A Tall Tale of the Texas Soul

Tornado
A seduction.
The eerie green hue of the sky,
the captivating inert silence,
my hair rising, skin tingling,
swept up
in the nothingness and everythingness
of a moment,
the earth on the cusp of an orgasm.
This silence has taken all,
silence, absence,
my breath is emptiness.
I am.
The winds roar,
push and pull,
swirling, pulsating,
the air from my lungs is its force.
I am the winds,
the silence,
the destruction.
Nothing and Everything
in a moment.

As a child growing up in Texas, tornado safety precautions were instilled at a young age. In elementary school, we learned the sounds of tornado sirens, and the ensuing tornado drills taught us how to crouch into the fetal position against concrete walls to ensure our safety. The force of the wind, we were told, pulls in like a vacuum and projects like a shot-gun, destroying everything in its path. Yet, as I stood in the midst of the tornado that tore through Fort Worth, Texas in 2000, it was not the wind that paralyzed me. On the contrary, it was the stillness that took my breath away. The deafening silence before the destruction, the calm before the storm, was an inert madness on the verge of chaos. I stood, captivated in its midst. Despite all the warnings of my childhood, this stillness would not let me move.

Tornados are part of the southern soul, a destruction that rests at our core, just as the vastness of the Texas terrain calls to our wandering hearts. Upon an international move to Dallas, James Hillman described his initial impression of Texas: “The external limitlessness of Dallas is what strikes one first on arrival from Switzerland: where are the hills, the little streams, washes, drops in elevation? And the immense relentless sky so opened out. Not much to force geographical boundaries” (285). This description captures the long-held romance of the Southwest, with its wide-open spaces, of its bigger and better. The limitlessness that Hillman details permeates the limitlessness of Texas thought. This connection opens into an interesting exploration of the relationship between the Texas terrain and the Texas collective psyche. In this land of extreme weather, where climate changes can range from over one hundred degrees Fahrenheit to below freezing, or where a tornado can destroy a lifetime in a moment, so too is it a land of extreme opinions, of the “right-wing fear machine […] jumping at shadows” where “Open Carry evangelists [fight for] everyone to carry heat,” as a recent Rolling Stone article describes (Binelli). The outer terrain of Texas corresponds to the inner terrain of the Southern soul. This essay explores the permeable membrane between the witnessing world we label as “nature” and the inner experience of the psyche. As we observe the phenomenon of each affecting the other, we can begin to imagine this relationship differently.

Gaston Bachelard states: “Matter…through the work of the imagination, mirrors our own energies” (qtd. in Stroud: 40). This philosophy functions on multiple levels. Physically, we project ourselves into the world by manipulating the matter that surrounds us. When we cut a clearing in a forest, build a home, or farm the land, we are altering our surroundings to our own needs and therefore projecting our desires into the land. These actions in turn, reflect back onto us. While we manipulate matter with our hands and tools, matter also manipulates us. It mirrors our own creations on a tangible level as well as a psychic level, through an imaginal act that entails both the former and the formed, the creator and the created. Though it is much easier to conceptualize our physical manipulations of matter, Robert Sardello explains a more reciprocating relationship between matter and soul. The human psyche does not simply project soul life onto an inanimate world, rather “soul inheres within the world and creates our psyches” (Sardello qtd. in Cobb: 123). We are not simply of the land or live on the land, but rather we are in the land, our psyches embedded in the same membrane from which the world emerged. As a fetus within a mother’s womb, the action of each effect the other, so that to mark something on the earth finds us marking our own skin. Michael Whan states succinctly, “if we can appropriate stone in the service of the human symbolic, so stone can also ‘petrify’ us, turn us to stone. Projection can work in a dual-direction” (24). The current collective culture, the state of the resources of the earth, and the narratives we tell ourselves as humans, stand as witness to the reciprocating nature of projection. A Texas myth, or what is known in the Southwest as a “tall-tale,” offers an image upon which to develop this thesis.

Hillman states: “An image presents a moment of time and forms it like sculpture” (285). The myth of Pecos Bill opens into a moment of time filled with legendary heroes who emerged around campfires on the rugged cattle-drives of the early Texas ranching industry. This was a wild, untamed, and unsocialized Southwest carving an identity into the dusty terrain. Pecos Bill, “the greatest cowpuncher ever known on either side of the Rockies,” spent his infancy teething on horseshoes, drinking the milk of mountain lions, and playing with grizzly bears (Osborne 73-74). When neighbors moved within fifty miles, Bill’s parents packed up the wagon claiming, “It’s getting too crowded around here” (Suter 41). As the family made their way across the rough terrain of Western Texas, Bill was dropped from the covered wagon. Coyotes found him and raised him in the lands around the Pecos River, a striking similarity to the wolf who raised Romulus and Remus in the foundation myth of Rome.

There are many tales of the escapades of Pecos Bill’s youth, such as inventing scorpions and tarantulas as practical jokes (Osborne 82). However, of interest to this essay, is how Pecos Bill tamed and encultured the wild terrain of Texas. He taught his “ranch hands” how to sing and write songs, and he is credited with the creation of cowboy attire; ten-gallon hats, spurs, and six-guns (45). There are various narratives of Bill inventing roping and teaching cowboys to lasso steers and tame horses, a vital skill-set for a ranch hand (Suter 45). Pecos Bill was legendary for his ability to rope anything. However, the tallest tale told is how he roped and rode a cyclone across the Southwest countryside.

Multiple tellings of the Pecos Bill myth give various reasons for the audacious act of harnessing a tornado. Some versions say that Bill did it to win a bet, while most tell of a terrible drought, the worst drought in Texas history (Polley 310). When all was almost lost, Bill looked up to see a deep shade of purple in the sky. His cattle began to stampede as a huge black funnel headed straight for Bill’s ranch (Osborne 82). He swung his lariat, lassoed the cyclone, “grabbed the cyclone by the ears and pulled himself onto her back. Then he let out a whoop and headed that twister across Texas” (83). He leveled mountains, cleared forests and made the Panhandle of Texas treeless (Crawford 22). Although the cyclone was wild and bucked like an untamed bronco, Bill held tight and rode the cyclone through Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, wringing out rain the whole way (Osborne 83). As the cyclone shriveled up in California, Bill fell to the ground, the indention of his body creating the basin for Death Valley (83). Akin to the Titan Prometheus, who harnessed fire for the use of humankind, Pecos Bill, in his own titanic nature, harnessed wind and water for the consumption of humankind, a titanism Texas still holds to this day.

The image of Pecos Bill, who harnessed a tornado and mastered nature, is a strong thread in the Texas psyche. While Bill is a trickster who utilizes the resources present to him, taken literally, he masters the untamable, feeding into the iconic idea that we can do the same. When no space is left open to the unknown, when the wildness and unpredictable nature that is “nature” is tethered in a harness, then everything that threatens this perceived order is met with fear and defense. Jung states: “[Man] has long ago adapted himself to nature in so far as it conforms to general laws; what he fears is unpredictable chance whose power makes him see in it an arbitrary and incalculable agent. […] And the alarming manifestation of a power which can transgress the natural order obviously calls for extraordinary measures of placation or defense” (105-6). Tornadoes are a living image of unpredictable chance. These destructive vortexes of violent circulating winds move arbitrarily, demolishing all within their grasp. Yet, in the myth of Pecos Bill, he is able to yoke these natural forces dissipating their power and controlling their path. Pecos Bill is the manifestation of an impossible defense. To control the uncontrollable, to tame the untamable, requires a mindset that sees no limits to the power of will and determination. This mindset creates limitless inhabitants who gluttonously drill and frack like crack addicts puncturing wounds into their own flesh. We become the cancerous cells pulsing through the veins of the earth, feeding and devouring the source of our own life, pooling crude oil like melanoma on the skin of the land. Extreme weather mirrors gun-slinging extremists convinced that the devil is in all the unknowns. As inhabitants encroach on the wild open spaces, our wildness moves inward in a ferocious defense of what is “our land.” The wildness that was Texas is now us.

Marco Heleno Barreto explains: “Logically, the confinement to and obsession with domination of external nature impedes humankind from fulfilling its complete notion as a spiritual species” (261). To understand this is to understand the reciprocity of soul, from within and without. What we “do” to the world, we “do” to ourselves. In harnessing the tornado, we have harnessed our own soul. Hillman alludes to this in his essay “Imagining Dallas.” He states, “The absence of both external and internal natural borders leaves a city without those obstacles and hindrances that force reflection. Nothing to come up against that turns us back on ourselves – total availability, endless action to the horizon, the spirit of Texas space” (285). Hillman reflects on the external affecting the internal, and that without limits, we become too big and disconnected from our psychological interior. The subtle nature of soul is lost in the vastness. To find a more balanced interaction with the world, Hillman develops the “Romantic idea of self-limitation through image” as a way of “keeping each thing to its dimensions” (286). The negative space, the unknowns that abound in the unseen absence, are also present and part of an interaction within nature. He gives the example of a tree, how its growth is limited and formed by the emptiness that surrounds it. While unseen, this “negative capability,” as Hillman calls it, is an integral part of the image that is seen (286). It balances what is known with what is unknown, the mysteries of deep and dormant truths. Holding space for this emptiness creates a vacuum for the imaginal, a seduction that pulls absence into presence. “The natural emptiness, flatness and aridity of our geography,” Hillman explains, “become[s] a perpetual challenge to which we continually imagine new responses” (287). The need to control everything leaves no space to interact with soul, no realm in which the imaginal can play. “[H]uman imagination generates culture within its sense of lack,” Hillman explains (287). Life is found in the emptiness, in the imaginal, in the not knowing. The tornado may destroy, but its destructive vortex pulls into presence the living wildness that feeds the soul.

To perceive nature in this way, through our own permeability within it, is to see, as David Abram explains, “the boundaries of a living body [as] open and indeterminate; more like membranes than barriers, they define a source of metamorphosis and exchange” (46). We exist entangled and intertwined in the membranes of the world from which we emerge. To experience this, is to understand an amorphous state of being, a kind of blurring at the edges of our temporal structure in a shape-shifting, metamorphic interaction with our surroundings. This is not a natural interaction in our rationalist and logic-driven culture. It requires a phenomenological state of being, a presence that restrains from judgment and action.

William Paden explains; “The word phenomenon literally means something ‘observable’ (from the Greek phenomena, ‘appearance’). Phenomenology is the study of things in their observable aspects as opposed to their causality” (74). Phenomenological observations amplify instead of reduce. While our culture teaches us to have a critical eye, to compare and contrast in order to categorize and understand, phenomenology perceives the world as it presents itself, in all its various forms. Scientifically, all matter can be broken down into its various parts in order to study and ultimately comprehend. This hermeneutic implies a cause and effect that is replicable so that an outcome can be predicted and eventually controlled. Phenomenology emerged in response to this analytical nature of scientific examination. Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, approached observation through perception. According to Abram, Husserl turned “toward the world as it is experienced in its felt immediacy […] not to explain it but simply to pay attention to its rhythms and textures […] and ultimately to give voice to its enigmatic and ever-shifting patterns” (35). Turning toward the world in this way is to sit within it, entangled as a being of it, in a fluid experience of exchange. This gives space to the unseen, that which can not be categorized or ultimately understood. To perceive phenomenologically is to gain awareness through the senses, a sensuous experience with “otherness.” Through sight, sound, smell, and touch the boundaries of our own temporal structure blur into the other, a metamorphosis that mirrors as it transforms. By stepping beyond the analytical approach into the felt sensuous experience, we are given the space to encounter affect, to draw near to the mysterious depths of soul, the realm that holds meaning. In this exchange, we cannot help but be changed as well. As we breathe, the world breathes us, in an absence and presence of form.

Influenced by Husserl, phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty expressed an embodied interaction with the world as an active presence that has a sensibility all its own. Abram states, “Merleau-Ponty writes of perception in terms of an almost magical invocation enacted by the body, and the body’s subsequent ‘possession’ by the perceived” (55). Possession is a powerful word. It implies letting go of some sense of autonomy to an entity that can perceive as well as possess. To be pulled into presence by that which is perceived, is not only to see, touch, smell, and hear but to be seen, touched, smelt, and heard in a sensuous reciprocity. This interaction is in the realm of the imaginal, the psychic space that coheres our wholeness of being, that allows otherness to flow into self. The imaginal holds space for the unseen to be given form. As with Hillman’s negative capability, absence is given presence by an entangled interaction between the perceiver and the perceived, each forming the other, reflecting soul in a metamorphic mirror.

To consider my experience of a tornado phenomenologically is to imagine into the image of the tornado, not as a passive object but rather as a sensible entity with the ability to actively engage. My interaction is perceived through the sensuous experience of my own presence within the vortex. A phenomenon occurring with me, not to me, as I am a being of all just as the all pulsates through me. The seduction of the eerie green hue of the sky, the captivating inert silence, my hair rising, skin tingling, swept up in the nothingness and everythingness of a moment, the earth on the cusp of an orgasm. This silence has taken all, silence, absence, my breath is emptiness. I am. The winds roar, push and pull, swirling, pulsating, the air from my lungs is its force. I am the winds, the silence, the destruction. Nothing and Everything in a moment.

It seems only natural to imagine a hero who can harness a cyclone. We interact with the world through our narratives. Abrams states, “Communicative meaning is always, in its depth, affective; it remains rooted in the sensual dimension of experience, born of the body’s native capacity to resonate with other bodies and with the landscape as a whole” (75). Myths are how we imagine the world making sense. Pecos Bill is the collective culture’s imaginal way of entering into the ontological reality of our own powerlessness in the face of destruction and death. Tornados are terrifying. To imagine an interaction with this force is to feel an utter loss of power. The arbitrary destruction of houses stripped to their foundations while neighboring homes stand untouched is an uncontrollable destruction that sits too close to home. It uproots our psyches as it uproots our trees, rips through our searching-for-certainty souls. To feel, in that moment, so small, urges us to imagine ourselves bigger, grander and more in control. So we harness our tornadoes and force them to do our will, because the alternative is too frightening to bear.

However, by being too big, too extreme, too certain or too possessive, we encroach on our own wild open spaces. Ian McCallum states: “To lose one’s sense of union with wild places is to preempt what I believe is one of the most overlooked conditions in modern psychiatry – homesickness” (3). The wild spaces, our own negative capability, the absence that forms our presence, is the imaginal realm of the soul. It exists both within and without as we open our imagination to perceive the world more fully. The unknowns whisper truths of nature’s rhythm, a certainty we know too well. Jung explains, “People…looked down upon the ground or up into the trees in order to see what could be put to use, and for what purpose; like the animals they herded, paired, and fought, but did not see that they dwelt in a unified cosmos, in God’s world, in an eternity where everything is already born and everything has already died” (33). Absence sits ever close to presence. Nature conforms to our need for utilization, the means to our own perceived end. Met in a different way, nature meets us in sensuous reciprocity evoking transformation of both the perceived, as well as the perceiver, in a perpetual emergence into life, in all its polymorphous forms.

Works Cited:

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