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.