Wednesday, August 30, 2006

mishanyni...


{listen bun-nehs this time!}

I took the ecological footprint test again to see if my new living situation has improved it any, and happily, it has decreased from a footprint score of 4 to 3, and the usage of 2.2 planets to 1.7 planets.

CATEGORY GLOBAL HECTARES
FOOD 1.1
MOBILITY 0
SHELTER 1.1
GOODS/SERVICES 0.8
TOTAL FOOTPRINT 3



IN COMPARISON, THE AVERAGE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT IN YOUR COUNTRY IS 8.8 GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON.

WORLDWIDE, THERE EXIST 1.8 BIOLOGICALLY PRODUCTIVE GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON.


IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 1.7 PLANETS.


***

In other news, I am pleased to report that I did read some of poetry aloud last night at the Blood Ink gathering, even though a large portion of the crowd were definitely behaving (& writing) like hipsters and beatniks (which I am now calling 'hipniks'). But I read Her Mother's Dress and Rusalka, and did not cry, or die, or twitch too much. My voice did not sound too bad either, no helium-mice. My poems liked escaping into the space of the room... & people did clap. It was good practice. I think I might just do it again sometime.

It was certainly an anthropological experience, listening to the others.. I did very much enjoy one boy's story called On Liberation Avenue, which can be found in this issue of their zine; he had a very pleasant, pensive reading voice. & another girl had sweet little poems, little morsels of good. Another girl sang a poem to her broken-old guitar, a capella with a voice like Serena Ryder.

But then there was a lot of that grandiose stuff. the 'i-am-a-tortured-dramatic-soul-who-is-smoking-and-drinking-angsting-&-sexing-too-much' stuff. Only one boy actually bothered me though -- he was just so misogynist. & even his poem about loving a typeface (helvetica!) objectified women. Also, his symbolic misappropriation of red kozak boots annoyed me. Bah!

(Bryna & I were talking about how so many love poems always have pronoun reference -- gendering the subject & object -- and how we like much better the ones that address 'you' & it becomes universalized, and the sentiments & images are then more important than the actors. They can then be any gender.)

But I digress. What else -- there was a man who sounded like he narrated 1970's filmstrip natural history documentaries, I think -- he had such a voice-over voice, where he should be saying something ''And there, among harsh wasteland of the forsaken tundra, a crocus struggles to be reborn anew into the kingdom of spring.'' You know the sort. An older woman writing very very clichéd erotica as if to prove that 'old ladies can say fuck, too!' & then the most confounding performance by a girl who was jumping around & acting like a floofy comedienne who began to rap about Fort Edmonton Park. I can honestly say I've never seen anything like it. It was all quite surreal.

* * *

That is all, I think. Oh -- this is quite an interesting article, about what we remember, how personal memory and public memory can be two quite separate things, and how severe the changes in one's life must be for a public event to imprint itself personally. (e.g. civil war for many years, like in Bosnia) The professor discusses how 9-11 (despite the media hype, the constant references to it) doesn't seem to have had that effect, even in New York City.

Perhaps this tendency to focus on the mundane personal details is a survival mechanism, that we choose not to remember certain historial happenings with the same detail because of what a burden those memories would be. When terrible things happen & don't drag on (the way a war would) we try to move on as quickly as possible. I wish the author would have examined more about the idea of memories (or lack there of) as psychological survival, talked about PTSD, etc. as well as how some memories we hold to for inspiration. To keep us going, not just as markers in time.

Sunday, August 27, 2006

hoodoos


{hoodoos watching the Bow -- a picture taken by Bryna}

Also -- I have updated flickr with some photos from Banff. So if you would like to see more photos of hoodoos taken by Bryna & I, do take a look here. It was a hazy-blue afternoon, & the rocks were so warm & full of presence, watching the Bow. According to the Siksika, the hoodoos are slightly malignant spirits (changed to stone as punishment) that move about at night to throw boulders at passing humans. However I feel that this little congregation is quite benign. One even appears to be sitting & meditating, contemplating the river like Siddhartha.

(We even found a secret document under a rock, entitled 'The Mystic Powers of the Hoodoos'. It appeared to be a script written by ESL students, & was quite amusing.)

I recently learned how to say the original names for the Banff area:

nato-oh-siskoom = holy springs in Siksika (Blackfoot) this one is my favourite, i think.

minihapa = Nakota (Stoney) for waterfall place

nipika-pakitik = Cree, named after the falls on Cascade Mountain

tsa-nidzá = T'suu T'ina for in the mountains







bright copper kettles & warm woolen mittens!


{lovely tree in belgravia park}

I have never really made this sort of list before in my blog, so here are link to a few of my (current) favourite web-based things:

Becoming an anthropologist
is a blog by a Finnish anthropology PhD student studying in Chicago & conduction fieldwork in Brazil. The main focus of her study is candomble; read here an interesting post on the ethics of interviewing spirits.

I also enjoy the Language Log, a blog by linguists at U Penn. Their posts are full of comments on neologisms, language use in popular culture, serious reporting on new theories, as well as stupid linguist jokes like this one. The bloggers Liberman and Pullum also have a collection of blog entries compiled for non-web reading pleasure.

Cat and Girl is a webcomic that I find quite amusing, especially this particular strip. It is always making clever references to post-structural & post-modernist theory, pop culture, and politics, whilst always being quite silly & full of wordplay. It also makes fun of both 'hipsters' & beatniks, & so I appreciate it that much more. As Girl once said, "A beatnik is just a misogynist with a typewriter." HA.

Speaking of beatniks & hipsters, I am hoping to read some of my poetry at this gathering, the Blood Ink Summer Benefit Show & Open Mic -- providing the audience is not full of hipsters & beatniks. Because they sort of scare me. But either way, if you would like to hear poetry from U of A creative writing students & perhaps others who will take advantage of the open-mic, it's at 7:30 on August 30th at Hulbert's, which is just down my street. It has potential, I think. I really do want to start allowing my poetry to take on its oral/aural form -- over the years I am seeing how acutely attuned I have become to the sound of words in my writing & how phonology is playing an increasing part in my poems. In my more confident moments, I am also attracted to the idea of a captive audience. Because it seems paper (or screen) just can make people read sometimes... perhaps I can make them listen.

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

a gallery of sorts


{my notebook & lantern}

Some of my photos have taken up residence on flickr... they do like visitors. Some of the current inhabitants of the page are photos from this summer... from adventures in Kananaskis and on Windfall creek -- of little fawns, & mountain dusks, & swallows over the Athabasca river. others are rather antique polaroids I want to preserve, like pictures of my Baba, dancing. In one it's Christmas Eve in 1968 & she's dancing in the living room, in another, she's my age, curtsying in a field.

Saturday, August 19, 2006

Bili Kvitky, Part 2


{seven o'clock, wandering around the block}

Here is the second part of the story 'White Flowers' by Ukrainian author/poet /cinematographer/actor Mykola Vinhranovskyj, which I have translated. The first part is in the previous entry.

Somehow this story is exactly, precisely August to me, and also perfectly encapsulates and expresses this strange nostalgic sadness I have been feeling.

*

“Can you see me?”

“Yes, I can see you. You are so pale.”

“You cold?”

“No. You?”

“In the morning I have a flight to catch.”

“What? Really?”

“In the morning.”

“Since I’ve been with you, I’ve never been able to understand when you’re joking and when you’re being serious.”

“Where are your eyes? Aren’t you ashamed to talk like this?”

“It wasn’t enough...”

“Don’t talk about it.”

“Put your arms around me...”

*

The row of carts stretched to the river. On the last wagon, on the sacks, a girl stood in a blue-flecked dress of white linen. Behind her, the sun was setting, but it looked as if it were rising.


“Boys, take me for a ride!”

We were already in the boat, I was sitting with the oars on the yellowish water, where the sun was setting as if it were rising.


Pavlo called:

“And where is your old man?”

“Which one?”

“Yours!”

“Dad? Over near the mill.”

“Then come here, we’ll take you.”

I turned the boat to the bank, and gave her my hand. Something flashed, blinding us with a deadly-violet light that illuminated our faces. One of the wires between the poles over the river had dipped into the water.

“It split! The poor devils! It couldn’t have been insulated properly. And that’s all...” mumbled Dmytro, holding onto the girl with his grey stare.

“Don’t rock the boat, don’t rock it!”

“Come off it! Don’t be afraid, or we’ll take you back.”

“Then you better toss me. Row to the bank!” She gazed back at me. “I can’t swim.”

“I can’t swim either, so what?”

“What, you can’t?”

“I can’t. I’m afraid of water.”

“In our village, there is no stream, no pond. Actually, there was once a stream, but they started to drain the bank below the cabbages, it died away. It disappeared somewhere. Now there is neither stream nor cabbages.”

“Poor devils!”

“And where are you from?” Pavlo was pouring himself some horilka[1].

“You know Three-oaks? It’s three kilometres from there.”

“Yes, we know it. Hold on, Vasyl!”

“Pavlo, maybe you should’ve first offered something to our lady? What’s your name?”

“Nastya. But, nothing for me. You go ahead, drink.” She took a glass from Pavlo and passed it to me at the oars.

“Cheers, Nastya.”

“To your health. You want a cucumber, or an onion?”

“Cucumber.”

The girl rinsed a cucumber, and I took a bite from her hand. She salted it, and I took another bite, and another from her hands.

“We had tons of cherries this year, a whole bogful!” But her mention of the cherries was in vain: I didn’t ask for a second cucumber, and she quieted. Only she couldn’t keep her hand still – she placed it on her knee, then on the edge of the boat, and finally dipped it in the water. The sun was setting near her hand, in the amber water.


I said: “Let’s stop near the island, and sit and play some cards.”

“Row on!”

“Do you play, Nastya?”

“Cards? I do. In pairs, or alone. Perhaps, another cucumber?”

“Sure.”

She picked out the largest cucumber, and I took a bite from her golden, dripping hand. Water dripped from her elbow onto my bare foot. Nastya lifted her elbow and droplets fell onto the barrel of the rifle.

“What’s this, your gun?”

“A gun.”

“Last winter the rabbits nibbled ten hectares of apple trees.”

“And you lost the orchard?”

“It was totalled. Maybe a hundred trees survived.”

“Poor devils! Couldn’t wrap up the trees.”

“There wasn’t time. The head of the kolhos[2] was changing.” Nastya laughed. Her dark blue teeth shone delicately in the evening sun.


*

“You aren’t tired yet?”

“No. I must always have you near me. Before, I used to think that I simply couldn’t stand you in large doses. Now, when you weren’t here, I was quietly going crazy.”

“My love, you’ve always been so serious.”

“But not so much that we can’t joke about it, now.”

“True.”

“Do you remember him?”

“Who?”

“Well, the one, as they say, you ‘won me’ from?”

“No. Absolutely not. Not one thing.”

“I trust you in everything. I just don’t know if I can separate lies from truth. I’m afraid –

that I want to believe you, but on the other hand, he was a filthy liar, the one whose face you don’t remember, so now I can’t believe that everything’s good. Or really, I can, but I don’t want to, you know?”

“I understand.”

“And above all, know this. I don’t want to be confused, and I don’t want to believe you for the sake of it being easier and more peaceful. So you mustn’t lie to me, understand?”

“You know me! If I don’t tell lies, I’m not myself. That’s the first thing. The second thing is, lying is easier than speaking the truth. So I’m lying to you. Listen: I have to take a trip.

This time, it’s going to be long, and far. We won’t see each other for a year.”

“A year?”

“A year.”

“And where will you find yourself, my poor thing?”

“Working, dear one, working.”

“You’re leaving me.”

“Today we’ve got summer. So there’s autumn, winter, spring...”

“When we met, I decided to be for you a wife ‘with whom you’d have no trouble’. But you see, I’m neither a wife ‘whom he love’, nor ‘with whom he’s married’, or even a woman ‘with whom he is living.”

“You decided well.”

“I didn’t want you to have to make excuses for yourself, to throw yourself into love, more than you actually were. I wanted that you be with me as you are with yourself – more yourself, even, than you are alone.”

“When we met, I decided to win you away from the one whose face I don’t remember. I remember only you. I was intrigued: Would I win you, or not? The first evening I didn’t succeed, but the second evening I got you.”

“No, love. For me, it was the first evening. Certainly, you fall in love easily, and you can love every time like it’s the first, it’s this I understood that evening and night.”

“Yes, that’s it. What’s this you understood?”

“All the time we’ve had together, from that first evening and night right up until today, I’ve had this feeling that you’re checking on me, and that you don’t love me. You observe me. Often enough, I feel like a rabbit. So, I haven’t become a wife ‘with whom you’d have no trouble’. You see how...”

“I see. And it’s probably true.”

“Don’t run away. Be blunt with me.”

“Maybe, that’s enough about feelings?”

“It’s like you’ve slapped my face.”

“Not bad. Haven’t we got anything to eat? I’m so famished, I’m seeing stars. What have you got there?”

“Macaroni.”

“Well, there’s a meal, God help her. Still, pass it over here.”

“There’s also some of yesterday’s borshch.”

“I don’t want your borshch. You don’t know how to cook borshch. Firstly, you overcook the cabbage. You must put in the cabbage the very last so it stays hard and wiry. And the potatoes must be put in whole, not cut up. And as well as the seasonings, you need to put in some onions. Also whole. They’re sweet when cooked. Well, did I hit you hard?”

“It really doesn’t hurt.”

“ ‘Doesn’t hurt’! If you don’t learn to cook borshch, you’re lost: you don’t know me and I don’t know you. Clear?”

“Clearer than clear.”

“So, give me some macaroni and some of your old leftovers, I’ll eat it, so you won’t need to make such borshch anymore.”

“And who will cook for you on your trip?”

“You actually think that there won’t be anyone?”

“No, dear, there are women more beautiful and wiser that I am – yes, there are. Nearer, dearer, yes. More desirable, oh yes! Only there are none like me, just as there are none like you, understand? That I know, and that’s why I’m so worried by this trip. And I’m concerned about something else...”

“Tell me quickly what’s worrying you, I’m holding my breath! And pass the salt, this macaroni is like grass.”

“Wait. You can laugh later. Yes, I’m worried about something else. I can’t recall the name of the village. That summer we visited old grave mound. We made measurements and surveyed the exterior. Some old men came by, and one told me this: He was digging in his own garden near this mound, and dug up a sealed clay pot. He was overjoyed, he thought it was treasure. He opened it – it was liquid, dark and thick with a gorgeous fragrance. His old buddies came and with his wife they drank it. It was sweet and potent, they were on their knees. They drank it. It was wine. Later, they began to fear they might die. They didn’t. And so as not to test fate, they poured it out, rinsed it, and uncle then filled it with kvas[3]. And later the archaeologists came, and discovered that the pot was three hundred years old... Imagine! These people didn’t know what a rare, old wine they were drinking... So rare....”

“You’ve got a point. But, as you know, I find horilka superior.”

“Don’t evade me. Tell me so: “My darling, there is something in your arguments that won’t let me agree with you.”

“My darling, there is something in your arguments that won’t let me agree with you.”

*

The island was just your ordinary little island; it lived there in the middle of the river, between steep, sun-blanched banks amid its own miniature African jungle of waxy henbane, vigorous thistles, long-maned dogwood, pigweed and marvellous explosions of wildflowers. They shone like palmated, white stars over the pedestrian population of the island and gazed over the world expectant, and uncertain.

Few ever disturbed the island with their visits. Sometimes a gathering of ducks would approach the island, quacking below the hungry dry banks before quickly swimming downstream, into the kingdom of duckweed and willow branches.

“Here.”

With her long, solid legs the girl stepped up on the bank. Her eyes glanced around at the flowers, and quietly passed on to me. The sleepy sunshine fell down onto her shoulders, and her face looked dark against the sun.

I said:

“We’ll eat dinner with the flowers, yes?”

“Shall I go and pick some?”

“Go, but don’t be long.”

“I’ll be just a moment,” she said, not moving from her place. “I’ll be quick,” she said again, and her shadow passed my long evening shadow into the golden henbane.

“Vasyl, look, look!” the boys shouted, grabbing their rifles and crouching down. “Sit, sit down!”

Two ducks were flying our way from the mill. They were far away, and high up, but the sudden whistling of their wings gave our movements a primal instinctiveness, as if we were still neanderthals.

A grey ferociousness shone in Dmytro’s eyes, Pavlo couldn’t sit still, and so he crept off into the pigweed, and then he moved slowly upward through the weeds to the dyke where the ducks were descending. Dmytro rushed after him, drove something sharp into his foot, twitched his leg like a trussed rooster, and disappeared back into the shaggy pigweed.

My rifle looked at me imploringly from the boat, and if it had legs, it would have run after the boys crying: “Wait for me! Those ducks are for me, bang-bang, God help me!”

But here the scent of white flowers came out of the henbane. It came quiet and radiant, brushing my face so calm and light, just touching, then glancing deeply over the dark water, turning it white. The water silvered, shrugged her blue shoulders, and the sun’s rays, caressed in the white breeze, became saturated in whiteness. They floated fragrantly in the dove-coloured evening, over the white houses and above silver Synyukha.

I glanced at the rifle, but I didn’t pick it up. I walked toward the white flowers. My heart was clear and thin as the air, although somewhere in the depths of this clarity awakened a golden trumpet of anxiety. Its empty, sad sound burned in my chest. True, it was late: the trumpet blared in anguish, and the sweet alarm led me along its path, my heart leading me down shoeless and innocent.

The sun was setting as if it were rising, but layers of darkness streamed in the nostalgic air and the world looked like a zebra. Suddenly the girl appeared standing straight before me. In her hands was a bunch of white flowers.

I looked at her between the flowers, and between those white flowers she embraced me. There was a smell of lupines and water. Our heads fell out of the sinking sun.



[1] a grain alcohol, much like whisky or brandy. it burns.

[2] collective farm

[3] a sourish-sweet drink of malt and fermented black rye bread




Sunday, August 13, 2006

Bili Kvitky, Part 1


{little aster-flowers gone to seed}


{profile by the house}

The following is the first part of my most favourite short story ever, I think. Last August it was my translation project -- the original story is called Bili Kvitky, and is by the Ukrainian writer and cinematographer, Mykola Vinhranovskyj. The setting in 'White Flowers' is so perfectly, sharply described; it is this time of year, this feeling, exactly. The shift in the light, the birds singing on colder mornings, the nostalgia for nothing and everything.

I will present it in two parts. This is the first half (or so); my translation is a little awkward in places but I am definitely pleased with certain paragraphs... though they are not quite as they are in Ukrainian. (You can be very sentimental in Ukrainian and not feel like you are drowning in sap &/or cheese.) So though some of its beauty may not come through, I think I have managed to preserve some of the achy loveliness in a few places.



White Flowers – Mykola Vinhranovskyj

It was still before sorrow. Before the golden farewell of the groves, where the blue poplars blossomed and milkweed lay on the dry banks of the river between the cliffs and the hawthorn; still before the blooming of the vines & wild dog-toothed rose...

*

“Do you want it?”

“No.”

“You do want it.”

“I’m telling you, no.”

“You don’t understand me.”

“I do understand. But, no.”

“No, you don’t understand.”

“Maybe not...”

*

It was still summer. These were quiet days over the steppes, with the calm sky rippling above the water, and perch seen lying on the yellow river bottom.

We were waiting for autumn.

We were returning from Mount Synyukha. On our knees lay shotguns, and with our boat carried by the current, we crunched green onions with our bread; milkweed was blooming, and the sky blossomed neither white nor blue – it was becoming its own colour in this pre-autumnal time when the water flows mournful and transparent, and the birds do not sleep through the night.

*

“I love you.”

*

A droplet fell from the oar.

From the grey bank a heron flew with her chick, circling low over us, and depositing something white near where Dmytro was sitting.

“Would you look at the spot she chose!” Dmytro grabbed his gun and fired. The heron looked back at her young one, waving her wing, and hid herself in the reeds and willows that separated us from the river.

“What if it was on your head?”

“So what?” said Pavlo, biting into a bluish onion. Pavlo had shot two ducks, I – one, and Dmytro, none.

The water quietly rippled against the banks, and there was a smell of gunpowder.

*

“Have you noticed, that every time we have a conversation, I always start talking to you first?”

“Don’t nag me. Honestly – why do you start nagging? Who needs it? No one. Not me, not you.”

“I love you. But you couldn’t care less.”

“No.”

“What’s that – no?”

“That’s right. I don’t care.”

“Don’t lie. You’re lying?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Because you’re a fool, such a fool, and you’re crumbling. Don’t be silly, my darling, don’t be so stupid.”

“All right, I won’t.”

“Don’t laugh! Just don’t laugh, what am I supposed to do if you laugh?”

“All right, all right...”

*


The pike escaped, and Dmytro once more grabbed his gun.

“See if she tries to get away from me again!”

“So what?”

“I’ll show her then!”

“You’ve already said that.” Pavlo was rinsing off a yellow cucumber in the water.

“I’m not a drinker, it’s you guys who choke down that moonshine who do all the bang-bang, and look – something fell on you from the sky.”

“Bang-bang! Bang-bang yourself.”

“Whatever, but I didn’t kill anything.”

“Didn’t kill!”

“So what, you didn’t kill anything.”

“Don’t kill it then.”

“Go to hell! Don’t bug me.”

“Didn’t kill, didn’t kill!”

“That’s right, I didn’t!”

“And what about us, we killed, yes?”

“Vasyl, turn towards the bank, let’s toss this ‘non-killer’!”

“Come on, boys. Really, what the hell for? Look, there’s the dike, get undressed, we’ll tow the boat.”

A second drop fell from the oar.


The rushing of the water, a row of green stones stretched across the river and beyond them, the willows below the reeds – all this was in our view. On the right bank was an antediluvian mill with three black, burnt stories, and a fourth hanging out over the water.

Here, the whole neighbourhood’s grainfields were milled, just as they were every year.

“Don’t rock the boat! Get rid of your pants.”

We undressed, & strode into the water, & the boat touched the dike nose-first.

“Lift it up, lift it!”

“I’m lifting, lift it yourself! What am I, an ox?”

“Turn up the tail-end, the tail!”

The boat went down. Up to our chests in water, we pulled it between the stones to the deeper part of the river, close to the mill.

There was a smell of flour.

From the mill stretched a long line of carts & cars with sacks of grain, and unharnessed horses grazed above the bank. Men were sitting on straw near the wagons, eating supper, playing cards, or drifting off.

*

“Hey... are you asleep already?”

“And you?”

“As you can hear, I’m not. I can’t sleep.”

“Then what are you doing?”

“Thinking.”

“So am I.”

“About what?”

“About you.”

“Me too.”

“Goodnight, then.”

“Goodnight.”


*

Wild geese in the sky! How long it’s been since I’ve seen wild geese in flight... Wild geese
circling above the mill, sensing the grain... Don’t circle, for your death lies in wait in our boat.

“Give me the gun, give it to me!”

“Let it go.”


Dmytro pushed against the water to the stern, but scraped his foot on an underwater rock and howled like a dog.


I said to him:

“Can’t you see how high they are?”

“Give it to me, I’m dying to use it.”

“Stop it, shut up.”

“Give me that gun, or I tell you, I’ll kill you.”

“Then just take it, here.”


Dmytro grabbed the gun. Up to his chest in the whirling water, he aimed it at the bellies of the flying geese.

“Well, fire! Why don’t you fire?”

“The water is swaying me, I can’t take aim.”

“Give it to me.”

“Here.”


I fired at these geese, as if they were my tears.

Fly! I don’t need you. I need only myself. For because you exist – the world, and everything else in it exists, and so do I. Fly away, for time is swaying me...




Saturday, August 05, 2006

chronotope

{old picture. aspen poplars last september up near oldman creek, whitecourt}

a poem that is still a bit unformed. work-in-progress, yes.

chronotope.

the chronotope expresses the indivisibility, the insolubility of space and time.—m. bakhtin.

back in suburbia the landscape can shift so quickly – turn your back for an afternoon,
cat-nap in the shade, work the back garden & turn around to find the horizon empty,
your grove of trees cut down in a day –

leaves all over the sidewalk strewn, dust in the air. in my twenty years
i never thought the sky would change. now i’m walking along streets there,
small shoots of grass blossoming in gaps & cracks of an asphalt mask
that tries to cover this uprooted memory –

but there’s a layer surfacing;
a small child still running there, sticks in her hand bent into a shoddy bow & willow arrows, artemis braided in her woods whipping around in the hot breeze & her skinned knees pedalling a pink bicycle, coasting down dirt-hills after her father who names the plants:

the heart-shaped shepherd’s purse, wild aster wild rose, sprig of pennycress
scottish thistle, stinging nettles, in the canola caragana canarygrass

the aspen stumps now with their sawdust smell in the soft rain, soft mud that sinks
through the strata of my cerebrum. i walk here & i can still see them stretched there, etched there like branches twisting lungs on the blue sky, above the scars of driveways, billboards, fast cars & golf carts something is remembering –

because there’s a layer surfacing
with a young girl watching the trees sway from her window, summer thunderstorms coming & going with sweet peppermint relief & she is running through the yellow stubble, through a whistling tornado of crows:

then in the winter grosbeaks, magpies, chickadees & flocks of crying waxwings
& in the springtime with robins, blue jays, hummingbirds then autumnal siskins

because we’ve dropped feathers on this land. those crows passing over, cloud shadows mark
our transience, the taste of rain & earth, the empty forest now, hallowed hollow
on the land that’s never noticed, land they thought they could forget, negate, erase
if they built enough houses, construction signs of false privilege in a place

that will never disappear – for there are still layers alive beneath my feet
where poplar roots sprout swift to grow & sigh under wind & arch their backs, buckling pavement stretching persistent to crack cobblestones & fracture cement basements & i will lie there pick pineapple-weed from the cracks that break our mother’s back

lie there with my heartbeat echoing into the dirt & i will remember my own body
like a living stratigraphy

of this place where i lived with its waxwings & thistles & magpies & poplar seeds

& deep, deeper to the buffalo bones beneath me, before me the tipi rings & pow-wow sings
now a crow complaining so loudly from the mansion spire above, feathers floating
to here where my whole body carries the memory

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

maps of experience

{swallows swooping over the athabasca river, on the windfall bridge}

I’ve been thinking about place again, as I read (my professor) Andie Palmer’s book Maps of Experience, which discusses stories recorded while travelling through Secwepemc territory. She places such a clear focus on how everything happens at both a time as well as a place, and how this unification of time & place is rooted to the land.

It also reminds me of a quote from Catherine Taine-Sheikh’s article in La rencontre du temps et de l’espace, “Poésies d’intineraire...”, which discusses toponymy and the role of places in the poetry of Mauritanian nomads:

‘La mobilité du bédouin est devenue une référence pour le nomadisme modern. Pourtant ses déplacements qui obéissant à une multitude de déterminations de tous ordres (écologique, économique, climatique, tribal, religieux), renvoient à une conceptualisation spatiale plus complexe qu’il n’y paraît de prime abord, même si elle se construit essentiellement autour de lieux bien concrets – et non pas largement rituels comme dans l’univers mondialisé de l’hypercapitalism.’

To roughly paraphrase her French, essentially she’s saying that the conceptualisation of space for Bedouin people is fundamentally different from the concept of most people in a non-nomadic, industrialized society. It differs in that the Bedouin concept is centred around actual, concrete places, whereas in our industrialized society (‘the global world of hypercapitalism’, she says), place is more ‘ritual’; it is not concrete.

It’s true. With the invention of the telephone, you didn’t have to be within earshot of a person to have conversations with them. Now, of course, between internet & cellphone (or internet on the cellphone!) you can be anywhere at all. You are not limited by land & distance.

Now, of course, this expansive communication network has allowed for the dispersal, the sharing of information & thus the furthering of knowledge & ideas in unspeakably vast ways. What it has done for learning, for creating is invaluable. It allows people to communicate who would otherwise never meet, & I realize this, and value it because of this.

However, I also feel that this type of communication, for all its connection, creates a certain dis-connection. Not only between people, for few people actual bother to see each other when they exchange information or thoughts anymore, but between people & their environments, their places, their lands.

In many societies (such as the Secwepemc that Andie Palmer describes) the transmission of story and knowledge is directly anchored to the land – land acts as a mnemonic, helping the teacher recall the important information that must be conveyed. The distinction between the oral and the written is also involved here, but for the sake of simplicity, I just want to emphasize that there are still other ways of understanding places, and understanding what they represent.

That what has happened before at a particular place, that what is happening now is all important. What a place represents needs to be remembered and respected.

This is a place too
They call it Nuklawt
That’s where we get
wild rhubarb in the springtime...
it’s the roots
boil it
and put it wherever you’re sore...

-- Angela George, p.106, Maps of Experience

If people recognized the knowledge in the landscape – whether it’s related to the knowledge of ecosystems, as in a particular plant growing in a particular place that is remembered by a related story that describes its medicinal use, or the knowledge of one’s history or spirituality (e.g. Nose Hill in Calgary being the nose of the first man/creator of the land for the Siksika cosmology) – I think that they would be apt to respect the earth more. Instead, perhaps, of thoughtlessly paving over sacred ‘noses’ and endangering plants.

“How the environment is categorized as ‘human’ or ‘built’, versus ‘natural’, may reflect how members of that culture behave with respect to the earth.”

-- Andie Palmer, p. 160, M of E

I also like to be mindful of the personal mythologies I have created in particular places. I think of the Riverlot 56 woods at the Edge-of-the-Earth, the field for headstands and alien-regeneration & all the stories and conversations there... Places in Kananaskis (like Lost Goldpan Creek, Ptarmigan Cirque, & all our myths created over years of returning... Our personal experiences with the land instill us with connections.

I find that I tend to remember important things by associating them with places – sometimes I can remember only particular details about the place, for instance, how the wind was rustling in the leaves, the angle of light through a window, or the acutely bright sunset colour of the sky, but those (mostly natural) details help me to recall exact words, sometimes. I like to be aware of places like this, for their own presence, the presence created by history, as well as what is happening, what I am living out as I am in a place. These connections present me with a certain orientation – of my history, my identity, my inspirations.

It’s important for me to share these connections to the land. Speaking with my father when we went camping and hiking this year, we discussed how it’s so nice to go to a place that we both know so well, & love so much – a place that we feel a similar connection to, a place that we understand & appreciate the same way. This has grown from our shared experiences in significant places, and the knowledge he has passed on to me on each trip, in every little spot along the way.

With all this abstract technology, the world is in your house; but with the way we seem to live on our little wireless methods of communicating, & existing, our houses seem less in contact with the world, as the earth, the land.

I know that our wired & wireless ways of communicating, bridging time & space so swiftly and adeptly, are valuable, crucial, and in many ways quite necessary. But I strongly believe it is important to remember the memory & knowledge of concrete places, & what they mean to us and to others.