Sacred Landscapes. What are Song-Lines?

There is something about a journey that leads to the same line structure that you get in a sentence or a story. You start somewhere, you go somewhere else and eventually you get to the stop point. You can't be in two places at the same time and so you trace a line from start to finish.

We all know bus maps that show the various places we visit on the buses journey from its starting point to its end stop.

Sentences are exactly the same. And while there is a lot going on in our brains, when it comes to thinking it through or telling a story we are forced to start somewhere and go through various stages and then we get to the end.

Now this linear nature of a journey is rather lost since the invention of paper to draw 2D maps and recent mathematics to store graphs as 2D matrices. Now a whole landscape of destinations can be stored in X/Y space and all possible journeys can be seen as when we call up Google Maps. However when we actually select a journey we are back to a line and when we do that journey the step by step nature of it returns powerfully.

But before the existence of writing and paper to draw maps however people recorded everything in language and so in lines--both lines of words but also the line of a path. For the vast majority of human existence all things were recorded in language and that took the memorable form of verse, chants or songs.

So perhaps it's weird now but maps used to be a wealth of songs, and like a London taxi driver learning "The Knowledge" people learned all these songs to know their way around.

But Song-Lines are much, much more than this. The modern world is obsessed with building and laying roads, pavements and putting up signs and statues of famous people to remember the Past.

But in the Past the world was already here. People lived in the world and did not need to make new things or big changes. Why change what is already perfect. Rain falls from the sky, forms rivers; the deer breed and run through the woods by themselves, plants grow and put out fruit all by themselves: the world is already here and perfect. Before very recently people only needed to know and respect how the world worked to live. All this knowledge was embedded in the song-lines. And instead of man made sign-posts, natural features like mountains, rivers, rocks, even plants and animals became the notable points in the land that were captured in the songs.

But furthermore to follow a Song-Line is not even just a walk through the knowledge and the culture of a people it is also a walk through History. The names of places and features, and the stories around how those features even came to exist are all embedded in the songs. It sounds odd today in our modern world dominated by scientific factual narratives, but stories existed to envelop and embed in people's minds the important features of the landscape. I saw recently a double peaked mountain that local legend said had been cleaved by a giant throwing a boulder. That story immortalises this feature so people will always recognise it and never forget it, passing it on through the generations: known as the mountain cleaved by the giant. One day lost in the mist we see the cleaved mountain we were told about and suddenly we know where we are. This is not just pointless leisure fantasy but encoding the fundamental parts of the world for survival.

This is not an unfamiliar idea even today. We have inherited the Greek constellations which include important heroes immortalised in myths that we still tell today. And while it is usually thought today that it is romantic to put things in the stars, more importantly an already existing part of the world was being appropriated and brought into the culture and history of the people. Today we are more likely to make a statue of Perseus and the land just supplies the raw rock for this work. But this underlines the subordination of land by more modern culture. The bringing of existing parts of the land into the culture unchanged reveals a prior respect for these features. This is being exponentially rapidly lost now. And did Perseus really exist? It does not matter. He makes the night skies familiar and meaningful, ties the story to reality and upholds and preserves the important elements of the culture just like a Song-Line. It is amazing how Ancient Greek modern America is. For all its "modernity" it still recalls profoundly the story of Perseus in the 21st Century just as we still use that constellation.

None of this is actually unfamiliar to the modern mobile phone hosting Google Maps equipped person. We can go on day trips (and people do) to see things like the "Giant's Causeway" in Ireland. This is part of an odd not very attractive song-line now: but you drive to the car park and then follow the foot paths and signs to the coast where you will see a place immortalised by a story of a fight between two giants and a causeway built between Ireland and Scotland.

 

Now we part dismiss this today because we have other more respected songs to sing which tie in vast amounts of knowledge of geology. They say the hexagonal pillars are the result of the way basalt from an ancient volcano cooled. However which would you rather have if lost: a geologist singing his song of plate tectonics, volcanos and eruptions or a song-line with a story of giants which explains that the causeway links to Scotland if you cross the sea, and will have knowledge of what fish are good to eat in the sea there and where to find water, and which direction to travel home. Plus it will be a song from your community and like an immortal pop song will remind you of your home and youth, and it is a song that was sung to you by your parents and was sung to them by their grand-parents and was sung all the way back to the time the causeway was created and even before to the creation of the world. The song is as real and solid as what it talks about.

This intimate way in which the language, songs, culture, community, history and land all interlink is a Song-Line. It lets us know not only where we are in a physical landscape but also where we are culturally and in time. It tells us everything about who we are. It makes the land a living part of us.

These are fiercely guarded by Aboriginal communities in Australia and I think quite rightly. The problem with song-lines is that modern westerners will just plot them on 2D maps, digitise them and perhaps have concerts where people sing them. But this is all as worthless as planning a walk in the Lake District say up Sca Fell and then not actually walking it. Who goes to an art gallery to see this:

There is a short route. It has all the information needed for the route but it is missing one central thing: the actual land. Without the land it is of no worth at all. And a song-line is worthless without the land, and the people and the communities and the history. They all go together. It could even be said the song-lines are of no value to outsiders and so it is quite right to protect them. They are irreplaceable and unique and virtually unteachable without belonging to the community. To think they are no more than Wainwright walks in the countryside is missing the whole point.

And it is this way that modern humans dip into landscapes for holidays and day trips which underlines the poverty of our culture and the way we are divorced from the land. As argued before such vast divorce feeds ultimately into divorce from everything including our bodies and our whole planet. This is the root of the ecological crisis and the recent destruction of the planet by Western humans. We killed our songs and now everything is dying.

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Now one thing I don't understand is what do people with song-lines make of parts of the land that are not part of a song. If you are "lost" and cannot think of a song for the area then where are you? I wonder what this experience is like for people with song-lines.

I wonder whether there is any insight in the book "Walkabout" by James Vance Marshall. Was the boy on a song-line? Long time since read. TBC.