Walking in beauty

We have been in New Mexico for almost a month now, and Helena is getting used to the place: the dry, thin air, the cold mornings, the big open vistas.  But as we walked to the Railyard Park today, so that she could meet other kids and play in the playground, I realized that though I have talked to her a lot about Tupi-Guarani philosophy, we've never talked about the native people of her second home.  It was a beautiful morning and we were walking in the shade of the cottonwoods, so it seemed to make sense to talk about the Navajo virtue of "walking in beauty."

The Navajo word hosho doesn't really mean just beauty, I explained to Helena Iara.  It means goodness, happiness, and most of all, balance.  For the navajo, things are beautiful and good when they are in equilibrium, an idea shared by many cultures, but one that it particularly important for people who live by herding sheep in the desert, where a small tip of the delicate natural balance can mean death for a family.

I've never actually studied Navajo philosophy: I worked with a homeless Navajo girl when I first came to Santa Fe, and Rita and I have been out on the Big Rez a couple of times, but like most whites, my contact with the Navajo comes mostly through Sgt. Jim Chee and the Legendary Lieutenant, Joe Leaphorn: yes, the novels of Tony Hillerman.  In fact, though, as I explained to Helena Iara, that makes all the sense in the world given the value that the Navajos place on hosho.  As Agatha Christie once explained in reference to the detective novel, murder disturbs the balance of the world, and the role of the detective is to restore equilibrium by explaining why it happened and by seeing to the punishment of the guilty.  It makes sense that Jim Chee is both a detective and a shaman: both seek to restore a balance that has been lost to illness, crime, or evil.

By the time we had gotten to this idea, Helena Iara and I had reached the playground, so rotation (of the merry-go-round) seemed much more important than the violation and restoration of balance (in Portuguese, by the way, balançar (to balance) also means to swing.  It is one of Helena's favorite verbs, especially given how much she loves to swing and rock).  But finally, as we walked home, I explained the problems of this philosophy of beauty as equilibrium.

The problem is this: both the detective novel and the philosophy of balance suppose that things started balanced, right, beautiful... and that some evil action messed everything up.  Our role as humans is to restore the lost balance: a fundamentally reactionary mission.  We can see this idea in contemporary right wing America, for instance, for whom everything was perfect in the 1950s before the hippies and the commies and the New Left came to screw with America.

In fact, of course, America in the 1950s is not a Paradise Lost, now were things happy and wonderful before the murder that the detective must solve.  Neither history nor justice works as a return to the past, but as a learning that reaches for the future.  Unfortunately, though, as I got to this point in the talk, we made the final turn home and Helena fell asleep in the snuggly, so I didn't get to wax pedantic on the dialectics of history.  Hegel will come another day.