What Happened To Us?
Severed from the Source
The work was an installation you could walk into and explore. It consisted of a number of 3D constructions, natural objects, painted images, and sounds. It depicted themes of nature and the cycle of life from an aboriginal perspective. I was fascinated by it and lingered in there for a while. Then I went out for a coffee in the gallery café. Half way through my cake I suddenly began to feel a wave of emotion billowing up from some uncharted depths within me. It was unwelcomed and unsettling, but not unpleasant as such. Lest I embarrass myself, I got up quickly, left the gallery, and drove off in the vague direction of home.
As I drove, waves of emotion continued coming, surging from within, and spilling over. Since I was free to let it out in the bubble of my car, I began to sob — deep, long, inexplicable sobs… Again, I continued to cry and sigh — deep sighs that knew no reason and couldn’t care less that my mind could make no sense of it all. It was a profound experience, and it was primal. And it went on for at least a couple of hours, eventually subsiding to a quiet weep when I finally returned home. I remained moved and perplexed for days afterwards.
What was it, I thought later, and to this day still ponder? Was it a deep, empathetic realisation of the tragic plight of a people losing their cultural and spiritual connection to the land after the British invasion of Australia? Or was it an unearthing of some primal loss of innocence in me? In humanity? Was it a longing for a real, authentic connection to nature and the spirit embedded in earth and in me?
__ Charles Fivaz
Are we the walking dead of our fantasies? Are we a lost civilization, the lost continent of our dreams ? Have we cut ourselves away from the source of life like astronauts untethered from the mothership? Maybe we’re floating in the void, spiritual orphans who have forgotten their history and origins.
Were we ashamed of being just another species of animal that we disowned the family of beings we were born into, making ourselves better than, superior to, separate from? Have we orphaned ourselves and then forgotten we even did it? Do we live our lives secretly nursing a giant wound?
We are taught that our neuroses are personal, that as soon as we can address our personal ills, we can get on with getting ahead. Psychology bills itself as a cure of souls, but what if we are trying to navigate a sick culture that goes back a millennia or two? Our pride in our culture, it’s rock solid norms and beliefs, our vaunted religious certainties and our inertia have paved over deep, unhealed wounds.
We don’t even suspect that we’re not living at the depths we’re meant for until our buried grief surfaces. It looks like we are sleepwalking into a civilizational disaster in which our grief will need to finally be addressed. As members of a giant family of criminals with a long history of crimes against nature and other beings, we are not blameless just because we don’t remember or learn our history. It’s implanted in us at depths we severed ourselves from a long time ago.
We live in what has been called an “interesting time.” May we do more than survive it, may we learn its lessons.
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Iroquois elders told ethnologist Harriet Converse that you can lose your soul if you don’t listen to what it’s telling you in dreams. The punishment for failing to heed repeated dream warnings is that the “free soul” may abandon the dreamer, leaving him to live out his life as one of the walking dead, “bereft of his immortal soul”.
~ Robert Moss, DREAMWAYS OF THE IROQUOIS
