Lost Blogging: from the Omo River Valley

Sometimes my notes disappear for a long time. It doesn't bother me much to have them sit unattended or even lost. From the writing point of view, if the note was to have prose value, it just allows for better editting. From the pedagogical point of view, if the note has a pedagogical purpose, it is true that almost no one learns something the first time they see it or write it down. And there is a certain strangeness to uncovering something a year or two past or older, a not unpleasant strangeness if it's not overcome by awkwardness. (Well, Aristotle's been dead a long time, so he can wait patiently while I change my mind about what I said about him.)

Usually the point is to polish them, if they're supposed to become journal entries, to embelish them with context and make out the rhythm of a full entry. It's not too infrequent that my point (there usually is one) is very short and I want to make it in a sentence or two. (I am reminded of the desire of my often-aphoristic dead German mentor to "say in twenty sentences what another would write a whole book on" -- I paraphrase this quote from memory -- good advice for philosophers.) But sometimes I think: These little sentences are just too cryptic. Who will know what they mean? If I had read them yesterday or the day before, would I know what I'm talking about? When I read them tomorrow, will I have an idea about what I supposedly meant? To be fair, do they really mean anything? If am I not understood, and there was something to understand, isn't it really my fault? (My "Gangasrotogati-living" dead German mentor, despite famously upset on this score, probably agreeing -- according to the proposition: man who uses Sanskrit in a passage about how he's not understood must be making a joke; I mean BGE section 27.) So I must draw out a verbal recording of mental context.

Dawn over the Omo River Valley

Anyway, not to tediously furnish yet another example of what I'm talking about in Sun-Drunken's most common bit of irony, but this entry was just supposed to be about a short, expository note to myself I found that I wrote last summer, in July or August, I'm not sure, that I figured I'd post with only a few fingerfehlers ("finger blunders") corrected. Editorial parentheses [...] in the original. (It's a compulsion.)

There's a BBC program they['ve] show[n] on CBC Newsworld called Tribe. It follows a Brit, Bruce Parry, on travels to see and live among various indigeneous tribes of the world. Once he went to live with the Nyangatom of the Omo River Valley, in Ethiopia, near the Sudanese border. The Nyangatom are proud [warlike] people living in ancient-style huts, drinking cows' blood in the daytimes, and wearing traditional clothes and raiments, with a few recent additions: t-shirts, AK-47's, and pierced bullet jewelry. There he was adopted by the village elder and made an honorary member of the Ibex, their corps of young fighting men. During the initiation ceremony they were harangued by their elder, who remarked that today's young men aren't like those who came before, that they laze around all day and can't protect their cattle, and drink too much alcohol. He might as well have added that civilisation is doomed for it -- but the Ibex warriors were quite keyed-up by it, and vowed to shoot and kill anyone who tried to steal their cattle, as the womenfolk sang a song about "Lokloram, the lion" (Bruce Parry's adopted name) and about how their enemies were afraid to cross the river.

Call it: From the

civilisation is doomed! because the youth are unruly

file, thinking of an (apocryphal?) ancient Sumerian (Akkadian? Babylonian?) text said to already have been making that argument. Of all the things I wonder about Sumer, the one I'd want answered most is about what it's like to live in a world that has no history.

(Insert externally-silent mental struggle about how much to amplify that remark in an already-burgeoning entry. I'll just leave a reference to the last sentence of the previous entry so we remember there's a theme being developed. Myth only counts as history at half-weight.)

Bullet-case earring?

Three quick remarks about the quoted text:

• Brackets on "warlike" because this is a word that comes as naturally as it sounds cheesy. It makes me think I've been deeply influenced by Zulus with tanks in Civilisation. I mean, people don't really talk like that, do they?


• Yes, I really wrote "womenfolk." I'm sorry. I swear that would never make it to the second draft, nor would the massive run-on final sentence. It's just a summary note to myself, damn it.


• Check out the similarity to the Wikipedia entry, whose current revision I note uses the word "warlike," with a placeholder for a citation (!), in the first sentence.
  

More Lost Blogging to come. I have a thing somewhere around here on airplane pictures which I promised back in December but actually dates to September. And I have a full Page-a-Day Calendar page of subject titles for Journal of a Lower-Division Grader I scrawled the last time I was marking papers.

Bruce Parry &c at the well

Pictures shamelessly borrowed fairly used from the BBC Tribe website.