Common threads: some notes on twilight and anxiety - negotiating liminal areas between what is known and what is unknown - the familiar and unfamiliar - patterns and apparent chaos - the response to the fragmented and the need for the whole.
We may need to examine our responses to the unfamiliar in landscape - that what is beyond our experience is by definition a gulf of ignorance. What happens in unfamiliar terrain is that, what we don't know, we seek to clarify or come to terms with - deal with, assimilate...
Late at night - it's dark. Maybe there's some wooden shelter. Into the vacuum of this space, this ignorance - comes some account of - animals, some half-remembered experience, sounds we don't know, creatures whose behaviour is a mystery to us. On this basis we begin to evolve stories, tell tales, tall stories, folk tales, narrative accounts - these are our way, of not just describing our experience of landscape (which in the case of a new environment is limited) but of shaping, defining and significantly, completing it for ourselves as an imperative.
As a consequence of this, there are things that we know and there are things we must project into this uneven, incomplete framework. So the picture itself becomes a picture/account made up of empirical information on the one hand and information based on what might be termed superstitious responses to fear, uncertainty and dread - but possibly more...
In the case of Greenland there was a very real but unspoken decision to get lost in the landscape - to get in a position where we were there for days on end, deliberately in order to disorientate ourselves. By going far north or far south, the number of daylight hours is altered, the sun may move in a different direction. The value of being in uninhabited areas with no roads is that one is left with no choice but to be there and continue until reaching base after walking through that terrain for a number of days and nights.
If that choice is removed then it's possible that you may reacquaint yourself (as a member of the species) with a relatively unmediated experience of landscape. Previously acquired knowledge of a country through media and written accounts didn't stop us imagining that we may be in danger from all manner of things it wasn't necessary to define.
At the point where we place ourselves willingly at the top of the slide into sleep - that sometimes protracted moment, the liminal area between two states - consciousness, waking and the other of surrender and sleep - one of control and one of relinquishment of control - it's there that we're most likely to be able to experience the conflation of two different ways of experiencing the world. We may wish to prolong this state in order to examine the degree of contradiction between them. Where things are no longer certain and where we can test what we accept perhaps as being real and what we imagine not to be real to be illogical and non-correspondent with our understanding of the immutable. It is a willing participation in a state of less or no control.
What the lullaby is designed to do is to carry us through that transition in such a way that as we enter the less controlled state we are in a condition of well-being. Whatever a lullaby is saying or appears to be saying - literally, lyrically, metaphorically - the tone of the lullaby is one of reassurance. Musically and structurally a lullaby is symmetrical and predictable - they tend to resolve as you'd expect. They are repetitive, hypnotic and ultimately not big on surprises. They stake out a mental space in the mind of the listener, which is easily occupied and assimilated. They say, all's well in the world - close your eyes because all is safe - it's safe to surrender, to slide under.
The subtext is that there's someone there to sing the song - a parent, a mentor, a guardian.
In the case of a recorded 'lullaby' it becomes something else. We hear it on the radio, we play it on the hi fi, we carry it in our mind and hum it or play it to ourselves, most of the time in an unconscious attempt to induce this type of reassurance. And you could say it probably works - it does what it's designed to do. You could probably say that this reassuring tone functions the same whether the lullaby is heard instrumentally or whether it has six verses or one verse or simply a repeated chorus or phrase. The tone can be relied upon.
Why can't the land be the lullaby? Why can't our passage across the land be that song to the rhythm of our walk? Of course, in the case of the familiar or habitual walk it can be just that - a lulling experience. We notice and accept differences and change, within a familiar environment - the seasonal shifts, the comings and goings of migrating species. We note them and are assured that these shifts are part of the larger pattern, a cycle that we understand. A cycle is still a loop.
But when we go into unfamiliar terrain, particularly a long way away from what we might regard as home - far enough to create a disorientating effect, where seasonal shifts are not understood, the topography is alien and the cycle is gone. Here, whatever is new, stands in contradiction to pattern and to reassurance. All manner of things can remind us that we are the aliens in this territory. To a superstitious mind - a mind that has no forewarning of these things, difference can have a far-reaching psychological effect.
If we imagine a settler being planted on the far side of the world where things at first glance seem familiar (for instance Tasmania) and we imagine him seeing a six-foot 'rodent' leaping around at dusk - the biggest he's seen is a hare and yet here he is, standing shoulder to shoulder with this critter. Or he goes out at dawn - staggers out of the shelter in the middle of the night, because he can't sleep, because the forest around him is alive with the most shrill and alarming wall of bird call shrieks and whoops and chatter...
A strange creature makes its presence known. It hangs around the camp at dusk and at dawn and slopes off revealing a striped back and tail. There are other animals with stripes - zebras, an okapi maybe but they're grass and leaf eaters - this thing's a predator. Predator - stripes - tiger. A tiger is fearful, immensely strong, secretive, nocturnal, patient, menacing... Half a dozen common comparisons like this and the name begins to stick.
You might also begin to understand why they might call it a wolf. A wolf has a similar shape and has some similar habits. But wolves hunt in packs - these things hunt alone or in pairs. A wolf's bad enough but the parallel with the tiger comes back and back.
So he's sitting there late at night and he hears a rustle. These animals are shy - they have no reputation for attacking humans. But they can crush a dog's skull in their jaws. They're different. And he's got this incomplete picture in his head about what's going on in this country. He’s got this great chasm of ignorance about the place and this thing crops up and there's the unholy chattering and screaming of the devils as they're fighting amongst themselves. There are a lot of them about and they're all adding to his sense of disorientation. And he remembers the stories he's heard of sheep left with their throats torn out and drained of blood...
So whatever the reason for this, the animal is providing the settler with a focus for his fears and his resentments and anxieties and frustrations and problems with the landscape and its awkwardness and the difficulties it presents, by being just so far away from h o m e...
Here's something he can seize upon and maybe use as a valve for his frustration - to wreak some vengeance - to shoot - and with growing frustrations and the grooming of the myth - go on shooting...