Black Elk, the Red Zone, and the Tree of Life

This morning, I listened as a Taiwanese colleague of mine told a group of preschoolers the story of a childhood vision of Oglala medicine man Black Elk, with a considerable degree of artistic license. This was all in Chinese, but I’ll summarize her version of the vision in English:

Black Elk saw an enormous white disc. He saw the sun, the moon, the stars, the planets, plant life, and all manner of animals — quadrupeds and bipeds, fish and birds, and all the insects and other creeping things — and he understood that the disc represented the entire world.

Black Elk saw the four cardinal directions. He saw a red “belt” (a Chinese word with senses ranging from “ribbon” to “zone”) running north and south, and a black belt running east and west. At the center of the disc, where the two belts crossed, stood a gigantic tree with beautiful white flowers and fruit. There were numerous birds in its branches, and also bees and butterflies and other insects. (All this was illustrated via flannel board.)

Black Elk saw that the two belts were roads, on which innumerable people were walking. Those who walked the red belt were good, and those who walked the black belt were bad. (This was expressed in toddler-appropriate terms, e.g. being kind and polite vs. pushing and shouting.)

This became, for this teacher’s purposes, the moral of the vision. “Would you rather walk the red belt or the black one?” Of course everyone said red, and the teacher explained that when you are kind and honest and let love guide your actions, you are walking the red belt.

This pinged multiple sync themes for me. After a long break, I have recently begun reading again from W. F. Warren’s Paradise Found, of which a prominent theme is a gigantic central tree from which four rivers flow in different directions, like the belts in the vision. (See for example “The Stadium Arcadium covers.”) The white fruit, the straight paths, and the numberless concourses of people also link the vision to the Tree of Life visions of Lehi, Nephi, and Joseph Smith Sr. (It’s symbolically odd, though, that both the good path and the bad one apparently lead to the tree!) Most striking, though, was the odd description of the roads as “belts” or zones, with the red zone being a good thing. Just yesterday, William Wright posted “Red Zone,” interpreting that phrase in a more positive way than is usual, and noting that zone originally meant “belt.”

Later I looked up the apparent source material in Black Elk Speaks:

[The Grandfather] spoke again: "Behold the earth!" So I looked down and saw it lying yonder like a hoop of peoples, and in the center bloomed the holy stick that was a tree, and where it stood there crossed two roads, a red one and a black. "From where the giant lives (the north) to where you always face (the south) the red road goes, the road of good," the Grandfather said, "and on it shall your nation walk. The black road goes from where the thunder beings live (the west) to where the sun continually shines (the east), a fearful road, a road of troubles and of war. On this also you shall walk, and from it you shall have the power to destroy a people's foes. In four ascents you shall walk the earth with power" (p. 18).

Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy (p. 26).

Later I asked the teacher why she had called the red and black roads "belts." She said it was because of her visual aids, which used ribbons to represent the two roads, and led her to slip into referring to the roads in the vision itself as "belts" or ribbons.

This made me think of the Woody Guthrie line "As I went walking that ribbon of highway," so I gave that song a listen:

After that was finished, YouTube automatically queued up another Woody Guthrie song, one I hadn't heard before:

The refrain goes like this:

California is a Garden of Eden,

A Paradise to live in or see,

But believe it or not,

You won't find it so hot

If you ain't got the do re mi.

In context, "do re mi" clearly means money, but it's a phrase I associate with Joan and Claire. The references to the Garden of Eden and Paradise are links to W. F. Warren's book and to the Tree of Life.