Craig San Roque
580 California St., Suite 400
San Francisco, CA, 94104
On 'Tjukurrpa', Painting Up and Building Thought
2009, PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature
https://doi.org/10.4225/03/58587C8A7F2F5
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Abstract
Old man, you listen! Something is there; we do not know what: "Something." Like engine, like power, plenty of power; it does hard work: it pushes. 1 The capacity of a person to be a psychoanalyst rests upon his or her grasp of theory and aptitude for observational technique in the fieldwork of the psyche, as well as the capability to dwell enough in the "main thing" marked so definitively by Freud as that bittersweet activity generated between persons. The psychoanalyst must be willing to deal with the strange substances that shake one's being when two or three are gathered together in a way that enables matter from that famous "unconscious" to emerge in bits, groans, and halfformed misunderstandings-to emerge in any shape, from anywhere along the spectrum of love to hate, beauty to terror, self-knowledge to self-delusion. This matter can be developed further if I slow things down and ask, "Who are these two or three who sit together?" And I am thinking now, remembering occasions sitting in the company of older men-the sort of older men with whom anthropologists often have conversations. Older dark-skinned men who have custodial functions for their specific languages and a cultural obligation. Older men who smell of embedded smoke and kangaroo grease and maybe Log Cabin tobacco. And the question might be, "What is in our minds as we sit together, you and I?" with the fire simmering, tea stewing, ants busy on the sand, and maybe the heat of coals drifting through the shade of a mulga tree. These settings are fitting for reflective conversations between men of two worlds-Indigenous Warlpiri, perhaps, and the travelling Caucasian. Such conversations take place on the edges of campsites, on the edges of settlements, on the edges of and between dreams, between times, between languages, a shimmering, dusty place where nothing much is really what it seems. And nothing spoken is exactly what it might mean and nothing heard is quite what is intended, perhaps. Ambiguous answers and ambiguous tracks of thought are exchanged between persons in exactly the settings where transference phenomena might readily be found, if Freud or Jung had time enough and the chance to sit there long enough-learning, letting go of anticipation, observing the flow of desire and projection. Seated between the eyes of two worlds. That sort of thing. And thus another question arises about what emerges from somewhere between a different pair of men, not an Austrian Jewish doctor and a Swiss Protestant psychiatrist, both speaking German, seeking forms of feeling, edges of image, flurries of body sensation, legs, gut, heart, throat, headache , squinting eyes, nods, moving two minds so differently formed, hunching into conscious enough conversation, seeking to listen. No, not these two, but, let us say, a Warlpiri or Pintubi man, speaking Warlpiri, Pintubi languages and a half-formed English, and maybe a psychiatrist or anthropologist or a lawyer or police prosecutor, the two of them sitting there wondering about a mutual problem: an act of drunken assault, the suicide of a petrol-sniffing boy, the mutilated body of a woman in the creek bed, a traditional man so senseless with sweet white wine that he blurts out age-old secrets in bad company and ought to be speared for it. And if the spear is cast, the men who mete out the sanctioned, traditional punishment will be imprisoned for assault or maybe manslaughter. And they may deserve to be, if they carried out the penalty while drunk or lost their reason while doing it. Irreconcilable parallel laws, cognitive dissonance, daily bread. Myself, I have sat in many such conversations, the ants busy, the fire dimmed by psychic pain, on a cold concrete floor, dull with ash and grease, supporting so many suchlike conversations, a hundred times, somewhere between two worlds. In the overlap of intercultural conversation, things arrive, if we take the trouble to create between us a "location for cultural experience" 4 and accept that what might arrive will be perplexity, compassion, humour, irony, whimsical desire, flights of ideas, confusion, resolution-or nothing much