Via a convoluted route through the internet, I discovered Ursula K Le Guin’s article on the Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.
This is great. It chimes perfectly with my views on what I studied about prehistory and human evolution and how agriculture developed.
We forget what is lost in the decay of time, and come to believe it never existed. Carrier bags, for example.
We find ancient amulets, their edges worn smooth from years of gentle abrasion inside a leather pouch. We discover ancient baskets, ancient bowls, in dry places far apart across the globe – Chile, Egypt, Siberia.
Never mind the folk who pop up to say “what about teh leatehr used to make teh bag dint u need to kill an animal to skin it so u need weapons lol”.
You don’t need a leather bag.
You can weave a bag with whatever’s to hand. You pick up a big leaf, and fold it in two, and you have a carrier.
All things organic decay. Bones and stones are left. We treat as special the ivory carvings from the Palaeolithic because – along with cave paintings – they’re all the art we have left from those times.
They are special.
But you don’t start carving ivory, or bone. You start with something softer.
You start with wood.
You don’t start making bowls from fired ceramics. You start with something softer.
You start with wood.
And you don’t make bags from tanned animal hides that take weeks to cure. You don’t even start with knotted sinews or strands of rawhide.
You start with something easy.
Something to hand when you’re gathering things you need a bag for.
No, not wood this time – you start with grass, or reeds, or whips of bark stripped from suitable trees.
You weave.
You knit.
You knot, and net, and crochet.
You make boxes from birch bark.
This carrier bag approach is hidden but it’s close to how we began.
We talk of the first settlements, and why they appeared when they did, where they did, without considering the precursors to a village with farms that need protection.
For centuries before the farms were needed, we chose the seeds to keep and the seeds to ditch.
We bred the wheat from abundance, not scarcity. We picked the seeds from wheat and barley over thousands of years, each time choosing what pleased us, and the seeds we left behind became next year’s crop.
Somehow, someone, at some point – and it’s likely to have been an intelligent woman – said to themselves: “Hmm, this stuff keeps coming up, and it’s a pain in the grass to harvest the grains in ones and twos, why not see if some of those freaky ears with double rows will grow as well as these.”
So the process begins.
Lo, the wheat germinates and grows, and produces more double row wheat.
Our Gatherers like this. It takes less time to harvest a handful of grain. That’s more time to sit round the fire gossiping, or taking a swim, or staring at the sky while stoned and giggling.
Time moves on. The double wheat is fine.
Slowly the climate changes, the plants become less abundant and we start to worry there won’t be enough for everyone.
Year by year, we stay longer at the wheat site.
We take care of those little grains.
At some point, we leave a group of folk behind to look after the wheat fields. These might have been blokes. Let’s pretend they were.
Now, it isn’t much fun guarding wheat fields. You sit around all the time chasing away hungry birds and mice. You wave wildly at wandering goats to keep them off the crop. You wonder how the women are getting on without you.
Once in a while, some of you go off into the mountains and take potshots at ibex with a slingshot.
You see huge animals down in the valley eating grasses you can’t eat yourself.
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You head down there to see what’s happening – to see what they are – and your mates dare you to climb onto one as if it were a pony (maybe it even is a pony, who knows, this is fiction).
You’re bored. You have a go. If you’re lucky, you fall off without being gored, or trampled, or crushed.
You start to tell stories about your once-in-a-lifetime trip to the valley of the horses, mammoths, whatever.
When the women come back from whatever they were up to (wimminz things, clearly, and no business of yours) you tell them of your Fabulous Adventures Taming Wild Mammals With Your Bare Hands.
They stand there and look at the wheat, and maybe they say “good job”.
Maybe not.
And then winter comes on, after the harvest, and this year it’s colder than ever. Your shelter just isn’t enough. Your tribe cuts down more trees, and builds a wee hut, and hunkers down there in the dark.
Once in a while you set your wee hut on fire, when you’re tired or stoned or just careless. Eventually you run out of trees and build a hut in bricks, made of mud, and then you start to leave archaeological traces we pick up on thousands of years in the future and *suddenly* farming begins.
And the women still walk to the valley beyond with their children in slings on their backs, digging sticks at the ready, their woven weed bags filled with grain for the feast and their voices raised in song.
Feminist archaeology, in the 1970s, asked who was keeping the armies alive when the menfolk went off to fight battles. They asked who kept hold of the slaves when Caesar was bedding Cleopatra; who turned over the soil when the army was parked outside Troy.
We hear and read so much about history from only one perspective.
The history of what goes on behind the scenes, underpinning society, holding the fort while others go off to war, isn’t the narrative we’ve been sold.
That’s the point of the Le Guin article. Our world is built according to the story of the hero’s journey, and in order to be a hero he must have a foe to defeat, an enemy to conquer, a valiant deed to wow the crowds on his triumphant return.
It feeds our current fantasy response to COVID19 in the UK. It isn’t something we can beat with grand sweeping gestures or heroic deeds. Our sacrifice will be in vain.
We need to approach the pandemic with a different mindset – one which holds the future safe for everyone, like a carrier bag for the planet.
Plain, careful, unspectacular. Small steps. Soft steps.
Every day, focus on a simple task: wear the mask and stand apart.
We need better stories to deal with this threat, because the stories we need to deal with climate change have to be familiar before the threat has the power to kill us all.
I believe we already have the stories. We have the storytellers, the audience, the means of sharing the words.
Do we have the time?
This week’s links:
Ancient pottery – cooking bowls – found in the Amur region of Siberia, suggest we’ve been making these things for some time. The article is badly titled but the text says “…these people used nets, most likely made of plant fibre… as we found stone sinkers for nets” referring to a site twelve thousand years old – a time of different climate change, in a world with a lot more resources. Human adaptability at its best.
Back in July the world Heavy Metal Knitting championships took place in Finland. ‘Nuff said!
Probably because much of the early story-gathering by Europeans in the wilderness where hunter-gatherers live(d) was done by the sort of explorer who shot tigers and elephants and liked to be photographed next to dead heaps of ’em, comparative history spends too much time on the big mammoth fable and not enough on the small scale stuff, like making leather from fish skin. Carrier bag, anyone?
Bonus book link: The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory (not read this yet; sounds interesting).
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