Mythic Landscapes: Narratives of Belonging and Possibility

We, the human species, inhabit landscapes and landscapes inhabit us. It is my contention that we are relational beings constantly at work finding ourselves in a generously creative Cosmos. Furthermore, it is the work of generations in weaving narratives of belonging and hope that makes sense of the shifts in human awareness. This awareness of course is expressed through human activity. It is praxalogical in nature and creates feedback loops that confirm or undermine the narratives of being and belonging we devise to understand our place within the wholeness of the universe and its local manifestations. The prophetic-pragmatic nature of myth, captured in the earthy words of Kate Tempest above, invites us to consider how we lock ourselves down, and how we might unlock ourselves to the much ‘bigger notion’ Tempest points to.

Tempest’s prophetic temper points to the movement between the subjective experience of narrative being and the narrative’s constant renegotiating of relationships with the environment. In modernity such renegotiation is understood as shifts in the energy regimes that give meaning to a worldview premised on growth and the material extraction of resources from the planet. This is a highly one-sided, anthropocentric, process that has violated the relational conditions of being. The result is that earlier lifeways have been swept aside or reduced to psycho-spiritual refugia in the human subconscious where ancient memories still reside and from which calls to reconfigure — even reclaim — the sacred in the mundane come with insistent regularity.

Of course it was not always so. The Aboriginal peoples of Australia operated in a world of spirit, presence and active agency. They were fellow travellers with their stories. They understood themselves as an extension of the land inhabiting a permanent temporally rich present. Bill Neidjie (1920–2002), an Indigenous elder from the Kimberley region of Western Australia was interviewed in the 1980s. For him the landscape was a story, a feeling and it was alive to the human-nonhuman presence. One human task in such a world was to pay attention, to be attentive to the story of which we are a part. Attentiveness, the act of deep listening or dadirri, is a significant aspect of all healthy relationships. Neidjie put it this way:

But there is, from our Modern perspective a gap, an unbridgeable chasm, between today and yesterday. We live, it seems in a fragmented present. A present that Douglas Rushkoff describes in his book Present Shock as suffering from narrative collapse. This collapse is brought on by the instant, the immediate and the sensual compression of consciousness, that is scattered and distracted, and also in pain. When narrative collapses time collapses because the temporal is given coherence through narrative. Narrative collapse results in our losing ourselves to sound bites with the result that consciousness and attention become fragmented. When narrative time collapses we surrender our agency to the fragmented litany of an edgy dasein that swamps us, drains away meaning and baffles the deeper senses of memory and foresight.

The indigenous worldview resists this movement towards collapse but at great cost to those caught between worlds. Yet, as Neidjie demonstrates, there is an embodied link that can be called upon. It is both cellular — ‘fingernail and blood’ — and also mythic, calling us back to an embodied relationship with the inner landscapes that remain below the surface, awaiting a ‘dadirri moment’ when we pay attention. One such moment is captured beautifully by the 20th Century indigenous poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920–1993) who wrote The Past:

Noonuccal is pointing to the fact that, as cultural beings, we carry deep story. This is the mythic reservoir that deepens consciousness and offers a plane of Being from which resistance can emerge. ‘Let no one say the past is dead!’ Noonuccal asserts. Such counter movements lie at the heart of those pockets of psycho-spiritual refugia that inhabit us all, just waiting to be called back into the conscious domain. The hegemonic pressure of fragmented being that holds us to any given present — ‘now is so small a part of time’ — is of course vulnerable to attack from deep memory, those ‘thousand thousand campfires’, and the relational networks that such memory sustains.

As narrative beings we of course can engage in counter movements that disrupt the dominant, the ‘real’ and can awaken to alternative possibilities. Yet such awakening is often painful — a scraping away at the identities we have adopted to survive in the present. Small acts of rebellion such as finding kinship with the non-human can be shocking and lead us to question the very nature of relationship provided by modern epistemologies. This is reflected in a poem by Meera Chakravorty who notes the shock she feels when faced with the death of a palm tree in her garden:

What do we make of this shock of finding relationship with the non-human? It is hard to face as it brings into question our entire civilisational model. In short in brings our very identities into question. We are forced to ask that deeply mythic question: who am I? An answer certainly lies in the habitation of the mythic landscapes beyond the shores of modernity, where relationship with the other is the defining quality of identity. We inter-are as Thich Nhat Hạnh puts it. Such inter-being was central to the hunter-gatherer cultures of the Pleistocene and remained strong through much of the Holocene as well, only becoming severely compromised with the rise of modernity and the onset of the Anthropocene.

Turning to an indigenous group from Tamil Nadu we find such an understanding present in the concept of tiNai. Nirmal Selvamony suggests that:

‘The long-lasting tiNai, our Pleistocene legacy, is a primal home-community in which the humans, Nature and Supernature are members.’

This practice of relating, behoming, that lies at the heart of tiNai is evoked in Chakravorty’s lines cited earlier. Why, she asks, is the plant world referred to in the neuter? This modernist distinction separates us from the biotic landscape we inhabit: the world of birds, bees, trees, and rock and ocean. tiNai is the practice of kinship — of relationship with another. From it Selvamony coins the term tiNaicene to designate the period where this form of relational being was at its peak. This was a time when the inner landscape of mythos was aligned with the external landscape inhabited by indigenous peoples around the world. It was a time when biophilia was the norm. He uses a traditional Tamil song about the kinship between a girl and a specific laurel tree. This is described in an intimate scene with the young girls, now a woman, being wooed by a strapping fisherman underneath that very tree. As you may discern she is feeling uncomfortable being intimate in the shade of her sister. The song first sets the context:

Then it moves to the woman’s shyness in the presence of her sister:

This poem presents the family as extending to the non-human world, it is a natural extension of affinity and affection. It tells the story clearly and lyrically, being filled with rich metaphor, gentle humour and candour. How can the young woman make love in front of, beneath, in the shadow, of her sister?

Such relationships ground us, extend us, open our horizons to alternative possibilities: futures beyond us, yet ourselves. In seeking to express this expansive sense of being-more I wrote these words in a poem giving voice to St Francis of Assisi:

The object here was to explode the limited identity at the core of our fears. This is a ‘bhakti moment’, rich in the counter intuitive senses that flood our body-minds when we encounter the mythic in the prosaic. To me the secular collapses into the sacred at such moments and we become open dark holes, exposed and undefined: pulsing beings momentarily shed of our limitations.

Kate Tempest captures this openness and vulnerability in these lines from her poem ‘Man down’:

It is, however, the human equation that eludes us, taunts us. The resacralisation of the world begins with us finding the sacred freedom to act counter to the dominant narratives that shape our landscapes; wearing them down through a process of spiritual erosion that carves new meaning from the world around us.

For Tempest the world we inhabit inhabits us; we find freedom, voice, agency only when we walk into this world with eyes wide open. Yet our eyes are wounded. Our voice stifled. Her call is from that space inhabited by seers such as Tiresias whose sightless eyes see beyond the given to other spaces. The reclaiming if such sight is the task of all committed to reclaiming their humanity through the fostering of orientations to the lifeworld such as dadirri and tiNai in their lives. This is a mythic calling to become new humans who are comfortable to inhabit their skins in the full appreciation that their skin is alive to the sacred. This shift in awareness opens up the critical spiritual faculty within us all. To see the world relationally, aka spiritually, is to see it anew and to expose the violence and damage we inflict upon the planet and upon ourselves.

I will conclude these reflections with some lines from Kate Tempest’s novel The Bricks that Built the Houses. At the heart of this novel is the power of place to both liberate and also confine people. Beneath all the slick surface noise of South London lies a darker more powerful landscape, one that shifts and changes to reflect the changing directions of the novel’s main characters. One such character, Harry (a young gay woman) is sitting contemplating her environment as she heads towards a deep and deadly crisis. Her identity and her life are at stake. Let’s end with these lines which ably reflect the theme of this talk:

She scratches the back of her head, scrunches her hair. Sighs and looks up at the street lights. Tells herself she’s doing fine. She’s smashing it. She’s making it happen. And as she sits she feels the hum of all the endless houses she has lived amongst since she was born. She holds onto the comfort of this road, this wall, this corner. Hers. She looks around. The houses are filled with people. The people are filled with houses.

NB: Odd placement of poems the result of Medium not allowing for poetic formatting