Another Shot at Songlines

Golden Willow

 OK, so let's risk ostracism with an act of faith by falling into the Everywhen of the Original Australian Peoples, Walking Stewart's ill-tutored Great Circulation, and the Buddha's Karmic Ripening in an attempt to kick out the jams and go Punk Rock on social structures that were persuaded to fill out the nothingness of longing by inventing the Coffee Table Book. 

What!

In our own time, in our own place, Stewart is closest to our habits of thinking. His Great Circulation, can be subtitled Atomic Ethics. It's not about the bombs, it's about atoms, the tiniest part of mass and Moral Motion. Like Whitehead a hundred years later, Stewart proposed that fundamental matter was sensate, it had the gift of senses. If you were nasty to it, that nastiness was recorded, and round the Great Circulation went taking your nastiness with it. There again if you were good to it, it was recorded into the long term record and round it went taking your goodness with it. For Stewart when you died, you personally were not rewarded for being good or bad, instead you returned to the atoms you were made of and these atoms joined with the universe. 

The Buddha has a whole university of not schisms as such, better to call them distinct practices. Karmic Ripening as a means to understand belonging to the whole, uses the idea of seeds planted by good or bad deeds which when conditions were right sprouted and returned to haunt or bless you. And when you think about some blubbering supreme court justice casting around for righteousness and coming up with what goes round come round, rest assured it wouldn't be the first time some horrible mother's boy has caused the Buddha to think about taking a ruler to knuckles.

To you and I, the Everywhen is a non-linear concept of time explained to us by anthropologists. Anthropologists are people and as people they have disagreements. Their general definition defines the Everywhen as a simultaneous past, present and future which can be understood as an Eternal Present where the distinction between being awake and asleep are very blurred. Reality, in this understanding, isn't fact or fiction it's a resonance shared with the living mind of the land itself. To walk a Songline is to walk inside the mind of an ancestor. And when you add to that Songline or subtract from it because of a change in the circumstances of a waterhole you are expressing a state of relatedness between yourself and your role in the reality of the universe.

 

The Germanic Festival of Yule In Bethlehem

A Yuletide Young Buck Hoof Print

 Even Johnathan Swift "hankered after a lost Golden Age." Hanker comes from Dutch words that mean to hang, to hook and to crave. Johnathan Swift was an Irishman who died in 1745 of "unsound mind and memory" when he was 77. Swift's hankering lead him to write "satirical prose" such as Gulliver's Travels, and long before Swift, back in Ancient Greece, poets were waxing and waning on the shores of "Lost Golden Ages." Fortunately I remain puerile, which comes from the Latin for boy, which these days means "childishly silly and trivial." And so it is, that my grasp of a golden age falls off the cliff whenever the word "Civilization" is mentioned. 

It's not so much a question of stealing souls, it's more a question of replacing them. So, let's talk about the Kenneth Clark who doesn't have an 'e' at the end of his surname, he's the Kenneth Clark who was made a life peer for "Services to Art." This Kenneth Clark, you might be glad to hear, died 1983 when he was 79. He was a well mannered boy, polite and hardworking, from yet another family who'd made their fortune in textiles. Kenneth wasn't an artist himself but he knew a lot about Art, and in his later years, in response to thinly veiled criticisms of his "Great Man" approach to the world in general and Art in particular he wrote this:

"I hold a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the liveliest intellects of our time. I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology."

He is quoted here as a man whose soul had been replaced, he had a creed, an "I believe" response. Fair and balanced, in his society he was everything he wanted to be. When Kenneth Clark knew he'd be dead soon, he did a Schlegel, he decided the Church of England was too secular for his taste, with pomp and ceremony he prostrated himself to the Roman Catholic Church. An operating system, which, he'd probably decided, gave him a better chance of attaching his frequencies to the frequencies he imagined already operated the next world. 

I can actually hear a tidal wave of criticism. But as I said, I remain Puerile. So na-na-nanny-boo-boo.

Written and unwritten.

Old Bits of Wood

 How accurate are the means of our understandings. The second question is: what do you mean by means? I'll tell ya! "An action or system by which a result is brought about, a method."

You got math, physics, biology it's a long list that includes Accounting and Creative Accounting. Some way off is the question: has physics cheated us? Max Planck in his 1944 speech in Florence Italy suggested that maybe it had. And why? Because by means of physics the finalizing metaphysical equation hadn't been determined, a conclusion hadn't been reached, something as yet unidentified, was missing. In short the Physics journey was unfinished, the means had a long way to go.

When Planck offered his thoughts on the gaps in physics, many a hard-nosed adult went spiritual and in the meanwhile far away in the bombed out ruins of Frankfurt am Main, Arthur Schopenhauer, a bad tempered Metaphysical Materialist well known for throwing a seamstress down stairs, grunted in his grave. He'd never been big on linear thinking, the compulsion to require an ending was not strong in Arthur. Nor was it a quarrel between circles and straight lines for him, it was closer to what John Walking Stewart called Moral Motion.

And what on this good earth did your hero mean by Moral Motion? 

First of all, with a name that includes "John" and "Stewart" there is no way he can be my hero, if there was a "Chad'' in there I'd spurn him completely.  Second of all: Moral Motion is Stewart's name for the idea that the universe is not made of "objects," but of sentient matter in a constant state of transition. And this is were the argument that Thomas de Quincy attempted to develop over how and where Stewart got his ideas, twinkles anew in our warm, festive hearts as we sup on Kentucky's own Ginger Ale and wish it was Bourbon.

For his part, Walking Stewart claimed that all his ideas had come to him through the physical act of crossing continents on foot. De Quincy knew for sure that Walking Stewart was an "untutored," ill-stabled genius who'd done a bit of walking, and might have stumbled upon and talked to Buddhists and European Materialist as well as a mix of atomist and animist thinkers, and he'd got got himself so muddled up he couldn't order his thinking into a well trained bundle. And it's true Thomas De Quincey's own contribution to the written world was spectacular, all that and he'd discovered a novel way to monetize addiction, he'd invented the genre of Addiction Literature.

The Romantic critique of the Industrial World had dreams of changing it all for the better. A holism that completed the whole man, didn't leave parts of him lost and panting. And your'e right, percentage-wise not many people heard of Schlegel's Lucinde or Hoffmann's Nutcracker, until Dumas and Tchaikovsky did stuff to the Nutcracker and Emmanuelle Arsan did stuff to Lucinde, and Lo as the line was straightened the genre of Romantic literature, and chorus line theater turned sticky from industrial portrayals of lingerie. 

As a result, in the search for a happy ever after, never was Schlegel's contribution to the meanings in Irony mentioned. Schlegel supposed that the role of irony in art was to demonstrate there was no such thing as an ending. Try putting a slightly retarded Bastian on the back of a fluffy dog and flinging him around in a dark void called "The Nothing" and not mention Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer Heidegger or Sartre.

No wonder David Foster Wallace threw a coffee table at his girlfriend, he couldn't get his mind around the possibility that if it ended happily or with hope, it was suspect. And yes as Baxter likes to point out, throwing coffee tables at anyone or anything is a first world problem. 

For de Quincey's interest, as he wonders where Ann went, the thousands of generations of Aboriginal People of Western Australia were well tutored in their understandings of their world. It was place where the land carried the dreaming, were custodians of the verse walked the tracks of songlines, followed the lore, and maintained a frequency. 

Of the two, de Quincey and Stewart. Stewart was closer to understanding a world without the written word. That world would have been a non-linear world. In that non-linear world where, as a transient collection of atoms I am nothing without everything else.

Where have the Butterflies gone.

Bark

 Back when De Quincy was a Romantic young junkie the word resonance wasn't commonly used. It's from Latin for echo or resound and more recently its meaning as a vibration has reached the marketers and propagandists where it's called a virus. Through physics this echo or resound has found a home in the world of electronics, specifically radio waves where it was baptized as frequency and there it slowly pushed aside harmony. 

And whether you like it or not, as we return to Jorge Luis Borges' essay on the Nothingness of Personality you might notice a vibration stirring the spirit, a harmony soothing the soul, a resonance rhyming with balance because I at least am going to argue that the last Golden Age of our species was destroyed by the written word.

Borges was a young man when he wrote The Nothingness of Personality. He claimed Personality was a "mirage maintained by conceit, it was without metaphysical foundation or visceral reality." He also suggested that a reader absorbed very little of what was written, rarely was the reader ever in a position to challenge or debate what was written, and altogether, in my view, Borges insinuated the relationship between writer and reader was a sterile relationship where the writer, in the interest of his own success, was attempting to impress the reader either with the equivalent of tablets from on high or a ripping yarn which as a best seller could mean a second home in the Cairngorms, or somewhere. 

The meanings in resonance that incline toward balance allows for the concept of what Zarathustra called Ahura Mazda, the Lord of Wisdom, the Master of Balance if you prefer. An imbalance betrays itself as a disharmony, a frequency that produces only static on the wireless as you search for Radio Caroline, a pirate radio station out there on the North Sea that's touched your imagination and into which you want to fall.

Go ahead, ask Socrates, he'll tell you the written word creates the illusion of understanding, fosters a pretense of knowledge, destroys memory. If you don't believe me then tramp homeless, friendless, handheld deviceless and hungry across the land, and there you may ask where the hedgerows have gone, you might wander after Hedgehog, and try to remember when you last saw a Butterfly. Or not.