REPRINTED FROM JULY OF 2014
Thor Heyerdahl, well known to the general reading public
as the author of Kon Tiki and Aku Aku, surprisingly enough had much to
say that readers in the modern radical community could well listen to.
In Kon Tiki,
his best-known work, he set out to verify the practicalities of his theory that
early sea voyages from Polynesia had contributed to the populating of South
America. In Aku Aku he visits Easter
Island. But the revisiting of his earliest manuscript and expanding it,
recounts his youthful period on the island of Fatu-Hiva in the Marquesas group
in the South Pacific, when he was what we now might call a practicing
primitivist. One says “might” because there are so few of them that hardly any
have ever before been identified, and certainly the moderns who represent
themselves as primitivists from a few posts in big cities or in lectures at
universities that they fly to on commercial airlines after financial
negotiations conducted over internet connections, are laughably so far from
acting on their alleged philosophy that no term for ones who do has ever
arisen.
But when young Thor was newly graduated from school in
Norway (1936), he and his teenaged wife, Liv, fired with longings to escape
from blighted civilization, overcame social and parental disapproval in order
to live the life they had come to think of as ideal.
Back to nature?
Farewell to civilization? It is one thing to dream of it and another to do it.
I tried it. Tried to return to nature.
For this he deserves great respect – respect that the poseurs
and high-tech lifestyle advocates and profiteers battening cynically on a kind
of industry catering to such dreamers do not deserve.
Once among the natives on Fatu-Hiva, Thor and Liv
commence an idyllic existence in which food literally falls from trees that
spring up from seedlings in mere days; they live in a house built cooperatively
by themselves and helpful islanders; they experience freedom and leisure for
thought and exploration, scientific inquiry.
And what went wrong?
Everything.
Ignorance and strange diseases intruded. Fatu-Hivans with
generations of ancestry on the islands were divided into cliques of enemies,
many of whom had historically killed – and even eaten – each other, and in the
1930s at least were prey to the emptiest superstitions. In these moist island
paradises leprosy and elephantiasis ran rife, sanitation was horrifying,
communal diseases and intimate bodily contact in eating and many other
activities spread diseases also well-aided by flies and other insects. Thor and
Liv develop a ghastly malady of sores on their ankles and legs, probably from
what we would today call botfly attacks, although he doesn’t say so; and when
these worsen to the point where if not treated Liv may have to undergo an
amputation, they have to make difficult journey to Hivaoa, another island in
the group, where medical attention can be had.
Their “own” island is so devoid of knowledge and
civilization that not even a dentist exists there, and one of the first natives
the Norwegians meet is afflicted with a huge “gumboil” – no doubt what we would
call an abscess – that has swollen his face to an alarming size. (Thor does
manage to cure the fellow of that himself, somehow.)
Then back on Fatu-Hiva after their own disease is cured
on Hivaoa, Thor and Liv innocently run afoul of a truly crazy religious
division on their part of the island, and become targets of vicious menacing in
an atmosphere of outright threats, so they are forced to desert their idyllic
home and make the difficult cross over the island’s high peaks to the other
side. There they live in harmony for a while with an older man and his quite
young consort, but a few erstwhile neighbors finally track them down. That
band, led by a home-grown thug, bring on raucous 24/7 saturnalias complete with
homemade orange alcohol. Faced with what are clearly (but reticently described
by Thor) threats to rape his wife, the two once more are compelled to flee, and
getting back across the island’s high backbone again they take refuge near the
water’s edge in a cave where they can watch for one of the infrequent small
schooners that visit the islands. When they had first traveled to the place it
had been a requirement that they purchase round-trip tickets, so now, though
close to penniless and missing most possessions they had arrived with, badly
scarred by the island disease and the fear and disillusionment, they have, at
least, the wherewithal to get back to Europe.
(There, their relationship apparently dissolves; Thor
recounts that in a mere phrase or two at the end.)
It was on Fatu-Hiva that Thor first began to see the
connections with South America, and his photographs of ruins and statuary on
the island clearly show ancient connection with similar ones on the faraway
mainland:
Soon we reached a
slope above a small stream. Here the forest seemed more open, where a truly
giant tree had fallen and torn down everything in its way … Naked rock in the
form of two huge slabs emerged near the upturned root of the tree, partly
covered with invading coffee brushes.
Tioti pointed.
Look, the fish!
There it was, over
six feet long, head, tail, fins and all, clearly outlined on the rock. Not a
fossil, but the first petroglyph ever discovered on Fatu-Hiva. The only one of
this kind known in any part of Polynesia …. A large number of other figures
emerged from beneath the black soil.
So some ideas of value did emerge from the Heyerdahls’
experience, but these had little to do with the spiritual and philosophical
ones they had set out to live.
Here, however, an acknowledgement needs to be belatedly
made of another writer and another book. Why Thor doesn’t mention Frederick
O’Brien is hard to say, but he had to have known about him. Back in the early
years of Thor’s reading, he had access to:
… The world’s
largest private collection of books and papers on Polynesia. Bjarne Kroepelien
had as a young man spent the happiest year of his life … on Tahiti, and on his
return to Europe he began to collect anything published on Polynesia and the
Polynesians, no matter where and when it was printed … He let me use his
important library …
This was in the 1930s. But in 1919 a book by O’Brien was
published by Garden City Publishing Company in New York, called White Shadows in the South Seas. O’Brien,
a traveler with few or no scientific pretentions, is also a sort of
primitivist, and he recounts his period on Hiva-oa (he spells it with a hyphen)
with a trip to Fatu-Hiva. As Heyerdahl does twenty years later, he finds a
definite degradation of the native inhabitants caused by contact with
Europeans, and, also like Heyerdahl, he regards the natives as a sadly dying
race. He speaks of disease and especially leprosy, but unlike Thor and Liv he
apparently keeps his clothes on and doesn’t have botflies laying their eggs in
his feet. He even stays for a while with the father of a European, Monsieur Francois Grelet, a Swiss who had
lived here for more than twenty years. Grelet has become a big landowner on
Fatu-Hiva, and O’Brien describes extensively the man and his mode of life. For
instance:
Grelet had
innumerable books in French and German, all the great authors old and modern;
he took the important reviews of Germany and France, and several newspapers. He
knew much more than I of history past and present, of the happenings in the
great world, art and music and invention, finances and politics. He could …
discuss the quality of Caruso’s voice as compared with Jean de Reszke’s. Twenty
two years ago he had left everything called civilization, he had never been out
of the Marquesas since that time; he lived in a lonely valley in which there
was no other man of his tastes and education, and he was content.
In his own book Heyerdahl recounts meeting Willy Grelet, the only one on the island who
had grown up with a European father.
His late father was
a Swiss who had married a local island girl and whose only friend had been Paul
Gauguin, who he hardly ever saw, since they lived on different islands. Willy
seemed introverted and lonely, clearly keeping aloof from the rest of the
village people. We were to learn that he was a very honest person, even though
he loved money, which he gathered wherever he could get it, and he was rich,
but saved his earnings as there was nowhere to spend them …
The Heyerdahls stay with Willy for a while. And in
another parallel, chapter three of Thor’s book is titled, “White Men, Dark Shadows.”
Willy Grelet assists in the episode of the terrible
botfly disease, but there is never any mention of his father’s extensive
library. On the other hand, Willy, always desirous of getting more money, after
a while quizzes Thor about the famousness in Europe of Paul Gauguin, and,
learning that almost anything once owned by Gauguin would fetch a good price,
shows up with an old Winchester rifle the artist had kept, and the wooden stock
of which he had engraved. Heyerdahl buys it, and a photo of the stock (the action
itself is later seized by customs authorities) appears in the book. But though
there is no mention of the Grelet library, Heyerdahl still later makes the
acquaintance of one Henry Lie on one of the islands, and Lie has an impressive collection of books.
His big, one-room
bungalow was filled with beds and books … I was puzzled to see that Lie had so
many books …
Many years later Heyerdahl revisits Lie’s dwelling place
on one of his world travels, and not a sign of his home remains; witnesses say
it was destroyed and washed away by a tidal wave.
What is one to make of these failed experiments in
isolated living? Clearly, Thor and Liv went about it in far too extravagant a
way. In seeking the Garden of Eden they disdained all the better products of civilization,
in these two books exemplified by (a) art and literature and (b) medicine.
Over-arching both of these is, of course, advanced learning. The primitivists
who really were able to live the life were people like Grelet and Henry Lie,
who both married native women and dwelt quietly in their primitive paradises,
but didn’t let it all go too far – they retained connection with the life and
history of mankind, the thought that set them above the ignorant and
potentially dangerous islanders.
This seems to be the lesson that the current legion of
primitivist writers ignores, even at their best. At their worst, this legion
descends to complete fatuousness. A correspondent of mine mentions a recent
Anarchist event:
I went to talk to a
woman (well, she was pretty and had a few visitors). Turned out she was a
primitivist and hoped to give demonstrations on how to ignite a fire with a
wooden pestle and mortar. She had several computer-generated booklets on her
subject and offered me some. Further, she invited me to join her blog.
I smiled politely.
****
BOOKS REVIEWEDHeyerdahl, Thor Fatu-Hiva – Back to Nature (Doubleday, 1975)
O’Brien, Frederick White Shadows in the South Seas (1919)
****
NOTES
CRAIG EDWARD KELSO
Thor Heyerdahl died in 2002 at the age of 88. The famed
ethnologist from Norway led many expeditions in an effort to gather evidence
for his theory of cultural diffusion, ideas still not widely taken in anthropological
circles. He was obsessed with recreating possible voyages, examining the topics
of pre-Columbian contact with peoples of the Western Hemisphere. He was also
the subject of a few documentaries and motion pictures (Kon-Tiki in 1950 and The Ra
Expeditions in 1971).
Paul Gauguin (he croaked in 1903) was
a French artist similarly fascinated with Polynesian culture and what was to
become the primitivist way of life, a return to the natural state of things.
Gauguin’s work (see inlays above) no doubt gave birth to the avant-garde
movements of the 20th century, including Picasso. He hung out with
Pissarro, Monet, Manet, Degas, and Renior, and generally led the life artists
of our day now manufacture … with standard ups and downs, triumphs and
tragedies.
Primitivism is a strange and rather
perverse notion humans must and need to get back to something called nature,
and that’s usually capitalized. Nature. Bah! Yes, of course, pollution and
crowding and modern social ills can be plagues, but primitivists are all wrong.
They get almost nothing right, and they’re largely hypocrites to boot. Thoreau
was such, as was Kerouac, where they’d CLAIM to’ve gone off to escape it all …
only to return to the comfy necessity of the same civilization they poo-poo’d.
Today, they’re your standard Hippy, hand-wringing about corporations … all the
while typing on their corporate computing device, linked to humanity by their
corporate internet service provider, driving in their corporate cars filled
with corporate gas – you get the idea. Cancer is natural. Disease is natural.
Humans succeed because they rebel AGAINST nature, and not because they give-in
to its redness of tooth and claw.
THE MATCH!
Post Office Box 3012Tucson, Arizona 85702
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