Summary of content :- ) A Wavering Truth.
Men, women and their children are walking all over the world complex and
complexer.
Everyone seemingly walking to a light held on some horizon, a need and/or
want; a may and/or a must that VERY, every so often issues into mayn't and/or
mustn't as both deflector and/or detractor from some great and seeming
attractor.
This beacon then lit seeming by another upon some hill attracts but not so
obviously as the dip in the landscape that embraces the river's flow. Both as
within and as without the meandering of both each and eVERY is the stILL and
dWELLing self. Water becomes the flame.
~~~~ 'That truth in which all intellect finds rest.' Dante
Fragments to shorten the long.
An infant died in Gurka'wuy on Trial Bay, Eastern Arnhem Land, in the country
of the Gumatj and Marrakulu clans. The child's spirit home was in its own
Mardarrpa clan country 100kms away. - The objective of the ritual was to move
his spirit from Gurka'wuy to Gunmurruytjpi. -To be accomplished by calling
upon the ancestral beings that created the areas bridging the land between
the two. -Each place associated with particular ancestral songs, dances, and
painting. The form is the 'restored behaviour' of ritual, resources upon
which people can draw. - Participants in this ritual select from particular
places on the journey and so organise them in a sequence to move the 'body'
from a to b. A dance is then performed from a place, a series from another, a
painting will be made from a third, a ground sculpture from a fourth and so
on...¦-Many alternative routes could be taken.
In the case of the Mardarrpa child the choice was between the coastal route
or the inland route, the latter being chosen. Decisions like this are based
on multiple factors; to whom the dead person is related, who offers to take
part in the ceremony, which groups decide to stay away. It is thus an
affirmation of friendship, also trust since it involves using one's own
spiritual powers and restricted knowledge on behalf of others.
For the Mardarrpa child the journey began with a dance led by Yama
Munungurritj that represented the yellow ochre ancestors from Yarrwidi Gumatj
nearby at Gururrga Bay the site of a big yellow ochre quarry associated with
the child's clan, the Mardarrpa. The ancestors were portrayed walking along
the beach searching for yellow ochre deposits. They dragged their digging
sticks behind them and held sacred woven-string dilly bags gripped between
their teeth. Every so often the dancers would stop and dig the sticks into
the ground, representing ancestors levering up bits of ochre which they
tested the quality of by rubbing on their own bodies. The highest quality
ochre happened to be found in front of the shade where the child's body lay;
through this enactment the ancestors found the child's spirit, which would
them commence it's journey.
The dance allowed the anger and pain felt at the child's death. The dilly bag
gripped tightly in the mouth was not simply for collecting the ochre; it
contained the anger and anguish of the bereaved.
The journey then unfolds itself through time space as macrocosm and
microcosm, implicate and explicate. - A 'key' component was provided by the
coffin lid. Among the many designs that could have been chosen in this case
it was one that belonged to another clan grounded on the journey at a place
about half way on the spirit's journey; the painting represents a place on
the Gaargarn River where the waters flood in the wet season and where a fish
trap is set up by blocking off the stream, it represents in its details the
fish trap at Gaargarn: the diamond patterns signifies the raging torrents of
the wet season floodwaters over the site of the fish trap; streamers of weeds
extend from the limbs of the freshwater tortoise and mark patterns on his
shell. In songs and dances the participants referred to the same floodwaters
carrying the coffin on its downstream journey and onward to the great snake
who swallowed it and took it to the coast. This was the snake whose ribs were
used, in turn, to make the fish traps in the ancestral past.
Finally the journey ends at the graveside when dancers acting as crocodiles
'buried' the child in the crocodile's nest, for it was from the crocodile at
Gunmurruytjpi that the child's conception spirit had come.
'Each element woven in a complex way into the whole, yet each existing
independent of it's context to resonate in the minds and memories of those
taking part.'
For those confused as to the relevance of such a contribution in this virtual
place may I offer off the top of my head the article in The Dance of Change
'Moving Upstream from Measurement' H. Thomas Johnson. pp 291-298. (A man who
IMHO moved his own river and so may yet shift a mighty nation from another
kind of slumber from which it is not yet, quite, too late to awaken itself.)
But you will all and each be the best judges of that ;-)
But for those with a disinclination to read backwards, sideways and maybe
even forwards this might make it plainer.
" Perhaps Johnson was resonating with this point when he said that 97 percent
of what matters cannot be measured and conventional measuring was tampering:
manipulation without genuine understanding. He seemed to recognise that many
of our deepest frustrations come from an inherent sense of the natural way of
life, lost in the process."
Lost in the process...¦Mmm.
With Care,
Andrew Campbell
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