Underwater connections

 

This is a book review of  "Underwater Wild" by Craig Foster and Ross Frylinck. 

  

This artwork will function as a decoration on your coffee table.  The photographs are colorful.  The patterns and designs are mesmerizing. 

What’s different is the voice of the author.  The photo captions tell the facts about nature in the sea, and also share the photo creator’s journey to get the image.  The photographers invested years of time and risked their safety to bring back reports of life under the surface. 

The artists of this picture/word book spent the time to make relationships of understanding with the creatures of the sea.  The artists made connections and invite us to join in. 

Along with the current photographs of sea life, they show ancient human rock paintings.  Our pre-historic family members made pictures of their relationships with creatures around them.  Their pictures are a connection from us to them over centuries and millennia.  I’m eyeing those images, and they eyed the images. Thank you for sharing your pictures with me. 

The book authors visited a museum in South Africa and describe what they saw.  The Linton panel of rock art showed a mirror image of a man of the San people.  The image has been reproduced as part of the national coat of arms. 

“I would later find out that this mirrored figure did not appear in the original art work.  In a misguided attempt to acknowledge and include indigenous people, the government of South Africa had created its own interpretation of the image, and by removing the figure’s erect [word for member*], it had unknowingly erased the San symbol of potent life force and connection to source.

“I was soon distracted by the rest of the panel, which was far more fascinating.  An artist or artists had painted a wonderfully rich and strange collage of human, animal, and mythological forms that seemed to float on the rock in various postures.  Passing through many of these figures were thin red lines with white dots running along them….

“The lines in the panel reminded Craig of a story he had heard from…his !Xo guides.  They had spoken of ‘ropes of God’ and explained that some of their shamans could see these lines of light weaving through the landscape during high-level tracking. The San believed that if a connection was made with an animal, a thread of love was formed between the human and the animal, even during a hunt.  If the connection were deepened, the threads would in time be woven into ropes, which connected them to “God.”  Perhaps this is what the painted lines represented?

“I immediately understood what Craig was getting at, thanks to my moments with the super klipvis and the sea bream.  I had felt that love and expansion, which was almost impossible to express in words.  I knew then that, just for a moment, I had touched on an ancient human condition that was still latent in me.”   [p. 168-169.]

 

Reading this book, I feel a connection with the author connecting with sea life.  It’s not a line I could draw.  It’s a connection faintly resembling what he experienced, but can it be the beginning of a woven rope?

                       

 

*OK, I realized I am doing the same thing by erasing the word from my blog.  Forgive me but it’s not what I want the search engines to bring.