I have been following the work of Rupert Sheldrake for a short while and came across this TED Talk which proved to be quite controversial and subsequently removed from the TED website. It is worth watching if you are interested in the unpacking of Western philosophy of mind and scientific dogmas!
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Entities
Traveling up the great chain of being toward the world soul, we may get in touch with things that precede any capability of verbalization, that seem to reach out for contact, that are learning to communicate in a language we can understand – Ralph Abraham
Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright: the Dancing Fairies
Something that has grown as an actor in my research is the word entity; it is a symbol of the more-than-human world, and all of things within, which we are being with when we are walking and dwelling with country. John Law (2004) uses the metaphors ‘impossible, or barely possible, unthinkable or almost unthinkable’ to try to describe slippery entities (but he never actually names them…). I imagine these tricky entities lurking in shadows, whispering to us in our dreams and showing themselves when we least expect them to. But are they really there: perhaps non-physical but autonomous in their existence? Or are they, as Jung suggests, mere projections of our own minds (Sheldrake, McKenna and Abraham 2001)? Does it matter? If we are to imagine an existence without the presence of entities, does it mean that we automatically inherent a disenchanted, mechanistic world? So entrenched is the atomistic and mechanistic view of the world, that it seems unimaginable that past western societies communed with all sorts of entities that now only inhabit our ‘fairy tale’ storybooks. Sheldrake, McKenna and Abraham (2001) question, what if ‘they/we’ (the collective consciousness that continues to perpetuate the modern scientific paradigm) got it wrong?
The eradication of spirit from the visible world has been a project prosecuted with great zeal throughout the rise of modern science. An admission that this project overlooked something as fundamental as a communicating intelligent agency co-present with is on this planet would be more than a dangerous admission of the failure of an intellectual method. It would pretty much seal the bankruptcy of that method (p. 94).
Our Western ancestors and some descendents would call the names of these entities: elves, fairies, sprites, genius and the like, but what about the things that we feel which lack physical form but still feel… sense… yet, grasp to comprehend… What do we name these things?
Walking the Lurujarri Dreaming Trail I see the physical form of country, and slowly I awaken to ‘seeing through feeling’ (Roe and Hoogland 1999), through my liyan, and ‘see’ the country in new light. I am attracted to things that seem to beckon me forth – trees, lagoons, sand dunes, the full moon – but they are tangible. Then there is the feeling in each place, the liyan of that place as Goolarabooloo might say. Is the feeling of each place a memory of the ritual and dwelling that has been performed there one generation after the next? As I write this I think of the ash from fires mounting up and being sucked back into the earth with the rains, then the cycle being repeated again and again. Perhaps the liyan of a place is an entity, a spirit dwelling there, anticipating and recognising us on our return. Sheldrake, McKenna and Abraham (2001) question too whether the morphic resonance (memory) of a place is like a spirit.
A few weeks ago I explored in conversation with a group of women our experiences with non-human entities. We shared stories about our experiences with old trees, stones, and places that called to us. Someone in the conversation brought up the idea that if we allow ourselves to listen to our intuitive sense, we are attracted to entities (trees of whatever they may be). We asked each other, what would it be like to embody attraction as a way of being? When I shared this conversation with another friend amongst tall trees in the tropics, it resonated with her deeply. She told me stories about the places she has been attracted to as a child, which she then journeyed to as an adult. I asked her, did she have a sense that these places had ‘called her’ to be with them so that they could teach her something? I makes me think about all the places I have felt called to, whether they be Gurambai, the creek near to where I live, Wamoon down south, or the lagoon at Ngunungkurrukun; are they pulling me towards them to reveal something, about themselves or about being with? And again I fall back into the words of Kombu Merri woman Mary Graham (2009) ‘the world reveals itself to us and to itself – we don’t “discover” anything,’ (p. 75).
Filed under Theory, Uncategorized
On Gratitude
Many thanks to a dear friend who posted this on social media today – an offering on gratitude by David Whyte. It reminds me so much of my seeking to find stillness, which feels so difficult at the moment. I have been rejecting the invitation to be still, to be present and with that which is seeking to emerge. To let go and be in some type of flow seems impossible. I feel like my body is hoarding (ideas, expectations, guilt and intentional blindness) so much so, that I am bulging and about to burst my banks. What is it that I am not paying attention to? I went and sat under the sheoaks at the cliffs this morning, hoping that the wind and trees would whisper secrets into my ears and heart, and help me to be present and still. They were soothing, as are these words from Whyte…
Gratitude is not a passive response to something given to us, gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us. Gratitude is not necessarily something that is shown after the event, it is the deep, a-priori state of attention that shows we understand and are equal to the gifted nature of life.
… to intuit inner lives beneath surface lives, to inhabit many worlds at once in this world, to be a someone amongst all other someones, and therefore to make a conversation without saying a word, is to deepen our sense of presence and therefore our natural sense of thankfulness that everything happens both with us and without us, that we are participants and witness all at once.
Thankfulness finds its full measure in generosity of presence, both through participation and witness… Thanksgiving happens when our sense of presence meets all other presences (©2013 David Whyte – Excerpted from ‘GRATITUDE’ From the upcoming book of essays CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words).
I am reminded of the words of Abram (1996) and Mathews (2003) about being in silent conversation with things and being present enough to encounter the more-than-human world. To be open and acknowledge with gratitude the abundance of life that we can be with all of the time. To realise we are never alone.
Filed under Uncategorized
“I can see the sea, it is a lovely blue…”
Whenever I catch my first glimpse of the sea and the island shaped like ET I am reminded of the words to a song that Miranda’s mother used to sing to her and her sister on their approach… “I can see the sea, it is a lovely blue…”
Distant and removed from that place, I sway in my seat, weaving through the imaginary turns of the imaginary corners of the road imprinted in my mind. This blue evokes something in me, it calls to me, reels me in. I see it and feel like I have returned home. Dwelling 4000 kilometers away I yearn to see this blue, anticipate it appearing on the horizon after each familiar turn in the winding road.
What happens when we are called to be with and cannot be there? Can I still be with this place in an imaginary? There must be a place inside of me where I can crawl up into a ball and be with the blue sea. Today I feel a deep longing for that.
The grevillea outside my window soothes me in its afternoon glow, but it also reminds me of where I am and it illuminates the distinction between here and there. Can I be in both?
When I stand on this beach (it faces the head of the island shaped like a sleeping ET) and look at the big and little mountains, I feel a welling-up inside of something big. A big feeling like a creative blurrrrgghhhh that just rises up from somewhere (maybe the wet sand), through my feet and goes ‘bang!’ when it reaches my heart. Words pour out – poetry and song – like some ecstatic frenzy. At times like that I am present, but reminded of Rumi and what he must have felt like when he was connecting with a bigger source of love and creativity. I want to be in this place today… Listening to what is seeking to emerge. Not waiting, just ready for it to come and flow through me.
I close my eyes and invoke being with this place, the big mountain and the little mountain there beyond the expanse of sandy beach.
Filed under Uncategorized
Mythopoetic fields
I returned to a book by David Tacey this morning, Edge of the Sacred: Jung, Psyche, Earth, and opened up at a page on which he wrote about landscape as a mythopoetic field. Tacey (2009) writes:
‘Landscape is a mythopoetic field which acts on human beings from without, causing them to conform to ancient patterns and re-enact lives and movements of ancestral animals and other beings’ (p. 145).
This single sentence is so rich with meaning and immediately resonated with multiple threads of my research… country speaking to us and through us… each place has its own feeling (liyan) which makes it right for doing certain things (including avoidance)… Bugarregarra as a dreaming/process of co-creation imbues places with this liyan (perhaps it could even be described as a kind of affordance for doing certain things).
How do interpret or understand Tacey’s statement about landscape, or Country, as a mythopoetic field?
Beyond the materiality of Country or place, there is a larger field (not seen but sensed), from which stories emerge. These stories might just be there, lingering, waiting to be spoken; perhaps spontaneously, or maybe through a felt sense of a word whispered to us in a time of deep listening. The emergence of stories from a field that is inextricably interwoven with place, that is place, tells a bigger story about how storytelling binds people and place… we emerge together through stories. This is a vastly different conception of stories and storytelling as compared to egoic authorship.
I am reminded too of a post I wrote a few months ago about memory in nature/place and Rupert Sheldrake’s work on morphic resonance:
‘Perhaps the ‘memory’ in a place, which may have been created through repeated ritual practice in that place, acts like an intention of how beings should interact with place and each other in situ. Maybe morphic resonance is like an affordance of place…’
Filed under Theory, Uncategorized
The case for Gularabulu by Paddy Roe
From The Conversation
15 April 2014, 6.38am AEST
By: Stuart Cook
On publication in 1983 Gularabulu: Stories from the West Kimberley was nothing less than ground-breaking. According to cultural theorist Bob Hodge, it represented the birth of a new tradition in Australian Literature.
A collection of nine stories narrated by Paddy Roe – an Aboriginal Elder of Gularabulu (now written as Goolarabooloo) – and transcribed by Professor Stephen Muecke, the book is a remarkable negotiation of Aboriginal and Settler cultures in the complex, enormous region known as the West Kimberley.
Paddy Roe categorises the stories into three different kinds. The first, “trustori”, are indeed true stories, but the heroes of these stories often do extraordinary things. We might call such tales “legends”.
The next group he calls “devil stori”, in which strange, even unnerving events can only be explained by the presence of a spirit being.
Then there’s “bugaregara” stories, or what we might call “myths”, which tell of the magnificent supernatural beings that created Country and Law.
The book’s title refers to a vast, liminal region of land and sea. Goolarabooloo (“the coast where the sun goes down”) is a large area of coastal country that stretches from La Grange in the south, right through Broome, and north to Dampier Land.
Click to enlarge
Consequently, Goolarabooloo encompasses multiple tribal groupings, and urban and non-urban lands. Roe stresses that the stories of Gularabulu belong not just to him and his family, but to all the people in this diverse region, including whitefellas.
To tell stories for black and white alike involves a difficult negotiation of cultures and contexts but, rather than shy from it, Roe embraces the challenge. Many of the stories’ characters exist between Indigenous and non-Indigenous worlds. He talks to whitefellas so “they might be able to see us better than before”.
Like his characters, Paddy Roe crosses languages, genres and cultures as adeptly as he crosses country. Until the time of his death in 2001, Roe was the head of a large family, and maintained a position of power as a negotiator between government departments in Broome and the surrounding Aboriginal communities.
Prior to assuming such responsibilities, Roe had long negotiated the myriad differences between indigenous and non-indigenous societies. A fully-initiated Nyigina law man, he also spent many years travelling across the Kimberley as a drover, before being contracted to work as a repairer of windmills. He met Stephen Muecke in the 1970s, when Muecke was visiting Broome for the first time as a young PhD student.
The ever-present possibilities of transformation and expansion in Gularabulu give Roe’s narratives a distinctly contemporary feel. The absence of any controlling, authorial point of view contributes to a plenitude of explanations for why or how things happen. Roe’s landscapes are richly poetic, full of various rhythms that allow them to become more than static literary representations.
After all, no place is still in Goolarabooloo country.
The ground is alive with meat ants, the horizon is thrashing with acacias or ragged swells. Roe’s stories, like the places in which they are told, are alive with an energy that thoroughly captivates Muecke, who takes them from local yarns into the global realm of literature, from oral narrative into written poetry. Gularabulu is an example of being “always here, and always on the move”.
Roe and Muecke use a number of strategies in order to allow Gularabulu to “travel” across the locales included in the narrative. Roe’s Aboriginal English, as Muecke notes in a useful introduction, is a crucial mode of communication between Aboriginal people of various language groups. Furthermore, it is also a way in which Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians can communicate.
For Muecke, then, Roe’s could be “the language of ‘bridging’ between the vastly different European and Aboriginal cultures”.
Consequently, one could say that Roe’s language articulates a distinct mode of poetics and politics: the mode of the in-between. Here, it matters as much that Roe’s stories describe his country as it does that non-indigenous readers enjoy them.
To travel into the realms of written literature, the narratives depend on Muecke’s response (and subsequent transcription); it is therefore important for Roe that Muecke understands him and that he performs his own role as a listener.
One touching moment comes to mind from the story Worawora Woman – a trustori about a married man who goes hunting with a greedy woman – in which Roe pauses the narration to find out if Muecke is uncomfortable about their friend, Butcher Joe, lighting up a cigarette. Roe continues only once Muecke has said, “Oh that’s all right”.
That’s not to say that Gularabulu is all about talking to a white audience. As I’ve written elsewhere, often Roe threads his stories with words and phrases that are left unexplained and mysterious to those unfamiliar with Nyigina language or culture.
During his telling of Djaringgalong – a tale from bugaregara about a monster bird who ate people’s babies – Roe laughs and says to one of his countrymen, “binabinaba”, the meaning of which is never explained.
And a large chunk of one of one of Roe’s nurlu, or songpoems, is included in the book’s opening story, Mirdinan, with only a very basic gloss. By repeating these fragments of stories or songs, older patterns of tradition are imprinted on contemporary texts.
Roe’s voice is, therefore, an example of what scholars Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra have called an “Aboriginal Polyphony”. Rather than a text which represents a “pure” Aboriginality, Gularabulu is a “composite and federalist” literature that crosses a number of genres and can operate in many different cultural contexts.
Indeed, Hodge and Mishra remind us that a link to oral modes is a sign of exceptionally high status within Western literary culture. Roe’s stories exploit this link: like his stories, the most famous members of the Western canon show the marks of their oral origins (retarded narratives, prolepsis, bricolage, dialogue).
Muecke’s innovative typography does not eliminate or disregard the features of Roe’s speech, either, but translates them into minimalist arrangements familiar to readers of Western avant-garde poetry. Muecke’s system produces written marks not only for Roe’s narration, but also for his growls, hesitations and other pauses.
If we read the language as poetic, Muecke says in his introduction, we pay attention not only to its “underlying content”, but also to its very form. After all, Roe’s stories are much more than spoken language: he growls, sings, rasps a boomerang, draws pictures in the dirt, or members of his audience will interject and contribute to the story.
To understand this book’s real importance, suggest Hodge and Mishra, we might consider that Gularabulu consists “of a set of genres which will not all correspond exactly to any equivalent in English”. Reading Gularabulu is to verge on an experience of watching or listening; it is to be following Paddy Roe through his country while also aware that there’s plenty you can’t see or comprehend.
To read this book is to be always moving somewhere else, away from the confines of Western literature, of settlement, and of the edifice of colonial thought.
April 16, 2014 · 12:17 am
Memories of quin and sheoaks
“Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells…when the wind was favourable, a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness. At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imports to it. There came to me in this case a melody which the air had strained, and which had conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the sound which the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale to vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood”
– Thoreau, Walden
Filed under Uncategorized
Being with Country 