PART THREE: Opening the Crack of Otherness
PART THREE:
The Opening Crack of Otherness
A frontier opens a chasm beneath the feet in terms of the foundations of human consciousness. The Sacred marks of eight aboriginal men on the Batman treaty are the shifting lines of this crossing-over of meaning. They are like swing bridges across an abyss of time in the telling of history. Of meaning that is yet meaningless to us who can not yet read them. Meaning goes over our head in this inability to translate. The squiggly lines might be scribbles on a gum tree. But these are the signs used on the formal wooden message stick as a letter-post to summons countrymen. They are the sorts of dendroglyph signs that were used to inscript trees as memorials or tombs on Dandenong Creek[1] or similar monuments in central northern NSW.[2]
The ‘objects’ or ‘facts’ of these aboriginalities in the documents mean things that can not be understood just from within monochrome English. These ‘texts’ have waited through many years of our human blindness for their interpreter. They are waiting still. The historic scene is depicted, where aboriginal men cluster around a group of whitemen wanting to be named.[3] But no word gets out with an intelligent reading. This is seen as an inconsequential little act of historical theatre. The cultural interpretation of a reality is not yet seen from the other side. The cross cultural nexus here is not about redress of injustice. It is about meeting the stranger.
The body language, let alone the proto-Auslandic language of signing is more often left out. What were the aboriginal signs used in the language of signs? How do we read these texts within the texts. They are gaps that yawn under our understanding. How do we cross that sort of bridge?
The real value of the ‘Batman’ Treaty is that it is just such a bridge. Just as his record of the use of sign language is a bridge. As naming rituals are indicators of aboriginal attempts to include, to embrace or to be embraced, to find kinship relationships, or else to make namesakes as cultural ambassadors on the other side. These are transcultural bridges coming from the other side across the abyss of transcultural space. What were the reciprocal expectations of name exchanges? What causes the electric excitements that came of these frontier meetings? These signs on the treaty parchments are the embrace of the stranger. [4]
The desire of and for the other, is for the stranger. [5] Wiesel also explains the historical danger of the stranger. ‘Between you and him no contact seems possible, except through suspicion, terror, or repulsion. The stranger is the other. He is not bound by your laws, by your memories; his language is not yours, nor his silence. He is an emissary of evil and violence. Or of death. Surely he is from the other side’[6]
‘Transcultural Space’[7] yawns out of the everyday assumptions of these documentary footsteps in glosses and anomalies. Tomas suggests a need to look at first contact between cultures in that transcultural space and in the intercommunicational instability that exists ‘outside the parameters of any ordinary historical frame of reference, including that of a Foucault-inspired mirror or subjugated history. This is to look at history for its ‘Cracks of Otherness’. To see where the stranger is met with. Here, a sort of test takes place. Here is a way of refocusing on who might be the more important players in history. Often this focus[8] will need be on formerly seeming inconsequential and pedestrian events.
History, then, is a theatre of trials to the sense of identity in need of renewal. The frontier cracks with an otherness that represents a human need. ‘The need to replenish himself’.[9] The frontier well opens into depths of great moment. The womb of human identity might be plumbed to depths greater than the reader of history might want to probe. Nadir and profundity might be reached by unseated historical players. This is a pit, an abyss, a well of chasmic proportions. Yet we have bridges. The cavity of otherness often goes borderless in the dimensionality that is met with in the human otherness. The pit of being does not easily find a new bottom. This is a trough where gaps open in consciousness.
Cultural Misunderstanding[10] is sure to be one of the prime factors in the melting pot of cultural meeting. This meeting is at times fraught with primal violence and bloodshed, a primordial soup of ‘beings’ in the flux; as the life-forces cling on to sinking principles, or lash out at imagined threat in the unknowns.
The Chasm of Transcultural Space opens metaphorically out of Earthquakes of the Frontier. Meeting with otherness, the earth quakes. The frontier provides a possible earthquake in the human identity. Just what the Port Phillip aborigines might have made of the tectonic shaking of their lands (and of archetypal poemes of their consciousness)[11] is suggested by the response Buckley observed to the death, about 1828, north or Geelong, of a giant two-headed ‘Mindi’[12] snake.[13] Causation is metaphysical. ‘Aborigines do not believe in coincidences. Everything has a cause, and luck is due to help from invisible friendly spirits, (njäpan).”[14] Ill, the converse.
Here are just some Omens and Earthquakes of the port Phillip Frontier: 1. The Earthquake of 1837 while Governor Bourke was inspecting the Iramoo Plains near Werribee. 2. Earthquake of March 1843.[15] 3. Earthquake of Autumn 1847. 4. Earthquake at Night. January 1850. Omens such as these would literally go bottomless in earth-incarnating ‘totemic’ readings of their religious disposition. And the advent of aliens, the ‘E.T.’ whitemen on lands long seen as texts themselves, were seen as being heralded in this literal earth shattering, culture-clashing, myth-tolling embodiment.
The making of new people out of diverse peoples meeting on the shifting ground of uncertain relations is likely to be catastrophic.
[1] LaTrobe records carved Dandenong redgum trees bearing motifs of unknown significance.
[2] James Etheridge Jr ~ The Dendroglyphs of NSW, Museum of Sydney 1916
[3] 1. James Kirby - Old Times in The Bush of Australia. 2. Peter Beveridge - Aborigines of the Lower Murray 3. James Dawson - Australian Aborigines 1881 - 4. William Thomas ~ Journals
[4] Elie Wiesel ~ The Stranger in The Bible ~ from The Kingdom of Memory, New York 1990
‘Man, by definition, is born a stranger: coming from nowhere, he is thrust into an alien world which existed before him - a world which didn't need him. And which will survive him. A stranger, he goes through life meeting other strangers. His only constant companion? Death. Or God. And neither has a name. Or a face. Are they strangers to him too?’
[5] The Stranger in The Bible. Judaism teaches us that man must be authentic, and that he can find his authenticity only within his own culture and tradition. We don't want to make Jews out of Christians; we want to make Jews out of Jews, and to help Christians to be better Christians. We want the stranger to offer us not what we already have - or whatever we may have given him - but that which he has and we don't. We don't want him to resemble us any more than we wish to resemble him. We look at him hoping to find his uniqueness, to understand that which makes him different - that which makes him a stranger. For man, aware of both his limitations and his desire to transcend them, recognizes that the stranger forces him to call into question not only his own judgments of himself but also his relations with others. Faced with the unknown, we realize that every consciousness represents the unknown to everyone else. God, and God alone, remains Himself in all His relationships - never becoming someone else, never becoming the other. And yet, just as man can attain his ultimate truth only through other human beings, God can be united to His creation only through man. Man needs the other to be human - just as God needs man to be God. For the Jew, the stranger suggests a world to be lived in, to be enhanced, 0r saved. One awaits the stranger, one welcomes him, one is grateful to him for his presence. Elie Wiesel ~ from The Kingdom of Memory New York 1990
[6] THE STRANGER, on the sociological and human level, the unknown, the prohibited, is someone who suggests the beyond; he seduces, he attracts, he wounds - and leaves; he is someone who comes from places you have never visited - and never will - sent by dark powers who know more about you than you know about them, and who resent you for being what you are, where you are, or simply - for being. The stranger represents what you are not, what you cannot be, simply because you are not he. Between you and him no contact seems possible, except through suspicion, terror, or repulsion. The stranger is the other. He is not bound by your laws, by your memories; his language is not yours, nor his silence. He is an emissary of evil and violence. Or of death. Surely he is from the other side. Elie Wiesel ~ from The Kingdom of Memory New York 1990
[7] David Tomas ~ Transcultural Space and Transcultural Beings, 1996 - ‘This book concerns the existence and dynamics of transient, sometimes humorous, often dangerous, and periodically cruel intercultural space - generated in situations often governed by misrepresentation or representational excess. This transient space can open before on ( or under one’s feet, so to speak) to suddenly overwhelm one in misrepresentation. It can just as easily close up behind one, or draw away from one’s immediate presence, as if nothing significant had taken place, except, perhaps, the inexplicable or accidental catastrophe of one’s own injury, or death. To this type of space I have given the name transcultural space. pp 1 ‘ Transcultural spaces are predicated on chance events, unforeseen and fleeting meetings, or confrontations that randomly direct activity originating from either side of geographic or territorial, natural or artificially perceived divides that separate and distinguish peoples with different constellations of customs, manners and language. These spaces are therefore the product of fleeting intercultural relations, of special kinds of spatial and communication; dynamics that unfold during the course of first contact or early contact situations between Western and Non-Western peoples.’ pp 1
[8] Tomas Ibid ‘If transcultural events form part of an invisible and pedestrian history, a “living history” which lies dormant in the shadow of a monolithic, positivistic picture of non-European peoples and places, this is because the events themselves escape the thresholds of what is normally considered to be historically significant’ pp 21
[9] Wiesel op cit: ‘The question therefore is, How should the contact, the exchange, occur? What should its nature be? Am I to approach the stranger in his language or mine? On his level or mine? In other words: Must I make an effort to resemble him so as to better discover him, to make an effort to resemble him? The answer, naturally, is, no. For that would mean accepting his terms; that would mean submission and defeat, leading - finally - to dissolution rather than to affirmation of our identity. Now, we realize that there is in man precisely such a desire, calling for this kind Of end, this kind of death. A desire to break with his surroundings, burn his bridges, deny his past and his experiences, plunge into the mass of humanity and go under . . . thus solving the problem of existence by putting an end to that existence. It is a desire to become another, to live the life of another, the destiny of another, assume the death of another - to die as a stranger in order to forget pain, shame, guilt, in order to disappear - to commit either physical or spiritual suicide. That urge may or may not be rooted in weakness. Man may feel helpless to adjust to the image he has of himself and so wish to adopt the image the stranger has of him; ultimately he may try to resemble the stranger - or even the enemy. But then it may also be related to a more positive passion - his need to renew himself, to replenish himself. He may leave his land, his home, his habits, in the hope that as an expatriate he may have greater opportunities to rethink, re-evaluate, and redefine his place and role under the sun.’
[10] Raymonde Carroll ‘... we erroneously think in this domain we are basically the same ... - all universal beings. We are, in fact not the same, but this is far from catastrophic. Indeed, one of the greatest advantages of cultural analysis, aside from that of expanding our horizons, is that of transforming our cultural misunderstandings from a source of occasionally deep wounds into a fascinating and inexhaustible exploration of the other.’ pp 11 Cultural Misunderstandings - The French -American Experience, Uni. of Chicago Press Chicago 1987
[11] My own creative response is in the forthcoming poem: ‘In Days of Omen & Prophecy - Two Heads inthe Hunt ’ http://frontieraustralasongs.blogspot.com/2007/02/in-days-of-omen-and-prophecy.html
[12] Mindie -legendary serpent from Bukrabanyule subdued by Bunjil and unleashed by him as punishment to the kulin. pp 276 Craig Robertson 1980~ Buckley’s Hope: The story of Australia’s Wild White Man.
[13] John Morgan ~ The Life and Adventures of William Buckley Hobart 1852
[14] Johannes Falkenberg - Kinship: Group Relations of Australian Aborigines in The Port Keats District
Oslo University Press, George Allen and Unwin LTD 1962 pp 241-2
[15] Bride ~ Letters From Victorian Pioneers (James Clow) p 111-113
The Opening Crack of Otherness
A frontier opens a chasm beneath the feet in terms of the foundations of human consciousness. The Sacred marks of eight aboriginal men on the Batman treaty are the shifting lines of this crossing-over of meaning. They are like swing bridges across an abyss of time in the telling of history. Of meaning that is yet meaningless to us who can not yet read them. Meaning goes over our head in this inability to translate. The squiggly lines might be scribbles on a gum tree. But these are the signs used on the formal wooden message stick as a letter-post to summons countrymen. They are the sorts of dendroglyph signs that were used to inscript trees as memorials or tombs on Dandenong Creek[1] or similar monuments in central northern NSW.[2]
The ‘objects’ or ‘facts’ of these aboriginalities in the documents mean things that can not be understood just from within monochrome English. These ‘texts’ have waited through many years of our human blindness for their interpreter. They are waiting still. The historic scene is depicted, where aboriginal men cluster around a group of whitemen wanting to be named.[3] But no word gets out with an intelligent reading. This is seen as an inconsequential little act of historical theatre. The cultural interpretation of a reality is not yet seen from the other side. The cross cultural nexus here is not about redress of injustice. It is about meeting the stranger.
The body language, let alone the proto-Auslandic language of signing is more often left out. What were the aboriginal signs used in the language of signs? How do we read these texts within the texts. They are gaps that yawn under our understanding. How do we cross that sort of bridge?
The real value of the ‘Batman’ Treaty is that it is just such a bridge. Just as his record of the use of sign language is a bridge. As naming rituals are indicators of aboriginal attempts to include, to embrace or to be embraced, to find kinship relationships, or else to make namesakes as cultural ambassadors on the other side. These are transcultural bridges coming from the other side across the abyss of transcultural space. What were the reciprocal expectations of name exchanges? What causes the electric excitements that came of these frontier meetings? These signs on the treaty parchments are the embrace of the stranger. [4]
The desire of and for the other, is for the stranger. [5] Wiesel also explains the historical danger of the stranger. ‘Between you and him no contact seems possible, except through suspicion, terror, or repulsion. The stranger is the other. He is not bound by your laws, by your memories; his language is not yours, nor his silence. He is an emissary of evil and violence. Or of death. Surely he is from the other side’[6]
‘Transcultural Space’[7] yawns out of the everyday assumptions of these documentary footsteps in glosses and anomalies. Tomas suggests a need to look at first contact between cultures in that transcultural space and in the intercommunicational instability that exists ‘outside the parameters of any ordinary historical frame of reference, including that of a Foucault-inspired mirror or subjugated history. This is to look at history for its ‘Cracks of Otherness’. To see where the stranger is met with. Here, a sort of test takes place. Here is a way of refocusing on who might be the more important players in history. Often this focus[8] will need be on formerly seeming inconsequential and pedestrian events.
History, then, is a theatre of trials to the sense of identity in need of renewal. The frontier cracks with an otherness that represents a human need. ‘The need to replenish himself’.[9] The frontier well opens into depths of great moment. The womb of human identity might be plumbed to depths greater than the reader of history might want to probe. Nadir and profundity might be reached by unseated historical players. This is a pit, an abyss, a well of chasmic proportions. Yet we have bridges. The cavity of otherness often goes borderless in the dimensionality that is met with in the human otherness. The pit of being does not easily find a new bottom. This is a trough where gaps open in consciousness.
Cultural Misunderstanding[10] is sure to be one of the prime factors in the melting pot of cultural meeting. This meeting is at times fraught with primal violence and bloodshed, a primordial soup of ‘beings’ in the flux; as the life-forces cling on to sinking principles, or lash out at imagined threat in the unknowns.
The Chasm of Transcultural Space opens metaphorically out of Earthquakes of the Frontier. Meeting with otherness, the earth quakes. The frontier provides a possible earthquake in the human identity. Just what the Port Phillip aborigines might have made of the tectonic shaking of their lands (and of archetypal poemes of their consciousness)[11] is suggested by the response Buckley observed to the death, about 1828, north or Geelong, of a giant two-headed ‘Mindi’[12] snake.[13] Causation is metaphysical. ‘Aborigines do not believe in coincidences. Everything has a cause, and luck is due to help from invisible friendly spirits, (njäpan).”[14] Ill, the converse.
Here are just some Omens and Earthquakes of the port Phillip Frontier: 1. The Earthquake of 1837 while Governor Bourke was inspecting the Iramoo Plains near Werribee. 2. Earthquake of March 1843.[15] 3. Earthquake of Autumn 1847. 4. Earthquake at Night. January 1850. Omens such as these would literally go bottomless in earth-incarnating ‘totemic’ readings of their religious disposition. And the advent of aliens, the ‘E.T.’ whitemen on lands long seen as texts themselves, were seen as being heralded in this literal earth shattering, culture-clashing, myth-tolling embodiment.
The making of new people out of diverse peoples meeting on the shifting ground of uncertain relations is likely to be catastrophic.
[1] LaTrobe records carved Dandenong redgum trees bearing motifs of unknown significance.
[2] James Etheridge Jr ~ The Dendroglyphs of NSW, Museum of Sydney 1916
[3] 1. James Kirby - Old Times in The Bush of Australia. 2. Peter Beveridge - Aborigines of the Lower Murray 3. James Dawson - Australian Aborigines 1881 - 4. William Thomas ~ Journals
[4] Elie Wiesel ~ The Stranger in The Bible ~ from The Kingdom of Memory, New York 1990
‘Man, by definition, is born a stranger: coming from nowhere, he is thrust into an alien world which existed before him - a world which didn't need him. And which will survive him. A stranger, he goes through life meeting other strangers. His only constant companion? Death. Or God. And neither has a name. Or a face. Are they strangers to him too?’
[5] The Stranger in The Bible. Judaism teaches us that man must be authentic, and that he can find his authenticity only within his own culture and tradition. We don't want to make Jews out of Christians; we want to make Jews out of Jews, and to help Christians to be better Christians. We want the stranger to offer us not what we already have - or whatever we may have given him - but that which he has and we don't. We don't want him to resemble us any more than we wish to resemble him. We look at him hoping to find his uniqueness, to understand that which makes him different - that which makes him a stranger. For man, aware of both his limitations and his desire to transcend them, recognizes that the stranger forces him to call into question not only his own judgments of himself but also his relations with others. Faced with the unknown, we realize that every consciousness represents the unknown to everyone else. God, and God alone, remains Himself in all His relationships - never becoming someone else, never becoming the other. And yet, just as man can attain his ultimate truth only through other human beings, God can be united to His creation only through man. Man needs the other to be human - just as God needs man to be God. For the Jew, the stranger suggests a world to be lived in, to be enhanced, 0r saved. One awaits the stranger, one welcomes him, one is grateful to him for his presence. Elie Wiesel ~ from The Kingdom of Memory New York 1990
[6] THE STRANGER, on the sociological and human level, the unknown, the prohibited, is someone who suggests the beyond; he seduces, he attracts, he wounds - and leaves; he is someone who comes from places you have never visited - and never will - sent by dark powers who know more about you than you know about them, and who resent you for being what you are, where you are, or simply - for being. The stranger represents what you are not, what you cannot be, simply because you are not he. Between you and him no contact seems possible, except through suspicion, terror, or repulsion. The stranger is the other. He is not bound by your laws, by your memories; his language is not yours, nor his silence. He is an emissary of evil and violence. Or of death. Surely he is from the other side. Elie Wiesel ~ from The Kingdom of Memory New York 1990
[7] David Tomas ~ Transcultural Space and Transcultural Beings, 1996 - ‘This book concerns the existence and dynamics of transient, sometimes humorous, often dangerous, and periodically cruel intercultural space - generated in situations often governed by misrepresentation or representational excess. This transient space can open before on ( or under one’s feet, so to speak) to suddenly overwhelm one in misrepresentation. It can just as easily close up behind one, or draw away from one’s immediate presence, as if nothing significant had taken place, except, perhaps, the inexplicable or accidental catastrophe of one’s own injury, or death. To this type of space I have given the name transcultural space. pp 1 ‘ Transcultural spaces are predicated on chance events, unforeseen and fleeting meetings, or confrontations that randomly direct activity originating from either side of geographic or territorial, natural or artificially perceived divides that separate and distinguish peoples with different constellations of customs, manners and language. These spaces are therefore the product of fleeting intercultural relations, of special kinds of spatial and communication; dynamics that unfold during the course of first contact or early contact situations between Western and Non-Western peoples.’ pp 1
[8] Tomas Ibid ‘If transcultural events form part of an invisible and pedestrian history, a “living history” which lies dormant in the shadow of a monolithic, positivistic picture of non-European peoples and places, this is because the events themselves escape the thresholds of what is normally considered to be historically significant’ pp 21
[9] Wiesel op cit: ‘The question therefore is, How should the contact, the exchange, occur? What should its nature be? Am I to approach the stranger in his language or mine? On his level or mine? In other words: Must I make an effort to resemble him so as to better discover him, to make an effort to resemble him? The answer, naturally, is, no. For that would mean accepting his terms; that would mean submission and defeat, leading - finally - to dissolution rather than to affirmation of our identity. Now, we realize that there is in man precisely such a desire, calling for this kind Of end, this kind of death. A desire to break with his surroundings, burn his bridges, deny his past and his experiences, plunge into the mass of humanity and go under . . . thus solving the problem of existence by putting an end to that existence. It is a desire to become another, to live the life of another, the destiny of another, assume the death of another - to die as a stranger in order to forget pain, shame, guilt, in order to disappear - to commit either physical or spiritual suicide. That urge may or may not be rooted in weakness. Man may feel helpless to adjust to the image he has of himself and so wish to adopt the image the stranger has of him; ultimately he may try to resemble the stranger - or even the enemy. But then it may also be related to a more positive passion - his need to renew himself, to replenish himself. He may leave his land, his home, his habits, in the hope that as an expatriate he may have greater opportunities to rethink, re-evaluate, and redefine his place and role under the sun.’
[10] Raymonde Carroll ‘... we erroneously think in this domain we are basically the same ... - all universal beings. We are, in fact not the same, but this is far from catastrophic. Indeed, one of the greatest advantages of cultural analysis, aside from that of expanding our horizons, is that of transforming our cultural misunderstandings from a source of occasionally deep wounds into a fascinating and inexhaustible exploration of the other.’ pp 11 Cultural Misunderstandings - The French -American Experience, Uni. of Chicago Press Chicago 1987
[11] My own creative response is in the forthcoming poem: ‘In Days of Omen & Prophecy - Two Heads inthe Hunt ’ http://frontieraustralasongs.blogspot.com/2007/02/in-days-of-omen-and-prophecy.html
[12] Mindie -legendary serpent from Bukrabanyule subdued by Bunjil and unleashed by him as punishment to the kulin. pp 276 Craig Robertson 1980~ Buckley’s Hope: The story of Australia’s Wild White Man.
[13] John Morgan ~ The Life and Adventures of William Buckley Hobart 1852
[14] Johannes Falkenberg - Kinship: Group Relations of Australian Aborigines in The Port Keats District
Oslo University Press, George Allen and Unwin LTD 1962 pp 241-2
[15] Bride ~ Letters From Victorian Pioneers (James Clow) p 111-113
posted by Wayne D Knoll | 4:42 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home