Light Extracts

“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 ikon that must remain unscarred.”

Page 11

“By singing the world into existence, he said, the Ancestors had been poets in the original sense of poesis, meaning ‘creation’.”

“’So the land’, I said, ‘must first exist as a concept in the mind? Then it must be sung? Only then can it be said to exist?’ ‘True.’ ‘In other words, to “exist” is “to be perceived”?’

Page 14

“The more I read, the more convinced I became that nomads had been the crankhandle of history, if for no other reason than that the great monotheisms had, all of them, surfaced from the pastoral milieu…”

Page 19

“’And these tracks run every place?’ the man asked. ‘All over Australia?’ ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Lacey, sighing with satisfaction at having found a catchy phrase. ‘The song and the land are one.’”

Page 28

“’Perhaps it’s the light?’ I suggested. ‘The glare of Australia that makes one long for the dark.’”

Page 46

“’Suitable for marsupials, but never meant for man. The land, I mean. Makes people do the most peculiar things. Did you hear the story of the German girl and the bicycle?’

‘No.’

‘Very interesting case! Nice, healthy German girl. Hires a bike from a shop on Todd Street. Buys a lock from a shop on Court Street. Rides out of town along the Larapina Drive and gets as far as Ormiston Gorge. She drags the bike through the Gorge, which, as you know if you’ve ever been there, is a superhuman feat. Then, in the middle of absolutely nowhere, she locks her leg to the frame, chucks away the key, and lies down to grill in the sun. The sun-bathing impulse gone haywire! Picked clean, she was! Picked!’

‘Nasty!’

‘No,’ he shook his head. ‘Reconciled! Dissolved! That’s all part of my little theory about Australia. But I won’t bore you with it now, because I’m really so dreadfully tired and I should be in bed.’”

“He sipped his wine.  We sat in silence for a minute or two, and then he said, dreamily, ‘Yes, It’s a lovely place to be lost in. Being lost in Australia gives you a lovely feeling of security.”

Page 47

“In the Beginning the Earth was an infinite and murky plain, separated from the sky and from the grey salt sea and smothered in a shadowy twilight. There were neither Sun nor Moon nor Stars. Yet, far away, lived the sky-dwellers: youthfully indifferent beings, human in form but with feet of emus, their golden hair glittering like spiders’ webs in the sunset, ageless and un-ageing, having existed for ever in their green, well-watered Paradise beyond the Western Clouds. On the surface of the Earth, the only features were certain hollows which would, one day, be waterholes. There were no animals and no plants, yet clustered round the waterholes there were pulpy masses of matter: lumps of primordial soup – soundless, sightless, unbreathing, unawake and unsleeping – each containing the essence of life, or the possibility of becoming human. Beneath the Earth’s crust, however, the constellations glimmered, the Sun shone, the moon waxed and waned, and all the forms of life lay sleeping: the scarlet of a desert-pea, the iridescence on a butterfly’s wing, the twitching white whiskers of Old Man Kangaroo – dormant as seeds in the desert that must wait for a wandering shower. On the morning of the First Day, the sun felt the urge to be born. (That evening the Stars and Moon would follow.) The sun burst through the surface, flooding the land with golden light, warming the hollows under which each Ancestor lay sleeping unlike the sky-dwellers, these Ancients had never been young. They were lame, exhausted greybeards with knotted limbs, and they had slept in isolation through the ages. So it was, on this First Morning, that each drowsing Ancestor felt the Sun’s warmth pressing on his eyelids, and felt his body giving birth to children. The Snake Man felt snakes slither out of his navel. The Cockatoo man felt feathers. The Witchetty Grub Man felt a wriggling, the Honey-ant a tickling, the Honeysuckle felt his leaves and flowers unfurling. The bandicoot Man felt baby bandicoots seething from under the armpits. Every one of the ‘living things’, each at its own separate birthplace, reached up for the light of day. In the bottom of their hollows (now filling up with water), the Ancients shifted one leg, then another leg. They shook their shoulders and flexed their arms. They heaved their bodies upward through the mud. Their eyelids cracked open. They saw their children at play in the sunshine. The mud fell from their thighs, like placenta from a baby. Then, like the baby’s first cry, each Ancestor opened his mouth and called out, ‘I AM!’ ‘I am – Snake… Cockatoo… Honeyant… Honeysuckle… And this first ‘I am!’ This primordial act of naming, was held, then and forever after, as the most secret and sacred couplet of the Ancestor’s song. Each of the Ancients (now basking in the sunlight) put his left foot forward and called out a second name. He put his right foot forward and called out a third name. He named the waterhole, the reedbeds, the gum trees – calling to right and left, calling all things into being and weaving their names into verses. The Ancients sang their way all over the world. They sang the rivers and ranges, salt-pans and sand dunes. They hunted, ate, made love, danced, killed: wherever their tracks led they left a trail of music. They wrapped the whole world in a web of song; and at last, when the Earth was sung, they left tired. Again in their limbs they felt the frozen immobility of Ages. Some sank into the ground where they stood. Some crawled into caves. Some crept away to their ‘Eternal Homes’, to the ancestral waterholes that bore them. All of them went ‘back in’.”

Page 72-73

“So a musical phrase’, I said, ‘is a map reference?’

‘Music’, said Akady, ‘is a memory bank for finding one’s way about the world.”

Page 108

“A short way off to the west was the old administrator’s shouse, of two storeys, which had since been given over to the community. The roof was still on and there were floors and fireplaces. But the walls, the window sashes and the staircase had all been burnt for firewood. We looked through this X-ray house into the yellow sunset. On both upper and lower floors sat a ring of dark figures, warming themselves over a smoky fire. ‘They don’t give a fuck for walls,’ said Red, ‘but they do like a roof for the rain.’

Page 135

“I had a presentiment that the ‘travelling’ phase of my life might be passing. I felt, before the malaise of settlement crept over me, that I should reopen those notebooks. I should set down on paper a résumé of the ideas, quotations and encounters which had amused and obsessed me; and which I hoped would shed light on what is, for me. The questions of questions: the nature of human restlessness. Pascal, in one of his gloomier pensées, gave it as his opinion that all our miseries stemmed from a single cause: our inability to remain quietly in a room. Why, he asked, must a man with sufficient to live on feel drawn to divert himself on long sea voyages? To dwell in another town? To go off in search of a peppercorn? Or go off to war and break skulls? Later, on further reflection, having discovered the cause of our misfortunes, he wished to understand the reason for them, he found one very good reason: namely, the natural unhappiness of our weak mortal condition; so unhappy that when we gave to it all our attention, nothing could console us. One thing alone could alleviate our despair, and that was ‘distraction’ (divertissement): yet this was the worst of our misfortunes, for in distraction we were prevented from thinking about ourselves and were gradually brought to ruin. Could it be, I wondered, that our need for distraction, our mania for the new, was, in essence, an instinctive migratory urge akin to that of birds in autumn? All the Great Teachers have preached that Man, originally, was a ‘wanderer in the scorching and barren wilderness of this world’ – the words are those of Dostoevsky’s Grand inquisitor and that to rediscover his humanity, he must slough off attachments and take to the road. My two most recent notebooks were crammed with jottings taken in South Africa, where I had examined, at first hand, certain evidence on the origin of our species. What I learned there – together with what I now knew about the Songlines – seemed to confirm the conjecture I had toyed with for so long: that Natural Selection has designed us – from the structure of our brain-cells to the structure of our big toe – for a career of seasonal journeys on foot though a blistering land of thorn-scrub or desert. If this were so; if the desert were ‘ home’; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigours of the desert – then it is easier to understand why greener pastures pall on us; why possessions exhaust us, and why Pascal’s imaginary man found his comfortable lodgings a prison.”

Page 162

“Our Nature Lies in movement; complete calm is death. Pascal,Pensées.”

“A study of the Great Malady; horror of home. Baudelaire, Journaux Intimes.”

“The most convincing analysts of restlessness were often men who, for one reason or another, were immobilised: Pascal by stomach ailments and migraines, Baudelaire by drugs, St John of the cross by the bars of his cell. There are French critics who would claim that Proust, the hermit of the cork-lined room, was the greatest of literary voyagers.”

“What is this strange madness, Petrarch asked of his young secretary, this mania for sleeping each night in a different bed?

“What am I doing here? Rimbaud writing home from Ethiopia.”

Page 163

“He who does not travel does not know the value of men. Moorish proverb”

Page 164

“On the night express from Moscow to Kiev, reading Donne’s third ‘Elegie’: To live in one land, is captivitie, To runne all countries, a wild roguery.”

Page 165

“In The Descent of Man Darwin notes that in certain birds the migratory impulse is stronger than the maternal. A mother will abandon her fledglings in the nest rather than miss her appointment for the long journey south.”

Page 167

“Robert Burton – Sedentary and bookish Oxford don”

“The heavens themselves run continually round, the sun riseth and sets, the moon increaseth, stars and planets keep their constant motions, the air is still tossed by the winds, the waters ebb and flow, to their conservation no doubt, to teach us that we should ever be in motion.”

“There is nothing better than a change of air in this malady [melancholia], than to wander up and down, as those Tartari Zalmohenses that live in hordes, and take the opportunity of times, places, seasons.”

“The Anatomy of Melancholy”

Page 169

“Life is a bridge. Cross over it, but build no house on it. Indian proverb.”

Page 181

“Most nomads claim to ‘own’ their migration path (in Arabic Il-Rah, ‘The Way’), but in practice they only lay claim to seasonal grazing rights. Time and space are thus dissolved around each other: a month and a stretch of road are synonymous.”

Page 184

“Max Weber traces the origins of modern capitalism to certain Calvinists who, disregarding the parable of the camel and the eye of the needle, preached the doctrine of the just rewards of work. Yet the concept of shifting and increasing one’s ‘wealth on the hoof’ has a history as old as herding itself. Domesticated animals are ’currency’, ‘things that run’, from the French courir. In fact, almost all our monetary expressions – capital, stock, pecuniary, chattel, sterling – perhaps even the idea of ‘growth’ itself – have their origins in the pastoral world.”

“Is it not passing brave to be a king, And ride in triumph though Persepolis? Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Part I, I 758”

“We were walking to Persepolis in the rain. The Quashgais were soaked and happy, and the animals were soaked; and when the rain let up, they shook the water from their coats and moved on, as though they were dancing. We passed an orchard with a mud wall around it. There was a smell of orange blossom, after rain. A boy was walking beside me. He and a girl exchanged a flashing glance. She was riding behind her mother on a camel, but the camel was moving faster. About three miles short of Persepolis we came to some huge domed tents under construction, to which the Shah-i-Shah had invited a riff-raff of royalty for his coronation in June. The tents were designed by the Paris firm of decorators, Jansen. Someone was yelling, in French.”

Page 185

“That man is a migratory species is, in my opinion, born out by an experiment made at the Tavistock Clinic in London and described by Dr John Bowlby in his Attachment and loss. Every normal baby will scream if left alone; and the best way of silencing these screams is for the mother to take it in her arms and rock or ’walk’ it back to contentment. Bowlby rigged up a machine which imitated, exactly, the pace and action of a mother’s walk; and found that, providing the baby was healthy, warm and well-fed it stopped crying at once. ‘The ideal movement’, he wrote, ‘is a vertical one with a traverse of three inches.’ Rocking at slow speeds, such as thirty cycles a minute, every baby ceased to cry and almost always stayed quiet.”

“Day in, Day out, a baby cannot have enough walking. And if babies instinctively demand to be walked, the mother, on the African Savannah, must have been walking too: from camp to camp on her daily foraging round, to the waterhole and on visits to the neighbours.”

Page 227

“Sluggish and sedentary peoples, such as the Ancient Egyptians – with their concept of an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds – project on to the next world the journeys they failed to make in this one.”

Page 228

“When I rest my feet my mind also ceases to function. J. G. Hamann”

Page 248

“I know this may sound far-fetched, ‘I said to Elizabeth Vrba, ‘but if I were asked, “What is the big brain for”? I would be tempted to say, “For singing our way through the wilderness.”’ She looked a bit startled. Then, reaching for a drawer in her desk, she finished out a watercolour: an artist’s impression of a family of the First men, and their children, tramping in single file across an empty waste. She smiled and said, ‘I also think the hominids migrated.’”

Page 249

“Poetry proper is never merely a higher mode (melos) of everyday language. It is rather the revers: everyday language is a forgotten and therefore used-up poem, from which there hardly resounds a call any longer. Martin Heidegger, ‘Language’”

Page 270

“He goes on to claim that the great Darwinian ‘struggle for life’ many, paradoxically, be more relevant to stable climates than volatile ones. In regions of assured abundance, animals will stake out and defend their lot with sows of aggressive.

‘No,’ he closed his eyes. ‘No, I wouldn’t care to. Too many bad memories.’

‘Well, do you think of anywhere as “home”?’

‘I most certainly do, ‘he jerked his head back and grinned.

‘The promenade des Anglais in Nice. Ever heard o’that?’

‘I have,’ I said.

One summer night on the Promenade, he had engaged a well-spoken French gentleman in conversation. For an hour they had discussed the world situation, in English. The gentleman had then unfolded from his wallet a 10,000 franc note – ‘The old francs, mind you!’ – And, after handing him his card, had wished him a pleasant stay.

‘Bloody Hell’ he shouted. ‘He was the Chief of Police!’

He had tried, whenever possible, to revisit the scene of this, the most moving moment of his career.

‘Yes,’ he chuckled. ‘I bummed the Chief of Police… in Nice!’

The restaurant was now less crowded. I ordered him a double helping of apple pie. He declined a cup of coffee which, he said, made his tummy feel poorly. He belched. I paid.

‘Thank you, Sir,’ he said, with the air of an interviewee who has a string of afternoon engagements. ‘I hope I have been of assistance.’

‘You certainly have,’ I thanked him.

“He got to his feet, but sat down again and stared at me intently. Having described the externals of his life, he was not going to go without some comment on its inner motivation. He then said, slowly and with great seriousness: ‘It’s like the tides was pulling you along the highway. I’m like the Arctic tern, guv’nor. That’s a bird. A beautiful white bird what flies from the North Pole to the South Pole and back again.’”

Page 276