Reading Herodotus at Deep Springs
Photo courtesy of Pablo Uribe
I’m standing outside my house, where a sandy two-track truck path begins a gradual descent toward the southern end of the Deep Springs basin. The ranch lies ahead of me, cottonwoods casting sporadic shade on a few houses and outbuildings while the paddocks and barn etch sharp shadows. The valley sinks toward a whitish disappearing point before brown hills interrupt and rise, piling atop one another like boulders. Farther still the jagged crest of the Sierra Mountains raises its icy palisade to scratch the sky.
Sage fills my nostrils. Salt bush and ephedra tinkle drily. I toe a petrified cow pie from the edge of the track and boot it with a soft thud into the grass. Cows lumber in slow motion around the field. A snort punctuates the stillness.
This place – Deep Springs Valley – felt written for Herodotus. Or made for him. I came to this place and was overtaken with wonder, that almost erotic curiosity and interest which Socrates referred to as the starting point of philosophy and Aristotle called “the desire to know.” I discovered stories and traditions in the place that Herodotus would have loved. Lore of a lost students who still haunted the hills. Scattered monuments – an old green truck, a cabin built above the scree behind campus, the “tree of solitude.” A Druid-like stone monument that arrested your gaze all around campus. Trails crisscrossed the hills shouldering the valley floor, but no book or map described them. Among crusty work gloves and twists of wire lay a ream of photocopied pages labeled “The Horse Book.” Inside, photocopied sections of topo maps with hand-annotations instructed you where to find trilobites or rock crystals or abandoned mine shafts that ended in wormhole darkness.
Stories we tell come from listening to others. The legendary Polish journalist Ryszard Kapunsckinki evokes this when he writes that he learned the art of reportage from Herodotus, how Herodotus illustrates that everything we know comes from someone who lives somewhere. Wikipedia’s layers of reader contributions and editorial suggestions give some sense of this, but most information we encounter today suffers from radical decontextualization. We don’t know who saw what’s being reported, who wrote it down, who interpreted it and put it into a story. We don’t know what the reporter ate for breakfast or what’s inside the top drawer of her nightstand. Herodotus loves these details: the oracles and how people interpret them to suit their tendentious predilections; the daughter who hides to observe her father and then reveals herself when she blurts out her distrust of the advice he’s receiving; the goats that graze backwards lest their horns catch in the turf; the foolish myths as well as the wise ones.
In the second book of the Histories, Herodotus describes how the king of the Persians, Cambyses, decides to invade Egypt. Before recounting the fate of this expedition, Herodotus pauses to examine the history and customs of the Egyptians. A massive excursus follows. He relates his own explorations of the Nile’s origin as well as his speculations about why it floods. He tells the story of how an early king of Egypt, Psammetichus, sought to establish if the Egyptians were the earliest human beings on earth by isolating a child from language until it spoke its first word, which would ostensibly indicate the original human language. (The word was bekos, a Phrygian word for bread, which belied the widespread belief in the Egyptians’ being first among all civilizations.) Herodotus talks of the phoenix, which immolates itself only to be reborn from its ashes, as well as crocodiles and the special burials Egyptians give to their victims. He relates his conversations with priests and the chronology of kings he could see from the statues lining their temples.
All this, the longest section of the entire Histories, numbering around seventy-five pages in most English translations, is preparation for the invasion that Herodotus later describes with much more brevity. Why the digression? Scholars have lucubrated. One point, in my view, is how Herodotus learns what he tells. Herodotus looks for himself, counting the statues one by one, or he retells what he’s heard, attributing his sources and the stories they give him. The knowledge and content of the Histories depend on Herodotus’ own inquiries and on the relationships he forms while pursuing them. They depend on conversations with himself and with others.
A few years into my tenure at Deep Springs, I proposed a course on Herodotus and his Histories. My idea was that pursuing a Herodotean inquiry in the valley would yield fascinating results, revealing, for example, the often overlapping and sometimes contradictory stories that shapeshifted among us. The stories we tell are not just garments we wear or hang in the closet, depending on our mood. The stories we tell are like the air we breathe, the water in which we swim. They form the flesh of the world, the substance of what sustains and connects us. My hope was that reading Herodotus and bringing his form of inquiry to the Deep Springs community could illuminate some part of the social body – an arm here, a foot there – and thus our contributions to it, how we kept the collective alive.
My students took up this challenge with characteristic gusto. Tanner wrote about Nietzsche as a formative figure among the century of Deep Springs curricula. Nathan spoke with alumni about re-invitation, the process by which second year students evaluated first years and decided whether or not to “re-invite” them to continue their education. Jackson focused on the Main Circle, the lawn around which the primary buildings of the college were clustered. Each of these inquiries brought the inquirers, my students, into new relationships: manila folders stuffed with stapled Xeroxes of course syllabi; vociferous alumni who still held grudges against their classmates – or had forgiven and befriended them; yellowed photographs of the early days in the valley when no trees canopied the campus and dust from the road hovered like pollen in the air.
Pablo took the example of Herodotus even farther. He left the valley and drove to the Inyo County Courthouse to visit a tiny archive there. He wanted stories that weren’t circulating already in the valley, stories that would let him look from the outside in. Deep Springs, like any other place, had constitutive outsiders whose traces you could still find if you looked for them. Pablo discovered a sad yet unsurprising history of omission, negligence, and violence, of ways that the coherent inside of the Deep Springs community rested on a forcible removal of what did not comport. The Paiutes were remembered by their petroglyphs, but the pedagogy of the land they followed was forgotten.
