The Songlines Passage 2 (chapter 3/pp 13-14/"a Song...The Creation.")

The Songlines Passage 2 (Chapter 3/pp 13-14/"A Song...the Creation.")

This except is taken from chapter 3 of Bruce Chatwin's Songlines. In this chapter, Bruce recounts his first meeting with Arkady, who serves as his guide. Arkady begins to explain what he has learned about Aboriginal culture and their understanding of creation. Arkady explains how each totemic ancestor dropped a trail of musical notes along the line of his footprints. These Dreaming-tracks that lay over the land are way of communication between tribes. The Aboriginals' idea of singing creation into existence demonstrates that man is by nature a peaceful and singing creature and that language began with song.

A song was "was both map and direction-finder", and a man traveling down his Songline will be able to find "his brothers" who shared his Dreaming. This demonstrates the universality of the Songlines and how it connects man from different places.

"The whole of Australia could be read as a musical score", thus the land can be seen as one interconnected map of songs, and these trials of musical notes allows different tribes to communicate with each other.

Music is often called the universal language of mankind, thus the Songlines form the basis for human language. The Songlines is then compared to "a spaghetti of Iliads and Odysseys, writhing this way and that." An allusion makes a reference to Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, which may suggest similarities between the epic poems and the Songlines. The Songlines is ancient and full of history. Also, the Songlines is long and therefore spans all of Australia.

The parallel drawn between the Songlines and spaghetti allows the reader to visualize the shape of the Songlines. Chatwin utilize the verb "writhing" to describe the twisted and intertwined Songlines, which further construct a clear image in the reader's mind.

Any feature of the landscape is a "sacred site" that has a story behind it, though the story may be unique depending on the Ancestor. The Aboriginals sings everything into existence, which indicates they they created songs and poems which are the fundamentals of human language.

The land is again compared to a musical piece, this time to "Beethoven's Opus III". However the land is described as "a featureless stretch of gravel". This contrasts with the previous descriptions of the landscape such as "a heap of boulders" and "a lump of reddish sandstone". The descriptions allow the readers to form a more detailed picture of the landscape.

"By singing the world into existence, the Ancestors had been poets in the original sense of poesis, 'creation'" This sentence once again states that songs and poems form the basis for language.