The Long Night's Journey Into Day

For those who survived our longest solstice night and are tuned to seasonal celebrations, here’s a chestnut about mobile context-aware community narratives that hopefully brings some warm inspiration to your fireside reflections.

Christmas is just one child within a large family of cultural traditions that were born from or married into ancient human observances of the winter solstice.  As an astronomer-by-first-vocation living in Vancouver I was intrigued to study the miraculous birth story of the Pacific north coast, sometimes called Raven and the First People or Raven Steals the Daylight.  One dimension of this story is captured brilliantly in Haida artist Bill Reid’s “The Raven and the First Men” sculpture at UBC’s Museum of Anthropology. Raven is a complex trickster and this story is a focal point of the Raven Traveling myth cycle.  The epic poetry of north coast mythology is illuminated in Robert Bringhurst’s fascinating trilogy starting with “A Story as Sharp as a Knife”.

Without getting into the cultural astronomy details here (a paper I wrote on “Raven’s Universe” can be tracked down or requested), Raven Steals the Daylight is precisely about the human experience of the winter solstice.  On the north coast the days don’t just get shorter – they almost disappear.  This tale is about the evolving tension between day and night, between the real and spirit worlds.  It is the cultural creation myth of the people who tell it.  It is the centrepiece of a weeks-long Winter Ceremonials rooted at the solstice. And it is scaffolded on the orbits of the Sun, Moon and Venus - deus ex machina – so that spiritual, cosmological, social, and personal narratives are meaningfully interwoven. 

For mobile media producers, the key point is that we have a similar opportunity to use virtual media to weave together elements of peoples’ everyday reality with their personal, social and spiritual existence.  To make people feel like they actually belong in and actively participate with their mythologies. That’s a powerful new form of story telling that hasn’t been available in our text-based and digital media for a long, long time.

In a world addicted to copyrighted linear narratives, it may be impossible to conjure a world and time where oral traditions were embedded – were context-righted – into community memory, traditions, landscape, and cosmology.  As we struggle toward something we call the semantic web, let’s be clear that “meaning” is much more than digital.