Little

I best learned about the shimmer of life from Aboriginal people in the Victoria River region of Australia’s Northern Territory […]. I use the concept of shimmer to frame this chapter because I believe it is susceptible to a ‘reciprocal capture’ with Western thought. […] Stengers proposes that possibilities for new modes of existence emerge in acts of reciprocal capture, and it is my hope that an encounter with shimmer may help us better to notice and care for those around us who are in peril. Here, at the edge of extinction, is the place to begin, when the world that one loves—including angiosperms and flying foxes—are being trashed.
Deborah Bird Rose, ‘Shimmer: When All You Love is Being Trashed’
In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, Tsing et al. (eds)

What is shimmer (or Bir’yun)? It is a kind of brilliance that ‘brings you into the experience of being part of a vibrant and vibrating world’ (ibid. 53) that is also ‘one’s actual capacity to see and experience ancestral power’ (53-4).

And we have the skills as humans, drawn from many traditions over great lengths of time, to open ourselves up to the world and re-establish our connections.

Theatre and performance are a way of doing this if the commitment is extensive.

One of the reasons AnthrApology is a durational performance with ritual overtones is to stage the endurance and athleticism from which resilience and flourishing can come.

(From 57. Golden feathers: Rosita, Page, Arizona, 1977)

I wish I’d taken the golden feathers when I first saw them.
They were bright and floating in the air right above my new baby.
I was scared and didn’t take the golden feathers made of light.

The ancestors are ignoring me now,
and now I am sick and have no energy.
I wish for another chance.
I’m sorry I didn’t take the feathers when you gave them to me.
I should have grabbed them and held them to my breast along with my baby, and he would be well now too.

Please, give me
Sickness
Isolation
Dismember me on a rock
Resurrect me
Stain me and purify me
Let me starve myself and then vomit
Cut me with a broken Coke bottle
Bring me suffering
More sickness
Death of my mind
Exhaustion
Travels out of my body
Meetings with spirits, human and otherwise
Let me marry a spirit, even a mean one
Let me see myself as a skeleton
No flesh on my bones
Or a zombie, or wraith or ghost

Give me another chance
Another time close to death like the birth of my son so that I can see the eagle feathers again and take them this time and be strong again
Tear me to pieces, let the spirits tear me to pieces
Take my brain from my skull, turn it into soup and make me drink it
Drag me behind a truck in the dust until the dust is red with me blood
Take hot metal and put it in my eyes
Stick sharp stones into my body, my womb
Make me rub two stones together for years until my fingers don’t exist
Let an animal eat me, let a pack of them eat me and throw me up and make me put myself back together again

Drop me from a cliff
Drown me in a river and bring me back with water plants for eyes
Bury me with the garbage at the dump
Tear my limbs from me
Strike me with lightning and blow my insides out
Boil my blood in my body on a sunny day in a way that confuses everyone
Bore me so much that I want to leave this world
Cover me in flesh-eating beetles and don’t let me scream
Bury me beside my grandmother and demand that I
chew her dry sick bones
Let me stand for days in an empty field waiting
for your guidance and counsel
Stuff me in a cave and leave me to become a stone
Take my brain and trade its place with my heart
Give me sacred songs that will burn my throat and tongue like acid Burn me
Turn me into a windstorm

Feed me to the roots of angry trees
Tie me down and make me convulse until I break my bones on the rope Take my blood and feed it to stones
Chop and boil my flesh for a stew to feed the mice and desert rats
Find an extra bone in my body and pull it out, without anaesthetic
Send me to another world and let me lose my mind
Please
Please
Please: anything to see the golden feathers again
To claim my place in the family
To heal myself
To be able to do my work of healing of the world