The Nomadic Alternative – Page 176

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All religious teachers have concentrated on the mental state of a dying man. And the hunters share this concern. They attach paramount importance to dying 'at home', that is, within the territory.

A human life runs full circle to its close only if the dying man dies where he belongs. "Crawl to Earth, thy Mother" calls an injunction contained in the Rigveda. Mother Earth is the place of his infancy and she reabsorbs him when his time comes. Strehlow quotes an Aranda song - a sort of recipe for death - of an ancestor hero who feels the wings of death upon him. "His heart is filled with longing to return home." He makes one last tired journey and cries when he sees the chasm marking the place he slept in as a boy. He hears the same birds twittering. Then as he sinks down for the last time, he sees that the birds have spoiled the place.

My home, my own dear home,
Whose feet have disfigured it?
The mulga parrots have disfigured it.
Their feet have scratched the deserted hollow.

DISFIGUREMENT - in this case disfigurement by birds. But disfigurement by men is a root cause of violence. A man lacks stability if he does not 'belong' to a place, and he defends 'his place' with spontaneous emotion against change imposed against his will from outside. Conversely, territorial 'aggression' is the direct product of rootlessness. A rootless or deranged man is possessed of a desire to lay down roots of his own. Each act of settlement or foundation of a city, in the name of God or some earthly divinity, repeats the orientation myth of the Creation, and attempts to realign lost men to their place in the world. But in laying down fresh roots, he destroys those of others. The man who knows 'his place' to be free from disfigurement, will never need to defend it from outsiders or set down roots elsewhere, or even live in it during his life.

The defacers, not the visitors, are his enemies. Scarred landscapes mean scarred minds.