Songlines

This is nice:

Any location on earth can now be labeled to absurd precision by a pair of coordinates.

Naturally, all this is a matter of convention. Australian aborigines map their land by songlines. Australia, for them, is not a one-to-one correspondence between points in the land and pairs of numbers, the coordinates of those points. Rather, their land is a set of highly twisted, multiply intersecting lines, along each of which runs a specific song. Each song relates a story that happened along that path, usually a myth involving humanized animals, contorted fables full of emotional meaning.

At once, the songlines create a complex tangle, so that a point cannot be just a unique pair of numbers; rather, it matters not only where you are (according to our conception) but also where you came from, and ultimately the whole of your previous an future path. What for us is a single point may for aborigines spawn an infinite variety of identities, because that point may be part of many different intersecting songlines. Unavoidably, this creates a sense of property and ownership that does not fit into our culture. Individuals inherit songlines, not areas of land. One cannot build a GPS that operates in songline space.

- Joao Magueijo, Faster than the Speed of Light, pg. 22


One reason, I think, I find this appealing is that it kinda unifies the two hemispheres of the brain, the left and the right, the logical, analytical, scientific with the intuitive, dreamy, artistic. More precisely, I think it allows the right to participate in what is traditionally, for those of us in the West, a left-hemisphere activity.

Anyway, I’m more than tempted to incorporate a slightly different version of this into my fantasy novel, which at this stage is still only a three-page outline. But I’m really jonesing to sit down and write it, if I can only squeeze out an extra hour a day to do so.