Unurthed

An illustration from Alfred Gell’s “The Language of the Forest,” reprinted in The Art of Anthropology.

“One can indeed imagine the Umeda world/landscape as a series of articulatory gestures, syllabic shapes moulded within the oral tract (microcosm) and the macrocosm consisting of the body, social relationships mediated through the body, and other natural forms, particularly trees, and the encompassing physical ambiance” (p242).

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“In the New Guinea forest habitat [dense, unbroken jungle]… hearing is relatively dominant (over vision) as the sensory modality for coding the environment as a whole… Umeda, and languages like Umeda, are phonologically iconic, because they evoke a reality which is itself ‘heard’ and imagined in the auditory code, whereas languages like English are non-iconic because they evoke a reality which is ‘seen’ and imagined in the visual code” (p247/8).

“Even vicarious participation in alterity is subversive of the conceptual restrictions which motivate our own sense of the real, and, by derivation, our conceptions of the poetic” (p257).

Two yantras from Rajasthan in Tantra Art by Ajit Mookerjee (1971 edition, plates 43 and 45).

“The dynamic graph of the diagram of forces by which anything can be represented—the picture of its functional constitution—is called the yantra of that thing. It is not an arbitrary invention but a revealed image of an aspect of cosmic structure” (p20).

The yantra below “tries to express primordial vibrations, or spandas, the ‘cosmic drum of sound’, which by their lines of sound-energy create a dual ‘magnetic field’. Here vibrations are slowed down at laya (absorption) points” (p80).

“And just as the musical string must be plucked in a particular fashion to sound a certain note, so must the yantra line be mastered and mentally plucked to bring forth its image or power” (p21).