Meeting Place: The Human Encounter and the Challenge of Coexistence

I Have Wondered beyond Absolutes

I Have Wondered beyond Absolutes 185 I can imagine that the defense of walls offered in the last section will be offensive to some. They will think of the wall Israel uses to confine the Palestinians or of any administrative border that punishes difference. However , the object was not to defend their instrumentalization, their colonization in the interests of power. It was to tackle the problem of containment inrelationtoconceptualizingthemeetingplace.Howcanthemeetingplace bebothasituationinthehereandnowandapotentialencounteranywhere? How can it combine the attributes of crossroads, vanishing point, and elevation ? How will it incubate a self-knowledge that is not merely narcissistic, a self-transcendence that is not simply a plunge into the abyss of nothingness (which, according to Canetti, may be no different from succumbing tothetotalizationofthecrowd)?Inresponsetosuchquestionsthewallwas presented as the host of echoes and the site of a new kind of writing. It was characterized as a reflective membrane alerting the subject to his subjectivity and tying this uniquely to a physical situation. These ideas make fuller sense when we return to the Australian situation and to the walls of the Kimberley escarpment adorned with rock paintings. Mowaljarli,theNgarinyinelderwemetbeforeinconnectionwiththeMilky Way,explainsthatwheretheWandjinasarepainted,“Whereallthepainting is, it’s all a cloud.” Does that mean, his European interlocutor Jutta Malnic asks, “Each whole escarpment is a cloud?”1 Exactly. In the act of reenactment , in the painting and in the visit to the paintings, the rock is liquified. The act of representation is understood as a form of writing that alters the matrix in which it is drawn. The expectorated ochre, for example, that createsthestencilofahumanhand ,iswet,butsoistheweatheredstone.Inthis reciprocity of breath, impression, and wall, the hedra, or fit of human and 186 i have wondered beyond absolutes nonhuman forms, merges into the ambience. The solid wall melts into air, cave into cloud. In this conception of place, where the spiritual and corporeal fuse in the act of painting, the physical situation (a human figure standing near a cave wall) retains the momentum of travel. The painter stands in a “connecting spot,” to borrow the Yolngu concept, a place that resembles a track. The paintings, as Mowaljarli explains, “represent history, the Beginning, the journey and the reason of the track.”2 Mowaljarli’s astonishing transformation of the cliff into a cloud is an act of animation—literally due to the artist breathing life into matter through the creation of an image. Here speaking and painting fuse into a new kind ofmimologisminwhichthephysicsofbreathproductionproduceanimage of air, a trace of the atmosphere. Here, surely, encounter is revealed to be the intersection of the human and the divine, a hinge place where the face of the other is glimpsed but turns away. The wall becomes a cloud when the turbulence of the breath pattern it documents is taken into account. MichelSerrescommentsthat“noisesthatcomeandgoarecontingentonan observer, they hinge on a listening post, on a channel, on an aperture, open or closed, door or window, through which they pass in part, and behind which the one who is the receiver of the flux, the wind, the manifestation, takes refuge and trembles.”3 In what Bachelard calls “the pneumatology of lines,” the “volume” expressed is captured in an image; the turbulence of passage deposits the outline of an encounter. These are not exclusively Indigenous insights. They can also be attributed to Pallas Athene when her powers are released from their patriarchal cuirass. It was the uncertainty of the wind that Pallas Athene sought to harness through her invention of the aulos, or auloi, the ancient double flute that featured in the disastrous music competition the satyr Marsyas staged with lyre-playing Apollo. Although tamed differently, through the training of human respiration, the aulos, like the bullroarer, entertained a “mimologism of total breathing.”4 In some way the forms of nature were pneumatically released into sound; through these devices an auditory index of the unseen organization of nature was obtained. Moved by turbulence, it produced turbulence. That is, it refused the reason of tonal music, with its promiseofdeliveringustoabetter,harmonizedworld,andinsteadenjoined those who heard its unstopped wailing to imitate it bodily. The mimologic of the aulos compelled its performers to wander where they were, a principle that explains the association of theaulos with the cults of Dionysus. Rohde reports that the dances the bacchants performed “were i have wondered beyond absolutes 187 something very different from the measured movement of the dance-step in which Homer’s Greeks advanced and turned about the Paian. It was in frantic,whirling,headlongeddiesanddance-circlesthattheseinspiredcompanies...