August 2022. The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
1987, Vintage Classics, 315 pages. Written in English, read in English.
The Songlines is a peculiar book, because it doesn’t appear to decide what it wants to be. It starts out as a travel memoir. It follows an author named Bruce, who we should assume is the author himself — but even that is contended — on a journey in Australia from some point in the middle, in which he accompanies a researcher for the national railroad named Arkadi, whose job it is to determine whether the planned railway across the Australian desert will disturb any aboriginal sacred places. On their route to Alice Springs, and from there further into the heart of the continent, they encounter many aboriginal folks and Bruce learns about the songlines — geographic paths across the land on which ancestors have walked and named everything around them, which are remembered with a song. He learns about the churinga — a wood or stone tile onto which the songlines are etched as geometric shapes, which only their bearer, an aboriginal elder, can see and which are forbidden for everybody else; he learns that for each elder there is a ritual manager, who is an enforcer of the traditions of the aboriginal Australians, and of the ways in which the aboriginal life and the modern life intertwine, not always in the favor of the aboriginal folks.
At some point, the book loses its steam as a travel memoir, and Chatwin elects to transfer it into a repository of excerpts from his many Moleskin notebooks — starting with a story, that I’m sure I’ve heard or read somewhere else, about how he was not able to purchase his notebooks at some point, because they stopped being manufactured anymore. He moves on to includes several excerpts, some of which are his, some of which are quotes or transcripts of books or essays he’s read. All of these — and in their shadow all of Chatwin’s path through the Australian outback, are there to converse about one thing — humankind’s restlessness, or its proclivity to wander from place to place and never truly to rest. Within these excerpts he leaps from Australia onto Africa and Asia, compares tribal cultures, and realizes that language in fact has started with song and song has, indeed, created the names of everything around and therefore the essence of everything around. Between these excerpts we learn of his grand idea, the one which he came to Australia to further explore — that our restlessness is a result of early humankind’s fight for survival against a fiercer predator, which has caused us to spread across the continent and eventually to reach Australia, where some of the history is preserved in stories, in dances, in songs.
Between these two parts of the book, lies Chatwin’s notion that his own wandering days are coming to an end. In fact, he adds the excerpts from his notebooks out of concern that he will not have another chance. And in the context of what we know of Chatwin’s life, the book takes on a complete other meaning. At the point of writing the book, Chatwin has discovered he has contracted HIV. True to his art, he had many different stories on how that came to be, and furthermore, when he has contracted a rare fungal infection which has eventually killed him, he had found a myriad other stories to explain how that came about. The year in which he has found out the new and shocking truth about his life and his impending death, has been a year in which he may have realized that he was not wandering, but running away.
The discovery of the disease has hastened the completion of a book that may have taken many more years to write, many more ideas to incorporate. Chatwin’s sense of urgency has generated his most famous book, and an acclaimed work on aboriginal Australia and on nomadic life in general. He died two years later, never revealing publicly that he was HIV positive or sick with AIDS. He had several more books under his belt, and probably would have had several more if his life were not cut short as they were. His own restlessness may have cost him his life, but it has brought life to a set of notions, of beliefs, that may have been lost in the Australian desert, diluted and diluted again into modern society. He left, at least, in this book, his own songline.
The September 2022 selection of the David Bowie Book Club will be Fingersmith by Sarah Waters.
