I was going to write a friend a letter. It would have started like this: Dear F., You won’t read this, but I remembered the other day talking about the case of bullroarers in the Pitt Rivers: the oddness of a musical instrument you can only play set away from the body, can hardly control the pitch of, subject to the volume and force of wind at that moment, heaving air through or around a hollow body that sounds like a cycling guttural scream. I don’t think you were that interested: we always, it seemed, talked if not at cross-purposes then at oblique angles to each other, trusting—maybe wrongly, who knows—that what we had to say would intersect somewhere. But I had some vague knowledge about the ritual meaning of bullroarers in the numerous and widely separated cultures that used them: their frequent association with burial and the spirit world, embodying the voices of ancestors or the dead; the Dogon (I learned years later) used bullroarers as part of funeral rites, in connection with the ancestor from whom their people are all descended.
Shadows on the sun
Shadows on the sun
Shadows on the sun
I was going to write a friend a letter. It would have started like this: Dear F., You won’t read this, but I remembered the other day talking about the case of bullroarers in the Pitt Rivers: the oddness of a musical instrument you can only play set away from the body, can hardly control the pitch of, subject to the volume and force of wind at that moment, heaving air through or around a hollow body that sounds like a cycling guttural scream. I don’t think you were that interested: we always, it seemed, talked if not at cross-purposes then at oblique angles to each other, trusting—maybe wrongly, who knows—that what we had to say would intersect somewhere. But I had some vague knowledge about the ritual meaning of bullroarers in the numerous and widely separated cultures that used them: their frequent association with burial and the spirit world, embodying the voices of ancestors or the dead; the Dogon (I learned years later) used bullroarers as part of funeral rites, in connection with the ancestor from whom their people are all descended.