The Sanema - a tribe living on both sides of the border between Venezuela and Brazil. Four out five of its men are practicing Shamans who take an hallucinogenic drug called sakona, which enables them to communicate with the spirits of the jungle surrounding them.
Another BBC doco that has elicited a couple of dribbly tears out of my right eye. It's the sense of wonder. First, there was those shrimp on the ocean floor - darkness. It was the sense of enormity of this world, how species can exist - do exist - and we will never experience them, except through documentaries and books and stories.
Tribe - the BBC doco with Bruce Parry (one of the luckiest men alive) who roams from country to country in search of remote tribes and lives with them for a month or two, trying his best to inhabit their worlds and teach us a thing or two about them. It's absolutely spell-binding. This tribe, the Sanema, live such a primitive existence (by our standards). Once a nomadic tribe, they've now settled near a larger tribe, mainly due to the dwindling resources of the forest, and to be closer to the western medicine that they now sometimes rely on.
Translators! Heavenly translators. Just to listen to what these people have to say - about this Englishman who's come to live with them, about the spirits that inhabit this world, about their own relationships. It's fascinating. There was a little girl, ten or eleven, who is to marry a Shaman who would be, perhaps, triple her age now. She and her friend sit in front of the camera and talk candidly, giggling like any ten year old would world over. And the frankness of what they say - something like, 'He sometimes doesn't treat me well. He throws things at me and makes me sleep on the floor... if he treats me like this when my breasts have grown larger , I will run away to another village'. She says this with such stoicism (probably the wrong word), with a wisdom that belies the age of her little body (people are people after all, no matter their age, right?). Her face earnest. Then, a moment later, she giggles as her friend tickles her face.
I guess I cry sometimes because life really is so beautiful. It's bloody amazing and I wish I didn't get so caught up in the ugliness of its wallpaper! (Thanks again, Mr Wilde) I was thinking about the concept of 'God' tonight as I was driving home (listening to a podcast of a man who was wrongly incarcerated for the murder of his foster child) and wondering. I guess, in a way, I do believe in God. I believe there's something that binds us all -like the invisible umbilical cord of Middlesex. No matter where we are, who we are, there is such a thing as the human spirit. There is more than just the gift of speech, compassion, etc that sets us apart from other living things. Our spirit is universal. Is it human? I think it is. (Is that an oxymoron? Or am I a moron? Dunno, just thinking in typed words.)
I know what I'll be doing this weekend - watching the three series of Tribe back to back.
I'm in the bath. Twisted so I can type. I'm really uncomfortable, but I thought I'd have a Carrie moment with a laptop and some bubbles. Ha!
(Bloody Byron - beautiful poem the other day. You're still a cunt for not coming in October. I may never forgive you. But then ... I may.)
1 comment:
One foot dancing?
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