In the Beginning Was the Yarn

Talking Love Magic and Ceremony with Tyson Yunkaporta

In the beginning was the yarn · The Norns as depicted in John Melhuish Strudwick’s ‘A Golden Thread’ (1885)

The first time I had a call with Tyson Yunkaporta, he gave me homework. “You haven’t watched Game of Thrones?! Bruv, you need to know your own culture!”

So for a couple of years, whenever Anna was away or I was stuck in a hotel room somewhere on tour, I’d watch my way through another few episodes. In February, before starting a digital fast, my last hurrah was to binge the final season. I got to the end and saw what Tyson meant when he said he was the only person who thought they got it right. (Apart from sending Arya Stark off to colonise whatever’s west of Westeros.)

So then, a few weeks back, a one-line mail lands in my inbox. “Someone said we should have a yarn.”

At the start of his new book, Right Story, Wrong Story, Tyson writes: “In my community, yarning is like conversation, but with the futile and passive-aggressive parts removed.” Twice within a few weeks last autumn – first talking with Victoria Loorz of Wild Church, then reading Andrew Shanks’s Hegel vs “Inter-faith Relations” – I met the suggestion that the Logos in the poem at the start of John’s gospel would be better translated as “conversation” than “Word”. In the beginning was the conversation. Then my pal Jamie Moran sent me a recording of an Orthodox theologian talking with two Australian First Nations pastors, and I heard Uncle Ray Minniecon reword that line once more: In the beginning was the story. After chewing on this a while, I heard myself say: In the beginning was the yarn. Because, where I come from, a yarn is a winding story; a story that’s based in truth, but where the details are drawn out to make for a better telling. (“Much of what follows did happen,” notes Alan Garner at the start of Strandloper, “but I have been free with historical detail, in order to make clear the pattern.”) And if I ever did have to lay out some kind of theology – which, thank God, is not my line of business – then I might start from there: In the beginning was the yarn.

Well, this particular yarn turned out to be joyfully tangled. First, I didn’t actually know we were due to do a podcast recording, so I was just showing up for a conversation. And it seems Tyson had forgotten the whole thing until his calendar reminder pinged, so there was some family chaos and he was getting divebombed by his kids at various points. I start off reminding him about the call three years ago, when Felix Marquardt brought us together, where both Felix and I came away remembering something Tyson had said, almost under his breath, “Are you guys getting sick of all that stuff yet?” The next morning, I was listening to one of my fellow white Europeans talk with great sincerity about going off into nature to listen for a message from the Earth, and I thought, I’m surprised the messages people come back with don’t sound more like a grumpy Aboriginal guy muttering, “Are you guys getting sick of all that stuff yet?”

Pretty soon, we end up talking about how Anna and I met, why Tyson can’t come to the Viking end of the planet (“I’ll be like married in in ten minutes and you’ll never see me again!”) and how reality goes weird around falling in love, the way it does around birth and death and ceremony. So that’s what it became, a yarn about Love Magic and Ceremony with plenty of chaos thrown in along the way.

Enjoy listening!