THE PEOPLE OF THE FIRST DAY

bushmen art

Looking backwards into the deeply forgotten past the last couple days, looking for where my fascination with the most primitive people around the earth began. National Geographics magazines, found everywhere, showed me sometimes people who danced around fires wearing masks and covered with body paint. People who carry bows, a few arrows and spears, people who from our point of view look like the most poor, but from their point of view were the most rich. Wherever they are, they live in a garden. Want a monkey for dinner? Easy done. One perfect shot. And you get your arrow back. They know how to make fire and their musical instruments when they need them. I've an idea the fundamentalist church of childhood fed my interest somewhat. Tuesday night was Missionary Meeting. Every week. No getting out of it. Missionaries passing through would stop by, give a slide show, talk about the work they're doing in the fields of the Lord, and ask for money. I liked the slide shows of mostly Africans. It was like Africa was real missionary work. Schweitzer and Livingston. A continent of colored heathens ripe for the picking, where they boil missionaries in big crock pots. My heart was actually with the coloreds. I couldn't stand it that the missionaries were so proud of putting the people in American thrift store rejects. That's the way they were supposed to dress after they get saved. It doesn't show their private parts and it's the way of civilization. It's what the Lord wants for them. I didn't have anything to base it on, maybe intuition, but I did not believe the Africans were devil-worshipping heathens, still don't, and have learned enough about it that I never will. I feel sad for black American Baptists who believe their African heritage is devil-worshippers. Now we're getting into colonialism. Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

 

 

 

I do not have the heart of an adventurer. I'm not one to go off into the unknown to see if I can survive it. The unknown is happening all the time, anyway. I have a great admiration for people who climb Everest, K-2 and the other killer mountains. I enjoy reading accounts by adventurers, one of my favorite being John Long's Gorilla Monsoon, a collection of his accounts of Xtreme experiences you have to be ready to die to jump into. I'd rather read about it. I think John Long thought up the plot for the Sylvester Stallone movie, Cliffhanger. It would have been better with actors we'd never seen before, but they would not have been a box office draw. So we had Rocky's ugly face wrecking an otherwise good movie. I like other people to have the adventures and tell me about them in person, by book or movie. I don't want to be hanging by a rope on the side of an ice cliff that goes half a mile straight down into a chasm there's no return from. That's for them that want it. Sometimes I believe Milly Richardson and I are from the same planet yonder in space. We both feel like we are here to observe. It's like we both live by a maxim of don't get attached, just observe. Observing is great. It's an ongoing round-the-clock movie. It's like seeing everything behind you in a window. I admire people like Jane Goodall sitting in dense African forest among the chimpanzees. She made one of the most beautiful films of my memory, The Wild Dogs of Africa, with her then-husband who did the filming. I saw it almost 40 years ago on PBS tv and have never seen nor heard reference to it since.

 

 

 

The documentary JOURNEY OF MAN has taken me to looking at the Kalahari region of southern Africa in a picture book I have of landscapes in Namibia. Odd to have such a thing, but I do. Africa fascinates me to read about. Ryan Milan's MY TRAITOR'S HEART comes to mind first. He wrote of South African apartheid in the time of Botha, from the inside. Athol Fugard comes to mind. I passed him on a sidewalk, once, going in opposite directions. What's happening in that part of South Africa is capitalist strife. I'm more interested in the people of the Kalahari region, the people who live the original way we humans began. I look at pictures of them on google images. I've read about them in the past, but it has been a long time. So long that they are no more than familiar. Went to the shelf and picked up Laurens van der Post's THE LOST WORLD OF THE KALAHARI. I gave away the copy I read a long time ago. The copy in the house was found at an Alleghany County Library book sale, a discarded library copy. Probably paid a quarter for it. It's in rough shape indicating it may have been read a number of times. It's one of those books you don't forget. I sat down with it for awhile and let myself be pulled into the good writing that inspires thoughts that I'd love to be able to write like van der Post. I picked up the book and held it just now, opened it, read a chance paragraph and felt awe. Van der Post grew up on a farm pioneered by his grandfather on the edge of the Kalahari territory. He grew up hearing his dad and granddad talking about them, about their ways, their skill with arrows, hunting, the clicking sound in their language, enough to grow him up curious about the people of the bush.

 

 

 

I've read a little bit along the way about the Aborigines in Australia, their culture, their relationship with the spirit that was direct, so direct as to be participants in the Dream. The Aborigines say they have been here 50,000 years, which I thought incredible, though wondered how well mythology translates to history. Confirmed by DNA that they do indeed know their own history renewed interest in them. Now, to see from the Journey Of Man that the people of the Kalahari are the first people that all the rest of us descended from in a Persian carpet tree of life that covered the earth eventually. All the time their descendants were covering the earth, the original people stayed at home in the southern tip of Africa. I'm wondering how many thousands of years the bush people lived there before the band of explorers set out on their way to the floating continent. They were not lonely because they were the only people. They did not set out looking for other people. They walked over the virgin earth, their footprints the first human footsteps. They were one with the spirit world and the animal world. They didn't leave a swath of devastation behind them like humans do now. This was before money was an issue. They were one with the ground they walked on and the rivers they crossed, wherever they were. The vision or whatever it was that guided them had to be powerfully convincing. They didn't have machetes, either. I'm wanting to dive into Laurens van der Post's good writing again and read about the Bushmen of Namibia, Botswana and South Africa, this time seeing them the original humans, where we came from, what we came in with.    

 

 

 

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INTERESTING TIMES

australian aboriginal paintings

Thought I'd hear some Brahms this evening. Alban Berg Quartet again. It's such subtle music it makes me want to sit back, lights out, and hear every nuance. But I don't feel like it right now. I may have to turn the music off, because it takes me over, whatever it is. I can't use music for white noise, unless it's so repulsive I'd rather have silence, which I'd rather have anyway. This is not flowing with me like Dvorak did yesterday. Possibly Dvorak flows with my temperament. Had to turn off Brahms. I like it, but it wasn't the groove I thought I needed. It was going loud and quiet, loud and quiet, like an American movie where it's predictable that when they go to whispering in a scene, an explosion follows. I often use subtitles with American movies because I don't want to be turning the volume up to hear it when they're whispering, then have to turn it down in a hurry when the explosion occurs. With subtitles I can keep the volume even, read the whispers, and not have to turn the volume down for explosions. Just now in my head I've been listening to Brahms and to Dvorak to find the difference. The word institutional comes to mind for Brahms. With Dvorak I hear dance rhythms. There it is. That's when I call it music, when it makes me dance inside. This may be the foundation of my affection for Dvorak's music.

The temperature today is in the forties. A happy relief after days below thirty and nights below twenty. Last winter by this time we were wondering where the cold weather went. The cold did not hit until late. This year, it's starting off with cold. Every winter is uniquely itself. I used to try to find patterns in the weather, but never did. The only patterns I've seen are spring, summer, fall and winter. I heard a couple of meteorologists talking on NPR yesterday about how far off the weather predictions were for hurricane season this year. I think there were 2 minor hurricanes. The forecasters made out like it was going to be a bad year for hurricanes. I was interested that the man talking said they have learned a great deal from a year that went against the predictions. Isn't that what weather does? But this year was way off. This time of year I start thinking about pretending I'm living in Scandinavia where a day like today is on the verge of summer, pretending I'm acclimatized and a day when the rhododendron leaves never uncurl even in sunlight is mild weather. This way I don't get so impatient with feet being cold all the time. Found a little skullcap thing hunters wear under their hats to keep head warm. Warm sox and shoes and the top of the head warm makes a difference all the way in between. They say heat goes out of the body through the top of the head, so I'll wear this skullcap to help retain my own heat.

A documentary I saw a few days ago, JOURNEY OF MAN, has stayed with me and will for always. Spencer Wells, a biologist who studies DNA, found he can trace backwards through DNA in blood to find the original humans and where they came from. It turns out the first people on earth were the Bushmen of southern Africa. Their territory was the Kalahari of Namibia, Botswana and South Africa. Wells traces a band of maybe twenty or so people who left the region where they were living near the coast. They walked up the length of Africa, crossed at Suez, followed the coast around Saudi Arabia, the Middle East, around the coastal edge of India, into southeastern Asia where they evidently made rafts or boats of some sort and crossed to Australia. It was in the time of Ice Age over 50,000 years ago. Wells suggests that the ice accumulating at the poles brought the water level down quite a lot. The band of people that took off on "walkabout," must have changed as time went by, some dying, some being born. Some of them stayed behind in India, and thousands of years later branched out toward Europe and toward Siberia, where some crossed the Bering Strait 15,000 years ago when it was a stretch of land between Siberia and Alaska. Evidently they set out to find what is now Australia. Wells said the waterway between Australia and mainland was quite a lot narrower than it is now. The people who crossed the water had about fifty miles, less than from Cuba to Miami today. They became the Australian Aborigines. A book I'd read about them some years ago, VOICES OF THE FIRST DAY, by Robert Lawlor, said the Aborigines say they go back 50,000 years. Wells' DNA research confirms them.

A film made by a Dutch director using Aboriginal non-actors, TEN CANOES, 2009, shows the Aborigine way of life from their beginning to the time of the European invasion that put an end to their culture. It is a beautifully made film very well researched and as true to the Aboriginal way as the process of making a film can show it. They had a shamanic tradition all the way along. It looks to me like this migration to Australia was directed by vision. The walk was the most sensible of possible routes to walk from almost the southern tip of Africa all the way around to Australia. If they were guided by shamanic vision, by spirit, they were more than likely advised where and how to cross the water. They surely had to cross several wide rivers along their way. By the time they reached the southeastern Asian archipelago, they knew how to cross expanses of moving water. Following the coast, or even near the coast, they crossed rivers probably half a mile as a rule, at least, deltas with multiple rivers. I believe crossing that stretch to Australia amounted to another body of water to cross. The Aborigines made things as they needed them and discarded them when finished, buried them leaving no traces. I've an idea the very earliest people live by the spirit in such a way we can't imagine, we're so far from the spirit by now. The first thing I thought entertaining shamanic guidance to an island continent, Why Australia? I saw in my mind's eye Uluru, cave paintings, the Aboriginal paintings of energy lines in the earth.

I can't help but be convinced those early people on walkabout were guided by spirit in whatever ways they understood the ways of the spirit. They saw themselves as players in the world of spirit. By now, we are so far from spirit we don't even know what that means. So far from spirit that the Tao Te Ching is obscure unto opaque. The same can be said for the New Testament. Wondering why they were guided to Australia, all I can guess is uninterrupted isolation from the eventual covering of the earth by the spread of civilizations. Maybe, too, for the Aboriginal understanding, the continent is covered with what they call holy places in the spirit that are now tourist spots, a floating continent with some kind of energy they needed. Maybe they pray for the rest of us. I wonder if it was a way to isolate and preserve that original connection with spirit the earliest people had. Keeping it, something like an eternal flame among the Zoroastrians. I even suspect the earliest people were so one with the spirit that to us they look spiritually advanced. A big shift for humanity is in process right now. I'm guessing that our collective momentum away from spirit, our direction from the beginning, developing our new brain with experience, being self-focused unto the Age of Narcissism we're in now, is ready to reverse direction like an arrow shot straight up, the turning point. From that point onward, we'll be moving toward the spirit instead of away from it all through the millennia.

Maybe the places like Australia and Tibet are no longer needed to keep the rest of us in ongoing prayer. When we are turned to face the light collectively, it will unleash a tsunami of the heart. We will look at what's going on that's making us crazy and say: Cut it Out !!!  We'll say that to ourselves, individually, and, like Abercrombie and Fitch tshirts went away overnight, a cosmic twinkling of an eye, we'll cut it out. It seems like a shame to see these cultures go away at the same time all around the earth. They, too, are part of all that went before. I've watched a lot of contemporary foreign films from all over the earth, a theme that runs through them is the changes from the old people whose foundations were in a culture that went away. It's the same in China as in North Carolina. A few more generations will make a great deal of difference. The secrets of their cultures will die with them, as they already have. I can't help but find it curious that all the cultures of the world are being replaced by television culture. It surely is an interim culture needed to sever us from all that went before, a culture unto itself, out of which new cultures will emerge like branches on a sapling. The healing of the earth will begin. The healing of humanity will begin. Has begun. When things change on the outside, they've already changed on the inside.

 

 

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HERE COME COWBOYS

australian aboriginal paintings

I heard a sentence on the radio news this afternoon that started, "How can the richest country in the world...?" I was so struck by that opening I missed the subject. It struck me so naïve I wondered where it came from. The richest country in the world? I've heard that all my life. In London a few different people referred to me a rich American. I said I'm not rich. I could afford to fly to London; they can't afford to fly to Disneyworld. Therefore, I'm rich. Therefore, Americans are rich. I saw on the telly one evening a commercial that pictured a boat and its big V wake on a lake in England. The visual zoomed onto the boat to Mrs So&So, "a rich American" who appreciates the English lake country, refinement, taste and so on. Being a rich American, she uses butter. No oleo margarine for the rich American. None of the people I was watching the telly with understood why I was laughing. It was too much to explain. Besides, it had to do with irony, and I really didn't dare attempt explaining irony. I'd been there long enough to have good understanding that my status as an American was way far below the lowest British subjects. I was regarded with an arrogance similar to what American black people get from white Americans. I realized that racism is only one of many varieties of outsider. Nationalism is about another kind of outsider us-them thinking. Be-true-to-your-school is another group for identity where outsiders go to another school.

Americans have been spoiled for a century or so by the people of the rest of the world looking at us in awe because we're rich. American tourists go anywhere in the world and we're welcomed happily, open-handed, Americans have money. I wondered how welcome I would be if I were black, or Malaysian, or from Pakistan. That was in the last years of America being held in respect. Nixon was the president lying to us at the time. Riding the Orient Express, the train, I went through what was then Yugoslavia, now Croatia and Serbia. It was a very different world from the part of Europe we think of as Europe. This southeastern extension of Europe was part of the Ottoman Empire until about half a century before I passed through it. The air smelled of Turkish tobacco. In this time, it was "behind the Iron Curtain," part of the Soviet Union. Signs were in probably Serbo-Croation and Russian. I saw how people lived in police state. Quietly. On the train I passed a group of people of my age, mid to late 20s, and they knew on sight I was American. They seemed slightly threatening. One of them said, "President Nixon," in a derisive tone of voice. They all laughed. I thought: I dislike him more than you do. This was the time of Brezhnev. They probably disliked Brezhnev more than I did. Americans were less appreciated internationally. Young Americans backpacking different places in the world would often fix a Canadian red maple leaf emblem onto the backpack. Less chance of trouble that way. They don't have to answer to American issues we have nothing to do with and can do nothing about.

In Athens, staying in a pension, having meals there, good Greek cooking, several college students from Chile appeared at the table one day. Most of them spoke English. I mentioned Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who was given the Nobel Prize that year. His picture was on the cover of Time the week before. One said, "He's a communist," and they all shut me out at that moment. From then on, I did not exist. It had not entered my mind to note that going to college in Chile with parents able to fly you to Athens could only be of politically right wing families. The communists were the working people. I had no experience with a Latin American country where communism was legal and politically active. Communism has been so eliminated in USA there's not a trace of it that can be taken seriously. In Chile, they keep the local Indians down. One of the odd aspects of racism is white Brits invade the new world colonies, kill out the Indian people, bring in black people for slaves. In the Spanish colonies, they swept away the civilizations, Mayan, Aztec, Toltec, Olmec, etc, an extended civilization, for gold. Too bad for the Indians that they were naïve about the value of gold. A song by the Psychedelic Furs plays in my head, "It gets so hard sometimes, to take it serious. It really gets to be a drag when, all we really need is love. Here come cowboys, here to save the world, here come cowboys, they're so inside the law, here come cowboys, they're no fun at all."

It's bizarre to me how white people took over the lands they discovered, killed the population and moved in. The survivors and descendants of the aboriginal people are regarded by the occupier as the lowest of the social order. In Australia, the white people are even more arrogant to the Aborigines of the continent than white Americans are to the Indians here. We name cities, rivers, mountains and so on after them, but they don't even figure. To the racist mind that looks down on them, the Indians are lower than black. It's the same in New Zealand with the Maoris. The Chinese occupied Tibet, and moved in a new population that regards the native Tibetans as low as Australians regard the Aboriginal people. Israel and the Palestinians. Somebody I knew years ago told me Indians are not human. I said, What? Right, they're not human. That was the first time I'd heard that one. I was maybe 22. From my first memories I identified with the Indian people that lived on this land originally. They were the people of my heart. I didn't know why. I'd never met one. They had a good way of life that kept the water and air clean for quite a number of centuries. Superior white man has turned the rivers to muck, and the air too, with superior knowledge. It's all ego. As long as we have ego, we'll have racism, nationalism, religionism and the other exclusive clubs to differentiate us from them, ultimately self from others.

 

 

 

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