bringhurst on brain-birthplaces

aspen trees in the river valley, last week

black currants, the river valley, also last week

illuminated leaf veinage, the river valley last week

illuminated wild rose thorns, the river valley, last week

I was introduced to the writings of Robert Bringhurst in a very serendipitous way. I was in the library at the university looking for a book I needed to cite in my thesis, a rather technical volume on multilingualism, when suddenly, this other book sort of fell off the shelf into my hands: Everywhere Being is Dancing: Twenty Pieces of Thinking.



Robert Bringhurst is a typographer & a translator & a philosopher & an artist & a linguist, but mostly a poet, & he writes about poetry in a way that encompasses everything, & he writes about everything, because everything is connected to everything else, really. I am currently enthralled by these little pieces of thinking, as well as this book's 'spouse', as he calls it, The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Talks. There is so much goodness, here, goodness that nourishes my heart & mind so very well. I can't really adequately talk about it all at once, or really summarize exactly what it is that is just so exactly YESyesyesyesyes. Also, I am still exploring it, of course. But I want to offer little bits of it to you here, selected morsels that are particularly profound & inspiring for me.



(even though I'm finding you can pretty much open up any page of either of these books & discover some breath-catching sentence in one of these essays that he has been crafting for years)



The Tree of Meaning (p. 9) begins as follows:



there are a lot of rocks in western montana, and several creeks called rock creek. one of them, draining the north slope of the anacondas and the eastern flank of the sapphire mountains, became my father's favourite trout-fishing stream around 1949. that watershed is where my brain was born. it wasn't the first world i'd ever explored, and it's a place i never stayed for more than a week or two at a time, but that is the first landscape i began to learn to read.



I am in love with this passage for multiple reasons. Firstly, I am fascinated by the idea of the brain's birthplace, a location where the mind becomes aware & lucid, realizing its connection to a landscape, to the place, to the richness that surrounds it (that is within it, & without it). Where we understand our place within a place, where we realize we are part of that place -- place, of course, Mister Aristotle said, is the first of all beings. & so, I think that these landscapes where our brains are born can be seen as the places that we think from, a place where poetry (which Bringhurst reminds us simply comes from the Greek verb poein, to make or do) originates. I want to ask people, lately, where their brains were born. Which landscapes? Or, as a dear friend suggested to me, within which bookscapes, because many of us first found a meaning, a synchrony, or an awakening while exploring the paths & woods of words themselves...



For me, I think it first occured in the mountains, in Kananaskis, where my family has camped every summer (since the one right after I was born) -- there is something alpine in my thinking, in the breathing swaying valleys of lodgepole pine forests, in the ache & arch of the opaline ridges gone amber-red at sunset. But the other reason I love Bringhurst's passage so much is that my brain was also shaped by the boreal forest creek landscape, just north of here where the prairies roll into the rocky mossy hills.



I too grew up following my father on stream-fishing expeditions, where I didn't pay so much attention to the fishing, but a lot of attention to the rocks & the blue blur of hills in the distance, to the mushrooms in the muskeg & the swirls of water spilling over the beaverdams. To the rosehips & the labrador tea, to the secret berries, to the smell of sunlight on coppery leaves. & this landscape is especially dear to me because I know it's where my father's brain was born when he was young. It makes father, a self-professed non-poet, express to me so eloquently these thoughts that he usually keeps quiet: little things, like how smelling the scent of sunwarmed juniper & listening to the rush of water makes him feel indivisible from the trees , how he wishes he could grow arms wide enough to fall into the forest & hold it all close to him. & now, in his illness, I watch him return to these creeks -- the Windfall, the Oldman, Chickadee, Carson -- to fish, to wander, to photograph, whenever he can gather the energy, because they are healing to him. Comfort to his heart, but also a respite for his mind, from pain, from the body's slow failing. I think there he can feel a sense of indivisibility, he can read that landscape he is part of / that is part of him, & that dilutes the pain, & simply lets him be.