimuli as vibrations orcolour, which was a very important element forKandinsky, that an artist could transfer or translateemotion into visual form.The unconscious was new territory. Sigmund Freudand Carl Gustav Jung staked claims on the realestate once held exclusively by religion. The fathersof psychiatry and modern psychology spoke to theartists of their day, presented them with a challengeto go into the ‘mindscape’ and capture it to canvasand musical score.It was a small book, well under a hundred pages.But when Concer
a journey into the dreamland of “Visions & Voices,” a journey from rock paintings made before memory begins to the abstract art of our time. Don Hill e’re surrounded by magic, invisible forces. This broadcast, for instance: where is my . Europe from some of the first studies of the cave art, when it was discovered late in the last .
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