a comfort.

"...There is nothing to do but to warm myself on my own. There is nothing to do but to burn my own body and light the place around me..."

-- Jukichi Yogi

unsleep.

With my ear pressing tight to the feathers in my pillow the blood’s muffled echo sounds like footsteps outside my window crunching methodically in the invisible snow -- the sound of feet slapping sidewalk – I know that’s from a Mt. Eerie song... & that’s what my heartbeat sounds like, as I’m trying to sleep while it runs, runs like a small mammal’s heart, little feet crashing through a forest.

When I was younger I was distrustful of sleep. I suppose many children are... whether due to the possibility of unpleasant dreaming or just the fact that in sleep you go away for awhile, & then return... I used to make myself anxious then, thinking of the East Slavic & Siberian stories about your soul venturing out while you sleep, transforming into a little moth, a little mouse, exploring crevices & canyons in a dark forest (or under the bed), all while one is asleep. That’s always seemed frightening to me – what if they got lost? Went too far didn’t make it back in time for morning? Abandoned you & didn’t come back? Or got eaten by some other prowling night soul? The vulnerability of mice & moths, tiny esoteric creatures... such things made me uneasy because of their fragility, uncertainty... (Maybe if the soul turned into a tiger or a bear, I’d have been less terrified?)

Still, when my heart runs on & on like this, I immediately think of the tiny mouse of the soul, padding quickly, quickly... & how vulnerable it really is.

Sleep is highly mysterious to me, even now. I think I certainly appreciate it much more – I often crave it & relish it with great desperation in times of stress... In the autumn I even get a little jealous of animals that get to be cozy & hibernate. Yet I still worry about certain things... I cannot go to bed if it means leaving some major project unfinished, be it a poem or term paper. I feel too electric, too alive to sleep... & I begin to worry that if I die in my sleep I won’t be able to finish it so I better stay awake & complete it so if I die, at least then it will be done! I would hate to die unfinished. If creating something is like giving birth to it, it would be like my work, my writing dying stillborn... & that’s tragic. (I’m a little illogical during the late hours, so it took me a while to realize that if I would be doomed to die that night, it would probably happen regardless of whether I was asleep in bed or scribbling furiously by the window...)

Sleep seems too close to death sometimes, I guess. A little death, a taste of what it could be like to be not here -- & when dreaming, what it might be like to live a different (though often bizarrely familiar) life. In her new book Decreation, Anne Carson writes some interesting things about sleep. I haven’t quite digested it all yet (which is always necessary for her writing) but I do like her title for the essay: “Every exit is an entrance”. I like what she implies about sleep being both a departure & an arrival at once. Good sleep can indeed be a freedom, a lessening of waking burdens. This is similar to death, & the fact that we do it each night, like a ritual, as a mirror of birth & death is also very profound. I suspect that’s why it frightens me a little at times. When I’m having a panic attack, (& I suppose I’m having a small one right now) I want to cling to being alive as much as I can. Because to my twitchy mind, death & craziness are the greatest threats right now. (‘Craziness’ being a sort of death/rebirth of its own could be something intriguing & frightening to ponder, but not right now, not good to think about now.)

& often I can’t sleep just for too much thinking, as right now. I believe that we like to think that the entire world sleeps as we do – that everything else stops between the hours we are not awake – but it doesn’t. Nothing really stops at all. Humans might sleep, but human machinations (from computer programs to wars) keep on running all night. Even human bodies keep on, of course. Keep on functioning for better or worse. We replenish ourselves in sleep, but we also keep on disintegrating; tumours keep growing & cells keep dying.

My grandmother sleeps nearly all the time now. Sleeps like a cat in her hospital bed, squinting heavy eyes dimming blue when I go to see her. It’s almost like she is getting further away from life, removing herself slowly; she is retreating into sleep as a gateway to leaving life.

I feel horrible waking her sometimes when I visit; she seems more peaceful asleep. Her breathing is less laboured, frantic, frustrated... & it occurs to me that my reaction, to wake her, to keep her awake when I’m there is a sign of my clinging to her, my natural selfishness to want her alive & here with me.

I want so much for her to be happy now. Content & painless. But yet I still want her to talk to me, tell me something... I wake her simply to make sure she’s still here. & it bothers me that I can’t know if her sleep is good, if the dreams wherein she lifts her hands, shaking, grasping the air, are pleasant. Yet, she can’t even talk & tell me when awake, so what am I doing? It’s futile. But it just unnerves me that sleep & death seem to tangle their threads here, merge in a way that becomes too immediate & clear.

& as for me right now I guess sleep’s little mouse feet mirror all too closely these things like vulnerability & helplessness & uncertainty... whether in dying or living, these things I’m feeling all too much in my waking life at this time. So for me it’s all the more difficult to relinquish that little bit of control I still do have in order to rest. What little we can do when we are awake is even less when sleeping. It’s sad to me somehow, though I know that I’m fighting against a lot of futility here. There’s nothing I can do for my grandma, nor for my father, whose cancer treatment keeps him alternately awake & angrily restless, & too exhausted to move.

I’m tired now. I won’t sleep for awhile. But I should stop this non-sense, because it’s 2:30 & though at this hour, I’m entitled to some amount of un-clarity, my words are getting drowsy faster than the rest of me, & thus I should stop.

more toponymy.

On the subject of my last post, I just want to mention that this website-project makes me very, very happy:

GeoNative: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/9479/welcome.html

Not only is it devoted to minority-language toponymy, the entire site is in Euskara (Basque)!

I noticed that they have many names from northern Canada, but are missing most of the prairies... Maybe I should email them with what I've found here.

* Manda -- they have lots on Halq'eméylem -- especially on the Stò:lo River dialect. Just so you know. :)

This site also reminds me that there are so many languages I would like to learn. Too many, perhaps. I need more time! & more space in my brain... it holds three languages fairly well, but if I want to expand the Magyar & Gaidhlig sections... & add at least four more languages, I think it might explode. It already threatens to, sometimes...

I remember once speaking with Bryna about wanting little jump-drives for our brains, so we could save the extra stuff that didn't fit & only upload it when needed. This would be ideal, really.

I am going to blame the Edmonton Public Library & its deliciously expansive music collection for making me want to instantaneously learn Sámi, Suomi, Khalka, & a Chinese language. This week I've been listening to Mari Boine, Angelit & Värttinä, thus wanting to learn the first two languages, as well as throat-singing (Khalka!) & music played on the er-hu (I have a feeling the musician is singing in Mandarin, but I'd rather learn Cantonese, even though the thought of nine tones scares me and intrigues me at once...)

Too many languages! Too deefeecult!

tyranny of toponymy.

At the Edmonton Public Library the other day, I stumbled across a book on Alberta place-names. Toponymy and the naming of the landscape is something I'm very interested in, and I ended up flipping through both volumes in hot pursuit of where the town Sangudo got its name. You see, this puzzles me every time we drive through it on the way to go fishing, because to me it sounds vaguely Portuguese, and I wasn't aware of Portuguese settlements in Alberta... but it turns out that it's an invented word made up of initials of some first (non-Portuguese) settlers to the area. Yes. But I digress, because what I really want to discuss here is the loss of indigenous-language names across this provice.

I have always wanted to know what places were really called here. I wouldn't hesitate to say that most towns and cities have grown up around sites that have been settled for thousands of years by Aboriginal groups. Settlers were drawn to these natural areas via the fur trade or because they were natural places to settle for resources -- by waterways, by natural formations, sheltered places.

And now, so much has been forgotten. Many names have been translated awkwardly by Anglos, or erased and renamed something prosaic and unrelated.

The Sturgeon River is a translation of the Cree names or namao, depending on the dialect; Namao also obviously gets its name from the same source. Smoky Lake is a translation of the same in Cree, kaskapatau sakahigan. Thunder Lake was named for the sound the ice made in the spring when it was breaking up. Sounding Lake is called Nipimahitikwek in Cree or Oghtakway in Blackfoot, because the sounds of buffalo rumbling and racing can be heard emanating from the earth near the waters. Red Deer is Waskasoo in Cree, a name that is still attached to a park on the outskirts of the city. As for prosaic erasures, Whitecourt’s name is really Sakdewah, ‘place where rivers meet’, and the Pembina River’s name is Neepinmenan, which is Cree for ‘summer berry’. Pigeon Lake is really Woodpecker Lake in Cree, and that would be Hmi-hmoo sakahigan. Hmi-hmoo is such lovely onomatopoiea... I filled at least three pages in my notebook of these.

The most glaringly obvious one, of course, though, is Edmonton. This site on the banks of the North Saskatchewan has been a gathering place for many, many years -- graves on the Rossdale Flats can attest to that, if they haven't already been damaged. Why have we relegated its true name to a small downtown park, when this whole area, all the way out to the Astotin and Tawayik lakes at Elk Island, is Amiskwaciy-waskahigan, Beaver Hills House?
'Edmonton' is a district in London, England. How does this make any sense at all, displacing other un-related names when a name already exists, has existed for years and years?

Someone said to me recently in response to this: "But that would be to hard to pronounce!" To that I tried to explain that 'Edmonton' or 'Saint Albert' would pose difficulties as well for a speaker of Cree or Stoney, but they had to learn anyway! They were forced to... I believe that linguistic domination is a form of oppression. (But that's for another essay...)

I know that there are still other names that remain: Okotoks is from okatok, or ‘big rock’ in Blackfoot. Atikameg means ‘whitefish’ in Cree. Wabamun is 'mirror' in Cree (until a stupid train spilled oil in it, it was pretty clear...bah.) Etzikom (a coulee in Southern Alberta) comes from ‘valley’ in Blackfoot, Nakamun is Song of Praise (interestingly, there’s a bible camp there now) and Tawatinaw means a ‘river that divides the hills’. But how many people remember these, know this, understand the history? Who knows that 'Saskatchewan' comes from the Cree for 'fast-moving current'? It saddens me. It would only be respectful for everyone to learn what the names mean. (And for me, personally, it's another sign that I should learn to speak Cree, nêhiyawêwin...)

Now, I'm aware that we certainly we name things 'in commemoration of our history' -- schools and neighbourhoods in Edmonton and St. Albert have Cree names... for example, my elementary school is Keenooshayo, after a Cree chief of the region who signed a treaty at Lesser Slave Lake. On one hand, I think it signifies important recognition of the history of the place -- at least people are doing that! But on the other, it feels strange... I mean, I certainly don't want to speak for anyone who is a descendant of Keenooshayo... but I also wonder about about exploiting names, the ownership of names. Half of the neighbourhoods in Mill Woods have Cree names. Were Cree people in Edmonton consulted in this naming? Do any of these names historically relate to the land Mill Woods sits on? Or were they just labels added later? I want to know. Again, it's nice for municipal government & planners to acknowledge this heritage and history... but it also seems a little... sad. Because of the city really needs to acknowledge the people, now -- the Edmonton Aboriginal population is the second largest in Canada, and the fastest-growing. I really hope the new Edmonton Urban Aboriginal Accord Initiative is all it promises to be. It's encouraging, and I know that a number of the people involved are powerful & inspiring. And maybe if everyone else who lives here could learn & think a little bit more about the land they're living on & the people it was taken from, it would be a start.

* * * * * * * *

A particular area of Alberta that I would like to discover the true names for is Kananaskis. Certainly the region is named after a Cree chief who survived getting whacked on the head with an ax – after this he changed his name to kineahkis, ‘one who is grateful [to be alive]’. Some other indigenous names remain, such as Pekisko (‘small hills’ in Blackfoot), Nihahi (‘rocky’ in Stoney), Wasootch/Wasatch (‘hail’ or ‘beautiful’ in Cree), and Jumpingpound is a translation of the Blackfoot Ninapiskan or Stoney Tokojaptabwapta. There are names of explorers and trappers as well... But it drives me mad that most of the whole Kananaskis and Spray Ranges have the names of royalty, war personalities and battleships. Names of things that have absolutely no connection to this place in the Rocky Mountains.

I want to know what the Stoney names are for Mt. Indefatigable and Mt. Invincible are. I want to know why we refer to the Pétain Glacier not by its Stoney name Itarhye-na-kiska, ‘Go-up-in-the-mountains-country’. I am speaking as someone not of the culture, but I’d know feel a little perturbed if someone put my ancestors’ traditional hunting grounds on the map and named them after a treasonous head of state from WW2 Occupied (Vichy) France. I would also not be impressed by ‘the Royal Group’ over the border in B.C. being called after my oppressors. I want to research the true names, the true stories, what they are called by the Stoney, the Tsuu Tiina, the Siksika, the Cree. I want to know any of them would like to send a little compendium to the provincial government. Just to remind them of this, and let them know that the last time I was out hiking I certainly didn’t trip over any sunken warships stuck in the side of the mountain.

Post-modern theorists would likely contest and deride my desire to want to find the true names of things; but I don’t honestly think a rose by any other name would smell as sweet; I feel there is a tremendous amount of energy vested in names. They carry history and ancestry and certainly a connection to place in so many cultures. So many stories talk about the deities and forces giving names to the things they created, naming the land as they tread upon it; so many deities have spoken or dreamed the world into being... Just because the dominant industrial un-culture of this continent has no spiritual relationship with the land should not means that we can rename, forget. This over-naming is another symptom of disrespect and damage we do to place, to earth.

I just think that names possess a weight that anyone who still believes in the power of language will recognize – they reflect something human, primal, almost magical. And they will always be there, existing however faintly, even under layers of colonialism. Toponymy is also subject to tyranny; the way we have renamed these places is a kind of imperialism, another way of colonizing the land here. To recover these names would be an act of remembrance, resistance, and resilience.

public service announcement.

I just wanted to mention that I just heard the newest song by Cat Power... She will have a new album called "The Greatest" (which is not a greatest hits compilation) out in January, & I am excited.

You can download/hear one of the songs here:

http://www.matadorrecords.com/cat_power/music.html

It's very elegaic & soothing. I like it much. Her music has always been such a comfort to me. So sweet & cryptic & achy & obtuse.

Songs from her album Moonpix, like 'Metal Heart' and 'Colours & the Kids' are the sort that have inscribed themselves in my aural memory. They are the sort of song you think your subconscious self has actually written, or that you wrote in another life that is a but a slightly distorted echo of this one. Every stanza in 'Colours' could refer to a person I know or have known; this often haunts me. The plaintive Amajor/Dmajor chords often play through my head when certain random things remind me of the song -- the ocean at night, rolling up the cuffs of my jeans, the particular long fingers of a friend of mine, driftwood, a smile, pale blue sky, dry april grass beside a hill.

what are these hands, if they cannot touch the things they love? (hannah marcus, 'demerol')

[this is not finished by any means, but it's something]











a)

three times this week
she has repeated to me
this same
story.

it’s how are you, baba?
& then it is soon clear she is not
here but living in this
reminiscence, speaking of
her mother, dead forty years:

my mother! one summer,
you know, she rented out
our garden house, the one
under the linden with the
shiny tin roof where the
purple asters grew –

& you know, she saved enough money
to buy a dress in kalush,
a long white sarafan’ka
vyshyvanka

a dress
with burgundy-gold stitches
the colour of the babyne lito, that’s
the grandmother’s indian summer

& then she flutters her quaky hands,
moves them like the billows
of white linen, showing me
her mother crossing a sunlit yard,
under a blue sky as spacious
as the
heart –

b)

we’re driving down the highway
& out the window & i notice
the wheat looks sad this year, golden
but bowing under october frost,
grazing the last warmth of the earth –
& then she says, so plaintive:

i’m tired

& i miss my mother

my mother in the front
opens her mouth,
startled, wanting to reassure her

no you have ten more years left
at least you’re not tired you’re fine
just fine – she’s the frightened daughter,
a meadowlark rising startled from
the field

but baba turns to her & says
no,
not much longer. winter will be cold
this year. ash berries pull heavy on the trees.

then: i can
feel it –

c)

in the hospital
we visit her drowsy bedside.
her blue eyes stare at us
like tears in a body
already dissolving into the air –

i think she knows us, for
she tries to speak to us
words guttural & trapped
like clots in her mind,
lips bruised purple from her
fall –

i grasp her fingers cold
branches reaching to twine
around mine

& i’m going to cry
so i try to make her laugh,
no singing today, babusja,
not til you’re better?

& she smiles as her head
turns, we kiss her brows as
she drifts to the white snow
of the pillow –

& i cry then, when i turn
to go & see
her sleeping hands suddenly
stretching upwards

her arthritic
limbs trembling like a child’s
little fingers reaching
up

to tug on the trailing embroidery
of her mother’s
skirt –

-- november 14, 2005

some history.

My great-grandfather, Vasyl Myhovych, was conscripted to fight in the First World War. He was a peasant from the province of Halychyna, the backwoods of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and thus, he was considered expendable. Living in Nebyliv, he was so far removed from Sarajevo & the assassination of the Archduke, the rest of Europe, he was probably not even initially told why he was fighting. (Sounds familiar, yes?)

It was 1915, & the middle of February. A battle was being fought close to Vasyl’s hometown. Many of the villagers from Nebyliv and Perehin’ske had to hide in the woods & along the Lymnytsia valley. My great-grandmother Anastasya gave birth to my grandmother one night, alone & concealed in an old cow-shelter on the frozen riverbank while her husband fought some miles away. A week after my baba Anna was born, Anastasya was told of her husband’s death. One night, heading off the field after a battle, he had picked up what he believed to be his flashlight; it was really a disguised grenade, planted insidiously by the other side, to lure unwary soldiers in the dark. He died in a million pieces.

What has really changed, now? Whenever I remember my great-grandfather, I can’t help but think of Iraq. The peasants are still sent to fight in distant wars by leaders of empires who see them as disposable, dispensable. They don’t need to be told why they’re fighting, of course not! Just send them off to the desert & maybe they’ll come back alive. Maybe their children will have mothers or fathers, maybe not. Say what you will about the rhetoric & manipulative tactics of Michael Moore, but I appreciate how his films have highlighted the ways in which governments exploit the lower classes to carry out their delusions, their violent & selfish agendas. So many people turn to military service because what it (falsely) ‘promises’ them. Money while they serve, & maybe other things like education & such. If they survive the degradation & depersonalization of basic training. If they survive combat. If they survive their post-traumatic-stress syndrome. If if if.

In 1919, Anna Akhmatova wrote:

Why is our century worse than any other?
Is it that in the stupor of fear and grief
It has plunged its fingers in the blackest ulcer,
Yet cannot bring relief?

Westward the sun is dropping,
And the roofs of towns are shining in its light.
Already death is chalking doors with crosses
And calling the ravens and the ravens are in flight.

She may have well been writing this now, really. So many things that are happening are rooted in a ‘stupor of fear & grief’. It deeply, profoundly disturbs me how people forget, repeat – with history as an endless Sisyphus pushing the rock up the mountain & then letting the force of hypocritical politicians nudge it down the other side in their aggression, jealousy, greed, ignorance.

But I really don’t like asking the rhetorical question about why people are stupid, why they can’t change, why they can’t just make better choices & refuse to succumb to hypocrisy... I really don’t.

War can change people. My grandpa, my baba Anna’s husband returned from his conscription in the Second World War even more committed to his pacifism, a messy dove tattoo inked on his arm. He brought booklets & literature about the Holocaust, he taught my mother & her brothers about what happened, about what he had seen & heard after camps were liberated. & then he went back to his garden, & tried to make everything grow.

And I like to think of Anna as well. She never fought, but she endured so much as a result of war & revolution. As an infant she survived the typhus outbreak, because of the blood flowing in the water from the battles; she lived through the beginning of the collectivization, the Holodumor in Ukraine, the Depression, the Second World War, the death of her husband, so many deaths. & she has always been the toughest & the kindest person I have ever known; the most generous, most devout, most peaceful. She has always acted with such quiet, affirmative conviction. & she was born as her father passed on, born while the fire was flying, a little miracle.

Go here:

http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/twominutesofsilence/

poety ne maiut' stati.

I was reading a sort of silly little article in the kitchen sink magazine which was speculating which musician's lyrics particular poets might want to inscribe on their jeans. it was all catalysed, you see, by the fact that Bono of U2 has a clothing line, now, & there are lines by Rilke on the inside of the pocket in the jeans. Which is rather pretentious, I think... but the article amused me in that it decided Walt Whitman might like Rufus Wainwright's words in/on his pants, & I agree with that.

So then I was thinking that if I had to put lyrics in my pocket, I would probably inscribe Ani Di Franco. Likely some phrases from Joyful Girl (I do it for the joy it brings / because I am a joyful girl / the world owes me nothing / we owe eachother the world) or Welcome to: (At least you don't have to play along...)

& as for a poem in my pocket, I think the most powerful & the most apt to have scrawled on the inseam or along the waistband would be Halya Kruk's poety ne maiut' stati.

This is one of my most favourite poems; I have it memorized in Ukrainian. 'Poets have no gender' has so many luscious & powerful phrases, like hermafrodyty samotnosti ('hermaphrodites of solitude') and the most delicious of all, linyvu levytsiu u zalamanij trajektoriji pol'otu... ('lazy lioness in the broken trajectory of flight' is a nice translation, but doesn't quite have the same fluidity...)

& perhaps most importantly, it speaks to the way I am increasingly feeling... a girl-shaped person who is feeling more & more asexual in that she is a Person who is more of a medium for idea & spirit & creation than physical body attracted to other physical bodies, which of course are all playing roles, even as they try to shake them off ('the hula-hoops of bodily identification'). & I relate to the paradox of this poem -- as Kruk is trying to write as a Person, she is undeniably a woman, challenging her own experience. Even as we try to transcend gender, it follows us. I believe our identities are fluid, not fixed, but we can't shed these structures completely. We will always have our past & our memory of what we were, & how the outside gaze sees us.

Hemingway in the poem is trapped by his uber-masculinity, he can't transcend it. The other half of the binary (the female lioness) destroys him. But really, he wanted that. He was caught in that hunt, that power struggle, & maybe he wanted that. Obviously lot of people find that tension romantic. But Kruk suggests that we can transcend the binaries of gender, & become clearer. Our voices will clarify, if we can stop 'shouting from between the legs'. The poet, the poetic voice is beyond that. & that clarity is what I aspire to.

My writing is shaped by my experiences as (idenitfying as) a girl-shaped person in this society, they always will be. I want to speak of that experience. But I strongly recognize in myself the poetic genderlessness of the spirit my words filter through.

This is my own translation of Kruk's poem. There is another version too, that you can read (alongside the Ukrainian original), by Olena Jennings, here: http://ukraine.poetryinternational.org/ They're very similar. The last stanza is what I would put on my jeans...

poets have no gender – halyna kruk (2004)

poets have no gender
only faint words embossed upon the flesh
like secondary sex characteristics,
a many-yeared growth of impressions
that never seem fully expressed –
shave it off, or leave it for its charm?

bearded Hemingway hunts down his death –
a lazy lioness in the broken trajectory of flight
she pounces on him swift and heavy,
like a tropical downpour after a long drought,
how many years has he waited for her,
thirsting, hidden,
feeding mosquitoes of routine with his own blood?!

after all, who must wait for whom
in this unwritten codex of existence,
who is hunting whom?

poets have no gender
hermaphrodites of solitude
incomprehensibly desiring the other Other,
giving torturous birth only to themselves,
which is repeated
the repetition of a repetition

the repetition of a repetition –
how can one escape from the hula-hoops of bodily significance?

reconciling these differences within the self
smoothing the genitalia –
all with go smoothly, Hemingway,
without any snags;
the last boundaries of self-identification are crossed,
Gordian knots of mutual obligation are hewn,
Sisyphus’s stone of life is pushed from the summit –

genius has no gender
only a throat raw from shouting
between the legs

from a long poem i am writing...

want to see your heart-
beat? she asks.

wet leaves, slick as tongues
lapping a whisper
on the pavement, black
soak of the rain
singing, my footsteps
a pulse in my ears.

look,
under the cardiac trees
she points to a mountain
ash

spreading out
like arteries from an
upside-down atria,

branching out into
bunches of red blood-clots,

exploding berries
falling up into the autumn
sky...

-jenanne f. (november 2005)

all hallow's eve mascots

On the upper step is my vampire-pumpkin, Yuri; on the lower step is my experiment in carving stars... my constellation pumpkin, seen up top, shows Ursa Major, two tail-stars of Draco, and Polaris... but the picture isn't that good...

shadows of forgotten ancestors

This is one of my pumpkins. He is a vampire (see his teeth!) & he is called Yuriy, a.k.a George.

I like Halloween. I used to enjoy dressing-up & running amok in the neighbourhood, devouring candy for a month afterward. I always liked to think of how my ancestors in Scotland likely put on similar extravagant disguises so as not to be bothered by restless spirits roaming about, & ate soul-cakes, leaving some on a plate for the departed. They prayed for them, prayed for their rest in the afterlife. This was their new year, & the coming of winter; there is so much liminality – the idea of being between seasons, between dimensions... The attention to the seasonal change is paralleled in the focus on continuity of the dead within the living; so now I always think of my own ancestors, I light candles for them, I leave them apples & pomegranates under a tree.

There is nothing evil about Halloween, nor the Celtic Samhain (sa-wen). The Christian-fundamentalist propaganda that has plagued it disturbs me; but that’s really nothing new. Something that I find more disturbing (much like the commercialization of Christmas/Solstice) is how Halloween here seems to becoming more & more gore-fied.

This gore-ification lies in the way that Halloween has become such an inane festival of horror, of ghoulish fascination with dysfunction & violence. I was trying to look for the weather on the television on the 31st & came across a horror film on nearly every channel. It annoyed me, because Halloween has nothing to do with blood & guts, really --other than I suppose blood & guts are part of corporeal existence, which cease to flow & function in the dead, etc.

Halloween is really not about demons, Frankenstein, brain-eating zombies, alien creatures, psychopaths, telepathic misfits, nor serial killers. It’s not even about Dracula. Well, perhaps vampires, in that they are very agitated, un-peaceful, & dead... (But I’ve heard that wampyry prefer to haunt the crossroads on St. George’s Day & the eve of St. Andrew, not on Halloween.)

Some folklorists have written extensively about how our modern Halloween fulfills the psychological purpose of allowing us to face, & even embrace what frightens us. But are most people really scared of aliens & masked psychopaths? Maybe in the sense that they represent the unknown & the misunderstood & the unpredictable... but generally symbolic value is low in those films. I have a feeling that most people in North America, indoctrinated with ‘Western’ philosophy are actually more afraid of death. Not theatrical improbable death in the claws of zombies or vengeful psychic girls, but our own inevitable deaths, whether by old age, cancer or car accident. I really think such things represent our fear more than do murderous clowns. Just the fact that one day we’ll be ‘here’ & then 'not here' -- on the other side of the barrier, a ‘somewhere’ that we know nothing of... But instead (in typical North American fashion) we create an unreal ‘horror’ of the cheap, gory, b-movie sort to drown in, when perhaps we would all spiritually benefit from examining that real fear of death.

Halloween morning before work I watched the Ukrainian film Tini Zabutykh Predkiv (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors)... It is a film that deals with death, but it represents it in a realistic way, in that it presents as natural, cyclic, and potentially transformative. Some of the deaths in the film are tragic, & sudden -- they are haunting because they are possible, & real, & difficult for the characters to escape.

There is a scene that has become part of my photographic memory; near the end of the film, the spirit of Marichka is luring Ivan into the woods. He follows her through the labyrythine pine trees, dizzy in the snow, and her face has the sheen of dull blue ice. She is reaching toward him, closer and closer, and when her anemic little fingers touch him, the screen goes black. Then, three shots flash by in quick succession -- three view of curling, twisting, red-willow branches against a grey sky, fleshy as arteries full of blood, & then darkness again. The next scene shows Ivan being prepared for burial.

This transition, with the branches, is so striking to me... I have often associated trees with both the circulatory & pulmonary systems of the body in my writing... last week I noticed when walking home in the dark that the mountain ash tree on my front lawn, heavy with berries, appeared as a large upside-down heart... spreading branches like arteries arising from the atria, exploding red fruits like clots bursting into the sky.

As well, this scene in the film subtly symbolizes how in death we dissolve into the environment -- our bodies physically decay, maybe a tree sprouts from the dust of bones, & our spirit too, our energy, becomes released again into nature... According to Ukrainian traditional beliefs, the ancestors dwell within the land, & they are responsible for all new life -- the birth of children, & also the growing of new crops, plants, etc. They are the shadow of all life on earth, always present, watching over us.

Earlier in the film, Marichka appears as a little fawn after her death, grazing around the birch cross at her gravesite. Ivan cannot recover after her death, & the scene of her in the woods, calling to him represents him wasting away, dying, & reuniting with her. Then they are both part of the earth, together. They become the shadows -- as the ancestors they ensure life continues, in the little children pressing their faces to the window of the funerary hut in the last scene.

The other theme of the film (& Mykhajlo Kotsjubyns'kyj's novella) that resonates with me is artistic inspiration. Maybe it's less overt in the film, but in the written work we get a very strong sense of how the characters relate to the world around them, how it inspires them. Marichka is a poet, composing & singing songs, Ivan is a little mystic, able to see & feel the spirits in the world around him. In death, they cross the barrier between themselves & the land that inspires them, they themselves become part of the earth's regenerative & creative force. They become shadows, they also inspire the legend that is the book & the film... Kotsjubyns'kyj wrote the story based on the stories & songs he heard about Ivan & Marichka while visiting Hutsul villages in the eastern Carpathians.

This film is so important to me because it resonates with how I feel connected to the world & to my own ancestors/ancestry. I highly recommend watching it, but I recognize it could be confusing, what with poor subtitling & a lot of folkloric references... Marco Carynnyk's translation of the novella is the the Rutherford library & also includes a translation of one of Kotsjubyns'ky's ethnographic essays on the Hutsuls, which is rather useful.