The Eskimo devotes a lifetime to learning more and more about the habits of the animals and about the mobile sea ice on which he hunts, whereas the Kutchin, living several hundred miles inland, spends a lifetime learning more and more about the landscape. The key to hunting success in the high Arctic is knowledge of the game, current, ice, and weather--the major factors influencing resource availability. But in the boreal forest the key to success in hunting and trapping is knowledge of the landscape. The Indian must know where to find the trails, lakes, hills, valleys, forests, and meadows and the most stable concentration of edible plants and game.

Different places, different methods of mental organization--Coyote Tactics writ large, the essence of point-of-view.

Songlines are about singing where you've been or creating a map with words. The literal concept of Songlines is to "sing the trail", to "sing the place", to recreate and remember the physical landscape in song. And, it should be noted, this doesn't just apply to a literal landscape. Since few of us rely on a literal landscape for our sustenance anymore this concept can be extended to any figurative landscape. We all yearn for a sense of place and this is one way to achieve it.

Songlines in Australia can extend thousands of miles. Aborigines can unerringly find their way across terrain unknown to them simply by knowing the land's song--the songline. The Navajo Deerway Chant is a healing ceremony based on a songline of a couple hundred miles which circles a particular valley in Arizona.

Our immediate purpose of Songlines is to introduce them as a concept which sums up or encapsulates your particular experiences of a specific location. Using words and drummed "phrases," these Songlines are the equivalent of maps of experience which, whenever they are played and sung or said, will guide you back to and through the places you NightWalked. They will return you to (or to you) the feelings and events you experienced each night. Like all maps, the more specific Songlines are, the more useful they'll be for you and others.

To create Songlines:

1. Take the time to recall the feelings specific to the particular places you've walked/frequented. Each environment is very different from any other. In order to create a Songline one must be aware of that difference.
2. Retrace the course of the travel in your mind, what you saw (VEN/B) and felt (KEN/B), what occurred, what was heard (AEN/B).
3. Remember details such as the texture of the sand, the profile of the mesa you saw while walking along the arroyo, the chokecherry trees growing along the stream, etc.,etc.
4. Start attaching words to these images. As is often true in poetry, the fewer words it takes to describe and evoke your experience of place, the more powerful the description will be.
5. The final step is to fit the words of your memories and impressions into a "song."

Go take a walk around the block. Then come up with several images of that walk. Add what you hear and felt. Try to make them combinations of experience and details of place. What makes this block unique from other blocks? Begin putting your experiences into lines and verses that match the rhythms and patterns of your walk/block.

Creating Songlines isn't as hard as it might sound. Don't think about writing poetry, certainly don't think about making art. Do your composing in the peripheral state, the same state you used to recollect details, the same state you were in while NightWalking.

The whole existence of Songlines is based on the fact that in the peripheral mind, there's little difference between what you see and what you feel, little difference between who you are and where you are.

Of course, Songlines can also be written in Proto language, but don't be fooled into thinking that Proto is easier. Matching Proto to the particulars of journey requires exquisite sensitivity to the effects of words resonating in the head and chest, not to mention the meaning implicit in the rise and fall of a line.

Songlines were once common to all hunter-gatherers. All peoples who wandered needed these Land Songs. The Aboriginal peoples of Australia have undoubtedly created the most complex and comprehensive Songlines. They combine mythology with family and clan history and literally follow trade routes from one side of the Australian continent to the other, passing through as many as twenty different language groups. The common element of such a long song is the melody, and its melodies that literally hold the Australian continent and its people together. (Melody is still too advanced for us, so unless someone is inspired to do otherwise, we'll be saying or chanting our Songlines). So important are Songlines to Aborigines that unsung land is dead land, and if a song is forgotten, any land which is no longer sung over, will die. To allow such a thing to occur is the worst possible crime for an Aborigine. To be able to sing a Songline indicates an historically unbroken, intimate knowledge of the land. In short, it marries people to place. This is called ownership.

In the Southwest, the Navajo are known for the lyrical beauty of their Songlines. The following lines are from a Bringing Home Ceremony.

I fly around the edge of Fluted Rock
Now I being Early Morning Boy, I walk around the edge
The Black Mountain, hogan at sky center, I walk around the edge
These being Wind People, young men, I walk around the edge
With the Sun being still there I encircle it, I walk around the edge
I walk around the edge, I walk around the edge, I walk around the edge.

The sum of all the Songlines we write about a journey is our communal map of that journey, of the place and our experience of and in that place. Songlines reinforce our unity with the land. They express the same oneness we experience while engaged in the peripheral mind.

Additional bits of odd information in no particular order:

There is a belief (and some evidence to support it) that you can stimulate your spatial skills by breathing only through your right nostril. Some say that it's the right nostril for men and the left for women. In any event, it is known that we have a nasal cycle (where one nostril is easier to breath through than the other) that naturally switches every two-and-a-half hours or so. Unlike other senses, nasal stimulation affects the hemisphere on the same side, that is, right nostril affects right hemisphere and left--left hemisphere.

You can begin to use your peripheral vision while driving. AIM your eyes into the distance, just above the center of the pavement. For most driving you'll notice that at a certain point the pavement vanishes. Watch just above that point. Park your eyes there. Don't move them. Slowly become aware of the movement of the landscape on both edges of the road. Try watching the white lines (on the edges of the roadway) just where they vanish from sight in order to get fully into peripheral vision. Keep practicing. In short order you'll be able to see the sky, the road, and the landscape passing by all at once. If something directs your attention to focus on it, go ahead, then again AIM your eyes back at the distant point. Once mastered, this is a very alert, relaxed and SAFE way of driving. In the beginning you may worry that you're not watching for potential dangers, but with peripheral vision you'll find that, should the need arise, you'll instantly react to any hazard. You'll be amazed that you will react before becoming consciously aware of the danger.

Periphics sensitize the eye and brain to an astonishing degree, so some of what you "see" may surprise you. For example, we think there is a neurological basis for Australian Aboriginal dot painting and that in fact while using the vision described in NightWalking we can see the landscape in somewhat the same way as it is depicted in such paintings.

The enhancement of the object is mainly achieved by transforming an original dull and rough outline design into a clearly defined, delicately executed, and bright shimmering state through the use of dotting. It is not the sheer intensity of brightness or tone that appears to count, so much as the variations in intensity produced by formal consonance, dissonance, and relatedness across the dotted sections. The rhythmic structure produced by sections of dotting creates complex tensions and their resolution. Brilliance is a precept of variation and it is the quality of brilliance that is associated with ancestral power and beauty.

A painter describes his experience:

"I grab out that idea. I can just see'em. I must have a picture in here (pointing to head). And it comes out just like that. The idea. We don't practice, you know. We just work with the idea. We put one color first. We just get four or might be six tins. We make'em six differen' color. Alright, I start out now on this one first, in the center, like a story. Right after that we gotta put'em 'nother different color, finish'em right out. If you make a mistake, well you gotta rub that out a little bit, do'em 'nother way. You've got to do it that way. Tell that story for European. Alright, after that I gotta think about for 'nother story now, and after I finish'em, 'nother story. You've got it in your brain. All the way like that. If Daphne comes around when your paintin's finished, she will ask you the stories about that painting. So you gottta tell'em straight story. She writes it down, then writes down the check. Then there you are."

The brilliance, they say, makes the gut go happy.

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