Divining

9 DIVINING Stephen Muecke Now some of you little readers will have noticed some water courses that have the water-flow murmuring and gurgling songs of these Water Spirits. David Unaipon (53) Structure Randolph Stow’s 1963 novel Tourmaline features a water diviner, and it also paints the portrait of a certain kind of society. It is set in small Australian outback town in a totally arid landscape. In this society there are no animals or plants to speak of, certainly none that have anything to say. There is a cat, a dog, goats, but no native animals. There is an oleander tree, a poisonous species introduced from the Mediterranean. All the others are dead. There is a pub, a church and war memorial shaped like an obelisk. The diviner arrives in town like the second coming of the messiah, and the tiny population gathers around him in the fervent hope that he can find water, the very thing the town lacks most, a town that is almost dead after the initial prosperity brought by a gold rush years ago. The diviner had lost his rod, so one is forged for him: “a simple Y of heavygauge wire, the loop of the foot forged solid and a small hook at the junction. From this hook hung a small pill bottle filled with red-brown water” (Stow 67). This is the contagious magic of the apparatus: water will attract water. But it is not water that he will find. Later he attaches wooden handles to his rod, cut from the oleander tree near the church, and goes out to the old diggings: From his pocket he took a little knob of gold, and put it into the bottle that hung from his rod . . . he looked quite absorbed . . . standing there, with the DOI: 10.4324/9781003218272-12 116 Stephen Muecke rod between his hands. He held it with his palms up, forcing the forks slightly apart, and his eyes were fixed on the end of it. Frowning, very tense, he seemed to be entering a sort of trance. . . . He turned left and went on, away from the hillock, out towards the stone-littered plain . . . the rod straining in his hands. Suddenly it had defeated him, and was pointing downwards— straight downwards. And the handgrips of the ecclesiastical oleander had disintegrated in his hands, he took another step, and stopped. The rod fell to the ground. He looked up, exhausted. “There’s a reef,” he said, very quiet and weary. “Few feet of overburden. Old-timers missed it.”1 (Stow 91–2) The town was excited, after this “miracle,” but it “was of water, not gold, that all thought” because “gold means little now. It was the method of its tracking down that was the talk everywhere” (Stow 92–3). Prophetic, isn’t it? Stow was writing at a time when Australia was full of innocent confidence in the future of its mining industries. Yet the society he describes, that was made by mining, is broken and dying, thirsting not for gold, but for water, the essence of life. What is the structure of this society? It goes without saying that it is, in terms of its economy, colonial and extractive. It is not self-sustaining; the people depend on the truck bringing in monthly supplies. The trees are dead; there are no native animals. It is a dust bowl, and the little water they have is reddish and unhealthy. The Aboriginal people live at “the camp” out of town, except for one of their descendants who is a central character; Deborah works at the pub and lives with one of the white men. The diviner, Michael, lives up to the double meaning in “diviner,” by being the messiah figure who dramatically stages a Christian revival at the church, one that is conflated with the Aboriginal creation being Mongga, as old Charlie from the camp explains: “[h]e make baby, too, spirit of children, in the waterholes and Lake Tourmaline and some places. He make everything for us, Mongga. But mostly water” (Stow 170). And at the climax of the novel, the diviner is revealed in religious ecstasy “in a nimbus of fiery gold” walking up the aisle of the church “through the breaking waves of our need and adoration” (Stow 173). He was both Mongga and Christ for this born-again congregation, he who had made them dig all the gold out of the reef and deposit it in a safe, but never found water for them. This is the structure of the society in question: one god presiding over a material world from which wealth can be extracted, with humans, and one white man in particular, the messiah figure, dominating all other life forms. Method That may be the structure of that old society that must now be left behind if we are to find that life-giving water before it is too late, but what is its method? How Divining 117 does it go about its business? Remember, the people of Tourmaline were far more interested in Michael’s “method of tracking down” than the gold itself, because the method could lead to water, the return of trees and birds and all that Edenic well-being. One needs a method to get to what one wants: gold? No, maybe not, water actually. The practice of water divining certainly has a method, but it is not very scientific. Not at all, in fact. First Michael has to have his rods made to order, in a Y shape, then he adds the water or little piece of gold in the jar, as magical attractors, then borrows a bit of “ecclesiastical” magic with the oleander handles. When he walks around, all his human energy is focussed through the apparatus into the ground, and it depletes his forces. He can find minerals or water with this ancient practice of divining, dowsing or water witching that has been around ever since the Middle Ages. If it worked perfectly well for a number of centuries, why replace it with scientific hydrological methods? Did it actually work, or was it just ridiculous “doodlebugging” that somehow fooled the people? We can now turn to the field of science studies for a method for thinking about methods and what they include and exclude, and the reasons for such, because a method is never pure, it is always a combination of things. Methods traverse ontologically plural worlds, like their (human) subjects, and their objects. Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers is interested in practices that the sciences marginalise, such as mesmerism, healing, and the feminist politics of the witch, Starhawk. Take Franz Mesmer, the Viennese doctor who was famous in Paris for his “magnetic” cures in the late 18th century. He was subject to a commission of inquiry to determine whether there was any rational basis to his cures, or whether he was a charlatan. In parallel with the rise of the modern sciences which saw chemistry defeating alchemy and astronomy marginalising astrology, medicine came to define itself professionally by refuting the practices of those age-old healers who have successfully cured in every culture of the world, and still do today. Stengers argues that the commissioners tried to experimentally “purify” what was going on with Mesmer’s magnetising fluids by eliminating all possible causes until all they were left with was the power of the “imagination” of the subject. But they didn’t define whatever it was that this imagination was doing; by excluding its possible agency, they were able to conclude that the therapy was not rational and not medicine. Stengers corroborates this with a discussion of the limits of Watson and Skinner’s experimental behavioural psychology using lab rats: this method defined itself by transforming into obstacles against objective knowledge the whole set of activities which would make a rat, for example, a meaning creator, living in an environment which made sense for it. So doing, the imperative for objective description also eliminated everything which may be pertinent for ethological characterization: what makes rats different from other inhabitants of psychology laboratories, from pigeons or 118 Stephen Muecke humans, for instance? In this sense, the “objective rat” with its quantifiable behaviour can be defined as an “artefact”, an artificial being stripped of any capacity to answer in its own way to the situations it is confronted with. (Nathan and Stengers 102) Stengers bravely takes up the cause of the contemporary neo-pagan witch Starhawk (bravely because of the derision that could be directed her way) “as a co-thinker,” as a demanding part of her milieu when Starhawk throws out the challenge that “[t] he smoke of the burned witches still hangs in our nostrils.” We know that witches were burned because of the threat their know-how posed to men’s projects, because of men purifying their own knowledges. Stengers asks: what would be the response of the academic milieu to those who dared to propose some continuity between the ultimate triumph of the witch hunters—the fact that we have lost the active memory of the eradication of European witches . . .—and critical (de)constructionist theory? We have become used to Michel Foucault’s “shocking” ways of questioning our modern pride in matters such as psychiatry or penal practices. But the shock now may well be addressed even to academic followers of Foucault, those who have turned his production of destabilizing, and even frightening, demands for lucidity into a “we know better” industry. (49) Method, if we don’t pay attention, can have this “we know better now” effect. As when someone scoffs at old practices like water divining without knowing how or why it “worked.” In the name of a universalising modernisation, it can be thrown out along with other pagan, superstitious or primitive practices and beliefs. Scientific methods, far from always being rigorously objective and rational, are heterogeneous, and do not themselves “work” unless they have the support of their own milieus, which can include industrial, financial and political arrangements, and even beliefs in notions like “progress.” Restructure When the pioneering Ngarrindjeri intellectual David Unaipon addressed his “little readers” in the early twentieth century, asking them if they had heard the “waterflow murmuring and gurgling songs of these Water Spirits,” his pedagogical tone indicates the value of what he had to pass on to future generations (53). Reading Unaipon, we are aware we inhabit a world where multiple realities are in play, where native animals and plants have much to say. They have world-creating agency. They are not a part of nature, dominated by humans, though humans are key players as well. Nor is this “pagan” pluriverse monotheistic, everything has its own spirit: Divining 119 Myeyea (Wind Spirit); Pa nee (Rain Spirit); Kallitthie (Hail Spirit); Sunlight Spirit; Cloud Spirit. Then there are Spirits that take the form of Trees, Bush Shrubs, Plants, and Rocks. Everything that exists has some life apart from itself. (Unaipon 53, my emphasis) In stressing this last amazing sentence, one is tempted to theorise further in the direction of those ecologists who have moved against species individuation and towards the concept of holobiont, “symbiotic assemblages” of living things that co-exist and co-evolve in intra-action (Haraway M26). I guess Unaipon’s people already knew this over the one and a half million generations they have inhabited the continent. “Everything that exists has some life apart from itself.” Frogs, humans, birds, bacteria, water-courses all need each other. If Stow narratively demonstrated the toxic outcome of the earlier imperial/extractive/monotheistic structure we saw in Tourmaline, then the necessary restructure could do a lot worse than retain features that Unaipon has generously left for us as his legacy, including the key role of water: Water Spirit or the Spirit of Water is the most multiple Spirit of all, because from it and into it there is a continual change of organism taking place from one form to another; life coming from it may be in plant form or weed. A life goes into it and comes out a quite different body. (53, my emphasis) Unaipon is wonderful to think with because of assertions like “[w]ater is the most multiple Spirit of all.” That sentence may be unfathomable. It is without dimensions in this world of earthbound divinities, immanent to the Earth itself rather than transcendent, Mongga rather than Christ. Our renewed confidence in pagan divinities—for those of us prepared to countenance such confidence—is not about any kind of piety at all. It is simply a redistribution of the divine: making it multiple, locally placed (in every tree and water-course) engendering attention and respect, and no doubt pleasure as well. You may need a ritual, with a song or a refrain, to “bring out” the “spirit.” You may need to write or paint. Now, as you create, the spirit is part of the song, text or painting. The divine is no longer a noun or a thing; it is an ongoing process: divining. Notes 1 The Sydney painter Tom Carment recounts a method for divining the depth of water as he was taught by the grazier Tim Whitney out of Mudgee, fifty years ago: once his wire had dipped strongly, he would straighten it out and hold it loosely in one hand to let it point like a compass in the direction of the underground stream. Then he bent the wire back into a U and picked up two handfuls of dirt from where he stood; he held onto the wire with the dirt still in his hands and paced in a slow 120 Stephen Muecke march our at right angles to the direction of the stream, until it dipped again—the distance he had covered was the depth at which the water lay [75]. Thanks to Prudence Black for referring me to both Stow and Carment. Reference list Carment, Tom. Womerah Lane: Lives and Landscapes. Giramondo, 2019. Haraway, Donna. “Symbiogenesis, Sympoiesis, and Art Science Activisms for Staying with the Trouble.” Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, edited by Anna Tsing et al., U of Minnesota P, 2017, pp. M25–50. Nathan, Tobie, and Isabelle Stengers. Doctors and Healers. Translated by Stephen Muecke, Polity Press, 2018. Stengers, Isabelle. “Experimenting with Refrains: Subjectivity and the Challenge of Escaping Modern Dualism.” Subjectivity, vol. 22, 2008, pp. 38–59. Stow, Randolph. Tourmaline. Macdonald, 1963. Unaipon, David. Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines, edited by Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker, Miegunyah Press, 2001.