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梅利莎·卢克申科:疫情·思考·创作

来源:中国作家网 | 梅利莎·卢克申科  2020年12月11日16:01

Jingiwalla jimbelung朋友们好!(原住民语)

 我们刚刚经历了我们完全没有预料到的一年,尽管科学家一而再,再而三地告诫我们,破坏自然世界必然会有不堪的后果向我们反扑。几乎没有人预料到新冠大流行,而且我想可以不冒任何风险地说,没人享受恐怖的病毒肆虐。但是我发现自己在寻思我们对于疫情带来的各种动荡的反应,澳大利亚动荡始于今年二月,其他地方要更早一些。

 正常的生活当然离不开混乱和毁坏,但它们成为人类生存惯例的令人恐惧的基础。但是对于混乱和毁坏全无意识的接纳是澳大利亚现代生活的基础。从殖民地诞生起就是如此,后来在很多方面也继续如此。绝大多的原住民坚信,澳大利亚是两个世纪前诞生于残酷行为和种族灭绝,并在对历史的否定中成长至今。对我们原住民来说,澳大利亚是一个将混乱称为"进步"、将毁坏称之为"文明"的社会。

 伟大的欧洲哲学家尼采说,秩序出自混乱。至少我一直相信他是这样说的,直到21世纪的今天,通过使用本世纪带给我们的惊人技术,我才发现,说这话的原来是好莱坞导演梅尔·布鲁克斯,他在《火焰鞍》中自我发挥了尼采的观点!

 尼采在他的小说《扎拉图斯特拉如是说》中写到的,"璀璨星辰始于混沌"。在现代的西方语境中,这听起来很像常识,就好像托尼·罗宾斯研讨会的腔调。没有痛苦,就没有收获那一类的话。但我从一个原住民的角度看,尼采的观点,无论是其自命不凡的语调,还是背后的哲学,都在宣扬欧陆帝国计划中不可无视的暴力。他所说的观点就是混乱对于成功至关重要,甚至有些吸引力。但他的观点传达给我这个原住民作家的是,尼采所生活和成长的普鲁士知识分子之圈本质上是野蛮的,远远没有被文明化。而真正的文明是在人类中、在我们美丽星球上其他生灵之中,不断地、认真地寻求和谐。我们原住民语言称之为“因迪亚马拉“。我一会解释这个词。 我想那句被称为中国咒语的俗语“愿你生活在有趣的时代”应该很适用于当下,混乱虽然“有趣”,但大家都唯恐避之不及。只要对人性有成熟的理解都会如此认为。

 尼采当然是偶像级的,以对抗自己所处的社会的基本特性而闻名。然而,他的哲学思想超越了他的个人生命,强烈说明了原住民持续面对的遭遇。在这片大陆上,数万年以来,原著民享受符合法理的生活,奉行民主治理,没人凌驾于他人之上。我们无比幸福地拥有并管理着地球上最壮丽的土地。正如比尔·伽马格教授描述的,那些郁郁葱葱的水道、壮观的森林和的平原。现代物理学所教的很多内容原住民早就明白,原住民们是杰出的植物学家和园丁,他们懂得尊重养育我们的土壤,土壤是所有生命的基础。

 然后野蛮人带着他们的疾病、枪支和套着枷锁的奴隶,还有对我们原住民的种种谬论,抵达这里。英国殖民者故意用天花感染了斐济海龟岛的原住民, 我们当中很多人相信同样的事情也发生在我们的土地上。自18世纪晚期以来,原住民一直活在欧洲疫病大流行中。从那时起,我们就一直在反思被入侵和受到的剥夺。创造不需要给我们原住民带来混乱。我们早已经在这块土地上创造了第一个人类社会,没有战争,也没有瘟疫。我们创造的人类社会基于观察,基于对我们自然和社会环境的深入、详细、虔诚的认知。我们发明了社会,我们发明了面包和农业。我们发明了民主。所有这些都不需要尼采所宣扬的混乱,需要的只是人类共享的观察、反思和合作能力。我真诚地希望,澳大利亚和整个星球都能够放弃混乱是万物核心这个愚蠢的想法,混乱只能带来更多的混乱。愿我们本着“因迪亚马拉“的精神,重新在我们各族人民之间建设和平。“迪亚马拉”来自原住民威拉德朱里语,意思是在人类和非人类动物中缓慢行事,采用相互尊敬和适度的方式。这个词中隐含的意思是"在一个值得活着的世界里心怀敬意地活着"。

 作为这个地球上的文化长者,也许我们有责任引领更加年轻的、新兴民族重建这一认识。我本想不用多讲,但经过了这一年觉得还是有必要讲一讲。我们欢迎大家加入我们的努力,但请把尼采等人的陈旧、具有破坏力的思想留在他们本该属于的历史中。我们都是智人,就是会思考的猿人,我们能够并且必须知晓的更多,做得更好。

 Bugalbeh , 谢谢!

(翻译:任翔 校对:韩静)

PANDEMIC. REFLECTION. CREATION.

Melissa Lucashenko

Jingiwalla jimbelung – greetings friends!

We’ve just come through a year that we didn’t expect, despite scientists telling us over and over again that we can’t attack the natural world without expecting terrible consequences to whip back at us. Few expected Covid, and I think its safe to say that nobody has enjoyed its terrible ravaging. Yet I find myself wondering about our responses to these great upheavals we’ve seen in Australia since February (earlier elsewhere). Chaos and destruction are part of ordinary life of course, but they make a terrible foundation for a paradigm of human existence. Yet an unconscious embracing of just these things – chaos and destruction – are fundamental to modern Australian life. This is what the Colony looked like at birth, and it continues to look like it in so many ways. Most Aboriginal people believe that modern Australia is a nation born of cruelty and genocide two centuries ago, and fostered in denial in the present. For us, Australia is a society where chaos is labelled ‘progress’ and destruction is named risibly, as ‘civilisation.’

Out of chaos comes order, said the great European philosopher Nietzsche. Or at least I always believed he said that, until I employed the marvellous technology at our disposal in this century and found that it was actual said by the Hollywood Director Mel Brooks in Blazing Saddles, paraphrasing Nietzsche!

What Nietzsche actually wrote in his novel Thus Spake Zarathustra was “one must face chaos to give birth to a star.” In a modern, Western context, this sounds a lot like common sense, if also a little bit like a Tony Robbins seminar. No pain, no gain, and all that. But from my Aboriginal perspective, this idea of Nietzsche’s – both his imperious tone, and the underlying philosophy, speak to the unmissable violence at the heart of the European imperial project. The idea that chaos is essential to success, and even somehow desirable, tells this Aboriginal writer that far from being civilised, the Prussian intellectual world that Nietzsche inhabited and grew out of was fundamentally savage. For what is real civilisation but an ongoing, serious search for harmony among people, and among the other living beings of our beautiful planet? Yindyamarra, we call it. Yindyamarra.

Surely the well-known Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times” can be employed here to show that while chaos may be indeed ‘interesting’ it is to be avoided at all cost. Any mature understanding of humanity will take this as given.

Nietzsche was an iconoclast of course, and famously in revolt against the mores of his own society. Yet his philosophy has outlived him, and speaks strongly to what Aboriginal people continue to face. On this continent, for tens of thousands of years, First People enjoyed lawful lives, and democratic governance where no man was above any other man. We had the tremendous joy of owning and managing the Greatest Estate on Earth, as Professor Bill Gammage termed our lush waterways and spectacular forests and plainlands. We understood much of what modern physics teaches, and we were exceptional botanists and gardeners, who knew above all to value the soil which fed us, and which is the basis of all life.

And the savages arrived, with their disease, their guns, their slaves in chains and their fallacies about what we are. British colonists deliberately infected Native people of Turtle Island with small pox and many of us believe that the same happened here. We have been attempting to live with the ongoing European pandemic since the late 18th century. We have been reflecting upon the invasion and dispossession ever since. Creation did not require this chaos to be visited on us; we had already, free of war and pestilence, created the first human society on earth here. Our creation of human society came from observation, from the intimate, detailed, reverent knowledge of our physical and social environments. We invented society, we invented bread, and agriculture. We invented democracy. None of these things required Nietzsche’s chaos. All they required was the shared human capacity for observation, and reflection, and co-operation. I sincerely hope that Australia, and the planet, can abandon the foolish idea that chaos is central to anything but more chaos. May we build peace among our peoples once again, in the spirit of Yindyamarra = a Wiradjuri term for acting slowly, respectfully and appropriately among other humans and non-human animals. Implied in that term is the concept of “Living respectfully in a world worth living in.”

Perhaps it is our responsibility as the Elder culture of the globe, to lead younger, newer nations in rebuilding this understanding. I can’t believe its necessary to spell it out, but apparently, in the aftermath of the year this has been, it is. We welcome you to join us in our endeavours – but please, leave the old, destructive ideas of Nietzsche and those like him in the past where they belong. We are homo sapiens – the thinking ape, and we can, and must, know better, and do better.

Bugalbeh – thank you.