This is the first day of the 3rd trinity, and the principle that is most important to my world view. However I have a scientific orientation and view it more as a process of truth seeking rather than any sort of knowledge of ultimate truths. The way the word science has been personified and bandied about lately, as if it were some sort of absolute omniscient authority, has been driving me crazy. I suppose in the context of a faith-based epistemology, in which so many of us are brought up, it makes sense to use this reference to authority as the essence of the scientific enterprise.
But what science is really all about is piercing the biases and filters inherent in human sensation and subsequent cognition. The whole truth of any moment would be a data set so large it could never fit into any mind. Even the useful little narratives our nervous systems evolved to portray and predict must necessarily be simplified into a heuristic of signs, symbols, and their relationships. The whole point of science is to evade all these cognitive biases to reveal some more accurate detail of the world, even though it could never reveal all its underlying layers.
When I was 9 years old, I first went to a YMCA summer camp, Camp Fox, on a pebbly beach on Catalina Island. It spurred a lifelong love of and interest in the ocean, and especially those eight Islands and the deep Channel separating them from the mainland. This lead me to research and write a screenplay about the Chumash peoples, with whom I felt a deep kinship, and who inhabited the islands and navigated across the channel before the arrival of european explorers. I did a great deal of research on their Brotherhood of the Canoe, who jealously guarded the technology of the Tomol canoes they built to cross the channel and which were vital in maintaining their thriving communities on the Islands.
The Curator of Anthropology at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, Travis Hudson, was the foremost expert on the Chumash Tomol. I had carefully read his museum’s monograph on Tomol construction and scheduled a meeting with him at his hotel in LA where he was visiting for a scientific conference. When I tried to call him to tell him I was on my way to the meeting, I discovered he had committed suicide in hotel the day before. It added a some strange energy to the project, and I dug into his research harder than ever.
A couple weeks ago, the amazing Apricot Lane Farms in Moorpark, on what was once Chumash land, made a post asking about Toyon, which is the Holly that inspired this holiday. I started to reply about how the Chumash shipwrights had mixed crushed Toyon berries with the natural lumps of beach tar to make the caulking compound for the seams between their canoe’s planks. Given the above, I felt pretty confident on the fact, but pulled down my beloved copy of Travis’ Tomol: Chumash Watercraft as Described in the Ethnographic Notes of John P. Harrington to add some details. To my suprise, I could find no references to Toyon berries. I had shared this erroneous fact with dozens of folks over the years, and still cannot imagine how such a false bit of data got so embedded in my memory.
In fact, the falseness of this very specific little detail, which I had single-handedly spread for so many years, kind of freaked me out. Can I have any confidence in anything I know? How much of what is inside my head and that I take as fact is actually true? Turns out memories are constructed in a process of consolidation across numerous brain regions and functions. Most of studies on memory show that everytime we recall a memory it has to be reconsolidated and so becomes susceptible to having new bits incorporated into it. I doubt I’ll ever know how Toyon Berries got into my memories about Chumash carpentry, maybe if I reread the whole Tomol text more carefully I’d find an actual reference, maybe not. But the Truth, as it exists as an idea within our minds, is anything but. Kind of glad I pulled down the dog-eared old monograph rather than making a fool of myself.
Happy Truth!
HOLLY DAYS 