2002
If Aranda was the black circle, Strehlow claimed to have located the dot at its centre, which was the secret name of the ancestor being, of which the song sang, and whose name lay cunningly concealed in the line of the song.
His word for that concealment was masking. The notion of the mask he hit upon by reference to the Personae of ancient Greek theatre, which were worn by actors playing the parts of the Gods. They were masked to disguise the realism of ordinary life, and their particular personalities, all the better to accentuate the impersonal presence of the divine. The mask had another function: its mouthpiece accentuated what was spoken, or sung, creating for the voice a clarity and resonance. Thus the optic and the acoustic function together projected supernatural presence – divine expressiveness, and divine speech, all on the principle of impersonation.
And so, Strehlow thought, Aranda men did in their ceremonies; they ‘were interested in watching not human actors, but living impersonations of supernatural being.’ With faces and bodies painted up, their personal bodies masked by totemic designs, their heads transporting elaborate and sacred headgear that belonged to no one but their ancestors, they would, once launched into performance, cease to utter any ordinary speech and be speaking only ‘divine’ words, those first spoken by the ancestor being on the ceremonial ground.
The secret-sacred word was masked in two ways: acoustically and semantically. Acoustically because it could be disguised by the rhythm and measure of the song; and semantically because it could be subject to syllabic disguise – syllables might be added, vowels might be broken, speech accents eliminated. Sometimes the word itself might be an archaic word, long ago lost from ordinary speech, if indeed it had ever lived there; it was a ‘cryptic’ verse and, as the song unfolded couplet by couplet, the song might altogether sustain its secrecy as it thrummed across its mythic country.
Songs exalted under the ancient belief that there was power in naming, especially if those words were the names of supernatural beings: a conviction that moved the ancient Hebrew; who could not say the name of God, and the Egyptians, who gave their deities secret names, knowledge of which empowered the magicians as well as the sun god, Ra, and Isis the witch, ‘a woman mighty in words.’ Words had power over nature; they could create and they could destroy, and their utterance, their making, was the thing: as entities unto themselves they had power.
In Aranda life, terms for composing a verse doubled for naming: to make a verse was to ‘throw out a name,’ ‘call out a name’, ‘call out one’s own name’ – and so on, in a series that created a union between the ancestor who called out, and the song the performer would sing. The vitality of this concept, its energising power, the fecundity of grandiloquence, is caught by Strehlow:
According to the Aboriginal theory the ancestor first called out his own name; and this gave rise to the most sacred and secret couplet or couplets of his song. Then he ‘named’ (tneuka) the place where he had originated, the trees or rocks growing near his home, the animals sporting about nearby, any strangers that came to visit him, and so forth. He gave names to all of these, and thereby gained the power of calling them by their names; this enabled him to control them and to bind them to his will. In each instance he not merely gave them a name, but also described them briefly within the narrow limits of his couplet. In this way a series of couplets, loosely associated by time, space, and story, was brought into being; and this series constituted the song that each ancestor left behind for the benefit of those human beings who were to be reincarnated from himself and from his own supernatural children.
Strehlow, irresistibly speaks of Adam: by giving names Adam is the Lord of creation.
In the Aranda performance the chants are lords; they have the names of the first creative beings, they are known by those names themselves, and the only man who can sing them is the one with the knowledge – the deep, true, initiated knowledge, the inside knowledge of what the song is – he is the one who throws his name out, by singing the song out. And he is no actor who does this. He is the ancestor being himself resuscitated into the present by song. Revived, re-aroused, returned to the living present by song. Not brought back, for he was never departed, but called up out of the ground by feet dancing to song on the sacred ground.
The cryptic nature of the song, which throws the names up, takes the very idea of acting and hurls it from the ceremonial ground. Of course, these singers are men in performance; that is ordinary fact. But the performance itself is not representational. There is no one behind the mask of the totemic designs, just as there is no secret in the song, except to say the secret song is itself. There is ‘acting’ to the extent that there are better and worse dancers, expert and even more expert singers, and men of higher degree than others: and this is clear amongst performers, as it is in the lulls – informal, humorous, deceptively routine – between performances. Every man is in a way a double agent at all times, but again, no one is acting when they are in performance. Nor are they in roles, as ancestor beings. They are the beings, as much as one breath arises out of another breath. They are existing in the time it takes to be the supernatural beings of song, the original authors of song, the songs that are the names of themselves, sacredly, called out – as if, if it can be imagined, the names are nuclei, or seed syllables, as the Tibetans would say, of existence. On the dancing breath the song goes, being and song, song and being on the sacred ground. The essence of things called out, sparking by the fire. Life itself called out, up from the ground. Everything is in song: starlight, night, sun, blood, man, woman, spirit and more spirit.
Broken Song: T. G. H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession,
Knopf, Sydney, 2002