Informant38

On the phone with a relative last night, she said the snow level where she is, a ski resort that depends on winter trade, is at 9000 feet. I hadn't seen anything about that in the news, TV or online, though my looking is sporadic and not at all methodical, so I might have missed it.
It's not hard to imagine whatever intelligence has decision-making power over the news withholding that kind of information. It won't be good for business, and business is why the news is there.
The illusion we were given, and most of us still cling to, is that the news is there the way it would have been if our entire way of life hadn't been given over to merchants, the way the BBC once was, a conduit for impressions and evidence of the world, something to make a picture of the world out of, a way to know where we are and what's happening there.
The illusion is stories are chosen for their merit as information purely, and not weighed for their impact on the bottom line.
What I imagine now is people going home for Christmas, going to gatherings, being with each other, and talking about the weather where they are, and the weather where they live, and putting it together, getting the big picture. It's a human thing, it's what the news media was supposed to be doing, it's how we were able to accomplish a lot of the things we did early on.
Speaking of early on, there's a program that's part of the Annenberg/CPB Project called Exploring The World of Music that's been on the local educationa channel. It was made in 1998 by Pacific Street Films Project.
It has a lot of good stuff in it. Tuvan guys perfectly mimicing a fly, a river, a fox, and playing a song - on a kind of cello made from parts of a horse - that's about a much-loved horse that died and spoke to his master from heaven, telling him to make the instrument and the song. Everybody in the programs I've seen has been great.
While one of the interviewees was talking about how old music was, talking about the Kung - the Kalahari Bushmen - and how strong a role music has in their medicine, how important medicine is to them because they live so close to the earth, I flashed on some rock art I'd seen lately - pictographs and petroglyphs in the American West, and the Kalahari too, and it struck me that of course even the earliest painters, tens of thousands of years back, had music. Sang. Played instruments, and, as one of the ethnographers says in the program talking about Bosnian shepherd girls asking the stars where their love might be tonight, saying that for girls who lived up that high and were isolated much of the time the stars would be intimate, they would be someone you would ask, the music was made from and addressed to something familiar and close.
Later another narrator talked about the dissonance in Western 20th century music rising out of the noisy disharmony of the industrial urban environment.
So imagining whoever it was that painted the figures on the walls of Lascaux singing from there, then, imagining them bringing what was near them and important to them into the songs they sang...
Robbie Robertson has a tune called "Unbound" it's on his "Contact from the Underworld of Redboy". I don't know where he was coming from when he wrote it, but one time when I was listening to it I saw this guy standing on ground where no one had ever walked before, looking out toward a place no one had ever been before. Real places, in the early time, unknown places without boundaries.
The cave painters' singing is one of those things you can't prove, you can't make defensible statements about, because there's no record of it at all, it's like things in the spirit world - no rational positivist evidence will back up your claims.
But you know they did, you know they sang, and it was scary and strong and beautiful and healing, and real, running through the heart of what we were then, living held in the balanced hand, small and careful and brave.