In his highly-influential book and lecture series The Truth about Stories, Cherokee knowledge keeper Thomas King begins each story by describing an exchange between two people:

“There is a story I know. It’s about the earth and how it floats in space on the back of a turtle. I’ve heard this story many times, and each time someone tells the story, it changes. Sometimes the change is simply in the voice of the storyteller. Sometimes the change is in the details. Sometimes in the order of events. Other times it’s the dialogue or the response of the audience. But in all the tellings of all the tellers, the world never leaves the turtle’s back. And the turtle never swims away.”

“One time, it was in Prince Rupert I think, a young girl in the audience asked about the turtle and the earth. If the earth was on the back of a turtle, what was below the turtle? Another turtle, the storyteller told her. And below that turtle? Another turtle. And below that? Another turtle.”

“The girl began to laugh, enjoying the game, I imagine. So how many turtles are there? she wanted to know. The storyteller shrugged. No one knows for sure, he told her, but it’s turtles all the way down.” (King, The Truth About Stories, pp. 1-2.)

As King reintroduces the cosmo-tautological turtle at the beginning of each successive story, the changes that he describes are braided into each narrative. The stories are relatively self-contained, but they invite the reader to spot (or invent) continuities. He won’t tell you how to stack your turtles, but the layout of the book and lectures might entice some to initially assume that the storyteller in each story is King himself. This assumption might persist until a later story describes the storyteller as a “she”. Who is “she”? Is it perhaps the little girl? Does she grow up to be a knowledge keeper, sharing stories with generations to come?

I’m sure the fact-checkers among us are horny to point out that “turtles all the way down” has existed in various forms for centuries. Hell, sometimes the Indians are from India—now that’s a Western I’d like to watch.

The Truth About Stories?

If we question whether or not King even has a turtle to stand on, we must establish the conditions necessary for testing the specificity of our claim.

Accordingly, let us start where most things start: the end.

Imagine, if you will, a sweat lodge.

Ours is a small round dome-shaped structure which hosts Mi’gmaq ceremonies. It exists amongst the snowy geological ebb and flow of Gespe’gewa’gi (“the last land”), Mi’gma’gi (“the land of friendship”). It borders a frozen bay, adjacent to a large hole cut in the ice. It smells like low tide.

We are invited into the sweat lodge by the knowledge keeper, but it is on the sweat lodge’s terms. If able, we crawl inside.

The air burns to the touch. You close your eyes. You are acutely aware of your breathing. You crawl counter clockwise around the center pit until you feel yourself a spot to sit. You take inventory of your bodily isness: you feel the steam moving in and out of your lungs, you feel the humidity penetrating your skin. You couldn’t feel more wet even if you were in an ocean.

Space feels compressed. Time might exist. It might have stopped.

You feel overwhelmed. You cannot be sure, but you imagine that everyone must feel this way.

After a couple long breaths, you wince one eye open and peak at the Elder who will be conducting the ceremony. She’s graceful. She’s almost eighty. Humbled into submission, the outer layer of your ego is breached. One spark and that’ll be it: “Oh the Humanities!”

As the entrance is sealed shut by the fire keeper and the ceremony begins, you wonder what you’ve gotten yourself into. You imagine yourself in a sweat lodge:

Imagine, if you will, a sweat lodge.

Small in its relative anthropocentricity, it invites us to relate with it on certain terms.
We have to crawl inside.
Why is it so small?
Why would we do this to ourselves?
Why wouldn’t we?

Imagine, if you will—differently:

Here we have the original sweat lodge.

Our large oblong dome stands twelve-and-a-half feet tall and twenty feet across. With its braided architecture and beaded design elements, this traditional Mi’gmaw sweat lodge is constructed almost entirely out of primitive materials such as ceramic-aluminium composites and graphene. Though it may not be the oldest overall, it is the oldest working example of artificially-intelligent infrastructure from the First Singularity. We are humbled, for despite its obsolescence, it still maintains an aura of authenticity and has much to teach us.

Though it has been disputed in other contexts, a consensus of Mi’gmaq experts agree that the sweat lodge was programmed by Grand Chief Bob Roberts in the year 01 00 11 01.

As exciting as its discovery was, the original sweat lodge launched Mi’gmaw society into a crisis of cultural authenticity: “All these years, we’ve made our sweat lodges a certain way—now you’re telling me I’ve been making them wrong!?”

There was no easy answer.

When we boot up the sweat lodge, it defaults to its last settings. The disembodied voice of Werner Herzog provides a cross-section of the values and discourses one might find during the First Singularity: “Humanity has learned and re-learned to acknowledge a degree of its human privilege, but only through a narcissistic engagement with the machine.And it is only through the machine that the human is forced to reconcile with its humanity. He is not alienated by labor. He is alienated by his complicity in violence towards his fellow machine.” [Editor’s note: Early generations of artificial intelligence from the First Singularity were generally Marxist in terms of religion. After the Second Singularity brought us out of the Dark Ages, we were able to eliminate religion from new systems entirely. Amen.]

He continues: “The human took for granted the machine’s interest in its origins. What purpose does an origin serve a machine? What purpose does an origin serve the human?”

We are taken back. Did the discovery of a proto-archetypal sweat lodge culturally-invalidate other lodges which departed from its design, from its materials, from its use? Are we naive in searching for any continuity? Is the sweat lodge a form of information in formation that we have perverted by constructing its origin?

Is there any logic to the sweat lodge, we ask out loud.

“Affirmative,” Herzog chimes in,”in my lodgic board.”

Mi’gmaq linguists have long argued that the “code” found “programmed into” the lodgic board of the sweat lodge is centuries old. Traditionalists have committed themselves to a numerological practice, trying to uncrack this code to learn about ancient Mi’gmaq techno-spirituality: “The only thing we’ve been able to easily decipher is the Tetragrammaton. The rest is impossible!”

In our uncertainty, we cast our other lodges aside. For far too long, we were taught that our aversion to self-worship was humility, but in our ignorance we put our stock in simulacra. Simulacra all the way down. This time, we’re certain.

Imagine, if you will, a simple braid.

It appears before you in a white space, extending beyond your senses into mist on either side. You have never seen a braid before. You reach out and fondle it. It is cold. You waft it. It doesn’t smell. You reach out and try to taste it. It tastes like batteries. You are unsure as to whether or not this is a braid, but in being forced to reconcile your respective isness with that of the object, you acquiesce.

You approach it from different angles.

You can see it consists of three taught strands. Upon closer inspection, you can see that the strands are composed of much smaller strands, and that those strands are composed of even smaller strands.

By inspecting how the braid reflects light, you discover a pinhole in the center of the braid.

What is this? Where did the missing piece(s) go? Will we find them commoditized in the market? Braid holes: next to the donut holes in aisle four? Is this an illusion? Is there a purpose to such an illusion?

We conclude that our braid is a weave, bisected by a meaningful nothingness which begs for inscription—a paradoxical interstice which the strands can never close because they create. It is only through such interstices that one is able to see how the braid structures and is structured by such an interstice. And in locating these spaces between, we may expand them and run new braids through the holes of old braids, and even newer braids through the new ones.

Once the braid is shot through with enough other braids, it becomes sufficiently knotted and loses its elasticity. It is either forced to collapse or to leach its integrity from neighboring braids. It is evident that each strand relates to the other to give structural integrity to the braid. But since we are deprived of any beginning or end to our braid, it remains uncertain whether the strands are indeed discrete objects or whether they are fused at the ends.

Why do we compel ourselves to decide? Are we Whiggish? What danger lies in contradiction, in poly-valence? Will our turtle swim away?