A most wondrous book has found its way into my hands. Not yet published in the US, I've got the original Australian edition. It's called Sand Talk and invites readers to join a member of the Apalech Clan as he "yarns" with all manner of Aboriginal elders in profound and perfectly plotted ruminations on what "sustainability" can be. It's a sharing of the "how" as much as the "what" of indigenous knowledge, enacting the embodied nature of knowledge in social relations, in the land, and in non-linguistic forms like sand drawings and ritual objects. I've read two chapters so far; each is revelatory. Here, along the route of sharing "non-linear" ways of understanding, which also takes on kinship and Aristotle and cities and the first and second laws of thermodynamics among other things, he opens our eyes to the rainbow [serpent]:
When us-two see that arc in the sky, that Rainbow Serpent, we are seeing only one part of it, and it is subjective: just for us. If we move, the rainbow also moves, only appearing in relation to our standpoint. If you go to the next hill you will see it in a different position from where I am seeing it. The moon sisters were trapped by a similar phenomenon, chasing the reflected moon on the surface of the night sky, thinking it was a fish they could spear. But like the rainbow that image moves in relation to where you are sitting, so they could never catch it. Now you can see their shadows in the moon where they remain trapped to this day, a warning to all about the illusion of chasing fixed viewpoints.
The Serpent loves the water because that is what allows us to see him, and he communicates with each of us this way, but he is not just an entity of water. He is an entity of light. The part we are seeing there in the wet sky, or in the fine spray coming off the front of a speeding dinghy, is just a line across the edge of a sphere. The line moves across multiple spheres that are infinitely overlapping, spiraling inwards and outwards, extending everywhere that light can go (or has gone or will go), and the Rainbow Serpent moves through this photo-fabric of creation. He goes under the ground too, because light has been there in the past and he is not limited by linear time.
Ah, but is he a wave or a particle? I guess that depends on how you’re looking at him, but we could see him as a wave, a snake, because he is constantly in motion across systems that are constantly in motion and interwoven throughout everything that is, was and will be. (54-55)
When us-two see that arc in the sky, that Rainbow Serpent, we are seeing only one part of it, and it is subjective: just for us. If we move, the rainbow also moves, only appearing in relation to our standpoint. If you go to the next hill you will see it in a different position from where I am seeing it. The moon sisters were trapped by a similar phenomenon, chasing the reflected moon on the surface of the night sky, thinking it was a fish they could spear. But like the rainbow that image moves in relation to where you are sitting, so they could never catch it. Now you can see their shadows in the moon where they remain trapped to this day, a warning to all about the illusion of chasing fixed viewpoints. The Serpent loves the water because that is what allows us to see him, and he communicates with each of us this way, but he is not just an entity of water. He is an entity of light. The part we are seeing there in the wet sky, or in the fine spray coming off the front of a speeding dinghy, is just a line across the edge of a sphere. The line moves across multiple spheres that are infinitely overlapping, spiraling inwards and outwards, extending everywhere that light can go (or has gone or will go), and the Rainbow Serpent moves through this photo-fabric of creation. He goes under the ground too, because light has been there in the past and he is not limited by linear time.
Ah, but is he a wave or a particle? I guess that depends on how you’re looking at him, but we could see him as a wave, a snake, because he is constantly in motion across systems that are constantly in motion and interwoven throughout everything that is, was and will be. (54-55)
