When I talk about being a noble savage, I’m not claiming that I’m part of any authentic American Aborigine culture. It simply wasn’t passed down to me and the only way to reconstruct it is synthetically.
When I talk about being a noble savage, I’m talking about my genetic heritage. In the same way that my Aborigine genes have shaped my body, they have shaped my mind.
For example, my peak experience happens around too fast and includes a sense of precision. Kenny Loggins sums it up in his song the Danger Zone:
“You’ll never say hello to you until you get on red line overload,
You’ll never know what you can do until you get it up as high as you can go.
Right out on the edge is always where I burn to be,
The further on the edge, the hotter the intensity.”
The men in my family has always had an inexplicable need for motorcycles. It’s a family tradition we knew about but nobody talked about. It was just there.
My grandfather was known for riding a horse “like a trick-pony rider” and being able to shoot anything.
My ancestors were known for hunting with bows and arrows on horseback.
I can’t say what it was like or what it meant to them. Culture shapes experience as evolution shapes the brain. I have the brain, not the culture.
Living cultures are mostly non-verbal. It’s not so much in the words we speak, but in the order and structure of our lives, as we live it and the environment we live it in. It’s transmitted through spatial relationships, vocal tonality, facial expressions, body position, gestures and a million other things I can’t get from a book.
As I’m beginning to study American Aborigines, I’m not looking to duplicate their culture. I’m looking deeper for genetic patterns which may have been passed down to me.