1. By now it should be perfectly clear for my reader that Dream Voyager (a title alluding to the nighttime journey of the dream-soul of Hau Maka) must, in order to live up to its ambitious subtitle 'an outline dictionary of Rongorongo signs', contain far more than an enumeration of the basic glyph types together with their probable meanings. Hopefully the old ones (korohua) who a century ago lived together at the leper station and who spent their time discussing the old traditions and composing Manuscript E can help us to bridge the vast gap in thought from the rongorongo texts to our modern western minds. We have already learnt from them that the 'logic of contrasts' can disturb the normal order of time - the kuhane saw Rangi Meamea long before she got there. This fact should make us once again consider our primary text example:
Is not hipu in Eb7-2 another such contrast, from a wet underwater situation in Eb7-1 to the old calabash with water inside (instead of on the outside)? Eb7-1 is a day of Mercury and so is Eb7-8, where a toa (a sign of dryness) has the central important position. By thinking in terms of contrasts we presumably should look ahead in order to find the proper place for the 2nd in a pair of contrasting glyphs. Similarly the abrupt jump from Eb7-14 to Eb7-15 does not necessarily imply that the normal order of events is disrupted, it could instead be 'a way of speech' in order to make the developments in the slow flow of time more distinct. Also our modern novels or films use techniques of presenting later events earlier than according to the flow of time. |
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