Ancient Land Breathing

Abstract

You would think, given the individual’s sacrosanct place at the center of a political modernity imposed across the world, you would think, given your own sense of having a body and through it a life (habeas corpus), that there would be some sure measure, when persons die, wherever persons die, of how many persons have died. But no. There are countless ways to count persons, to decide where a person ends and another starts. Stick to sheep! Counting persons would only confound the mind, and if sleep came it would be a tangled, gnarled sort of sleep. Lévi-Strauss maintained that a traditional society was most ecologically viable when it did not exceed 250 (288). Students of such societies understand now this was not just a material and environmental limit— having to do with how much one could extract from an environment without destroying it—but also a mental and invisible one, having to do with an ecology of ghosts. Danowski and De Castro: Amazonian peoples prefer to maintain a steady population rather than to grow, “for people live in other people, with other people, for other people” (104). Ancient peoples know that reality is many-sided. This is why, said the prime minister, we cannot be sure how many persons have died from this sickness. It is not because we lack the means, he said. We have the world’s best information technology systems, we have a unique biometric identification system that links your gas and water connections and your food rations to your fingerprint, we have even borrowed from a fellow unapologetic nation the flying horse technology allowing us to gently watch over every citizen so as to better keep track. But we are a deeply philosophical people with roots stretching back into an ancient seer past. We know that despite appearances, reality is everelusive, shape-shifting, deceptive, a mirage that we must step through if we are to see the truth. We have known for millennia, long before the West caught on, that most stories are untrue, that news is fake, that the world itself is an illusion. And of such a land, you demand a body count? Consider, moreover, that in these parts many persons may share the same name. Take H.B. the father of the nation’s nuclear program and H.B.