Australian Aboriginals are a people inviolably enmeshed within their landscape
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The open stanza of Les Murray's poem, The Trances, runs like this:
"We came from the Ice Age,
we work for the trances.
The hunter, the Mother,
seers' inside-out glances"
Murray's work has been lauded throughout the English-speaking world, and for some time, he was in the running for a Nobel laureate. But few would deny that his work could be abstruse - far beyond the occlusion generated by mere poetic concision. Here, I suspect, he is referring to the end of the Ice Age whence humankind achieved a vast territorial and numerical expansion, and in which neolithic societies came together still partial to their Moon Goddess and their vision questing "
In 1998, at the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam, this Australian poet began his talk by declaring,
"The continent on which I live was ruled by poetry for tens of thousands of years, and I mean it was ruled openly and overtly by poetry. Only since European settlement in 1788 has it been substantially ruled by prose. The sacred law which still governs the lives of traditional Aborigines is carried by a vast map of song-poetry attached to innumerable mythic sites. Each group 'sings' the tract of country it occupies, just as each initiated person sings the ceremonial songs of the holy places for which he or she is responsible within that territory. A person may unselfconsciously say 'That Mountain is my mother: it is her ancestor and mine; it is the body of our ancestor, and the story we sing and enact there is her body. We are her body, too, and the songs are her body, and the ceremonies are her body. That is the Aboriginal Law.'"
Australian Aboriginals are a people inviolably enmeshed within their landscape: theirs is a profound understanding that the relatedness of all life is the consequence of its existence within a vast regenerative system, the Cosmos - which they model, not in theoretical abstractions, but in the lived terrain of their vast homeland. Modernity has greatly advanced our scientific understanding, but for most of us, our visceral experience of the Cosmos has atrophied. We have become estranged from its expression in our environment, and in our connection with the reciprocity of Life and Death. The acknowledgement of one half of this dyad, which, characteristically is call the Life cycle, dwarfs the other and cancels their reciprocity.
As Aboriginal Law demonstrates, it was not always, and everywhere, like this. There remain glimpses of how pre-modern societies organize a more equitable consideration of the reciprocal elements of the regenerative cycle. These societies seem to enable their people to hold both parts of a conjoined reality in their heads (and hearts), at the same time. Life and death, Ken Wilbur suggests, can be seen as a vibration like an ocean wave - a sine wave representing a fluid movement from peak to trough in a singular, indivisible action.
A society's interaction with the flora, fauna and the landforms found in its environment can promote an understanding of the cosmic process as a continuum, rather than as Modernity's stop-start, binary model of endings and beginnings. 60,000 years of human habitation in Australia attests to the sustainability of this model. Any society alert to its local environment on which it is manifestly dependent for its sustenance, will have a fuller understanding of life and death than a society in which money mediates and obscures how its food is obtained - which in either case, is inevitably through the death of other living organisms or their domestication to human needs. In the 21st century, when we, in the West, seek out the natural environment, it is often to have our experience of it construed by an Emersonian awe - to experience an enraptured psychological state. Modernity has sequestered nature - and within it, the inevitable processes of regeneration through death.
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