Wild Seasons and the Justice of Country: An Hebraic Midrash on Dreaming the Weathers anew

“And the song of the turtledove is heard throughout the land.”

I. A Rabbinical Rose

“Ani habazelet hasharon”—“I am the rose of Sharon.” So affirms the lover in search of

her beloved in the opening verse of the second chapter of Shir Hashirim, which is also to say in

another language, one that has become the lingua franca of global culture, ‘The Song of Songs’.

This lover’s exclamation, in which a human speaker takes on the raiment of a rose, not only has

been the object of extended midrashic interpretation by Rabbinical sources, but also resonates

widely through Rabbinical treatment of other Hebrew scriptures pivotal to Jewish tradition. For

instance, a lengthy passage in Midrash Tehillim, an important midrashic work, makes reference

to ‘The Rose of Sharon’ in order to interpret the difference between ashrai, the good or godly

mentioned in Psalm 1, who are likened to a “tree planted by rivers” bringing forth “fruit in its

season,” and rasha’im, the wicked or ungodly, who are as “chaff driven by the wind” (Midrash

Tehillim, I:20, 27-31). In doing so, the lover’s claim that she is habazelet hasharon is not treated

as a symbol for an abstract and/or universal truth but rather becomes its own active particle of

meaning, repeatedly emerging into new senses depending on the manner in which it sparks when

read within the context of other verses from Hebrew scripture, or other commentaries by other

rabbis. In the practice of midrashic reading, ‘The Rose of Sharon’1 comes to exist in a manner

not unlike that David Abram has identified in his readings of indigenous storytelling: as

metamorphic, as shape shifting (Abram, 296). ‘The Rose’ is not simply a symbol making a

transcendent reality concrete in a particular and earthly element, such as the manner in which

Christianity has come to see the Rose of Sharon as a prototype for Christ. Rather than practicing

Aquinian allegory or Ricouerian symbolism, however laudable either of these approaches might

be, Chatherine Chalier has spoken of midrashic discourse as being absorbed into its metaphors,

immersing Jewish thought in the senses and emotions of embodied, which is to say, creaturely

existence, precisely to keep at bay any fixation of transcendent meaning in an explicit concept or

single approach (Chalier, 106-07).

And so meaning is multiplied and magnified, as each answer to the identity of ‘The Rose’

affords yet further possibilities for midrashic commentary and storytelling. For ‘The Rose’ is

certainly a rose, or at least a species of plant whose precise biological identity is in our own time,

even as it was in the time of the rabbis, open to question.2 And at the figurative level in its most

1 Single quotation marks will be used in this paper to enclose ‘The Rose of Sharon’ and its abbreviated form ‘The

Rose’ when these words are being employed midrashically as an active particle of meaning with its own ontological

and semiotic modality as outlined in this paragraph. 2 Indeed, Rabi Judan argues that “bazeleth” (rose) is actually a name for the shoshannah (lily) at a more tender age

(Midrash Rabbah, II: 1.iii , 92). This opinion has been reaffirmed by contemporary scholarship. According to an

annotation of NRSV Song of Solomon 2:1 (May, 816), the more general Hebrew word for ‘crocus’ was translated as

‘rose’ in the KJV. It turns out, at least in some cases, a rose by any other name may still smell sweetly but not

necessarily at all like a rose.

straightforward sense, it can be argued the one who exists as a rose is also the persona of a

human lover in search of her beloved. But the rabbis invoke multiple sources from a wide range

of verses in the Hebraic scriptures to amplify and so to destabilize these and other senses of ‘The

Rose of Sharon’. In this process, ‘The Rose’ is heard to speak as the individual Jewish soul in

search of its creator. Rabbi Berekiah finds ‘The Rose’ has an affinity with mdbvr, the desert in

its solitude in which the creator has stored all future things, including the dead who await their

return to life. (Midrash Rabbah, II: 1.ii, 92). And most prominently for the Rabbis in Midrash

Rabbah ‘The Rose’ finds multiple affinities with the people of Israel, particularly Israel as it cries

out from under the full weight of history’s violence with all its attendant injustices (Midrash

Rabbah, II: 1.ii, 91-93).

In each of these movements to specification, the Rabbis’ arguments shift on the already

shifting senses of words, often employing puns in the process: for instance, the first two syllables

of batzeleth, the Hebrew word for rose spoken by the lover, becomes interpretively b’zel, which

is to say “in or by a tent, a shade, a shadow.” And this shift in meaning in turn suggests to the

redactors of The Song of Songs (who attribute their comment to “the community of Israel”) the

artisan Bezalel who was called upon in the desert by the Most High to build an ark for the Divine

Presence. Bazeleth—b’ze l—Bezalel (Midrash Rabbah, II:1.i, 91): in this line of paronomastic

transformation, ‘The Rose’ is revealed as Israel welcoming into her midst her beloved, the Most

High. But the senses emerging in the word play on zel/shadow framed by ‘Habazeleth/The

Rose’ turn increasingly ambivalent, as the midrash finds itself immersed in the very shadows it

has announced. The shadow like that provided by a tent, or the verdant limbs of a tree, a shadow

that welcomes the stranger and shelters her or him from the desert sun, increasingly shifts into

that darkness under which Israel walked as it made its way between towering walls of water to

cross the Red Sea. From this harrowing image it is not a long step at all to understanding the

shadow as the darkness cast by historical violence and oppression onto Israel as it is submitted to

seasons of injustice. As the text of Midrash Shir Hashirim graphically puts it:

“Another explanation: I AM A ROSE OF SHARON. I am the one beloved am I. I am

she that was hidden and thrust away in the shadow of the ruling powers.” (Midrash

Rabbah II: 1.i, 92).

The shadow of oppression in turn is revealed in yet other emendations to be useless suffering, the

depths from out of which Israel is pictured as crying in Psalm 130. And useless death: “I am she

and beloved am I. For I am plunged into the depths of Gehinnom…” (Midrash Rabbah II: 1.iii,

93).

Pregnant and shifting in its senses, the speaking of ‘The Rose of Sharon’ invokes the full

register of creation from its mundane to its eschatological, as well as from its depraved to its

elevated dimensions. To hear ‘The Rose’ then not only as a human soul, as desert, as the

afterlife, as Israel, or as flower but also and preeminently as rabbi, which is to say as teacher, is

not fanciful here. For the particle of meaning ‘I am the rose of Sharon’ offers manifold lessons

to those attending to its words and committed to passing on to succeeding generations the

scripture in which it is found.

Further, ‘The Rose’s’ instruction has much to offer not only those who adhere

specifically to the tradition of Judaism but also to that of Philosophy. Under the guidance of

Rabbi ‘Habazalet Hashron’, the manner in which one’s thinking might come to its own reasons,

might find the very words by which its discourse is to be formed and reformed, is offered a

particular, which is to say in this case of the particular, Hebraic inflection. And offering

hospitality to the particular, particularly in the wake of manifold seasons of a global striving after

the universal, sometimes known as Colonialism with its emphasis upon human exploitation and

servility and sometimes known as Enlightenment with its emphasis upon human rights and

dignity, might be called for. As a result, the author asks of his readers this philosophic license:

that he be granted the leave to follow reasoning into the expression of particular voices in

particular traditions. For if there is to be a discourse emerging here and now in a distinctly

Hebraic voice, among other distinct voices addressing the significance and role of the seasons for

both the good and the justice that would attain this good here and now, then the entire array of

these terms—‘rose’ , ‘shadow’, ‘justice’, ‘good’, ‘season’, ‘voice’, ‘earth’, ‘discourse’,

‘Hebraic’, ‘colonialism’, ‘Enlightenment’, among others—in one manner or another ought to be

oriented by and pertain to those of this scripture and its traditions, among others. To reason as a

creature and so creatively from the Hebraic perspective involves at the very least the renewal of a

commitment to this particular sentence found in a particular scripture that has carried forward a

thinking from generation to generation, in which the earthly, as well as The Most High, has had

its say.

II. What and Whose Season is This?

‘The Rose of Sharon’s’ teaching involves not only the content of what is affirmed, its

‘said’, but also the timing of when this affirmation takes place, its ‘saying’. That the rose speaks

when the earth is undergoing rejuvenation, coming into florescence after a long period of

darkness, is inextricably intertwined with its declaration and cannot be ignored. Thus, to

understand the themes of historical injustice and ultimate things being treated here, one must pay

attention to the season in which these subjects are being spoken of. Further, one must appreciate

how the turn to a season in order to announce the timing of the Rose’s pronouncement

complicates that timing in a peculiar manner. For a season exists not only as a particular time

but also as a timing-of-timing, as a meta-temporal and qualitative reordering of the first order of

timing involved in one moment leading inextricably to the next. For example, the movement

from the moment in which a dormant seed is aroused to that of its sprout breaking through the

earth to that of its blossoming into a rose is qualified by yet another temporal ordering through

which those moments find themselves altered by the specific seasons in which they might occur.

A rose blossoming in winter differs significantly from one doing so in spring: one cannot mean

rose in the same way, in so far as spring or winter has been acknowledged in one’s speaking.

And for this very reason whether spring or winter is involved should be acknowledged when a

rose speaks or when one speaks of a rose. The temporality of the living world is such that its

significance is always already seasonal and that chaiyot, living things, exist in altered manners in

regard to each season.

Keeping this in mind, the season in which and from out of which The Song of Song’s

teaching arises is what might to those living in temperate climates and reading solely the King

James Version be understood as that of spring, even more precisely, spring after its onset:

“For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;

The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of

the turtle is heard in our land;

The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good

smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.” (KJV Song of Songs: 2: 11-13)

These lines for all their poetry are also ones that recount a scene familiar to those living in

temperate zones, although one remarkable all the same. The sensuous intensity of spring—with

its smells and sounds and colors—is elicited. And in that intensity the renewal of life as it bursts

forth in vernal abundance is given a particularly striking witness. The rains have already come,

and the earth, along with its many flora and fauna, is regenerated. Spring signifies the time when

lovers search out one another, the time when fig trees bud, when grape vines perfume the air,

when the turtledove coos. And while the particular flora and fauna involved in this compelling

transformation may vary from place to place within the two temperate zones, north and south,

wreathing our planet, spring, it can be argued, is universally within these limits a time of

renewed life after the frigid silence of winter. And the potency of this universal finds its witness

in widespread stories, rituals and religious beliefs throughout the ages in the traditions of

manifold peoples inhabiting temperate climes. One need only mention Greek Persephone and

Roman Proserpina, together with their respective descents into Hades and Tartarus, as well as

their later and mortal emendations in the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, or the Christian appeal

to resurrection as a vernal event, to sense the power of this season to inspire in the Western

traditions ethical, political, ontological and eschatological reflection.3

But this very observation also complicates the season as universal in its significance. For

even if the seasonal is arguably an aspect of everywhere one might wander upon the face of the

earth, spring as it is known in the temperate realms is not. If one moves to the equator, for

instance, the length of days does not vary as much or in the same way. And the very qualities

identified with spring, of budding forth into abundance after a dearth of light and so of life, are

transformed by the even-handed illumination and persistent wetness of an equatorial zone into

the more subtle seasons that occur as one species of butterfly emerges from its cocoon in a

tropical rain forest, even as another dissipates. A season of blue butterflies, and then one of

green.4 Renewal occurs, but neither so dramatically nor timed in the same manner as in the

temperate.

3 One is called upon to become mindful of manifold traditions, especially indigenous ones, lying beyond the

Western (for even within Europe indigenous traditions exist that are left outside of Western discourse) that also

articulate the senses of living things both mundane and ultimate in terms of the temperate ordering of seasons.

While this does not occur in this essay, due to limited space and attention paid to indigenous senses of the seasons in

other climactic zones, the question of how there are manifold of cultural understandings of the seasons within the

two temperate zones obviously calls for protracted meditation and discussion. 4 This insight was related to me by cultural geographer Dr. Gina Bloodworth in a conversation on October 12, 2012,

concerning time she spent on the island of Taiwan. In her remarks, she emphasized how uncanny it was to find

herself in a place where the climate exhibited only minimal variations in the qualities by which seasons are normally

And an irony ensues here. For what is characterized as ‘winter’ in the King James

translation, namely the Hebrew word ‘setav’, is in actuality the wet season as it is found in

subtropical climes. Thus, the text above, if it is read accurately, at least as accurately as it is

possible to do in its faulty English translation, speaks of a time of wintery rather than vernal

precipitation. Israel’s weather, it turns out, is not temperate, and in fact no word for the season

of Spring5 or for any of its sister seasons as they would be understood in temperate climates are

to be found in the Hebraic scriptures. Roughly analogous to winter in some of its senses, the

Hebrew word ‘setav’ comes from an archaic root in Hebrew meaning “to hide” and so by

analogy to be in darkness (Strong, 5638). And ‘aviv’, the word translated as spring in some

passages actually refers to an early stage in the ripening of barley.6 One should also keep in

mind that in the subtropics, a season of darkness is less pronounced in regard to the length of its

day but more so in its manifold wetness. In the clouds descending on biblical Israel in its rainy

season, which is to say, its ‘winter’ or ‘setav’, the zel, the shadow semantically at play in

‘bazelel’, which is to say, ‘rose’, is afforded altered and creative senses that would be lost if

one’s mode of timing times involved solely the temperate seasons at the expense of the

subtropical.

Clearly rabbinical thought found it important to bring historical events into conjunction

with seasonal ones in texts such as Shir Hashirim. Among its other senses, the darkness of a sub-

tropical rainy season suggests for the Hebraic imagination at work in Midrash Shir Hashirim the

manifold shadows of injustice repeatedly cast across the face of the earth, shadows that continue

to darken human doing even as this commentary here and now, this renewal of midrash, is being

written. But the order of the seasons, in which rejuvenation follows withering, in which not only

individual creatures but entire landscapes arise again from out of the darkness that threatens to

consume them entirely, suggests as well an ordering of history that has come to be termed

messianic by Abrahamic traditions.

But the messianic does not, as the midrashic discussion of Shir Hashirim itself ably

indicates, emerge coherently as a set of principles, as a straightforward theoretical articulation of

the manner by which creation, rife with injustice and suffering, would find itself ultimately

redeemed. Rather, the messianic question in regard to justice, articulates itself in the midst of

murmuring depths that Avivah Zornberg has termed the “biblical unconscious” (Zornberg, xx)

but might as well be termed the creaturely unconscious. For the rabbinical mind, reality, which

is to say, creation, is such that attentiveness to the natural world is a necessary part of the

emergence of the good and the enacting of justice that would attain it. And yet that attentiveness

finds itself challenged by tehom, which is to say, the depths, roiling with the unquiet or disquiet

that will not be brought to term or terms by merely human means (Zornberg, xx). In the

discussion above of the ‘zel’ in ‘habazeleth’, of ‘shadows’ in the ‘rose’, is found an instance of

the emergence of tehom, of the creaturely unconscious. And this emergence is complicated and

defined: the change in length of days, in amount of precipitation or periods of heat and cold. The reader should keep

in mind that her comments do not extend to all equatorial climates but only to those of a tropical rain forest. Some

equatorial regions with savannas have distinct seasonal elements defined by periods of dry and wet. Regions

undergoing monsoons also have two discernible seasonal elements defined by weather. . 5 For an informative discussion on the seasons in Torah and the historical developments in a Jewish understanding

of the seasons see BHO, “Geography of the Bible: Seasons and Months.” Also Joy, “Seasons.” 6 See Strong G3501 for this discussion of ‘aviv’: “from an unused root (meaning to be tender); green, i.e. a young

ear of grain; hence, the name of the month Abib or Nisan:--Abib, ear, green ears of corn (not maize).”

amplified by the shadows of a season of shadows, in which winter floods threaten to swallow

instead of fructifying the earth. The ambivalence of creation cannot be ignored, particularly in

the search for justice.

At this point in this philosophic provocation, a question not explicitly articulated above in

the rabbinical discussion of the seasons of a rose needs posing: In what sense might injustice not

only have been foreshadowed by a season of shadows but also actively embodied in that season?

Put otherwise: In what sense might the season actually enter into the historical arena to become a

tool of injustice or even to suffer injustice on its own account due to human actions? And as a

corollary: In what sense might a human voicing herself in the guise of a rose actually undermine

rather than affirm the tie between one kind of creature and another? After centuries of

colonialism, in which the very scripture considered above was part of an apparatus of usurpation

enacted by European peoples in the name of allegedly Abrahamic values, in what sense might

Shir Hashirim and its teaching about and by a rose actually have caused injustice in its very

protest against injustice?

To add fuel to the provocation implicit in this final question and even to inflame it: How

might the very addiction of European peoples to their particular articulation of the season of

Spring, an addiction that has led for several centuries to an exporting of temperate seasons,

sometimes known as colonialism, across the entirety of the face of the earth, be itself a shadow

of oppression? Or, to switch metaphors, an enflaming of oppression? For was not the colonial

project in part an attempt to inflict a European timing of the seasons,7 which is to say, a timing of

the timing-of-timings, upon the entirety of the earth rather than living receptively and so

vulnerably to creation’s and the globe’s given weathers? And in this insistence that no matter

where upon the earth one found oneself, that place would first be interpreted and ultimately

engineered in manifold ways to fit the timings of time implicit in Europe’s seasons, European

culture has all too often engaged not only in manifold forms of indifference toward where it has

exported itself but in disturbing and perhaps unprecedented forms of injustice as a result of its

indifference. For as the case studies below suggest, an indifference to justice that is seasonal in

its nature can intensify injustice to the point of ecocide, not to mention genocide.

At this point in the discussion, case studies are indeed called for. For the vague and

speculative claims of the first two sections of this essay remain merely wisps of an unsettled

philosophical imagination without a stronger sense of actual practices of timing involved in

particular places in which a season might arise, particularly in places in which the exportation of

spring has gone deeply awry.

III. The billabong of the Mak Mak.

In the words of April Bright of Mak Mak Country:

7 This inclination is perhaps most pronounced in the timing of European liturgical elements—Christmas in wintery

December and Easter in vernal March or April, as well as the traditional months for Rosh Hashanah and Pesach—

remains inconsistently consistent in their observation, even if the weathers are entirely reversed on these dates in the

temperate zones of the Southern Hemisphere.

“Turtles normally hibernate on the edges of the river system further inland than the

banks, or in the billabongs, on the edges of the billabongs or in channel-type areas. Great

care must be taken when burning those areas. You don’t burn the areas when the turtles

are hibernating. We hunt for these turtles by poking in the mud with a crowbar, locating

them and digging them out of the mud. On one occasion we discovered that people had

driven out to the area and lit fires, burning the cane grass. We began to hunt for turtles

and located a large number. But for each one that we located and went to dig up, all we

pulled out was rotting pieces of turtles. The hibernating turtles were cooked and had

rotted.” (Rose 2002, 90)

From out of multiple circles of relation, involving a dizzying and yet exacting

interchange of voices and knowledge from the diverse creatures inhabiting Mak Mak or, as

Whitefellows would translate it, White Eagle country, April Bright addresses the world that

knows itself mostly through words written in a colonizer’s tongue. In doing so, she speaks from

out of a law imposed by the circularity of her country’s monsoonal seasons—dry and wet—in

order to enter into a global conversation involving the seasons of justice and the justice of

seasons. Her words are found in a collaborative volume co-written by anthropologist Deborah

Bird Rose with April and other members of the Mak Mak people--Sharon D’Amico, Nancy

Daiyi, Kathy Deveraux, Margaret Daiyi and Linda Ford. The work, titled Country of the Heart:

An Indigenous Australian Homeland, proceeds not unlike the Hebraic practice of midrash, in

which voice upon voice offers supplementing testimony to a people’s relationship with a living

creation, replete with its songlines and songline keepers, replete with its panoply of creatures,

places, seasons and elements. And also replete with the actions stemming from the deep past in

which the very sense of the land as land was given shape by creative energies, by beings and

their struggles that now lie memorialized in country’s very contours. Here the scripture through

which the midrash is to be performed is not yet another text but country itself.8

And through April’s words, we who hear them—Jew, Christian, Australian, American,

Colonizer or Colonized, as well as all the others—come into the ambit of one moment in a

history of repeated indiscretions, an infernal and yet exemplary moment, illuminating to the

point of being consumed in its own ashes, of the widespread practice of ecocide, whether

intentional or unintentional, upon the face of the earth. In other times, the cane grass would have

been burnt yearly in its proper time and season to encourage the foraging of geese also

frequenting the Billabong. The knowing hunter would have checked the fat in the windpipes of

slaughtered geese in its proper time and season to determine whether they were beginning to go

hungry and so set the exact time for when the cane should be lit afire. The knowing hunter

would also have taken into consideration the life cycles of the other entities sharing the

Billabong with Mak Mak and goose, before lighting the fire (Rose 2002, 88). In doing so, the

knowing hunter would have acted carefully in regard to the interweaving of seasons peculiar to

this place with the habits and cycles of growth of the multitude of creatures also sharing this

8 An issue troubling this paper that is not resolved and deserves further discussion is how, as Amos Oz has recently

put it, Hebraic or Jewish civilization has been diasporic for so many centuries that it ended up locating itself almost

entirely within the landscape of a text in lieu of an earthly place. What is being opened up in this essay, although

not treated as straightforwardly as it might, is the question many Hebraic thinkers now face as they are called to

make sense of their tradition precisely by stitching back together the deeply severed relationship over several

millennia between text and place.

place with the hunter. The knowing hunter would have become a time keeper, which is to say,

sensitive to and adept at keeping in time with all the modes of creaturely activity and climactic

dynamics that involve living in a place that emerges creatively. In doing so, the knowing hunter

would have been respectful, as the Mak Mak would put it in our all too English tongue, of

“country.” The knowing hunter would not have become wild in his or her relationship with the

land.

IV. Country is not Wilderness

In the words of Linda Ford of Mak Mak Country:

“The word wilderness is an affront to Indigenous people because it implies that

everything is still wild and not in any sort of control, or that the land isn't in use for any

sort of reason and that’s a false expectation or a false way of looking at this country,

Australia, because it’s not a wilderness—Indigenous people have been here for thousands

of years and we’ve learnt to engage with our environment in a very holistic way, and

when it was first settled by European people, they might have perceived this to be

wilderness but Indigenous people were already here and we’ve learnt to engage our

country, our home, and we continue to do that…” (Ford, 1)

For Linda Ford the very term ‘wilderness’ and particularly its root word ‘wild’ have served as a

colonial strategy of deracination and usurpation. The very naming of country as wild by

Europeans not only nullified claims made to country by peoples who had occupied it for tens of

thousands of years but also denied those peoples the fundamental recognition that they had cared

knowingly for country and, in doing so, had fulfilled exacting responsibilities to it. It is

profoundly ironic that the very term used by the descendents of European settlers to characterize

what they cared for in country actually served in the first place to dispossess the culture of those

who had been caring for it.

As Hobbles Danaiyarri, a member of the Yarralin people and neighbor to the Mak Mak

has argued, the very naming of his land as wild by the Whitefellas was itself the wildest, the least

restrained moment in the history of genocide and ecocide characterizing the settlement of

Australia. Hobbles tells the story of how Captain Cook characterizes the Aboriginal peoples as

“wild,” even as Cook himself ran amok:

“Because Captain Cook order: You got to clean that people up, right up. And put all my

whitefellows on top. This is my country. Good people this I bring in one day. They all

ready for the Aboriginal people. He’s the wild one. No good keep this land.” (Rose

2004, 3).

For Hobbles, as for Linda Ford, the wild does not bespeak a natural characteristic but a

discursive event. The wild comes about as the British State and its citizens inflict this term upon

the panoply of Aboriginal peoples without once asking how the very invasiveness of the

European presence is itself the paradigm of the wild. For Hobbles the wild names

irresponsibility and oblivion, which is to say, one’s naming Aboriginal country as wild involves

not only being irresponsible but also being so taken with one’s irresponsibility as to not see it as

irresponsible. Daly Pulkara, another voice from the Yarralin, adds to this rethinking of the wild

when he contrasts ‘wild’ country—country devastated by erosion and habitat loss—with the

‘quiet’, a term derived from his own language and traditions. (Rose 2004, 4)

The quiet is, in Deborah Bird Rose’s rendering of Pulkara’s words, a “country in which

all the care of generations of people is evident to those who know how to see it” (Rose 2004, 4).

The circularity of this reasoning may seem offensive to a mind intent on discerning first

principles through a clear and distinct line of reasoning leading ineluctably to a specific

conclusion. Nevertheless, Rose’s claim resonates fully with Aristotle’s own observation in the

Nicomachean Ethics that ethical truths require another mode of discernment than do theoretical

insights: namely, the discernment of phronesis, of mindfulness, of good judgment. And training

in this discernment is necessarily accomplished through the exemplarity of an individual who

embodies good judgment, as well as a society made up of such individuals. In arguing that only

those who know how to see the “quiet” will be able to see it, Rose is emphasizing that one must

be virtuous as country invites one to do so, if one is to see the virtues in country. A corollary to

this insight also follows: That a country can be wounded, degraded, even perverted to the point

that it discourages human virtue in regard to the earthly. Precisely the failure to exercise the

virtue of quietude in regard to country, such as the untimely burning of a billabong described by

April Bright above, is not an isolated act but already an instigation to vice that undermines all

further acts of virtue. For in the aftermath of a wild burning of the billabong, the people who dig

up the rotting corpses of turtles are less likely to know what country could be if it were treated

more virtuously, with quietude. The creative thriving that is country is turned against itself in its

wilding: wild country makes for wilder actions, just as wild actions make for a wilder country.

V. Wild Seasons

If country can become wild in the sense argued for by Aboriginal speakers, might its

seasons in turn also become wild? This is to ask whether the injustice of colonial settlement is

not only an undermining of a particular sector of country, of a place, but also of the timing of its

times, so that the very seasons arriving into or coursing through country become modes of

injustice.

At first glance, to raise this question appears to engage in a category error, namely, to

confuse the temporality of seasons with the time of specific occurrences. Put concretely, the

rose arguably blooms because the length of days increase and the rain falls, rather than the

inverse. As a result, one could reasonably conclude that the seasons are not conditioned by

country but rather provide the conditions by which country is born into its specific living shape.

For instance, in the creation story of Genesis, the earth is understood by the Rabbis to be

faceless, until the first spring arrives as the rains pour down upon the infertile soil and so provide

it the opportunity to fructify living things (Genesis 2:5).9 Only then can trees and other flora

9 See discussion of this point in Hatley 2012, 17-18.

grow and so in turn provide the earth with its “countenance.”10

Thus, the actions of human

beings in regard to enhancing the flourishing of life upon the face of the earth would occur only

after the earth has its face, which is to say, after its seasons have already arrived. Indeed, might

one not translate meaningfully the rabbinical notion of earth emerging as face as not unlike what

the Mak Mak mean by country, a place where humans and the earthly meet face to face after the

seasons have already arrived?

But in doing so, one should keep in mind that the seasonal, in both its Aboriginal and

Hebraic articulation, can only be understood as part of a temporal matrix in which various modes

of keeping time—lunar cycles, the periodicity of light and warmth, the annual or semi-annual

arrival and receding of wet or dry, not to mention the innumerable moments of succession as one

generation replaces another, as one species makes way for another in a yearly cycle—find their

proper or improper time(s) and place(s). In this regard, ethnomusicologist Catherine Ellis has

remarked upon how aboriginal peoples cultivate sensitivity to “perfect time,” a play in words on

the Western notion of perfect pitch, in which the interweaving of complex rhythms and cycles of

rhythms are performed with preternatural exactitude and mathematical precision. (Ellis 1984,

165). This capacity has ethical and spiritual, as well as aesthetical dimensions to it. As Deborah

Bird Rose comments:

“The correct interlocking of all the nested and co-existing patterns generates the strength

by which song draws the power of the Dreaming out of the Earth. Moments of perfect

pattern lift the Dreaming up from the Earth and enable them to become mobile. This is

serious business. As Ellis says, to lose the power of Dreaming or ancestral connection in

ceremony is ‘unforgivable’11

.” (Rose, 2008, 115)

To be good in a manner specific to humans, then, would be to work mindfully in conjunction

with the seasonal in all its cycles of plenty and lack to distribute carefully and with good timing

the benefits of seasonal elements such as fire, water and light.

This sense of the seasonal is reflected in the etymology of its naming in the English

language. Derived from ‘sationem’, the past participle of the Latin ‘serere’ (to sow), the

meaning of ‘season’ eventually shifted from an act of sowing in Vulgate Latin to a

time of sowing in Old French (OED, “season”). Thus, human beings themselves become

seasonal in their actions by amplifying or subverting the seasonal, by proceeding, to employ

another musical trope, in or out of tune with the seasons. In April Bright’s testimony of a season

running wild, when the cane is burnt by a human actor who has lost the power to keep time,

Ellis’s notion of a mistiming that is unforgivable finds its ethical, as well as spiritual

significance. In this act of imperfect timing the very notion of how the justice of seasons can be

subverted finds its expression. The wrongdoing of this wrong timing also provides a powerful

example for understanding how colonial (aka, Western and technocratic) practices of time

keeping, as they run wild, make the unforgivable, at least in the eyes of the Mak Mak, a regular

occurrence in country.

10

In yet another paranomastic transformation, the Rabbis read the Hebrew p’nei, which means the same as the

English “upon” but is literally translatable as “the face of,” as suggesting the earth receives its face precisely in

being that surface upon which the rains can fall (Hatley 2012, 17). 11

The comment about the “unforgivable” can be found in Ellis 1964, 109.

Surely there have always been those who have acted indiscriminately, who thoughtlessly,

without heeding the dreaming or scripture that is the earth, would have incinerated the earthly

womb of the billabong in which hidden eggs are hatching. But since Captain Cook made

Australia wild in a discursive event of naming, since he and his kin flooded into country and

occupied it, what were episodic moments of wildness, of indiscriminate burning, plowing,

grazing, uprooting, excavating, polluting, and the rest, became institutionalized in a manner

heretofore unknown to the Mak Mak. The land has increasingly been defaced, as witnessed in

Daly Pulkara’s retelling of the wild. Too many moments in too many places something like the

foolhardy burning of that Billabong has occurred.

One needs to acknowledge and cultivate sensitivity to the modes of injustice unleashed in

such moments. The issue here is not merely one of distribution, as if seasonal justice were

simply a matter of distributing fairly and creatively the opportunities for thriving among cane

grass, turtles, human beings and all the rest. Certainly this matters.12

But what matters as well is

how timing not only distributes these goods but also brings into conjunction from the very

beginning the various modes of creaturely thriving that is country, so that each living entity is

interwoven with all others in the complexes and cycles of interaction that mutually sustain the

lifting up of life in all its diversity and peculiarity. The justice of seasons is not only distributive

but also creative. This leads to the following corollary: Temporal cycles only take on the

significance of a season, in so far as in their wake the earth itself is fructified, is given its face, as

it emerges as country. In this sense, the blooming of the rose can indeed be argued to cause the

spring to arrive. On Mars, the periodicity of light resulting in cold and warm cycles proves to be

only a facsimile of the seasonal. Without the possibility of sustaining justice both distributive

and creative, the cycles of change on a lifeless planet are empty, a periodicity that lacks any

season, which is to say, any sense of a time and timing of sewing and all other manner of

fructification. That planet, then, at least here (or is it there?) and now, remains faceless.

VI. A Fire Season of Injustice

But circles and digressions abound in country. As do counter-rhythms and cycles

overlying yet other cycles. The timing of timings is unceasing and forever in transformation.

And so, before traveling any further straight ahead, as if the story of seasons and their modes of

justice were to be told in only April Bright’s and Linda Ford’s voices, or only in the voice of the

Mak Mak, or in the voice of Deborah Bird Rose or, more distantly, James Hatley in the hearing

of these voices, let us (which is to say, whatever audience comes to read these words) consider

how I too (how embarrassing and yet how necessary the first person pronoun is here) am called

to offer my own words, my own story on behalf of country, in particular, country to the south of

that of the Mak Mak people, country named Mpantwe in Arrente13

but known in English as

12

While Aristotle sees distributive justice as a function of the polis, for the Mak Mak and arguably for the Hebraic,

“country” (Mak Mak) or “creation” (Hebrew) are also contexts in which distributive justice takes place. In these

contexts modes of distributive justice emerge in which the polis might intervene but only in a secondary manner,

which is to say, in the aftermath of a distribution that is already taking place. 13

As explained by a staff member of the Northern Territory Alice Springs Desert Park during a presentation on

Arrente Culture and the Desert: July 21, 2012.

“Alice Springs” and “The Red Center.” Here the climate moves from tropical monsoon to sub-

tropical desert, a country sharing similarities in its seasons with that in which the biblical Rose of

Sharon blooms.

Here too an altered regime of burning is causing

havoc, as mulga/acacia indigenous to this area succumbs to

the intensity of flames fed by buffel grass. This latter species,

originally introduced inadvertently by Afghani camel drivers

a century ago has been encouraged since then by pastoralists

who were impressed with the plant’s capacity to weather

drought and grow back quickly in the summer rains, should

they arrive sufficiently in a particular year (CSIRO, 1). Here

was a fodder that both easily colonized the desert landscape

and fed cattle almost effortlessly in the process.14

In July of

2012, which is to say during the winter or dry season, I

became a witness to the effects of this century-long alliance of

Asian plant and European colonizer as Deborah Bird Rose

and I wandered about an open area off Laparinta Drive near

Gilbert Creek. At our feet stretching over the earth in every

direction were tussocks of buffel grass. In its wake, the rich

plant diversity normally a feature of the Australian outback in

this area had withered away. Only three other species of low

lying plant life, one of them Bermuda grass weaving itself across a dry river bed, were to be

discerned. Here was graphic evidence of buffel grass’s propensity for “decreasing water

infiltration to the soil and changing the way essential plant nutrients cycle in the desert.”15

But buffel grass’s other propensity—to increase the biomass after summer rains in any

area it colonizes by a factor of 2 or 3—leads, as mentioned above, to an altered fire regime of

intense burns with drastic effects upon indigenous woody shrubs and trees. That all around me

at eye level were trunks of mulga burnt to a crisp was not surprising, even if unforgivable.

Some background is necessary to understand the full implications of the seasonal

injustice implicit in this latter situation: Acacia wood is normally resistant to seasonal desert fires

that occur in cycles linked to wet seasons followed by dry, even when the latter becomes, in yet

another permutation of the seasonal, a years-long dry spell ended by a sudden spike in rainfall.

For the seasons of the desert of the Red Center follow not only the rhythm of wet summers and

dry winters, but also larger, cumulative waves of abundance and drought lasting years at a time

(particularly the droughts). As a result, the wet season in a period of drought is barely wet at all.

Acclimatized to these rhythms acacia has thrived throughout the Holocene on cyclical fires that

burn away the surrounding low-lying vegetation when a particularly wet summer is followed by

14

A similar situation with similar results has occurred in arid and desert areas of the American Southwest (USGS).

One important difference between the desert surrounding Alice Springs and the Sonoran: In the latter country, fire

seasons were not a part of the seasonal shifts until the introduction of buffel grass. As a result, Sonoran flora had

not co-evolved with fire. Buffel grass in that situation can arguably be understood as not only over-amplifying a

season already molding the shape of a particular country but of actually introducing a whole new season to that

country. 15

As reported by USGS ecologist Todd Esque (USGS).

a dry winter with at best a slight charring of the tree’s outer layers or at worst the incineration of

its trunk and limbs above ground leaving its root system still intact and capable of re-growth. As

in many other landscapes sculpted by the alternation of wet and dry seasons, particularly arid

ones, fire and plants have co-evolved.16

But the complexes of timing dependent upon the seasonal, the shifts from wet to dry to

wet to dry which functioned to shape a quiet country, a country in which the justice

accomplished through the seasons was exemplary, are now in disarray. The sewing of buffel

grass across the Red Center has left this charismatic landscape wounded. Spreading like wildfire

and through wildfire across country, buffel grass has put the seasons of fire emerging here as

country out of joint, altering for ill their capacity to engage in justice both distributive and

creative.

Increasingly another vector of disarray, of the wilding of the seasons, emerges at a global

level that is not only political and historical in its scope but also ecological: climate change.

While the issues raised above in regard to the justice of the seasons can be argued to emerge

from the manner in which human beings might intervene locally, even if these practices of

intervention are themselves rooted in historical, political, cultural and economic forces global in

their reach, in global climate change the air itself has assumed a new agency, as human practices

embedded in the universe of localities comprising a planet increasingly converge in their effects

to alter the weather of the planet as a whole. The tension between near and far, between the

planetary and the local, that is the very hallmark of an earthly existence, is being increasingly

altered with increasingly catastrophic consequences.

This alteration, occurring everywhere on the face of the earth, is also occurring in the Red

Center and in that field of buffel grass and cremated acacia through which my colleague Deborah

Bird Rose and I walked on July 18, 2012. According to the Commonwealth Science and

Industrial Research Organisation, the national science agency of Australia, three factors of

climactic wilding were and continue to be increasingly at play in that field of buffel grass:

warmer temperatures, altered rainfall and extreme weather events (Sharing Knowledge Project,

“Map”). Paradoxically, rainfall has been increasing in this desert region, even as temperatures

have generally been rising.17

Is the Red Centre in the process of moving from a subtropical to a

tropical clime? At this point it is perhaps anyone’s guess. But the very fact that this question

must be asked indicates the precariousness in our time of the seasons and of the justice they

enact. It also indicates how imperfect our sense of timing in regard to the seasons has become:

we are not even sure anymore of exactly what climate we are living in, of what season we are

undergoing.

16

While Aboriginal peoples in the Red Center traditionally used fires to shape country, this practice was confined to

eco-systems where spinifex, an indigenous grass, provided ground cover and acacia was not endemic. Human

caused fires were not used as frequently, if at all, to shape the areas where acacia grew. As a result, the country

came to have a patchwork structure. (Williams, 27) 17

See the webpage “Australian climate change site networks” (AGBM) to look up Alice Springs. This website has

a wealth of easily accessible information showing trends in climate change in various localities across the Australian

continent. Increases in rainfall in the Red Centre have not dampened the wildfires that currently bedevil land

infested with buffel grass but actually intensify those wildfires: increased wetness causes an increase in buffel grass

biomass, which in turn increases the amount of tinder, which in turn ignites with more incendiary effect, particularly

in extreme event heat waves during a dry period (Miller, 354).

VII. Hearing Other Voices in One’s Own Story.

In the words of Margaret Kemarre Turner OAM of Arrente Country:

“In the eyes of Aboriginal people, and in their ways of thinking, you can never tell

somebody else’s Story. You gotta tell only your own Story….And if you’re seeing the

Land without the Story, then there’s nothing there. We see our country, even though it

might be destroyed by another species, we see how the beautiness is still in the country.

Amwerne-alre areme ampere nhenhe nanthe-arle pweleke-arlke-arle akenge alhintyeke,

ampere anwerne-kenhe-arle arrelyemelyeme ampere utnenge amwernekenhe-arle. It

doesn’t matter that horses and bullocks have caused such destruction, we still see the

spirit of that Land glistening.” (Kemarre Turner, 126-27).

The time has come to consider again how and where the particular line of questioning

being pursed here concerning the seasons began: namely, in the midrashic abundance of a rose

whose voice(s) emerge(s) from the Hebraic scripture of The Song of Songs. Perhaps in light of

Margaret Kemarre Turner’s own words, in her testimony as a member of the Arrente people, the

reason for commencing this essay by telling the story in and of the voice of ‘The Rose of Sharon’

calls less for the philosophical license begged of the reader by the author than heretofore might

have seemed to be the case. For what is being written here from its very beginning has been the

attempt however tentative and in quandary to tell the story that the author has been called to tell,

the story that would illuminate country and its seasons in so far as that story calls to be told in the

light of the author’s own tradition(s) and his own people(s). But this story is being told even as

the author finds himself in the hearing of other traditions and peoples who have suffered seasons

of injustice during centuries of usurpation of their land and culture, in no small part due to the

scriptures by which the author would live.

Telling the story that would be in tune with the seasons in a country that has been

usurped and rendered wild, it turns out, is no simple matter. The rhetorical complexity of the

discourse being offered here and now to the reader, the discourse that is this essay, this trial in

speaking with justice in regard to the justice of seasons, does not allow the state of affairs that is

a season to be characterized straightforwardly. Even if country were quiet and uncolonized, one

must continually turn to one side or another as one speaks in order to remain attentive to one’s

kin—both human and more than human—in telling a story of the seasons. Indeed, the very act

of telling one’s story already finds one in the thickness of a plethora of reciprocal relationships

that are/is country, as the voices of its manifold creatures and elements pour into one’s own body

to create this voice that is speaking now. To put this perhaps more philosophically, the voice

that is telling this story here and now is immersed in something like what Julia Kristeva has

characterized as le semiotique (Kristva, 17-18), the giving of signs whose senses are concretely

and immediately rooted in one’s very flesh. But with this caveat: From the indigenous

perspective this flesh is in turn concretely rooted in and immediately shaped by country.18

For

18

One cannot think of the bodily drives or instincts as a Freudian schema internal to an organism but rather as fields

of energy and exchange already amassed in and articulated as country and through which the manifestation of a

drive in an individual body even become possible. The energetics is not in the first instance tied to the instincts and

instance, registering how walking through a field of buffel grass re-informs what the verb “to

walk” actually means requires remarkable patience and circumspection in one’s attentiveness to

one’s embodiment and its circumstances. In turn, this renewal, this teaching of the body by

country yet again to affirm in one’s speaking the words “to walk” also brings to light senses

implicit in one’s notion of justice that could not be in one’s keeping without the tutelage of

country, of this particular place under the sun. Country is perhaps at least in part termed “the

quiet” by Daly Pulkara above because in it one listens carefully before one speaks. As a result

one paradoxically comes to sense in manifold ways how one’s voice is already populated by the

speaking of manifold creatures and elements in the midst of whom and through which one finds

oneself. To be bereft of country would be to find one’s voice bereft of the very terms by which it

might know itself in its bodily depths. For who can speak in a Hebraic voice who would speak

of habatzeleth that could cast no shadow, offer no smell, or blossom without waiting for the

winter rains?

In circling back in midrash upon the very words beginning his attempt to tell a story, the

author would ask a final indulgence from his philosophical reader: that she or he become

mindful, in so far as that might be appropriate to her or his tradition(s) of what it would be to

walk through buffel grass in a field in the Red Center with ‘The Rose of Sharon’ at one’s side.

Indeed, one might even consider what it would mean to find oneself, as the author is called to do

by his own tradition, to have become ‘The Rose of Sharon’ in these altered circumstances. The

reader should also be aware that the author’s asking of this indulgence is not due to a superficial

whimsy exercised arbitrarily on his part but rather is the outcome of a responsibility that is

ineluctably being imposed upon him here and now. For whatever or whomever ‘The Rose of

Sharon’ might be, its active presence in a history of colonial conquest and the usurpation of

indigenous peoples and their country cannot be avoided, even if it might be repeatedly denied.

The biblical scriptures of the Abrahamic tradition are not at all irrelevant to what has recently

become of earthly seasons upon the face of the earth. And if one is to renew the active presence,

the creative advocacy of the face of a biblical rose upon the face of the earth, then not only the

shadows of oppression cast upon that rose throughout history but also the shadow the rose itself

casts oppressively across history, particularly a history of usurpation that declares itself in the

name of that rose, must find a place in one’s thinking, in one’s midrash and even in one’s

prayers. For the very citation of the bible and all its roses, whether explicit or implicit—by

rabbis, clerics, kings, prime ministers, armies, missionaries, mercantilists, colonialists,

capitalists, monotheists, philosophers, poets, anthropologists, ecologists, miners, pastoralists,

conservatives, liberals, believers, unbelievers and the many others who in one manner or another

claim to have claimed another people’s country and its seasons as their own, those who are

named alherntere mape in the Arrente language—leaves in quandary the respective stories

named by a rose, even if this very name “rose” is already a mistranslation. For what story can

the one who has usurped another’s place under the sun tell, such that in telling it one has not

again defaced the country in which that story is being told, or disenfranchised the stories of those

whose stories heretofore have through generations upheld that land, made it glisten?

In a field of buffel grass, the author turns to ‘The Rose of Sharon’ walking by his side in

order to share these qualms and to listen to her reply. What might she now say, even as she

drives of a discrete body but of an elemental flesh out of which all differences and distinctions of one body in

relation to all other bodies can then arise. See the account of le chair (flesh) in Merleau-Ponty, 137-141.

beholds the devastation that has been caused to other creatures, both human and more than

human, in her name? One would perhaps expect something akin to her speaking in a parody of

her scriptural words, a parody implicitly expressing repentance in the face of how the words of a

rose have defaced the country of other peoples and other climes. Perhaps she might speak the

following:

Who am I, if not the rose of Gilbert Creek,

the spinnifex of creation?

A thorn among the tufts of buffel grass

am I, beloved among the dunnerts.

in fields overtaken by foxes and feral cats.

In the dry desert winter of Mpantwe

I search for my beloved.

No longer in the dusk

do stick rat and mala

rouse from their dens to

leave tracks in the red dust.

No longer in the dust

does tjilpa sniff out the scent

of stick rat and mala

to feed her children good meat.

The summer rains arrive

too soon and too wet.

Salt bush and malga grow confused

in the fires consuming them.

And I am yours, and you are mine:

Let us walk, my beloved,

amidst incinerated acacia

to consider what our love has wrought.

Parody, in which the words of a particular tradition or author are imitated for the sake of renewed

insight, is not simply a parlor game in such instances.19

Nor need parody necessarily be

polemical, even if this is often the case, but can, in actuality, become penitential and irenical,20

fostering peace between differing traditions in its deepest sense. Such is the hope of the parody

offered, however imperfectly, above. Yet to argue straightforwardly for the explicit practice of

parody, as if simply rewriting Hebraic scripture through new terms emerging in a particular time

and place would be enough to respond to the discursive injustice brought about by usurpation of

the seasons, misses a crucial point. For parody to function, one must have both the words being

parodied and the words creating the parody fully in one’s mind and heart (even if these words are

19

But this can occur only when the other’s terms intervene in the hearing of my own, so that I now encounter my

own speech differently than I ever could have through the means offered to me by my own tradition. The situation is

asymmetrical—I dare not parody the other’s words (for this would be deeply polemical), yet I come to be thankful

for how the other’s words instigate a parody of my own speaking. I am indebted to my colleague Timothy Stock for

having illuminated for me in our conversations the philosophical significance of parody. 20

In ireny (derived from the Greek word for “peace”) one’s voice is revealed to already have been caught up in all

the other intonations of one’s words by all the other voices that have spoken, are speaking and will have spoken

(Hatley 2011, 92-95).

burning holes in one’s very flesh): only then can the parody make the sort of sense that is

required here. But has not this hopefully already begun to have occurred in this essay in the

manner in which one has come to hear anew the words originally spoken by ‘The Rose of

Sharon’ in Hebrew throughout the generations, before any explicit parody might have been

formulated in regard to a place that, after all, already has been cared for by the Arrente people for

thousands, if not tens of thousands of years? Rather than appropriating yet again another’s

country for one’s own, might not it be better to hear how the Hebraic and traditional words of

‘The Rose of Sharon’, as they come to reverberate with what usurpation has made of another’s

country, find they are already an irenical and penitential parody of themselves?

More important than finding new words is registering in all its complexity and

devastation how traditional Hebraic words—havatzelet v’shoshanim, chochim v’tor, hatehan

v’tapuah, (the rose and lilies, thorns and turtledove, the fig and apple tree)—are heard with

renewed intensity and extensivity in the light of the world to which they have come to bear

witness. In undergoing this responsibility, the author is being called, as one has been called

throughout the generations in the Hebraic tradition, to the practice of rereading Hebraic

scriptures with care and attentiveness, while being open to the historical and creaturely urgency

each speaker undergoes as she or he takes up with this task. In doing so, perhaps at least one

philosophical and deeply paradoxical principle has emerged for both author and reader in how

one is called to proceed. One must learn to tell anew, in the altered circumstances in which one

has found oneself, the stories which one has inherited a unique and enduring responsibility to

tell. It is not enough to exercise critique—the telling of the story itself also matters. Without the

telling, the very possibility of parody and the renewed insights it offers cannot come to pass.

One corollary to this principle is also announced by Margaret Kemarre Turner above: that one

should avoid telling the stories of another’s inheritance as if they were one’s own, for this latter

mode of storytelling, engaging in a mode of parody that is inevitably polemical, both

undermining and defacing the one imitated, has been the very engine of genocidal and ecocidal

hermeneutics. Further one is called upon by country itself to tell stories that lift it up, that are

illuminated by how country glistens and abides even in the midst of its devastation.

But even if the author finds himself prohibited from telling in a Hebraic voice the stories

of the Arrente people, as if those stories had become his own, he is in that very prohibition also

commanded to listen to the stories of Arrente culture and all other cultures in order to hear anew

what is meant in turn by his own stories.21

In what manner then, might I hear Margaret Kemarre

Turner’s voice, as well as the voices of her kin, both human and more than human, as they have

been, are and will continue to be articulated in the ceremonies, places, practices and tellings of

Arrente culture?

In responding to this question, ‘The Rose of Sharon’ whose story is being told here and

now, this ‘Rose’ who is walking with the author and perhaps his readers through a field of

incinerated acacia and yellowing buffel grass in the dry season of the Red Center, now becomes

a locus for the practice of what has been termed “recuperative work.” In this practice which

seeks to address the “dark times” of historical injustice, one seeks out “local possibilities that

illuminate alternatives to our embeddedness in violence” (Rose 2004, 24). This illumination is

21

I am indebted to Dr. Nimachia Hernandez, who first articulated explicitly for me this principle of hermeneutical

responsibility in regard to one’s reception of the stories and practices of other traditions.

of a peculiar sort. In it the very terms by which one knows one’s mind as one’s own are altered

anarchically, without precedent, as other voices and their seasons, which is to say other timings

of timing that have heretofore been ignored or even aggressively suppressed, now intervene

uncannily from within one’s very saying. One’s past and future, as well as one’s present, is

written anew, even if imperfectly and incompletely, in such moments of provocation, through a

speaking that has already begun in one before one could have spoken as oneself.

This speaking begins, if not in the stories of another culture, then in what is shared

between that culture’s stories and one’s own: a love for what is given to be loved in country. To

be in country without stories attentive to it, stories whose thickness have been built up over

generations and seasons, is to exist in a manner that not only leaves one bereft of one’s humanity

but also puts all creatures with whom one shares country and its seasons in peril. This peril not

only consists in the empirical harm that might be undergone as buffel grass colonizes an

ecosystem but also in the manner in which country itself is revealed as if it were no longer

creative, as if it were merely helpless before the onslaught of human capacities to rework the

earth in the image of the colonizer, a country responding solely to the colonizer’s own reckless

needs. As if the country no longer were glistening.

But country is precisely that which, no matter how devastated it might have become, still

glistens. The implicit glistening of country affirmed above by Margaret Kemarre Turner finds a

corollary in the Hebrew notion of ch’vod, often translated into English as “glory,” of a

fulguration emerging through earthly creatures that bears witness to their depths, and ultimately

to their respective vocations to bespeak creation, which is to say, country, regardless of how

immersed in shadows that speaking might have become. In this vein, the Hebraic thinker is

called by Margaret Kemarre Turner’s admonition regarding the glistening of country to consider

again what it means in a Hebraic tongue to struggle with Tehom, the murmuring deep that

Zornberg equates with the biblical unconscious but that here and now is revealed to be as well a

creaturely unconscious. The seasons as they emerge in Mpantwe, the Red Center, or in the

Billabongs of the Mak Mak trouble the seasons as they have already been articulated in Hebrew,

so that the very terms by which a season is heard to have made its place under the sun comes

into22

new intonations. One cannot have presumed to have already listened well enough. Only

then can the justice peculiar to the seasons find a place in one’s discourse and in one’s practices.

This is hopefully what has begun to occur in these very words. This is my prayer.

References

Abram, David. 2010. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. New York: Pantheon Books.

Australian Government Bureau of Meterology (AGBM). 2013. “Australian climate change site

networks.” http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/hqsites Date of Access: 7.1.2013.

Bible History Online (BHO). 2012. “Geography of the Bible: Seasons and Months.”

22

Thinking here of Augustine’s use of ‘invenio’ (‘to come into’) in Book X of De Trinitatae to characterize the

necessity of the soul’s coming into itself in order to be itself.

http://www.bible-history.com/geography/seasons_months_israel.html Date of Access:

11.5.2012

Chalier, Catherine. 2008. Traité des Larmes: Fragilité de Dieu, Fragilité de l’âme. Paris:

Albin Michel.

Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). 2012. “Buffel

Distribution.” http://www.cazr.csiro.au/documents/buffell_tc.pdf Date of Access:

9.30.2012

Ellis, Catherine J. 1964. Aboriginal Music Making: A Study of Central Australian Music.

Adelaide: Libraries Board of South Australia.

_____. 1984. "Time Consciousness of Aboriginal Performers." In Problems and Solutions:

Occasional Essays in Musicology Presented to Alice M. Moyle. Eds. J. C. Kassler and J.

Stubington, 149-85. Sydney: Hale & Iremonger.

Ford, Linda and Nancy Daiyi. 1988. Interview transcript for Australian Wilderness

Series. Directors, Catherine Millar, David Morgan, John Richardson, David Greig, and

Danae Gunn. Executive Producer, John Richardson.

http://www.filmaust.com.au/wilderness/pdf/nancyandlinda_transcript.pdf. Date of

Access: 10.10.2012.

Hatley, James. 2011. “Skeptical Poetics and Discursive Universality: An Etiquette of Legacy in

the Time of Shoah.” In Levinas Studies: An Annual Review. Volume 6. Pittsburgh:

Duquesne University Press.

_____. 2012. “The Virtue of Temporal Discernment: Rethinking the Extent and Coherence of

the Good in a Time of Mass Species Extinction.” Environmental Philosophy 9, no. 1: 1-

22.

Joy, Alfred. 1915. “Seasons.” In International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. Ed. James Orr.

http://www.internationalstandardbible.com/S/seasons.html Date of Access: 7.1.2013.

Kemarre Turner OAM, Margaret. 2010. Iwenhe Tyerrtye—what it means to be an Aboriginal

Person. Ed. Barry McDonald Perrurle. Trans. Veronica Perrurle Dobson. Alice Springs:

IAD Press.

Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed. Leon

S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

May, Herbert G. and Bruce M. Metzger. 1977. The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the

Apocrypha. New York: Oxford University Press.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Ed. And Trans. Alphonso Lingis.

Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Miller, Georgia, Margaret Friedel, Paul Adam and Vanessa Chewings. 2010. “Ecological

impacts of buffel grass (Cenchrus cilliaris L.) invasion in central Australia—does field

evidence support fire-invasion feedback?” Rangeland Journal 32: 353-365.

Midrash on Psalms (Midrash Tehillim). 1959. Volume XIII. Yale Judaica Series. Ed. Leon

Nemoy. Trans. Willilam G. Braude. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Midrash Rabbah. 1983. Volume IX (Song of Songs). Eds. H. Freedman and Marice Simon.

Trans. Maurice Simon. London: Soncino Press.

Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Compact Edition. 17th

Printing.

Rose, Deborah Bird, Saran D’Amico, Nancy Daiyi, Kathy Deveraux, Margaret Daiyi,

Linda Ford and April Bright. 2002. Country of the Heart: An Indigenous Australian

Homeland Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.

_____. 2004. Reports from a wild country: decolonizing ethics. Sydney: University of New

South Wales Press.

_____. 2008. “Dreaming Ecology ~ Beyond the Between.” Religion & Literature 40, no. 1:

109-122.

Sharing Knowledge Project. 2013. “Map.” Climate Change Research Centre (CCRC). University

of New South Wales. http://www.sharingknowledge.net.au/map/index.html. Date of

Access: 7.1.2013

Strong, James. 1988. Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible. Peabody Massachusetts:

Hendrickson Publishers.

United States Geological Service (USGS). 2002. “Buffelgrass, an Invader Fueling Wildfires in

the Sonoran Desert.” News Release: April, 24, 2002. http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/

article.asp?ID=383#.UGhulJjA-b4. Date of Access: 9.30.2012.

Williams, Jann. 2002. “Fire Regimes and their Impacts in the Mulga (Acacia aneura)\

Landscapes of Central Australia.” In Australian Fire Regimes: Contemporary Patterns

(April 1998 - March 2000) and Changes Since European Settlement. Eds. J. Russell-

Smith, R. Craig, A. M. Gill, R. Smith, and J. Williams. Canberra: Australia State of the

Environment Second Technical Paper Series (Biodiversity), Department of the

Environment and Heritage. http://www.ea.gov.au/soe/techpapers/index.html Date of

Access: 7.1. 2013.

Zornberg, Avivah Gottlieb. 2009. The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical

Unconsciousness. New York: Schocken.

Picture Credit: Photograph taken by author at Gilbert Creek near Alice Springs, Australia

7.18.2012 during the dry winter season.