Aboriginal people talk of the land as if it is a body merely and recently clothed with the supermarket, golf course, airport or town, as if in time the body could and would shuck off these flimsy shifts and be naked again. As if “Adelaide” were as inconsequential as pyjama bottoms and a street just a scarf to be lightly tossed aside in the breeze. You may think you tame the land with concrete and pavements, but its wildness persists, primal and feral, below.
Below, too, there is an immanent world of “spirit business,” which I heard about on the slant, a scrap of paper from a diary blowing in a garden, a paragraph of tension, a look askance, a brief recollection. It is as if the land has veins under the skin, hot with the blood of revenge and power.
(Jay Griffiths, Wild: An Elemental Journey, Penguin: London, 2006, p. 259)
wonderful little passage. i do sometimes wonder what the earth thinks of us, and all the encrustations of our making. i have ideas about this, of course; sometimes i think i actually hear what she thinks about this or that. how a certain thing is tolerable, or even rather nice, and how most of these others things are inimical or worse. but then i write poetry, and think in images...can i trust these...imaginings? and then i think, of course i can. that's one way earth speaks to us all, if we care to listen, if we pay attention.
ReplyDeleteand if the land has veins that run with revenge and power, i am not surprised. how could it not? we have not been gentle with the land...not for a long time...
I hope that she can shuck off the 'flimsy shifts' that we have imposed upon her, when the time comes, and whatever is waiting beneath can return.
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