Naming is vital to indigenous mytho-topographical poets,[i] but is also in the English tradition (summed up by Edward Thomas’ poem ‘Adelstrop’).
Interest in the particular and the local began in England in the mid-seventeenth century with the rise of natural science and natural theology. Paul Carter quotes a colonial source on indigenous naming, ‘For each variety of gum-tree and wattle tree, etc., they had a name, but they had no equivalent for the expression “a tree”.’[ii]
Landscape also needs naming, as Judith Wright notes in ‘Rockface’: ‘In the days of the hunters with spears, this rock had a name.’[iii] Coleridge knew this: ‘In the north, every Brook, every Crag, almost every Field has a name’,[iv] and Wordsworth wrote, ‘Poems on the naming of Places’ with a portentous tone, smacking of ownership, at the time he wrote his idyllic pastoral, ‘Home at Grasmere’. Wright warns that naming can control and label, ‘Flakes that drop at the flight of a bird / and have no name, / I’ll set a word upon a word / to be your home.’[v] Detailed naming requires identification, which suggests knowledge, experience and awareness of the environment.
[i] Keith Basso describes Apache weaving common stories, histories, and memories together into an ecosystem’, always interdependent with the land. An Indian named Nick Thompson swept his arm in a large circle over the landscape and told him, ‘Learn the names... learn the names of all these places.’ Another told him, ‘The land is always stalking people. The land makes people live right . . .’ Keith Basso, ‘Stalking with stories,: Names, places, and moral narratives among the Western Apache’ In Stuart Plattner, Ed., Text, play, and story: The construction and reconstruction of self and society, Proceedings of the American ethnographical society, 1983, p21. Or, ‘One time I went to L. A., training for mechanic. It was no good, sure no good. I start drinking, hang around bars all the time. I start getting into trouble with my wife, fight sometimes with her. It was bad. I forgot about this country here around Cibecue. I forget all the names and stories. I don’t here them in my mind anymore. I forget how to live right, forget how to be strong.’ Abram notes the Apache ‘travel in their minds [by] uttering the native names of various locations.’ 1976, p155. The Aboriginal naming of country is repeated throughout indigenous communities, ‘This landscape at Cibecue was filled with geological formations given place names which are physical descriptions of the features displayed there. Every place-name is a story of the character of or of what happened there. (One site ‘Tseka’ tu yahili’ comprises Tse’ (rock or stone) + ka (on top of it, [a flat object] + tu (water) + ya (down or downward) + hi (in successive movements) + lii (it flows). (p27). John Parke suggests to understand the power of such naming requires a translation into poetry. ‘Perhaps one way a non-Indian English speaker could understand the beauty and evocative power of such a name is to construct it into a poem of several stanzas: Rock, flat / on top of it/ water / downward, downward/ successively moving / It flows.’ John S. Parke, ‘Of the oral Tradition’, Spring 2000, http://www.miltonherickson.com/oralTrad.html#Ecology%20Spoken%20Word. [DL 24.3.2002] For example the name ‘Tseka’ tu yahili’ embodies the full sense of the place. It holds the sound and silence, the movement and stillness of the location. Thinking the name is like reciting the poem. It evokes the sense of the place and brings you there. Basso learned 296 place names; each of them associated with a story. All forms of Apache storytelling centre around a place-name, thus the narratives are ‘spatially anchored’ at points on the land. Basso, ibid, p32. The Apaches distinguish stories from ‘ordinary talk’ and ‘prayer’ but there various kinds, myths, historical tales, sagas and gossip. Historical tales are brief, and begin and end with the location of the story. The anthropologist Harry Hojier uses the same terms for the Navahos, ‘Even the most minute occurrences are describes by Navajos in close conjunction with their physical settings, suggesting that unless narrated events are spatially anchored their significance is somehow reduced and cannot be properly assessed.’ Quoted David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world, Pantheon, 1996, p162. [original emphasis]
[ii] R. Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria and Other Parts of Australia and Tasmania, John Currey, O'Neil, 1972 (orig. pub. 1876), vol 2, p.413. quoted by Paul Carter, ‘The Anxiety of Clearings -for John Wolseley's Patagonia to Tasmania’ May 1996, The Australian Centre, Melbourne.
[iii] From ‘The Shadow of Fire: Ghazals’, in in A Human Pattern: Selected Poems, Imprint (1990) 1996, p234-5.
[iv] ST Coleridge The Notebooks, Ed., Kathleen Coburn, Princeton UP, Vol 1, 1957, p579
[v] Judith Wright, ‘Nameless Flower’ in The Two Fires, Angus & Robertson, 1955.