horsemouth has discovered the major problem with the headhunting project - old skulls, lurking in the rafters, the warriors who killed them and so derived the magic power for the tribe are long dead but the skulls are still in the house needing to be placated, they aer the nuclear waste of the headhunting business. this is a bad deal for subsequent generations of headhunters - how do they solve this? - they move. they build a new house elsewhere (without mentioning it in the old house) and then one day they light a large fire and leave. after a few days the fire goes out and the skulls notice they are cold 'where have all the humans gone?' they ask,'and the roof has fallen in', 'let's look for them' ... but the rain has obliterated their tracks. how did headhunting start? a frog advised the warparty wang kok kok. takak batok - the last part of which means cut the neck.
horsemouth is a very dense creature (in the south wales meaning of the term - meaning stupid) he had not associated his reading of alfred c. haddon's head hunters: black, white and brown with his watching (last night) of bring me the head of alfredo garcia ) surely a guide to the many practical problems facing headhunters. he's still digesting. part of the pleasure of haddon's book derives from the fact that the european anthropologists were going around measuring everybodies heads with calipers (the better to determine their intelligence), conversely there were also ghost headhunters - come to collect heads to form the foundations of government infrastructure projects. a similar idea (that it is good to build on skulls) can be found in the discussion of london bridge is falling down by the opies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iona_and_Peter_Opie).
horsemouth is reminded of the scene in murnau's tabu when there is a montage shot of money being paid and bills for debts being presented with the word 'tabu' superimposed over them - it is money's undecideable character (good as money bad as debt) that enables this. these notions of tabu and fetish enter, his use of virgil's aura sacri fames - 'the accursed thrist for gold' translates only one side of this division.
No comments:
Post a Comment