My friend Steve King
sent an email this week
recommending a book:
“Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines is a literal and
philosophical trek through the Australian Outback
in search of the Aboriginal “songlines” — paths used
by their totemic gods when they sang the world
into existence in Dreamtime. The book was an unlikely
and controversial bestseller. This is Chatwin’s first chat
and controversial bestseller. This is Chatwin’s first chat
with his trekker-guide, a Russian named Arkady:
The Aboriginals had an earthbound philosophy. The earth gave life to a man; gave him his food, language and intelligence; and the earth took him back when he died. A man’s ‘own country,’ even an empty stretch of spinifex, was itself a sacred icon that must remain unscarred. ?
“Unscarred, you mean, by roads or mines or railways?”
“To wound the earth,” he answered earnestly, “is to wound yourself, and if others wound the earth, they are wounding you. The land should be left untouched: as it was in the Dreamtime when the Ancestors sang the world into existence.”?
“Rilke,” I said, “had a similar intuition. He also said song was existence.”
“I know,” said Arkady, resting his chin on his hands.
“Third Sonnet to Orpheus.”