Monday, 31 March 2014

Birdman 3

  

                   “Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which
                     the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for    
                     mental explanation or description.”
                                                                                                   D. H. Lawrence


And the Myth of Origin gave way to the Myth of the Ancestor Cult. Geography determines climate; climate determines culture.
The sixty square miles of Easter Island arose from three coalesced volcanoes, as extinct as the culture that had erupted on them. Terevaka is the largest, the youngest, the highest, the most northerly, and the least culturally significant, lava field and wind. The far eastern stoneless headland is Poike, the oldest, most weathered and once separate volcano, the site of the ‘Poike Ditch’ and the Battle of Poike, between the Long Ears and the Short Ears, that changed the course of Rapa Nui history. The last large volcano, Ranu Kau, in the southwest, has high sea cliffs that have eroded back from the blue ocean, chewing into the wall of the mile wide crater filled by an eerie freshwater lake, speckled with totara reed islands and its own microclimate. Sheltered from the wind, figs and oranges and vines and bananas flourish inside the caldera. The last native toromiro tree was cut down on the inner slope in 1960, for firewood. Here is the abandoned ceremonial village of Orongo, on the cusp of where the sea cliff and the inner crater wall, and the Ancestor Cult and Birdman Cult histories, converge. Robyn and I would come here last.
Before the descendents were the ancestors, and I was anxious to see where their birth and descent had occurred. We had negotiated the red and gunmetal Suzuki SUV in town the day before, from a Chilean mainlander who had given us a deal, because I had negotiated in Spanish. I asked him why the petrol was cheaper than on the mainland, almost four thousand kilometers away.
“No hay impuestos.” He said. No tax. For which we were grateful.
In the early morning, we headed east along the southern coast road, through the Polynesian vowels and glottal stops of all the bays we passed. Ahu Hanga Te’e, Ahu Ura Uranga Te Mahina, Ahu Akahanga, Ahu Oroi, Ahu Runga Va’e, Ahu Hanga Tetanga. The sun shot fibrous streams and shafts of quicksilver through the smoky clouds above us, onto rivers of twin tire track light on the mud road ahead, and broad pewter patches of the following sea, off to our right. Wild wet horses galloped across our path, and we rolled down our windows to smell them. When the sun pushed through the black sky blanket above, it turned the ocean the bluest of blue, just for a moment, before it was overwhelmed and enveloped again. We drove the grey line between wide expanses of coarse straw tussock spattered with cold chunks of coal-colored lava rock, past random red stone topknots, out of the quarry at Puna Pau, and an immense solitary broken dead prone moai I lay beside, out of empathy. And as we turned left, climbing away from the Southern Sea, the sun pushed through in a final burst of determination, and illuminated a convoluted crested crater cone at the top of the road. Here was where the ancestors lived. Here is where their descendents descended with them, and the nursery we ascended to. Rano Raraku.

On the most remote island in the world, Robyn and I found ourselves at the most famous mystery in the world, alone except for the forest of a hundred stone faces, looking right through us. It wasn’t anything like we had imagined it would be. It was like finding your own remains, and those of everyone who ever looked like you, in an attic- strange, spooky, surreal, ghostly, unearthly, hair-raising. The Rapanui believed that the akuaku spirits of their ancestors provided for all the needs of their living- fitness, fertility, and fortune. In turn, their descendents made offerings that provided the dead with a better place in the spirit world. It was a symbiosis. The aringa ora living faces were made to watch over the settlements before them, with their backs toward the spirit world in the sea. No one dares to go near them at night.

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