tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-184682472024-03-13T09:02:36.469-06:00sworn to lucidity(in which i tell you uncomfortable things)jenannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00546283561186929597noreply@blogger.comBlogger322125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18468247.post-42490641708535594042013-09-19T00:44:00.000-06:002013-09-19T00:44:07.052-06:00things to remember<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyCGjv-tqYTqd71oqoO85kcFC7m9DkfCX7T749HTnqcXu_mTl_8dUq83B_J6O1OUL3sKB1JtvoCj_hWvBQcIGTCiPkt8NeUMlrDmoP0Gbuxy3xSPVFjiTgwyAK63eBLwpXFXUc/s1600/rimbaud+on+a+wall.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyCGjv-tqYTqd71oqoO85kcFC7m9DkfCX7T749HTnqcXu_mTl_8dUq83B_J6O1OUL3sKB1JtvoCj_hWvBQcIGTCiPkt8NeUMlrDmoP0Gbuxy3xSPVFjiTgwyAK63eBLwpXFXUc/s320/rimbaud+on+a+wall.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>rimbaud's words on a wall near st. sulpice, paris, august 2013</i></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEsiKNmtP5pzr5mrS1o-070HJbAiLLRVCXR8fp33Nf2pA4nBLNiTfMHQ6opKqP-8gBJjVAEeXV0uu7EFJee__caQinfD2X2CYbk6foqkLt-bK5WKHQYc2htRN5Zzf6HbG-v8By/s1600/spiderling.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEsiKNmtP5pzr5mrS1o-070HJbAiLLRVCXR8fp33Nf2pA4nBLNiTfMHQ6opKqP-8gBJjVAEeXV0uu7EFJee__caQinfD2X2CYbk6foqkLt-bK5WKHQYc2htRN5Zzf6HbG-v8By/s320/spiderling.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">backyard weaver, st. albert, july 2013</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">If there is nothing else I do over the next few months (and really, I have a million things to do), I must allow myself to write poems. Think poems make poems be poems. Because I am feeling more and more sick in the heart that I am for some reason not allowing myself the time and space to be creative in this way. I know that in order to get the PhD dissertation done I had to push so much aside (so much feeling, especially grief) but I need to recover it now, because I am feeling more and more ill at ease in my head, in my life. I don't know why I've done this, over this past year, why I continue to do this to myself. I do know that it feels increasingly destructive, like I am neglecting and thus punishing myself, and I know that I have to somehow stop.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">* </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">"Whenever I don't write, I commit violence to myself. I write instead of kicking and screaming. I write instead of dying." </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">--Kate Zambreno, #32 in 'Toilet Bowl: Some notes on why I write'</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">*</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A Poet's Advice</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<pre><span new="" roman="" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words.
This may sound easy, but it isn't.
A lot of people think or believe or know they feel -- but that's thinking or
believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling -- not knowing or believing orthinking. </span></pre>
<pre><span new="" roman="" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">
Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human beingcan be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know
you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself -- in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. </span></pre>
<pre><span new="" roman="" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">
As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn't a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time - and whenever we do it, we are not poets.
</span></pre>
<pre><span new="" roman="" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you've written one line of one poem, you'll be very lucky indeed.
And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something
easy, like learning how to blow up the world -- unless you're not only willing, but glad to feel and work and fight till you die.
Does this sound dismal? It isn't.
It's the most wonderful life on earth.
Or so I feel. </span></pre>
<pre><span new="" roman="" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">
</span></pre>
<pre><span new="" roman="" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">-- e.e. cummings</span></pre>
<pre><span new="" roman="" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">
</span></pre>
<pre><span new="" roman="" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">*</span></pre>
<pre><span new="" roman="" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">
</span></pre>
<pre><span new="" roman="" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">"I do believe in poetry. I believe that there are creatures endowed with the power to put things together and bring them back to life".</span></pre>
<pre><span new="" roman="" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">
</span></pre>
<pre><span new="" roman="" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">--Hélène Cixous, in 'The Book of Promethea'</span></pre>
<pre><span new="" roman="" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">
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jenannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00546283561186929597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18468247.post-68743939979717947782013-08-01T22:47:00.003-06:002013-08-01T22:47:41.365-06:00poetry and projects<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I have been having difficulty writing poems for the last year or so, as I pushed to finish my PhD dissertation. I am constantly feeling inspired to do so, and I have pages and pages of fragments collected and scribbled in multiple notebooks, but creating a whole poem has been out of my reach for awhile. This has alarmed me greatly, because I have been writing poems quite steadily for most of my life (since I was eleven years old) and beginning the PhD coincided with a swiftly-dropping lack of productivity in that area that has left me feeling emptied and dull, and even a bit anxious to attempt the crafting of poems despite the strong desire to do so. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Part of this, I know, has been the sheer written demands of my program, to not only produce my thesis (117 000 words or so) but also conference papers and articles in an academic style, and that this has been incredibly draining for me, especially in the last six months as I've finished up. But today I came across a wonderful, unassuming little chapbook by Dorothea Lasky called 'Poetry is Not a Project' (<a href="http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/catalog/online-reading/poetry-is-not-a-project-by-dorothea-lasky/">go read it all online here, it is concise and brilliant and will not take long</a>) and this has helped me greatly to articulate another block toward the making of poems: that I am trying to make poems like I made my thesis. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">(This sounds very simple, but I honestly don't believe I quite identified the problem until I read this, and I am going to write Lasky a grateful letter for helping me untangle that.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Lasky notes that it is not that poets and scientists are all that different, but that she thinks that "poems are living things that grow from the earth into the brain, rather than things that are planted within the earth by the brain". For Lasky, poems are "not intention, but life". They are not planned out before they appear. They are created within an intersection between the poet and the poem itself, the poet's internality and the external world. They emerge through intuition, not overplanning.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And so I am realizing that right now, I am perhaps half-consciously trying to discern a theme, a greater cycle, an overarching purpose and point to prove for these poor little half-formed poems in my notebooks, and being unable to come up with one, I am thwarting myself before I even begin. I am trying to make a grand scheme, a grant proposal, a PhD out of my poems, and that is never going to work. </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I need to not worry about what is going to happen in the end, what it is going to become (so crucial to a thesis, where there is something I must prove) and let it be. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In Lasky's anecdote about the friend who decided to write a poem about a piece of art in a museum each day, she shows that while such 'projects' can be motivational, they often become more about the particular project than the poems themselves, which are often forced out to conform to a theme and tend to fade out hollowly into the shadows. In another piece I read recently, called <a href="http://www.theawl.com/2013/07/being-dumb">'Being Dumb' by Kenneth Goldsmith</a>, another example also resonated. He mentioned Christian Bök, a poet who came to renown for writing Eunoia, an experiment in univocalics--each chapter/poem contains words with only one vowel--and who is currently attempting to create <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/04/the-xenotext-works/">the Xenotext.</a> In the latter project, he writes that he is "</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia; line-height: 24px;">striving to write a short verse about language and genetics, whereupon I use a “chemical alphabet” to translate this poem into a sequence of DNA for subsequent implantation into the genome of a bacterium". The bacterium then produces a protein, which is also a text.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia; line-height: 24px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia; line-height: 24px;">That is a fascinating idea, I don't deny that. But I don't want to feel like I have to write something like that-- like a collection of poems all about one thing that all support that x = y, or forgo meaning for pure sound, or train bacteria to make poems for me. I don't want to feel like there is something I must prove.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">While I don't equate what Goldsmith called 'dumb' as the opposite of 'smart', I do think that too often, poets try to be too 'clever'. And so many of these smart poems instantly make me feel distanced. They are cool and calculated, crisp and crafted; many also lack apparent emotion. While some do show a certain joy in language, language and meaning do not always dovetail in a way that really satisfies me emotionally and intellectually at once. (Eunoia, I would argue, divorces words from meaning quite thoroughly) I try to go deeper into these poems, and I end up feeling like I just tried diving into a pool and finding out the water was a lot shallower than I anticipated, and I come up miffed with a sore head instead of feeling enriched and enlightened. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I want to let my poems flow, and I want them to be smart, but not 'smart' in Bök's way, but intelligent in a way that moves me, and will hopefully move others. I want to express things for the sake of expressing them, because I have the need, I am drawn to create them.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Hélène Cixous writes of this deep desire to create so perfectly and passionately in her essay 'Coming to Writing', which I read recently, and I keep coming back to parts of a quote that Arwen highlighted for me:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<i style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Let yourself go! Let go of everything! Lose everything! Take to the air. Take to the open sea. Take to letters. Listen: nothing is found. Nothing is lost. Everything remains to be sought. Go, fly, swim, bound, descend, cross, love the unknown, love the uncertain, love what has not yet been seen, love no one, whom you are, whom you will be, leave yourself, shrug off the old lies, </i><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">dare what you don't dare</span><i style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">, it is there that you will take pleasure, never make your here anywhere but</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> there</span><i style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">, and rejoice, rejoice in the terror, follow it where you're afraid to go, go ahead, take the plunge, you're on the right trail! Listen: you owe nothing to the past, you owe nothing to the law.</i><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This is the antithesis of creating a project, a clever 'exercise', and I do think that others, like me, also can get caught up in the need to make a 'something', and this stops us from letting the poems out, the poems that are us, that we are being. I need no governing laws in my writing, no theses to cleverly defend, no I must think less, and write the things that ache to be written, that are squirming about in my mind like restless embryos and choking away in my throat. As Cixous says (and I think Lasky would agree), we must be "ourselves in writing like fish in the water, like meanings in our tongues, and the transformation in our unconscious lives".</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>jenannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00546283561186929597noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18468247.post-72499230631943213342013-07-31T23:40:00.000-06:002013-08-01T23:40:59.132-06:00alberta herbal: yarrow<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvwGz6bG8ckqDx-_fe7iyJyWXfm1nG4Q00UxRFv1HQ7aA1YxfoBevyfJtdo2Y20Ou3eo-jjuXSpDIlO_5oLjEXMICWa5L8DBmPff6sOgnIwRqsxgKnAqraDspCustz-1SMXPAH/s1600/DSCF3003.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvwGz6bG8ckqDx-_fe7iyJyWXfm1nG4Q00UxRFv1HQ7aA1YxfoBevyfJtdo2Y20Ou3eo-jjuXSpDIlO_5oLjEXMICWa5L8DBmPff6sOgnIwRqsxgKnAqraDspCustz-1SMXPAH/s400/DSCF3003.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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<i>Yarrow, along the Maligne Canyon trail, Jasper, July 2013.</i></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGn78stG_KzuzRqiQalgH5A_V0DZnyrGysbbCcPZMuO284__A70gCWFN-fN_hpf1J_OkgcaWGOZD92B5z9j2-ASY9c0BgT0M-EgGIgoyJ9wbX2HBS9EgwihJ6pFNHPO4n3btPu/s1600/Achillea_millefolium_scan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGn78stG_KzuzRqiQalgH5A_V0DZnyrGysbbCcPZMuO284__A70gCWFN-fN_hpf1J_OkgcaWGOZD92B5z9j2-ASY9c0BgT0M-EgGIgoyJ9wbX2HBS9EgwihJ6pFNHPO4n3btPu/s400/Achillea_millefolium_scan.jpg" width="172" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Note the feathery leaves, too, divided pinnately into segments (not visible in the first photo). Very important for identification, because other white-flowered plants are very poisonous (e.g.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicuta"> water hemlock)</a>. </i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This is <b>yarrow </b>(<i>Achillea millefolium). </i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Parts to use: leaves, flowers to a lesser extent</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Uses: clotting wounds (esp. nosebleeds), easing menstrual blood, improving general blood circulation, treating colds (esp. with fever), treating internal bleeding (ulcers, etc.) </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Yarrow—its cluster of whitish-green flowers, feathery
leaves, tough and grasping roots—is a plant very dear to me. Not only for its myriad
uses, but because it’s one of the very first plants my dad taught me to
identify. Yarrow grows extensively throughout Western Canada, in the
grasslands, parklands, mountains, and the boreal; it will also tenaciously takes over
roadsides and ditches (and gardens, when you buy those alpine wildflower seed
mixes…) and so we encountered it often on the trails we walked when I was young. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I happened to meet yarrow when in need of one of its key
healing qualities – it is high coumarins,
compounds which contain vitamin K, and thus has the ability to clot blood. I
used to get terrible nosebleeds when I was young, especially on hot dry summer
days. I remember standing in the shade on a lakeside, anxiously pinching my
nose while my dad brushed aside bushes nearby and gently plucked a few unfurled
yarrow leaves. He crushed them up first with his fingers, and then gave them to
me. “Just chew them up a little, get them wet with some spit,” he told me,
“that will activate them”. I did as told—the leaves were aromatic, spicy and
bittersweet. Then he rolled them up into a little pack, and placed them up my
nose. I was fascinated by this experiment. In about five minutes, my nosebleed
had stopped and I was left with a sweet earthy smell even after I removed the
mass of leaves. Intrigued, I paid even closer attention as he named the plants
and told about their many properties, and stories of times he’d used them out
in the bush.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And so yarrow always reminds me of my father, and the care he
took to teach my sister and me about what was growing around us, and how this
healing knowledge has remained with us. My sister, who lost interest early on
in camping and living outdoors, remarked recently that she did appreciated
these teachings nonetheless, and was pleased she could still pick out yarrow
when she saw it on the sides of the road. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Due to its aforementioned clotting abilities, yarrow is also called
‘woundwort’. The scientific name is Greek, after Achilles, because there are
stories that a centaur gave him the plant before he headed into battle.
Millefolium for a thousand leaves, and another name in English,
‘thousand-seal’. In medieval Western Europe, its flowers have been a
constituent of gruit (a beer flavouring mixture) and its young leaves a tender,
bittersweet spinach-like potherb. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">My grandmother also knew yarrow (<i>derevij </i>or <i>krivavnyk</i> in
Ukrainian). Yarrow tea made using the fresh (or dried) flowers and leaves and
mixed with mint was good for colds, she said. Its anti-inflammatory properties
could help reduce a fever. Its styptic properties also helped with internal
bleeding, and could also ease bloody diarrhea ("People in the Old Country took
it," she said, as when she grew up in Western Ukraine, cholera epidemics were
still a great threat). My grandma drank tea from her garden yarrow to help with
a stomach ulcer as well. She told me that above all, yarrow is simply ‘good for
the blood’ and improved circulation. Most importantly, it can she first told me
about drinking plain yarrow tea as a remedy for regulating menstruation. Its
ability to regulate the blood means that it can help ease both heavy bleeding
and also stimulate a scant period. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">To make a <b>yarrow tea</b>, you can use the leaves (and flowers –
but I usually just use leaves).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">If it’s fresh, two long leaves will do it, and if dried, use
1 tsp. for each cup of boiling water. Steep it for 10 minutes either way (if
you cover the lid of the cup, you trap more of the goodness in). It becomes
bitter easily, so don’t oversteep it – be sure to strain out the leaves. Adding
a bit of lemon and honey can make it more palatable. Good for colds, fevers,
and also for reducing some of the pain and blood flow during a heavy period –
or bringing on a stubborn one.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And, as noted, you can use the dried powdered leaves to stop
bleeding as well, but fresh chewed leaves do work just as well and can be
pressed again cuts and wounds (alone or as part of a poultice) as well as
placed in the nostril as I found out early on. It has never failed me once. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">*Some notes of warning – I’ve heard of a few people who have had skin
reactions to yarrow (potentially due to taking drugs that cause
photosensitivity), so be cautious of that. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
jenannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00546283561186929597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18468247.post-32386454422231342012013-06-20T00:58:00.000-06:002013-06-20T01:02:23.106-06:00alberta herbal: wild sarsaparilla<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Wild Sarsaparilla, Edmonton River Valley, June 2013. Photo by Jason.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">When I first saw these little white-flowered spheres popping up in the river-valley undergrowth a few weeks ago, I was confused, thinking at first they were a wild onion. I soon figured it out that no -- not onion-y at all, and that my difficulty in identifying stemmed from the fact that I only knew this plant by its late summer cluster of berries, rather than its early blooms.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This is the <b>wild sarsaparilla</b> (<i>Aralia nudicalis</i>). Also known as rabbit root, wild licorice (not to be confused with this true <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Licorice">wild licorice</a>), shotbush and small spikenard.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Parts to use: the roots only (berries are inedible) </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Uses: blood purification, energy tonic, skin washes for ulcers, rashes and pox.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Sarsaparilla is a delightful word. It is from the Basque words <i>sartzia</i> 'bramble' and <i>parra</i> 'vine', and reached English via the Spanish <i>zarzaparilla -- </i>the invading Spaniards encountered indigenous people in Central America using the plant both medicinally and in enjoyable beverages that were the precursor to our contemporary root beers. These plants, of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smilax"><i>Smilax</i> genus</a>, are the true sarsaparillas, whereas the wild sarsaparilla is part of the ginseng family and was so named in English because the taste and qualities are very similar to that of the original sarsaparilla of the southern regions.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Wild sarsaparilla, which is found growing throughout moist and moderately shady woods in North America, is also now widely used to flavour many commercial traditional-style root beers. The plant grows about a foot high, and may have two to five-ish little branching umbels of greenish white flowers appearing in May or June. The purplish black berries that appear in July and August are not edible for humans, but bears seem to enjoy them. The part most useful for medicine are the dried rootstalks, which should be gathered in early autumn, as the plants begin to yellow. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Once the roots are dried, they can be made into a tea, which has general tonic properties much like ginseng does, restoring energy and purifying the blood. It has a lovely peppery-balsamic taste, with a hint of licorice, like the dominant root beer flavour. Like ginseng, it can cause a bit of extra perspiration (which adds to its purifying qualities). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">While again, I am not a herbalist or botanist, I would advise that it should be used with caution if you are sensitive to other <i>Panax</i> or <i>Aralia</i> plants; however, while I have adverse effects from ginseng (blood pressure drops and heart palpitations) I can have small amounts of wild sarsaparilla in teas and root beers, so it makes a nice substitute for the stronger plants with similar benefits. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">My dad also learned from a Woods Cree friend that the plant was also used to make a skin wash that was helpful in soothing ulcers, psoriasis-like skin issues and shingles/chicken pox rash. In the past the plant had also been used to treat syphilis, though which symptoms he didn't know.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This plant always makes me remember my dad, because when I was little and being mildly mischievous, he would always scold me with 'you little sarsaparilla!', dropping the 'r' so it sounded like 'sass'. And this is a sassy and delicious plant indeed.</span><br />
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jenannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00546283561186929597noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18468247.post-47189237357218710952013-06-13T01:00:00.005-06:002013-06-13T01:00:57.524-06:00alberta herbal: red currants in blossom<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Red currants blossoming, Tawayik Lake, Elk Island National Park, May 2013</span></i></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">As a general note -- I am not a professional botanist or a herbalist. The knowledge I am passing along here was taught to me by my dad, who learned it from others who knew the northern bush, and my baba whose knowledge came primarily from her mama and baba in the Ukrainian Carpathians. There are probably many other uses for these plants; I am only passing on what I have been taught directly, and in most cases, tried myself, so this is not exhaustive by any means. Be careful with wild plants: do your own research too so you are well-versed in their identification and uses, and take into consideration your own body -- everyone reacts a little differently especially to new foods they have never tried before. So there's my disclaimer!</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="text-align: center;">So here is the first entry in my Alberta Herbal: the <b>red currant </b>(</span><i style="text-align: center;">Ribes triste</i><span style="text-align: center;">).</span></span></div>
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<span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Parts to use:</i> berries, leaves (when young, never wilted!)</span></span></div>
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<span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Uses:</i> Vitamin C source, good for respiratory ailments (coughs and colds) and system immunity, gastrointestinal issues, anti-inflammatory and cleansing tonic.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Most currants are not a huge shrub, and this one is rarely found growing more than half a metre high, and tend to like wet, rocky woods, and swampy places. The ones in the photo are growing near a marshy lakeshore, in the shade of some balsam poplars and aspens. The leaves, which you can just see, have five palmate lobes -- a commonality among all the members of the currant and gooseberry family</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The blossom of our red currants, with their pinkish-red centres, look quite similar to those of the prickly black currant (<i>Ribes lacustre</i>), also found in the northern Alberta parklands and boreal. However, at this stage you can tell them apart by the lack of raspberry-bush-like prickles on the stem of the red currants. They begin flowering in late May and the tart-tasting, bright, semi-translucent red berries will begin to form in July, ripening in mid-to-late summer here in Alberta. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Both the red and black currant berries and leaves are highly edible, though North American black currant leaves give off a slightly-to-extremely skunk-ish aroma, and are less palatable in teas (European and Siberian black currant leaves are much more pleasant). The leaves, when harvested in spring and early summer, are also medicinal. (Never ingest them once the leaves begin to wilt, though, as toxins build up as they age and could really harm your stomach). Now would be a good time to gather some, as they are nice and fresh. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">My dad always told me that currants are among the best berries for preventing scurvy if you get lost in the woods as they are extremely high in Vitamin C (black are a little better than red, apparently, but both will keep you healthy!). They are also high in copper, an important trace element. He mentioned that chewing a few berries can help with nausea and stomach upset, and also stimulate the appetite after gastrointestinal issues. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">My baba would have told you to cook them down with sugar into a jam, sauce, or syrup. <i>Porichky </i>('red currants' in Ukrainian) were used in her village, she told me, primarily as simple sustenance but were also used as remedies for coughs (reduced into a thick syrup). When her family first arrived in Canada, they lived on a farm east of Edmonton in the Beaver Hills, were red currants still grow abundantly. Doctors were few and far between, and red currants (often mixed with elderberries) were one of the most important cough and cold remedies, and were also taken to generally improve respiratory health (pneumonia, whooping cough and diphtheria were especially feared at the time).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">My dad never mentioned much about the leaves, but my baba told me that fresh or dried leaves were also good in teas taken a few times daily to ease respiratory symptoms as well, and 'settle the stomach' after bouts of diarrhea. Back home in the Carpathians, she said that leaves were sometimes steeped in vodka, which was then diluted with water to be used as a cleansing tonic. People with arthritic issues also took it, so it's likely currants have decent anti-inflammatory properties as well.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">So now is the time for leaf usage, if you've got coughs or colds or an ornery stomach. You can use them fresh (just pour boiling water over about 2 tsp. of chopped or torn fresh leaves in a 250ml cup, cover and let steep about 5 minutes, drink up to 3 times a day). They are also nice mixed in with other fresh berry-bush leaves, such as wild raspberry. If you dried the currants, you could throw some into the tea as well for extra flavour; on its own it is astringent but only faintly currant-y.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Unfortunately I never witnessed the making of the vodka concoction, but if you are good at making tinctures and infusions, you may want to experiment. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I will include photos later in the season when the berries develop further as well as recipes for the berries. More general tips about drying leaves and berries to come as well...</span><br />
<br />jenannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00546283561186929597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18468247.post-59979196475130784152013-06-12T01:24:00.003-06:002013-06-12T01:24:30.694-06:00herbal survival: a preface<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>In late April, I spied my moose-friend at Riverlot. At first I thought the tree had ears...</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>But no, it was my yearling moose-friend, who I'd been seeing all winter with his mama.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>He's all grown-up now with his little antler-buds, and he's set off to eat saplings on his own...</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">* * * </span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I have been absent awhile now, I realize, but the PhD has now been written and I wait for a defense, so (as unreal as it seems to me) I hope to rekindle my blog-writings in the meantime. While there were so many things I wanted to write about, I could not seem to muster or divert any energy and words away from my thesis. At the moment I can't quite believe that I am done that particular document, but already the impetus to write little things (and post a few months' worth of photos) is slowly returning. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I have a lot of feelings right now that aren't really ready to be shared, but I'm feeling quite compelled to write about useful things, like plants. It's spring, almost summer now, and I am in my homeplace at this time of year for the first time in four years. The woods have kept me sane over the last few months, and now they are so alive and vibrant, all the old bones of winter streaming into green. I'm thinking a lot about my dad, and my baba, and how much I miss them. How far away I feel from them at times. But I've also realized that I can draw them much nearer to me when I focus on what they have taught me, imparted to me, and so much of that has to due with survival. I want to write about the emotional aspects of this eventually, but at the moment I want to pass on the knowledge they've bestowed regarding physical survival. My baba has taught me much about garden and semi-domestic plants, and my dad's teachings have connected me so deeply to the wild ones growing on this land. And so I want to pass along some of this knowledge, because it is not even so much the remembering of this knowledge that keeps them close to me, but the teaching and sharing of what they always shared with me. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Over the summer, as everything blossoms, I will create my Alberta Herbal. The plants that grow here, with a focus on the ones that will keep you healthy and nourished, should you want or need to consume them. And then, perhaps some other surviving-skills. </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">But first, a long story about how I came to the idea. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In the last month or so, likely due to PhD-related (which also includes the anticipation of being post-PhD) stress and a penchant for watching <a href="http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/doomsday-preppers/">ridiculous National Geographic documentaries</a> at 3am about people who are getting ready for doomsday, I've had a few apocalyptic dreams. The details of the cataclysms are usually vague, but the main flavour is extreme anxiety, coupled with a strange blend of frustration and annoyance. In these dreams, I am usually trying to finish writing the thesis, but am interrupted by having to organize things or figure out how to find my next meal, often whilst trying to cajole others to help me or teach them what needs to be done. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In one dream I come down from where I have been trying to have a nap, in an upstairs bedroom in a large mansion, where I am hiding from the external chaos. This unfamiliar house is full of other people (some I know, most are strangers), and when I emerge from the room, they ask me where the food is, because everything in the cupboards has been eaten. I suggest that we'll have to go foraging, because apparently there are no more grocery stores. My comrades are not pleased. To gloss over some dull negotiations and strange twists of dream-logic, it turns out I have to go evade fast-moving rabid animals alone to find some wild salad greens and fishes. I manage to make it across a very vast lawn to a stream without meeting my doom, and I fish with a long twig and twine, and a fish hook that magically appears, and soon catch a fish. It's a pike, slippery and toothy but nice and fat. Good for dinner. I am going to cut it open, to clean it, flipping it over on its belly when I panic, remembering that's not the best way to clean a pike. They are incredibly bony, and I am terrified of choking on fish bones. But then I blank, forgetting where to start filleting. I start to panic. What if I cut it wrong and ruin all the meat and everyone dies with bones lodged in their throats? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I wake up, glad that it not the end of the world, but the dream-remnants are still rattling about in my head, and I start to worry because what if I had to start fishing for my food and the river here is full of pike and what's that trick again that my dad taught me--I haven't cleaned a fish in nearly two years now, what if I forget... And I feel a wave of anxiety, not so much about the nonexistent cataclysm that would test my skills, but because I am terrified of forgetting what he has taught me. So I look it up on YouTube--how to filet bony fish--and begin the day looking at fish guts. It reminds me of my dad, of catching my first fish, a jackfish in Thunder Lake, and the sour-weedy smell of blood and viscera in the fish-cleaning stand, the grit on my knees in the bottom of a canoe. It's strangely calming, because of the memories, and because I instantly remember what to do as soon as the first cuts are made. And then I think a bit more about survivalism, and remember just how much my dad has taught me. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This knowledge--of how to survive in the bush--is deeply important to me, and so incredibly valuable. Not necessarily because I'm waiting for a societal collapse, but because I strongly believe that the skills he has passed on to me are something that everyone should have. My dad, who grew up basically outside, supported that too, developing the first outdoor education program in the city when he first taught junior high in the early 1970s. He taught those kids what he later passed on to his own children. He took kids winter camping, taught them to ice fish and build a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinzhee">kwinzhee</a>, introduced them to wilderness first aid, built canoes in the summer and showed them how to use a compass, read topographical maps, identify edible plants and learn their uses. They made fires with flint and even a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bow_drill">bow-drill</a>. Those kids could probably make it a few days at least, if they had to.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And I start wondering how many of those children he taught had children, and if they ever passed along any of the knowledge he imparted to them. I think of the kids now at the school where he taught, where they still have something like outdoor education but it's all focused on the sporty-ness of outdoor activities, and very little on learning how to live in the bush. Those kids there, at the school where my mother still teaches, could they name ten plants that grow around them? Would they know what to do with them?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">(Or, says the curmudgeonly old woman in me, are they glued to their stupid phones and don't realize that if civilization collapses, so does wi-fi? And that you can't just look something up on wikipedia or youtube if you're stranded on a mountain somewhere? And even barring disaster, how do people live in a place and not know, or desire to be aware, of what else is living and growing around them?) </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It hurts my heart, I admit, that this knowledge is no longer esteemed. I strongly believe that alongside all the digital technology skills we should be taking kids outside in school and teaching them to plant a garden and build a fire and catch a fish and dig medicinal roots-- both for a deeper appreciation of the land but also for their own well-being. I am incredibly lucky that I had my father teach me so much over the course of my entire life, and instill in me an early value system that focuses on these types of skills. Even my sister, who does not like to camp anymore at all, can still identify a yarrow plant, and could (if in dire need) chew it up to activate the clotting agents, and heal a cut. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Despite my overactive dreaming-mind, I'm not anticipating an apocalypse, or planning for one. But I can't say that I don't feel a certain peace knowing that I could take care of myself, and others, in the forest if I had to, and a deep gratitude and closeness to my dad for teaching me all he knew about the land. And right now I really feel I need to pass that on, all of the things he taught, because that ensures his continuing survival, too.</span><br />
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<br />jenannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00546283561186929597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18468247.post-58697654941346174552013-02-16T04:14:00.002-07:002013-02-16T04:14:36.487-07:00brain chemicals: why i take medication, part two of two.<br />
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">aberdeen, early morning haar-fog, may 2012</span></i></div>
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By this point in my life, I have gone over these events exhaustively, and I can’t seem to figure
out what triggered this period in my life that made me decide to try medication. No one stress seemed so monumental
that it could do this to me, it was everything and nothing. And it was
something that I simply could not seem to muster up the will or strength to do
anything about, and after nearly four months of it, it did not seem like it was
simply a season in my brain, like other intense periods had been. And now I could not do anything, and I wanted
to not exist any more, which also catalysed further anxiety, and that was what
made me decide that psychotropic drugs were probably no worse than what I
currently was feeling. I was in the strange state of not wanting to exist, but not wanting to not want to exist; I felt like I had nothing to lose.</div>
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Again, at this stage, I was lucky. Lucky to have such an understanding
psychologist, and a doctor who was patient with me, and warned me that I might
have to try a few different medications to find one that helped. And I did try
a different drug, before I tried the one I still take; it was one that made me quite ill right from the beginning. It made my frenetic thoughts slow down, but to the point where I couldn’t think at all. I went from highly anxious to strangely dulled, depressed. I remember one day when it seemed to only allow me to think about how I could hear the blood in my
veins, and that the raindrops on the windows sounded like they were amplified
and slowed down. I was nauseous constantly, and this was simply not feasible. So we tried something else, and I
was tremendously lucky in that this one just fit. The first week was rough, but all in all, it happened quite quickly. There were side effects, but they were better than how I currently felt, perhaps even a welcome distraction, and so I continued.</div>
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Over the next two months, my thoughts slowly returned to
something more normal for me: I could think clearly again, precisely enough to
replace my incessant mantras with more sustainable CBT. I could better tell
when my thoughts were I stopped shaking,
and panic attacks dropped off and I could do things, venture out, do healthy
things. I could distract myself not with sharp things but with productive
things to do with my hands. In essence, it simply allowed me to finally properly do the work I needed to do in order to deal with the anxiety I was feeling, before it got so bad I could no longer even think about doing anything. It allowed me to be clear and functional again, enough to cope. </div>
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It was not perfect. It still isn't. Most of the side effects have faded, but some linger at times. I am afraid of running out, losing my pills; I can't forget to take one or I feel it immediately. But this is still many orders of magnitude better than what I was feeling before, and so I deal with it. Through a lot of experimentation I've found the dose and the timing that seems to be optimal for me, and I go with it, while trying as much as I can to do all the non-pharmaceutical things I can to stay healthy. </div>
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Because I still get anxious, as I said; I still feel depressed. I have bad periods, very helpless-feeling, unproductive, waves that I have to get through. But these, while trying and unpleasant, are things I feel that I can deal with. They are something different than the pure terror, the neuronal storms of nonsense and inability to think. They arise from things I understand, most of the time, so they feel like something else. And I know that it could be argued that my brain with its faulty substrata
predisposes me to have certain kinds of reactions to things in the world. This
is not unlikely. However, I feel there is such a distinction between feeling
depressed and anxious due to the state of the world and my place in it, the
forces acting against me that I ultimately cannot alter, and feeling anxious
because I am having paranoid, terrifying, irrational thoughts that I still
recognize have no basis in reality. I am not trying to artificially separate the
kinds of anxiety and depression I feel into purely chemical and purely
situational; I am not trying to uphold the harmful Cartesian duality of mind and body that I think is one of the sources of the denigration of mental illness. That the medication seems to help one strain of anxiety though, and not others, though, suggests to my non-neurologist self that perhaps there are different (but connected) kinds; the kind that stems from my brain structure, and the kind that starts from outside of it but I experience and process (of course) through my neuronal set-up. Maybe they are far too entwined to fully separate, and interdependent
in myriad subtle ways; my reactions to the OCD-like thoughts certain do shape my reactions to situation-based anxiety too. I don't fully understand it yet, but I keep trying to. For now, I just want to acknowledge that some of what I feel is
traceable and comprehensible to me, and some of it arose without such triggers;
and the latter is what I find the medication helps.</div>
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It didn't magically restore my self-esteem, make me fearless, a better writer, make me love myself unconditionally, flood me with optimism. But it also didn't erase my personality and turn me into a mask-wearing zombie with stunted, inappropriate emotions, nor a shallow, uncritical consumer. It did let me feel more than constant anxiety and panic, though. That was all, and that is what I wanted.</div>
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I know, though, for some people, these kinds of medication make them feel horrible. They do feel like blank, stumbling automatons, just as clouded and fuzzy as they do while depressed, numbed and dulled. We know that for whatever reason, these medications are temperamental and finicky and quite
unpredictable (just like people’s brains). For some reason, what helps one person’s
anxiety or depression does little to nothing for (or seriously worsens)
another’s condition: I’ve heard both just as many completely terrifying horror stories as accounts of neutrality or ineffectualness as I have successes. And I wish I
knew why this was, wish we were at that point with neurology to have an explanation, but we aren’t. We
still can’t always discern the messenger from the message, the excess from the
essential; why some people’s brain waves look really different from other
people’s even while in very similar states, why this drug I take that they thought would be good for epilepsy (but wasn't) might be good for depression (sometimes, it seems) would end up helping more people with generalized anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder (it did for me, anyway). </div>
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Perhaps all this speaks to is the incredibly individual
natures of our brains, perhaps more so than any other part of the body. One issue with allopathic medicine is that it
wants to assume that all human bodies are essentially the same, rather than
specific systems, I feel; and perhaps the fact that not all anti-depression and
anti-anxiolytic medications work on every person’s issues I would hazard a guess that my brain
chemicals were perhaps quite responsive to psychotropic medication because I
seem to be pretty sensitive in general to any kind of chemical interference;
sleuthing out the triggers of my migraines has made me realize that the foods I
put in my body have a massive and often immediate effect on how I feel.
Therefore, by fastidiously avoiding those foods and supplementing my diet with
a concoction of vitamins does a lot toward making my migraines less frequent,
because I seem to be pretty chemically suggestible. </div>
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I suppose it would be wonderful if I could find a vitamin-potion/food
combination that did the same for my anxiety and depression. I’ve tried a lot
of different combinations, both through my own research and seeing a
naturopath, too, and I continue to try things even though I take pharmaceuticals.
But unlike with my migraines, I wasn’t able to find anything that could stave
off two breaking points. And that was when I decided (both times) to initially
go on my medication, and to continue it after a hiatus. I was doing all the
good things that they tell you to do with mental illness: to eat properly, to
take the vitamins, to exercise. And that helps a great deal, but not enough for
the worst bits, unfortunately. </div>
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Now, I did manage to get through a number of difficult
stretches without any medication; the OCD-like periods, some of the self-harm.
Sometimes I wonder if I could have handled my most serious breakdown that way, if
I could have pulled through it too. I realize that many people do go through
very similar things without it. And well – I didn’t. I did what I felt was best
for me at the time, the only thing I felt I could manage. If that makes me
weak, then I suppose I’m weak, but I’m alive, and I can deal with the periods
of depression and anxiety that I still go through because at least I am not contending
with that terror I could not will away on my own. I still struggle with doing a
number of things, but I am far more productive than I ever could have been
without it, I feel. This leaves me with the extra energy I need to deal with
what the drugs do not touch.</div>
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Everything that I’ve written may just read like elaborate
and desperate justification for my medication; so be it. For me, it is a potent
reminder for when I start to criticize myself, for when I start to think that I
am wrong to have started the drugs in the first place. I completely understand and respect why someone would never want to touch a psychotropic medication, as I've been there. I just happened to eventually change my mind. And if that makes me just
another brainwashed, ‘addicted’, misguided consumer who will take this
medication for the rest of her life, I suppose that is how it will be. I just
want to be fine with that, to openly acknowledge and explain why I did it, and through I may always struggle with it, I also want to be able to freely acknowledge that I’m grateful that
there was this option available to me. I'll settle for being weak, but functioning; for whatever the anti-psychiatry movement wants to call me, but alive.</div>
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jenannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00546283561186929597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18468247.post-44913627575658082022013-02-15T01:25:00.002-07:002013-02-15T01:28:45.035-07:00brain chemicals: why i take medication, part one of two.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">raven on a chimney, early morning Aberdeen, May 2012</span></i></div>
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I have never liked taking medication. As a young child I had to be bribed into it, because early experiences with penicillin made all medicine have pretty unpleasant associations, as did bad reactions to decongestants and cough suppressants. I remember tolerating the one penicillin that didn't wreak havoc on my system, the infamous 'banana medicine', but that was it. I learned to accept that ibuprofen could do fine things for a tension headache, and take a few hours off a migraine even if it did nothing for the pain. Half a dimenhydrinate makes nausea evaporate. But I was always (and continue to be wary) of what was going into my body because of the element of the unexpected, the understanding of their power, and I still am. I remember learning in biology about the load many medicinal substances place on the liver and the kidneys, and I worried about my body's ability to handle these substances; I understood that it should be fine if drugs are taken sparingly, but what about something you take every day?<br />
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I do agree with many opponents of psychotropic medications;
I think it is terrifying that you can walk into a doctor’s office and blithely ask for
an anti-depressant or anti-anxiolytic of your choice; this has happened to me and a number of others. I want these drugs to be available, but I am concerned that many doctors really know little about them, because from my experience and stories I've heard, patients are rarely
told about the trials and hazards of going on and off medication (or that their
concerns are explicitly dismissed or downplayed). They can have very serious side effects and consequences and should never be taken lightly or
without a lot of consideration, because they cannot be discontinued abruptly. And most definitely they can be worse than reasons why you're taking them; I have no doubt about that. But that doesn’t mean they’re worthless and
should all be condemned, as they can be very effective.</div>
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I thought about providing links to medical studies and articles both for and against anti-depressants, but frankly, it's pretty easy to find <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/aug/18/illusions-psychiatry-exchange/">these sorts of back-and-forths everywhere online</a>, by psychiatrists and other clinicians as well as those who have experienced the drugs. Yes, it's true that we know very little about the brain as a whole, and also only a very small bit about what causes mental illness and about the mechanisms of these drugs we use to treat it. However, I just can't understand how anyone can make the leap to 'these drugs are no better than placebos' just because it is not precisely known at this point in time how and why they work. Some <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_imbalance">brain chemical imbalance theories</a> may be outdated or (partially) debunked, but we do know that somehow these medications, these chemicals, can bring relief to symptoms by affecting the function of neurons. They did something for me.</div>
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I feel awkward writing this, because I really don't want to dismiss the fact that others have been miserable on them, and have found their conditions to worsen and become more debilitating. But I am also tired of having to downplay or deny my own experiences-- especially since it was not an easy decision for me to make, to take these drugs in the first place. I am tired of the subtle but insidious judgment that comes from taking them; the misunderstanding that it's a cheap and easy way to 'happiness' makes me seethe. I have done a fuckload of work to be able to function, before and after starting this medication. This is not the easy way out. I do not take these to be happy. These do not make you happy. I am not happy all the time. I sought out this treatment because I could not feel anything but pure terror and I wanted to have other feelings. I still get anxious. I still have periods of depression. But now I can have more than one feeling. Now I can deal with these things, most of the time. </div>
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I don't know where my anxiety comes from. I don't really know if this predisposition comes from brain chemicals, even though I use other chemicals to help fix it. I think a lot of it comes from my brain, though, and I have memories of anxiety and panic for nearly as long as I have memories at all. It's been with me for a rather long time. I had a very un-tumultuous early
childhood, with attentive and supportive parents, but I could really having a
full-blown, hyperventilating panic attacks that came out of nowhere. When my dad found me crying and shaking on my bedroom floor,
I didn’t know what to tell him. Even then, I realized that if you were upset,
there had to be a good reason to be so upset – and it terrified me that I had no such reason. I made up stories; I told him that the girl
next door had been mean to me. (That happened sometimes, and made me anxious
too. And I knew it was okay, it was
normal to be upset about that, because that was a thing that happened. It was
real.)</div>
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As I got older, I developed many more persistent anxieties.
Some of these things were because of things that actually existed in the world,
things that make many children anxious (being harassed in elementary school,
etc.) and others, were not so rational, and definitely not so external. This duality that I could see developing in hindsight tells me something, too -- that in some ways, my anxiety and depression is Janus-faced: some of stems from my responses to my social and environmental factors, and yet some of it arises within my own mind, for reasons that cannot be traced (despite years of therapy). Many people, like Ann Cvetkovich, write that depression is 'the symptoms of a response to a fucked up world or a fucked up life' (see <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=qn9jSPVRcDMC&pg=PA15&lpg=PA15&dq=depression+as+normal+response+to+fucked+up+world&source=bl&ots=LLJg0b9fxC&sig=GzvkthCeeCDn5zbd9C5RZYxHzwc&hl=en&sa=X&ei=2ekdUZjAHKrwigLV8IHgCw&ved=0CD0Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=depression%20as%20normal%20response%20to%20fucked%20up%20world&f=false">Depression: A Public Feeling, p. 15</a>) and I do agree. I still get anxious, I still get depressed, even after a decade on psychotropic medication. However, when I look to the causes of this anxiety and depression, I can generally always link it to something in the world, in my life, that is shitty. Because there are awful things, both great catastrophes and daily microaggressions that build up and weigh us down. (And honestly, I find people who do not react to kyriarchal oppression as a little suspect, because things are pretty dire). I think anxiety and depression are completely normal responses, to certain things.<br />
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But then there are these other things, things inside my head. They can be exacerbated by less ideal conditions in the world, but they feel so internal, so idiosyncratic that they seem to come from my brain. Like my migraines can be triggered by things I ingest or by conditions in my environment, but also can just spring up from no traceable cause, so can my anxiety. And this is the kind that led me to not be able to function. The symptoms of this kind is what I like to remind myself about when I want to stop taking my medication.<br />
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The panic attacks that came on in class suddenly, that sent me running for the washroom often at school to
hide there, because I often couldn’t explain what brought them on. And even if
I could, it was a thoroughly awkward thing to do. And when not feeling that
dizzy wash of fear, the accelerating breathing, the crush in my chest, I felt a
constant tightness in my shoulders, a constricting mass in my throat, a vague
nausea nearly every morning. When I was 10 and 11, there were times when I
could hardly eat anything, terrified I would choke on each bite I took. I was underweight, my blood pressure
was low, and my resting heart rate sometimes spiked up like a terrified rabbit until
I thought I would black out.</div>
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There was the kind of anxiety that made me feel as if I was going crazy. It crept up for no reason. I deeply feared losing my
mind, forgetting who I was, saying and doing horrible things. I don’t know
where those thoughts came from, what they arose from, what brought them on, but they definitely felt different than the other things that triggered anxiety, the people,
the situations, my fears about things actually happening in the world outside
of my thoughts. In high school, when I began seeing a psychologist, she helped
me understand I probably had a mild form of obsessive-compulsive disorder (my
sister and uncle have been diagnosed with a severe form of this), because I
created rituals to assuage the anxiety: I washed my hands often, til they bled,
not because of germs but contamination by frightening thoughts. I repeated
phrases to myself over and over, mantras before I slept each night, a certain
number of times, to make it so that everything would be okay. Looking over
notebooks I kept at the time, I see pencilmarks in the margins tearing through
the pages, fervently underlining the magical words I needed to write to prevent
these awful thoughts, to straighten them out, to keep them in check. <br />
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As I got older, some of these rituals fell away. But when
the tension in my body was too much, or I had a panic attack where I couldn’t
stop crying, I learned to dig my fingernails hard into my palms. This sudden
pain caused my focus to shift, and provided a momentary release from this
internal intensity; it led to me scratching harder, and eventually cutting my
skin – little vents for the anxiety, sort of like trepanning but for my flesh
instead of my skull. It helped at first,
but eventually caused me greater anxiety for doing it, especially when I
confessed it to others and received little empathy or support. This is when I
started seeing my psychologist, because I was at a loss as to how to deal with
this (I once had believed everyone dealt with anxiety like this, but trying to
explain my feelings to others had come to understand this most likely wasn’t
true) and was becoming afraid of myself in a way I could not handle.<br />
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With my psychologist, I engaged in Cognitive-Behavioural therapy, to help me deal with the
moments of intense anxiety and the panic attacks. And so they still came, but I
learned to manage them better, to fend them off as best I could<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=18468247" name="_GoBack"></a>
without resorting to cutting or burning. She always told me that medication
could be an option if I decided I’d like to try it, but we would work without
it unless I asked, and I was still very much against it. And I was doing fairly well managing with the CBT for awhile,
but then things started cropping up again. Near the end of my first year of
university, I wasn’t particularly
stressed about things in the world, external things; I was managing the new
routines and workloads fairly well.<br />
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Then one day I had a very severe panic
attack that coincided with a migraine that sent me to the hospital, and I was convinced I would die. The
headache and panic attack subsided, and then a few days later I woke up with
another one. And another one, and then suddenly every moment felt like constant
anxiety, more continuous than it had ever been before; panic attacks were mere
spikes on a high plateau of frantic unease.<br />
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It felt like my thoughts had aphasia; they came out in
chunks that raced around and I felt nauseous trying to round them up. I felt
lost in my own head, unsure of how I would ever make sense of anything again.
The OCD-like fears returned, mantras were needed, but sometimes they were not
even enough, and my mood began to sink when I realized that I really could not
even trust my own thoughts anymore. I wanted to practice my CBT techniques, but I could not slow
my thoughts enough to do so, could not even begin to do it no matter how hard I
tried. Walking around the block, let alone running, was too terrifying, so I
could not clear my head that way, feed myself the endorphins I hoped might help. Eating became difficult again, and I lost 15
pounds in three weeks. I would wake up shaking, convinced I was going crazy
and/or was going to die. Nothing could convince me that I actually wasn’t.<br />
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I
would have panic attacks that seemed to only subside when my body was too tired
to keep shaking, too dehydrated to cry any longer; I then became afraid of
always having a panic attack. When I wasn’t awake and worrying, I often had
terrible nightmares, chaotic and violent; in the moments when I would wake from
them I had the most scrambled thoughts, and it took all my energy to sort
things out in my head enough so that I could get out of bed.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
School term was over, I was working but kept having to miss
shifts or leave early because I could not focus. Functioning was a little
difficult though I tried so hard to not let on what was happening inside my
head, and then I would feel worse because I could not function. But one day in the moments before waking I had by far the worst dream of
my life, and I thought it was real, and I woke up and a cascade of thoughts
started and I can’t even begin to explain it, can’t even type it out, could
never even speak a word of it to anyone, but suffice to say
that my shaky traitorous brain took about three seconds to convince me that it
would come true and I would do a horrible thing and I was so fatigued and so
tired that I had no energy to even summon up one of my spells to compensate for
that hideous thought that I had another massive panic attack and decided that I needed to die, to not exist, to not be
anymore.</div>
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<br />
I can’t express these thoughts very eloquently. I wish I could. I write them out and they feel suitably frenzied, but I do not know how to convey the terror and sickness I feel when I think of them, remember them; I can’t seem to capture it on the page. But this is why I decided to take medication. I can’t do justice to the lows I felt that day, I could not even calm down enough to speak until later that day when I went in to see my psychologist, and that was when I told her that perhaps I would like to try something, because at this point I was willing to try pretty much anything, frankly, that could even possibly make these particular feelings stop, because they were not really compatible with living anymore, and I thought I still wanted that.<br />
<br />
So that, in a hastily explained, incomplete nutshell, is why I take medication for my anxiety. Not for the kind that comes from living in a problematic world and having feelings about it. Not the kind that is linked to my self-esteem and my place in the aforementioned world, but from living with a brain that antagonizes me and is uncooperative for reasons I may never quite discern, but seem to lie within it.</div>
jenannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00546283561186929597noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18468247.post-82800944194784924952013-02-13T02:44:00.001-07:002013-02-13T02:44:29.513-07:00brain chemicals: why i take medication, prologue.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPUn9xQzdMUko6K5k25jhFf7ZNhkB06AcQgvMpSsI_DtGNANNGwP4d0jaAhDFKKrQx40T8zP8xq4A-d5kac9vrVR2Y7BujRTQG4RTnnrxjTQVTLI7gVV6VzdQVmQCswoaQOH3q/s1600/DSCF0756.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPUn9xQzdMUko6K5k25jhFf7ZNhkB06AcQgvMpSsI_DtGNANNGwP4d0jaAhDFKKrQx40T8zP8xq4A-d5kac9vrVR2Y7BujRTQG4RTnnrxjTQVTLI7gVV6VzdQVmQCswoaQOH3q/s320/DSCF0756.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i> On Broad hill, 5 a.m., Aberdeen last May, after a night of no sleep</i></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggMIdpG9C_1rKrhsZNEiGzEvs3FDsb8wueftWGF39rPazFwTi6WInBf1zpit5M6as3U0Csk41bighxHbjAOVQYCOgrIFXAnW3WIU0x1zZClNQn-0IPcZJ-HZPbhxBeGCHKVbRk/s1600/DSCF0769.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggMIdpG9C_1rKrhsZNEiGzEvs3FDsb8wueftWGF39rPazFwTi6WInBf1zpit5M6as3U0Csk41bighxHbjAOVQYCOgrIFXAnW3WIU0x1zZClNQn-0IPcZJ-HZPbhxBeGCHKVbRk/s320/DSCF0769.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">On the way to the beach, that same early morning, one of those times the landscape reflects the inside of the mind so precisely</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">*</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></i></div>
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</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">As with my last post from a few months ago, where my running
alleviates my anxiety and depression due to both its chemical effect (dopamine,
serotonin, and their cohorts) and also for its emotional influence (catalysed
by feeling strong and reclaiming space), this next series of posts is also a story about the
two-sided nature of my brain’s condition: something that is both chemical and
emotional, something that is partially helped by psychotropic medication and
something that these drugs still cannot touch.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I’ve wanted to write this for the past year, really, because
it occurred to me that I had been taking medication for anxiety for a whole
decade. That it has taken me nearly
another year to sit down and write it speaks rather emphatically about my
continued ambivalence about said medication. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Or really, perhaps I am not ambivalent about my medication
anymore. If I ask myself honestly, I can frankly say that I’m grateful for it.
I am deeply thankful for what it has allowed me to do and writing the long
piece that follows is a way of reminding myself why, despite the currents of
unease that still run through me. I am
indeed still afraid of being judged for taking it, for having positive feelings
toward it, and for now being unwilling to stop, for accepting that I will
probably take it for the rest of my life, and I need to keep making peace with
this, for now. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I felt I had to write this now because I was reading a piece
recently where the writer was describing her tapering-off period on an SSRI
(not one I have experience with) that was fairly heinous. And it was almost
funny how I could have predicted the four
camps the responses fell into: the voices encouraging her and sharing their own
tips and stories with difficult drugs very neutrally; those who mentioned that
they hated how they felt on SSRIs and also faced a difficult withdrawal and
would never touch one again; those who had experienced depression or anxiety but
had not medicated, and mentioned their
wariness; and then those who smugly informed the commentariat that they would
NEVER put such POISON in their bodies.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I get it, those first three responses. And I completely respect those who do suffer
anxiety and depression and choose not to go on medication or not to stay on
medication because of how awful or wrong it makes them feel either because they
tried it or it simply feels like the wrong choice for them. I have felt those things and they made sense to me at certain points in my life; I just personally reached a point where they were no longer true for me at all. In writing this, the absolute last thing I want to do is condemn others for doing what they needed to do in terms of medication or the lack thereof. But I just get so tired of hearing people who have
never been depressed, never had constant anxiety or recurrent panic attacks say
things like ‘Oh, I would never take an anti-depressant, I could never put that
in my body, I heard they don’t work,’ and all manner of things like that. I feel the bile rise in me when people continue to conflate taking psychotropic medication to function is 'taking pills to find cheap happiness'. And I cringe when I remember how at one time in my life I'd be nodding along and agreeing,
something I don’t do outright anymore, but oh, I did when I was younger, all
the time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I did the nod-and-agree thing when I met a boy who I would later
date. We were both involved in a number of activist causes at the time, and one
day we were chatting about something, and something about pharmaceuticals came
up, and of course all good lefties are anti-pharmaceutical, and I agreed with
him on the dastardliness of such things, and he (who had never been depressed,
or anxious, I would later learn) said, ‘If I were depressed, I’d NEVER put
something like that in my body’, and I mumbled some assent, oh yes, how could
anyone do that, etc. Because I wanted to
be his friend. And I felt ashamed, and guilty, impure, and weak; I had absorbed
so many narratives about how these medications made your feelings inauthentic, or made you into a pliant and unfeeling zombie under the control of the capitalist market, took your
most unpredictable individuality and tempered it into something palatable and
controllable. ‘I’m so glad you agree with me, so many people just don’t
understand how BAD it is, etc,’ he said, and oh, off I slunk, because it was
just after dinner, and I needed to take my second dose of the day.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And we became friends, and then we dated for over a year,
and that whole time I surreptitiously slipped my pills, always hidden in the
internal pocket of my purse. I told him a bit about my anxiety, my panic (I had
to, because he witnessed it) but I never, ever told him about the medication. Not until a year or so later, when we were not
in a romantic relationship any longer, and I had been off the drugs for a few
months, but then had another breakdown and started again. I told him then I was
taking them, but not that I had before. Maybe he was already tired of dealing
with me, but we started drifting even further apart then, and I’ll now never
know what he thought of that.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I’ve told people bits and pieces of this, but perhaps never
all of it at once, or in sequence. I suppose, though, that this story is really
for myself, right now, as a reminder to remember why I am taking the medication
when I start to resent it, or feel guilty, or weak for doing so. To remind
myself that this a choice I made after a lot of hardship and a lot of
consideration; thinking back to the times where I could do nothing at all is helpful
whenever I am presently too hard on myself (which is most of the time).</span></div>
jenannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00546283561186929597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18468247.post-32534955644539830262013-01-09T03:38:00.000-07:002013-01-09T03:38:27.807-07:00settler responsibilities + idle no more<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1nYesHpAbe80Njquzly-4gOfdMPPDpn_P2-wK1Luq2ybMnzhHmmYHrBd58QxKMFHwf17k-z8s6ZMEvi8D5mkYIcpRa4q2Qj1koM8sz0Cd6s8FptsrKK-dXookVJ-3Tgn96lY_/s1600/DSCF0373.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1nYesHpAbe80Njquzly-4gOfdMPPDpn_P2-wK1Luq2ybMnzhHmmYHrBd58QxKMFHwf17k-z8s6ZMEvi8D5mkYIcpRa4q2Qj1koM8sz0Cd6s8FptsrKK-dXookVJ-3Tgn96lY_/s320/DSCF0373.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i> <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">This is the land I grew up within, along the Sturgeon River here, before it meets the North Saskatchewan.</span></i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwGlNCOlUzK82-h7CXUNaEWh8tmnirVTt_rwEZc6kk3oTYsBHWpc96-rbBklACY7yer6AyOG9bj_10ozhnUyfDX-VxYDlcJ8WaJBB0s9u07PgjVcGuhOnqt8bb5_Z6V4aUWjup/s1600/DSCF0376.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><i><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwGlNCOlUzK82-h7CXUNaEWh8tmnirVTt_rwEZc6kk3oTYsBHWpc96-rbBklACY7yer6AyOG9bj_10ozhnUyfDX-VxYDlcJ8WaJBB0s9u07PgjVcGuhOnqt8bb5_Z6V4aUWjup/s320/DSCF0376.JPG" width="320" /></i></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>I was told by a local elder Métis woman that the river was originally called after the red willow, the </i>mihkwâpemak<i>, and that's why the park is named for it in English.</i></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhC7W4LbTNrLV321XomHNMS2r30fabQpHpIti-B4k97d0_pDv7qk96Di1w7CSUxKh0xK3MmI-TrB1Xpn58zaBX7CNP03kK5FA1G5mc6ROdE50xgVTuHGqD7Q1VSq7D3tUH5SbIW/s1600/DSCF0383.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><i><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhC7W4LbTNrLV321XomHNMS2r30fabQpHpIti-B4k97d0_pDv7qk96Di1w7CSUxKh0xK3MmI-TrB1Xpn58zaBX7CNP03kK5FA1G5mc6ROdE50xgVTuHGqD7Q1VSq7D3tUH5SbIW/s320/DSCF0383.JPG" width="320" /></i></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><i> But now the signs downtown say '</i>names <span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; line-height: 14.545454025268555px;">sīpiy<i>'</i></span><i>, or literally Sturgeon River in Cree. It's certainly possibly though, that there are multiple names; however, I think perhaps this is a backtranslation from English.</i></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4B9l9H2hcmJ6af3xR6EcvNl43vKsc3Yg_Ri3-XOK6XFCxIEU7IQmpNX-4HNRew8qRfc1atHQbn8RcD0YKfF_sYX3tiBI2I6TPTnDwQd9g0WjbcE2QZRhrDIbThAJIFw3hAS_m/s1600/DSCF0382.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><i><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4B9l9H2hcmJ6af3xR6EcvNl43vKsc3Yg_Ri3-XOK6XFCxIEU7IQmpNX-4HNRew8qRfc1atHQbn8RcD0YKfF_sYX3tiBI2I6TPTnDwQd9g0WjbcE2QZRhrDIbThAJIFw3hAS_m/s320/DSCF0382.JPG" width="320" /></i></span></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><i> </i> wacask,<i> Cree for muskrat. </i></span></div>
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">So maybe you are hearing a lot about the <a href="http://idlenomore.ca/">Idle No More movement</a> right now, in response to the Canadian government trying to sneak through Bills C-35 and C-40-- two big omnibus bills that could have a rather massive impact on a lot of Canadian land and waterways. Perhaps you are hearing about the fast of Theresa Spence from Attawapiskat who is frustrated with the lack of housing, running water on her home reserve, not to mention environmental pollution, and a whole host of issues, or another fast in solidarity with Idle No More.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Oh! These bills, yes. Look at what C-45 covers:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<ul style="background-color: white; line-height: 19.200000762939453px; list-style-image: url(data:image/png; margin: 0.3em 0px 0px 1.6em; padding: 0px;">
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Bill C-38 (Budget Omnibus Bill #1)</span></li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Bill C-45 (Budget Omnibus Bill #2)</span></li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Bill C-27 First Nations Financial Transparency Act</span></li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Bill S-2 Family Homes on Reserve and Matrimonial Interests or Right Act</span></li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Bill S-6 First Nations Elections Act</span></li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Bill S-8 Safe Drinking Water for First Nations</span></li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Bill C-428 Indian Act Amendment and Replacement Act</span></li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Bill S-207 An Act to amend the Interpretation Act</span></li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Bill S-212 First Nations Self-Government Recognition Bill</span></li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“First Nations” Private Ownership Act</span></li>
</ul>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Look at all the mentions of First Nations here. Could it be that this bill also violates a number of pre-existing agreements the Canadian government has, with other nations? </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This is what a man named kâ-pimwêwêhahk, whose father signed Treaty Six, said the Queen's representative told the signers:</span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>‘iskoyikohk pîsim ka-pimohtêt, iskoyikohk sîpiy ka-pimiciwahk, iskoyikohk maskosiya kê-sakikihki, êkospî isko ka-pimohtêmakan ôma k-êsi-âsotamâtân.’</i></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><br /></i></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>‘So long as the sun should go along, so long as the river should flow, so long as the grass should come up, that is how long this promise I’m making to you will continue.’</i> (<a href="http://moniyawlinguist.wordpress.com/2012/10/15/as-long-as-the-grass-grows/">source</a>)</span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 24px;">_</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 24px;">(These things are still happening! You know, in case you didn't notice.) </span></div>
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">So, at the very least you should be angry that your government can't keep a promise, which in this case is a bilateral agreement (not a top-down law, but a TWO-sided treaty). You should be angry that your government keeps trying to distract from the issue by throwing out shoddy accounting as a decoy instead of owning up and answering questions. You should be absolutely livid because these two bills are going to endanger the water and the land, and the rivers and air and earth do not know any sort of border. And you should be seething because at the very heart of this issue are people, citizens of your country; this is an issue of human rights abuses, and this is happening on occupied territory. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">As much as I am inspired and heartened and feeling so hopeful about a movement like Idle No More, I am angry, so angry. So frustrated by the racism that flares at times like these, but also more terrified perhaps at how much lingers there, covertly, always, seeping out in the most insidious ways, colouring so many actions in this paternalistic, promise-breaking country. Not just the leaders, but the citizens. People in my family. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">I seethe at this lack of compassion, of empathy. I wonder how people can go about their lives like this, cut off from everyone else. Is it the dire individualism of the North American capitalist monoculture, the ridiculous bootstrap-pulling? Lingering fears of difference? That plus a head still full of colonial superiority, coated in ignorance because they have never been taught any different? And this refusal to listen, to learn? Perhaps the most frightening of all.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">How can you just tell someone to assimilate? That there is nothing left of their culture? That 'it' didn't happen to them (which is patently untrue, because colonialism is continuous) so they should just get over it and move on? How is it that people complain flippantly about turning into their parents but have no fucking idea that trauma doesn't begin and end with one person, not in their lifetime, not in the lifetime of their children? (Are they that separated, disconnected, that individual?) </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Suffice it to say that I believe that nothing stops at death, and we inherit a lot of from our ancestors. Just as trauma doesn't cease when the individual who suffered it directly passes on with issues unresolved, neither does responsibility. I strongly feel that the most fundamental ethical act as a human being is to acknowledge our responsibilities to each other, and we have to understand that though we may have not have been the root of the problem, we are still twined up in the branches and they are ours to bear, to disentangle.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">I am a <i>m</i></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>ôniyâw</i>, a non-indigenous person. So were my ancestors. What do I do? What is my appropriate role in this?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Maybe it's difficult. So many people carry such noble narratives of their ancestors, who travelled over the ocean to Canada for a better life for their families. It's harsh to find out that your forebears accepted (knowingly, or less consciously) stolen goods. But they did, and whether or not they understood, whether or not they are still alive now, it doesn't change the fact that they were occupying a place that was not theirs, and that their prosperity depending, in many cases, on land and resources being funneled away from the indigenous communities-- that still is.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">(It's perhaps a little uncomfortable to wonder what you might have done, in that circumstance, if you were the new settler and knew what was happening to the native peoples. It can hurt to think of these people you admire, to think of YOURSELF, as benefiting from the misery and subjugation of another group.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I know my relatives at least three generations back on the most sparse branch, and back into the 1600s on other sides. They were poor, working class Scots and English on my dad's side and Ukrainian ex-serfs and peasants on my mother's. They did not come to Canada for fun, because they were wealthy and looking for vast lands to conquer or even possess; they basically wanted a chance to make a living, or not die in a famine or a war. The Ukrainians heard something about free land, and a relative of mine heard about it, and started the exodus, in fact.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I understand that we do valourize our pioneering settler ancestors, and to acknowledge that their actions were not entirely noble or respectful doesn't mean denying outright their narratives of hardship or persecution or the courage it took to leave their homelands; it simply means recognizing and honouring that some of the successes they certainly have directly been to the detriment of the indigenous population of this country. We need to see both sides, allow nuance into the story. It is essential. Too often I find, especially with the descendants of Ukrainian immigrants, a great deal of deification of your settler-ancestor. And while I personally am moved by my own grandparents' and great-grandparents' survival and resilience, I must always remember that even those who were oppressed could still oppress others (We all live at the intersections of various oppressions and privileges, and we need to learn to identify them). This is all too often forgotten.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I have relatives who married into Métis and Cree families in east-Central Alberta and Manitoba and farmed and hunted and lived together respectfully. On the other hand, I also had a newly arrived Scottish great-grandfather waltz in and decide to fight against Riel. But the details matter little. The point is that as a whole, we, as settlers and descendants of settlers, need to learn humility and simply accept our responsibility as bearers of a colonial legacy regardless of the particular actions of our individual foremothers and forefathers; we benefit from the actions of the whole group, we continue to receive privilege as their descendants and we simply need to acknowledge this, remove our claws from it, and let go.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And with letting go of privilege comes the regathering of our responsibility as descendants of settlers, responsibility to act as allies for indigenous rights. We need to be humble, we need to criticize ourselves and listen closely to what others say of us. It will be awkward, and it will hurt. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And this Idle No More movement gives everyone a perfect opportunity. So, in lieu of the New Year's resolutions that I never make, I have made a plan in the spirit of incorporating Idle No More into my daily life. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>1. Educate others.</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Sometimes that's all you can do. But it's worth it, even if you make someone think just a little. I suppose it's always a little more than they would have otherwise.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There is rampant ignorance abounding, some of it horribly willful and virulent. As difficult as it is to engage with racists, there are also some people who are not deep and incurable bigots. They just don't know what's going on. And you can help them. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Don't let it go, and don't give up. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A tenacious and generous blogger, <a href="http://apihtawikosisan.com/">âpihtawikosisân</a> (Chelsea Vowel) has written tirelessly lately, compiling the facts for you: <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/chelsea-vowel/attawapiskat-emergency_b_1127066.html">about the Attawapiskat First Nation's financial situation,</a> as well as <a href="http://apihtawikosisan.com/2012/12/16/canada-its-time-we-need-to-fix-this-in-our-generation/">dispelling myths about the lives of indigenous Canadians in general</a> (in regard to the reserve system, etc.) Learn these things. Correct others. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">If you are having trouble keeping the points of the Indian Act (and what the bills C-35 and C-40 will mean) straight, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECi_7G0QAgw&feature=youtu.be">listen to Russell Diabo here</a>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">If you are looking for further resources for allies (information, facts, and how to be a supportive but not meddlesome, settler-splaining one) <a href="https://www.facebook.com/notes/settlers-in-support-of-indigenous-rights-idle-no-more/resources-for-non-native-folks-looking-to-relate-get-involved-and-act-in-solidar/578516912164905">there's a collection here</a>. The Idle No More page is also excellent for orienting yourself. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>2. Take care of the land. </b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Not because you own it, but because you are of it. Do it in the spirit of land stewardship, of living in a place and caring for it. I love this land so much it hurts me, that I ache in my legs and my chest when I go away for too long. It's not my land, no, not my ancestors' land, but I am made of it and I was raised on it and of it and I want to care for it, honour it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I am going to choose places that I go often and seriously care for them. Riverlot is already protected, but the edge by the water always needs cleaning in spring. Winter food for birds is always a good idea. And then in the road slump off the banks where I used to live in Edmonton -- the beer bottle golf ball graveyard amongst the saskatoons and hazelnuts. This needs love, and honouring. This is the kind of mindfulness I want to cultivate along with the time I spend in these places anyway, as a gesture to this place.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>3. Learn <i>nêhiyawêwin</i>, Cree.</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I have been meaning to do this for years. Always interested in it, growing up, learning the place names and the few words my dad knew for plants and animals and places. My Musée/Métis centre volunteering introduced me more to local toponymy and I meant to start then. But then I went up to the Yukon, and I learned <i>dän k'è</i> there, and then to Russia and learned Sakha, and I've learned these other indigenous languages but not the one that is indigenous to where I am from. And I want to honour the people whose land I live on, people whose names I have known in my elementary school (<i>keenooshayo</i>) and the woods (<i>p</i><span style="background-color: white;"><i>itikwahanapiwiyin</i>, Poundmaker</span>) and all those who have moved through these places and known them and loved them too. So I am starting to learn, in deference to this language of the land here, where I am from, and those a</span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19.200000762939453px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>miskwacīwiyiniwak</i><span style="font-style: italic;">,</span> the Beaver Hills people, and Métis </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">who have made their lives here far, far longer than my own people, so I can know it along with my own ancestral speech.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I want to support all Treaty Six First Nations here, and all indigenous groups across Canada.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I just want to give all people the quiet support and space to heal, and allow them the self-determination and agency to do so. I want to remember my responsibilities, and I want to listen.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I don't know what to do. I don't know if these are the best things to do. But I am angry and I am at a loss and this is what I want to try. </span><br />
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<br />jenannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00546283561186929597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18468247.post-29907651971133827972012-11-27T19:24:00.002-07:002012-11-27T19:25:13.343-07:00brain chemicals, part one: running in the dark<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Aberdeen sunsets (in my backyard and at the City Beach), July 2012</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This is one in a series of posts which will all be tangentially related to mental
health and its various bases something that’s always at the forefront of
my mind but especially so lately as I slog through the writing of my PhD. Some of my anxiety and depression is most definitely related to environmental and experiential factors, and the rhythm of my life at the moment is definitely not conducive to balance or relaxation, so I understand its occurrence; some is also connected to my emotional/psychological state, which is also very understandable. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And some of it is purely physiological, and this to me has always been the most inscrutable of the elements, these brain chemicals, because it seems sometimes that there is little I can do to predict and then mediate their effects on me. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">(And yes, I take medication for them, but that is another post!) </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Now, one way I can appease these wayward surges of badness is to run, thereby feeling the emotional and psychological effects of going outside and doing something that would make me feel strong and connected to the earth even if it didn't also have the lovely side-effect of flooding my synapses with endorphins and other good things. I have been running for most of my life, and I started during a time when I was in late elementary school and dealing with one of my first severe bout of anxiety and panic attacks. I discovered that it was something I could do to feel strong again, and sure of myself, confident and perhaps most importantly, distracted. I am sure the extra brain chemicals were also a good bonus, and basically, this addicted me for life. It is a productive and healthy addiction, as they go (though there was also a period where I did run a little too much, and suffered for it) though procuring my running fixes can get complicated, due to time and in the following case, daylight hours, and factors beyond my control (being a woman, for one).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">* * * </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">So I am writing a dissertation. And often late afternoon, and evening come, and I know that I still have hours of work to do, but I need a break. I need to move, to disentangle myself from the chair and desk and unlock my eyes from the screen. And so I creep out of my office, where many are still working, and put on my running things and go out into the evening and run. And then I come back and feel better and more productive for a little while longer. Calmer, sharper, everything is more crisp and serene. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A few weeks ago, though, in Aberdeen, a young woman was raped close to the University. She was walking down the street at 7:30am when she was attacked. And this made me sick, because these things happen at all, but that is another post, too. What really irked me was the advice of police: women, don't walk alone, even in daytime! Which of course is what's been said forever, and does not address any of the roots of the issue. And I was annoyed, too, because I was startled by it, and angered because I needed to go for a run. By myself, outside, in the dark. So, t</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">he next day I got ready to leave from my office as usual, and when someone asked where I was going, I told them, receiving the response, 'You're going for a run now!? Didn't you hear what happened to that girl?!' and 'Why don't you go in the middle of the day, or morning, when there are more people out?' and 'That's really... brave... of you' (implied meaning: stupid).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I told them it happened in daylight, and morning wouldn't be happening for me. I didn't want to get into it, so I just left. Morning runs have never been my favourite, anyway. I’ve always been an owl instead of a lark, and find it very
difficult to exert myself early in the day, especially on no food due to
metabolic issues. Waiting until breakfast digests puts me too much into the
middle of the morning and into my work, which, while flexible, is best done in
large blocks of time when possible due to my writing habits. And the days here
are getting alarmingly short with the season turning, with darkness now falling before 4pm and so I am really left with little choice, in some ways. And I am going to run regardless, because I will feel shitty, frankly, if I do not: because I will not get my brain chemicals otherwise, and I will feel down on myself for feeling belittled and thwarted.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">People also often tell me I should just go to the nice
fancy university gym on my street, but I really don’t want to. I’ve never liked
running indoors all that much, for one, and there isn’t even a track there, so
you must deal with the Sisiphean scenario of the treadmill: you go nowhere, at
a strange gait and pace, under headache-foreshadowing fluorescence. And the people, too – the hordes of football
and rugby men, and the women who are not hairy yetis like I am. I don’t want to
go and feel on display, to have to compete with those men for space, and I
don’t want to feel shamed into shaving. There is no solitude, no quiet there.
This is not a relaxing, affirming situation, to say the least. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And so I decided to keep running in the dark. And yes, I take precautions, should anything
happen, whether it be attack or injury. I am covered in reflective striping, on
my shoes, leggings, a highlighter-pink vest over my jacket and a climber’s
headlamp for where the streetlamps are dim. To protect myself menaces other
than local drives, I have a mobile phone and busfare, headache medication; a
whistle tucked inside my shirt and a keyring wrapped around a finger and keys
jutting out from my palm. Sometimes, I carry my dad’s Swiss Army knife in my
pocket, not because it would be much use to me if I were to be surprised, but
because of its talismanic weight and meaning. I do avoid Seaton Park, because
assaults have happened there frequently, and other heavily treed areas, and
stick to places out in the open along the beach road, and main thoroughfares. I
go early enough (before 11pm, usually) that there are still people and cars out
and about. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Beyond convenience to my schedule and patterns of energy, I’ve just always loved running in the dark. I used to run
around and around my block (exactly 400m around, my dad measured it for me) or
the loop road in my neighbourhood, as I wasn’t allowed to stray far, but my
parents knew I needed to train. Summer nights, when it was finally cool and
feeling breeze on my skin was the most awaited moment of my day. The flash of
my legs, birch-white, under a streetlamp, chasing the local rabbits that sprung
out of the shade of the driveways, disappearing ahead of me. In autumn, when my
feet whispered through the crush of black ash and poplar leaves on the ground,
the smoke-scent of early fires dissolving up into a black sky and the wintry
pinpoints of stars (or, if I was really lucky, bands of northern lights that
moved and breathed as I did, sighing and striding on with their own silver
rhythm). And it was so quiet, except for a distant car on a main road, or a
house party, perhaps, a few streets over. I made the most noise, with my
footfalls and my breath, mind quiet and still and clear and joyful.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And last night when I was running, I was again marvelling at
the sensorial changes of the dark. How when I turned off King Street down the
Beach Boulevard and faced towards the sea, I saw a cloudless night sky for the
first time in far too long here, the stars spilling above the ocean, the sprawl
of Auriga and Taurus, Orion’s bright belt pulling me forward. Cresting the hill
up onto the treeless boulevard ship lights make their own constellations, out
on the blackness of the invisible horizon. Cars pass intermittently, and I
follow the cues of light from the headlights, the glow of the city to my right,
and the twenty lumens spilling out of my headlamp into a flowing pool in front
of me. My eyes register the light, but I
am not really seeing, or looking now; it is just a faint guide. With this
deprivation (how we spend our days always looking, reading, writing, everything
so visual!) I feel enveloped by the dark, and forced into listening. The waves
of the winter sea folding in on themselves, a stray oystercatcher’s call drown
out stray engines. The ocean makes breathing easier, a pattern to follow, the patter
of my feet, the moments between mid-air and pavement, the tiniest of flights.
The southeast wind, salt and fish, frosted grass, leafy decay. I am very much
inhabiting my whole body, but at the same time I am aware of how truly faint
the membranes are between us and everything else. I spill out into this, forget
the boundaries, bones dissolving in warmth and all my dear little endorphins
(or whatever they are) go to work mending my synapses. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And yes, it’s true, even without my darkness, my sea and my
sky, I could still run. I could
go to the gym, and scrabble away on the treadmill, and I could manufacture a
whole ocean of brain-chemicals and feel okay in the end. But it would not be as
satisfying all around. Because while I am primarily running because of its
immediate chemical effect that is going to let me write a few more paragraphs
of my thesis that night, and function like a decent human being the next day,
and thus not feel utterly useless, and all the related emotional and
psychological reasons, there is the other reason here: I am doing this because
to not run there, in the darkness, on my own terms, is to let both bad
individual people and the misinformed patriarchy win, and take something from
me that I don’t want to give up.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I am sure that there are people that would still find this
crazy, an unnecessary risk, something foolish and careless and all those other
things women are told not to do, not to be. But lately, I feel like my mental health
depends a great deal on these runs, both for the physiological benefits of the
aforementioned brain chemicals, but the emotional and psychological payback as
well. This goes beyond feeling like a body beyond the brain, or the sense of
accomplishment from rousing myself out of a paralytic mood. There is something
so profoundly strengthening that derives from challenging what I am supposed to
do and be: a woman afraid of the dark, timid, overly cautious and avoidant. I
am not going to refrain from running alone, all by myself, at night simply
because I am female-bodied. I need to do this; this is my way of taking back
the night. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Certainly, I’ve been to marches full of people, and there’s
definitely solidarity in that and something empowering that can arise from that
feeling. But when I do this, I feel so sturdy, so tough, so self-sufficient,
and in the last throes of a long run, perhaps a little invincible. And that’s a
rare and treasured thing for me, when all my other thoughts and feelings are
otherwise conspiring against my well-being, and I don’t think it’s crazy at all
to do this, to run myself back into chemical equilibrium, and take back a bit
of space in the darkness, both physically and psychologically, at the same
time.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br />jenannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00546283561186929597noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18468247.post-86682684007805957212012-10-11T19:17:00.002-06:002012-10-11T19:20:30.437-06:00ashes to everything<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiPHXuD7GYvNLzyWlPaoMlMNpIwcPlfEoAQCt7xwQnJD8HUAXZR4SFfog8bxIdmkZnXYEMAMvD0vAhI6aQs7DfgWWzta9hwLmE2XbNJZZP7ec20bBNjChYD52pgpsqOoqh4H1M/s1600/ashes+in+the+creek.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiPHXuD7GYvNLzyWlPaoMlMNpIwcPlfEoAQCt7xwQnJD8HUAXZR4SFfog8bxIdmkZnXYEMAMvD0vAhI6aQs7DfgWWzta9hwLmE2XbNJZZP7ec20bBNjChYD52pgpsqOoqh4H1M/s320/ashes+in+the+creek.JPG" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It was a beautiful day, that Sunday last month; a perfect fishing day, when you could stand in the creek, shallows sun-warmed, and not be too shocked by the water's chill; when there is still enough warmth in the air to bring out the smell of the pine, to lull the fishes hiding in the deep still pools. The swallows under the Athabasca bridge had disappeared already, and geese had threaded themselves across the horizon, southbound. It reminded me so much of a weekend just seven years earlier, when my dad suggested we go up for a drive here, on the Windfall roads. He was tired already, he said, and didn't have the energy to hike and fish; but perhaps we could go look at the turning of the leaves? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And so we drove up, taking our time. We stopped in Whitecourt, meandered past the school where he'd taught all those years ago, saw the apartment where he'd lived with his weird roommate, Mercer, the community theatre where he'd acted in 'The Monkey's Paw'. Drove further up the highway to the turn-off, I remember so many migrating butterflies smashing into the windshield, torn wings stuck to the road when I'd get out to take a photograph. Arctic fritillaries, earthy and bright orange. "That was the colour of my orange Corvette," my Dad told me, and I remembered the pictures in his album. "But when I lived up here, I had my Challenger, that's what I'd go driving in when I went to explore these roads, looking for good places to fish. I'd turn up the radio, I remember this big hit that year, 'Spirit in the Sky'..."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">We'd come up here, to Windfall, many other autumns, when we'd go hiking through the bush, fishing in the creek, eating our lunch on the stones, being quiet. But that year, my dad had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, and was due to start the chemo the next day. He didn't know what his energy would be like for the next months, and he wanted to get up there, one more time that year before the winter came. And I went with him, as he visited all these places he loved, to which he attached such positive, sustaining memories, places that he knew he could draw strength from, places that could nourish him. While I know that travelling through was a way to calm and fortify himself, I also felt a sense of transmittance; he was passing these memories on to me, to hold them, he was reminding me of the times we'd had there too, and I understood more than ever the importance of these places. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In the next six years, he did have times when he was feeling well enough to come back here, to the woods he'd discovered in his youth, to fish and camp and wander. And so last month, when my mother decided she was ready to scatter his ashes, a year after he'd passed, we knew that this was one of the places he would want to be placed. Into the creekbed, with a shot of rum on a bright afternoon. The stream had flooded that spring, and change course quite dramatically; we were able to find a secluded grove to hang the prayer flags that people had written on at his memorial, festoon them with fish-hooks that latched onto the beard lichens. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">"Old man's beard," my dad would say. "You can eat it, make this awful soup when it's green, really high in Vitamin C, so you won't get scurvy if you're lost in the bush! And when it's gone black, it makes the best fire-starter, better than dryer lint!" Being there in my home landscape, especially after being away from home for another extended stretch, reminded me how grateful I was to him for teaching me how to live. I thought of the forest there, the plants growing, the labrador tea and the cat-tails and the marsh marigolds, lemon lichen and the soft spruce buds eaten by the young deer (and a small Jenanne, learning how to survive in the bush). I thought of how he had shown me how to fish in the creek, in the lake, and through the ice hole, to remove the hooks from the fish's mouth so as to prevent bleeding, to place the fish you wouldn't take back in the water carefully so it wouldn't be too disoriented, and watch it to make sure it could swim away (if it couldn't, you'd give it a gentle poke); I thought about learning to clean a fish, make it ready for eating, and felt very grateful he'd taught me all this, that I could do this if I needed to. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">He had taught me how to be in these places I love so much. And it felt so good to place his body back here, let the ashes trail into the tiny currents, watch them swirl and settle amongst the slippery rocks. To taste a little of the stream water, tannic and sweet. To let the smallest fragments free, without all those false trappings like coffins and embalments which spoke to him of holding on to something when it's really time to let go. It was calming, and peaceful, because it seemed like the best possible thing to do. It was right; it's where he'd want his body to lay, to let it nourish the algae and waterbugs, become the silty substrate where the greyling bury their eggs, and grind down into very stuff of sustenance, the earth. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">People have asked me if there is a feeling of closure-- no. Closure -- what is it to be closed? This is not over; it will never be over. I read this recently, in something <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/33443939/Precarious-Life-Judith-Butler">by Judith Butler:</a> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><br /></i></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>"W<span style="line-height: 18px;">hen we lose certain people, or when we are dispossessed from a place, or a community, we may simply feel as though we are undergoing something temporary, that mourning will be over and some restoration of prior order will be achieved. But maybe when we undergo what we do, something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that these ties constitute what we are, ties or bonds that compose us.</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>It is not as if an “I” exists independently over here and then simply loses a “you” over there, especially if the attachment to “you” is part of what composes who “I” am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only lose the lose, I become inscrutable to myself. Who “am” I, without you?"</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Loss does illuminate these ties between us, most sharply, in the case of death, and it forces us to think about our interconnections, because it is through that loss that we understand something of what makes our selves. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Through experiencing the death of my baba/grandma, and my father, I've come to understand that though there is a loss that can never be assuaged, there is a process by which these ties we have with the dead are reconfigured. It's difficult. Partly, I think, because we are so used to thinking of ourselves as 'I', and ignoring all these little spider-silk connections between us, usually invisible except in the right light. But they're there, and they are strong, and death just forces us to rethink our relationships, these connections between us. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I don't believe in God, or god(s), nothing anthropomorphic or omniscient or all-benevolent. No heavenly afterlife. I am not really sure what I believe in, if I 'believe' in anything; I have only what I have experienced. I do feel very strongly about being interconnected with absolutely everything else in existence; there's that. And that dying is not a destruction, but a de-creation in Simone Weil's sense of it -- "an undoing of the creature in us", a loss of the self. Visiting the bodies of my grandma and my dad just after they died, I felt something, the aftermath of their passing, and though I felt such acute loss, it was also transformative. I felt I knew something then that I cannot even begin to articulate. I felt that there was movement, that there was really no stillness in death. And so I don't believe in inertia, that anything can just stop; their selves are becoming something else just as their bodies are slowly transforming into earth.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">We've lost them as we knew them, and we'll never know them again as we did. And that loss is the most painful thing I know, because it de-constructs some of my self, as well. But I like to think about transformation, or de-formation, and that perhaps the death and de-formation of the self allows a kind of connectivity with all the other things that we don't yet know, as divisible, created beings that we are. And it's not always a comfort, it doesn't always make up for the feelings of loss, but I know that I will come to understand my own self again, as I re-form my relationships with the dead, live in memory of them. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Nothing is closed; our connections are always open, ever re-connecting. Everything moving. Before we leave I sit there on the rocks with him, think of the chalky ashes whirling, becoming the flash of an arctic greyling's dorsal fin, slipping downstream. This is my dad now, everything. And here he is now, as Windfall Creek.</span><br />
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<br />jenannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00546283561186929597noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18468247.post-74893330722248249122012-08-27T15:38:00.000-06:002012-08-27T15:54:03.504-06:00one year.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Sky breaking over the Wind Tower, Canmore, January 2012</span></i></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 13.333333969116211px; line-height: 17.981481552124023px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>"Mourning: not diminished, not subject to erosion, to time. </i></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 13.333333969116211px; line-height: 17.981481552124023px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Chaotic, erratic: moments (of distress, of love, of life) as fresh now as on the first day"</i>. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 13.333333969116211px; line-height: 17.981481552124023px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary.</span></span>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13.333333969116211px; line-height: 17.981481552124023px; text-align: left;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13.333333969116211px; line-height: 17.981481552124023px; text-align: left;">*</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13.333333969116211px; line-height: 17.981481552124023px; text-align: left;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 17.981481552124023px; text-align: left;">My dad passed away exactly one year ago today. It was unexpected, in that although he was in hospital and had been suffering from myeloma for at least six years, the day before we'd heard that whatever was affecting his heart and liver was not amyloidosis! More intravenous chemo! they said. He'd be an outpatient again soon. And I'd see him again the next morning, that he wasn't waving goodbye to me for the last time. That I would speak to him again the next day, and he would answer me. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 17.981481552124023px; text-align: left;">Instead, I would be woken early to go stand over him after he was already gone, his head turned to the door, eyes partly open, and begin the long one-sided conversation of grieving. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 17.981481552124023px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 17.981481552124023px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">That is the most difficult part. To never have an answer in words, in the only language you've ever used with him now utterly insufficient, completely useless. To want to share so deeply with him everything I am experiencing, and feel my heart burst every single time it happens and I remember it's not possible. It's happened so many times over the past year -- I live, feel joy and awe with the world, discover something, and want so deeply to tell him, because that is what he did with me. He shared so much of what he loved with me, and I can't even begin to explain this inheritance and how it has shaped me. If it was my mother who has taught me to love words and things you can do with them, it's my dad who helped me to really approach the world, to experience it profoundly and make me want to use those words for something. Ironic for someone who was never much for poetry, yes, but it's his, that quiet, ever-open eye and mind he helped to train in me, that I use when I capture the light, when I write.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 17.96666717529297px;">There is such gratitude, thankfulness today, for him, because I am lucky to have him as a father, to have had him in my life. But there is still grief. There always will be. Such things can co-exist, even in the pain the grieving brings. I just wish that the society I live in could better openly acknowledge grief, and recognize that it is not just something to 'get over', that whatever way it works (in spirals, a tidal movement) it is anything but linear. There is no wound to heal over with the supposedly magical powers of time -- rather it is one that simply changes shape and form, but always remains susceptible to itching, re-opening, flarings, bleeding and acute, intense pain at any stage. Like, as one friend astutely noted, the fragments of glass embedded in skin after a car crash, that work their way up through the dermal layers for years, precipitating on the surface. Or the nematocysts injected into the body after a jellyfish sting (as I well know) that can become inflamed long after the initial encounter as they wriggle up out of the flesh. It never really gets better, only different. </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 17.96666717529297px;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 17.96666717529297px;">The last few weeks I've been travelling, and a few days ago I started to cry at the remains of the Berlin Wall because I felt, once again, that this is how it will always be, for the rest of my life -- that I will always be experiencing things and wishing he could be there to share them, or at least for me to tell him about them, show him my photos that he always loved, </span></span><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 17.96666717529297px;">Maybe I will come to feel that he is part of me, living through me in the way I feel my baba is absorbed into me, that she is within me. </span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 17.96666717529297px;">But right now the fact is I don't feel that, and that he just feels slightly out of reach, and I am straining, straining to reach out to him, without words, with such inexpressible futility. I simply miss him so acutely it makes me physically ill at times. And it is this loss of discourse in these human terms, the only ones I know, that hurts so much. I can talk <b>to</b> him, yes, but oh, death and its lack of responses, answers... </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 17.96666717529297px;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 17.96666717529297px;">So I just remind myself that I am allowed to miss him, allowed to hurt, allowed to grieve, and most of all, allowed to express it. We may not be able to have dialogues (in our usual language-based human terms) with the dead, but if I had my way, we'd be living in a society that was a lot more comfortable having dialogues about grief and mourning and everything that will always be part of our experiences with death long after it happens to those we love.</span></span></div>
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jenannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00546283561186929597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18468247.post-12732335919967667102012-07-29T18:45:00.000-06:002012-07-29T20:04:24.916-06:00sixty-four<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc0HUblRswWAkyi-0e66KgAIr5IzXZ_SyXMbG-KTco7YJlCxHYsXrqd06pM_MdQ1IZzu_CES_sFFn1zdgAnlkYP1yg2lr1aDSii0DlW9NeBGBRCiBon2lHvXO6W7x31ohd3vmy/s1600/DSCF2105.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc0HUblRswWAkyi-0e66KgAIr5IzXZ_SyXMbG-KTco7YJlCxHYsXrqd06pM_MdQ1IZzu_CES_sFFn1zdgAnlkYP1yg2lr1aDSii0DlW9NeBGBRCiBon2lHvXO6W7x31ohd3vmy/s320/DSCF2105.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;"><i> Birthday dinner for my father by the mouth of the Don, Aberdeen, July 23, 2012</i></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjykl8xkzBnoe9vCK4dmCNXZjsnL38AnY_Nm3QnJdCfM9vFFDwVcyj_obbOI7vg_k3HQUVw3qk5I1NiKII-xbnIn5G0ycg-t_ymW6Jwps4SeNYuKcw7PsSuJSb59JMfiQ2t84XO/s1600/DSCF2108.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjykl8xkzBnoe9vCK4dmCNXZjsnL38AnY_Nm3QnJdCfM9vFFDwVcyj_obbOI7vg_k3HQUVw3qk5I1NiKII-xbnIn5G0ycg-t_ymW6Jwps4SeNYuKcw7PsSuJSb59JMfiQ2t84XO/s320/DSCF2108.JPG" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> <i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Birthday offering and the quiet river mouth before sunset, July 23rd, 2012</span></i></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNd1zbYZxZF1T_V_UE8pgSrXJsJta8tKsIDwZela3F6gdVeOIoxG0p5ohggfX5iDuJaFWALAsagj66j2Vt_HdOa6uDr74ip98eAhbQes2axXOEVf8Mn6Y8siXBZSkumWffMFfq/s1600/DSCF2130.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;"><i><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNd1zbYZxZF1T_V_UE8pgSrXJsJta8tKsIDwZela3F6gdVeOIoxG0p5ohggfX5iDuJaFWALAsagj66j2Vt_HdOa6uDr74ip98eAhbQes2axXOEVf8Mn6Y8siXBZSkumWffMFfq/s320/DSCF2130.JPG" width="320" /></i></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;"><i> Sunset over the Don near the estuary, July 23, 2012</i></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnd_a8d_DN7zP7lT-BoWjUWHUtVNr1zIdJHNbnB4ocDOA36MtDXLa1Rs7LLiZC_ytmS_FFQgEy50p9Mu_UPVYdyYkHXAt5GXMCHSI9VlpVPI1n-4ybE7oIX5GxoxnRE9A-tnJO/s1600/DSCF2148.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;"><i><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnd_a8d_DN7zP7lT-BoWjUWHUtVNr1zIdJHNbnB4ocDOA36MtDXLa1Rs7LLiZC_ytmS_FFQgEy50p9Mu_UPVYdyYkHXAt5GXMCHSI9VlpVPI1n-4ybE7oIX5GxoxnRE9A-tnJO/s320/DSCF2148.JPG" width="320" /></i></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>Water on the shore and the luminous sky, Aberdeen city beach, July 23, 2012</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">***</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This past Monday was a difficult day; July 23<sup>rd</sup> would
have been my dad’s 64<sup>th</sup> birthday. A few days previous, when talking with my mama,
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCss0kZXeyE">the Beatles’ song</a>, <i>When I’m 64</i>, got
annoyingly and depressingly lodged in my head, but I didn’t mention it to her,
lest she suffer the same fate, and also because it would hurt her even more,
for what would she not give to still have him there, growing old with her? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">My dad wasn’t the sort of person to get too caught up in
birthdays. Unlike my mother, who likes to have her birthday dinner and presents
on the actual anniversary of her birth, who takes great care in that sort of festive
commemoration, my dad didn’t seem to mind if you gave him gifts on the day, or
when the celebrations happened, or even if you weren’t there that day. He was
quiet and laid-back, and being the centre of attention never appealed to him,
so grand gestures were politely refused and festivities beyond a quiet dinner
(usually involving barbecued things, pizza, chocolate desserts finished with a
little rum or whisky) never really occurred. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I think my mama always had trouble accepting his lack of
desire to mark the occasion. Rather mischievously, she poked fun at his
reticence to observe this occasion. She never did anything like take out an ad
in the newspaper proclaiming ‘Lordy lordy look who’s forty’ or have fifty
vulture-statues skulking all over the front lawn. However, on July 23<sup>rd</sup>,
1988 forty black balloons adorned the garage door. (They popped in the heat of
the early morning, causing him great alarm). In 1998, fifty colourful cut-out
paper fish (courtesy of her grade three students) appeared dangling from tree
branches on our front lawn. He took these all in stride, and I think he was
secretly amused by her sneakiness. Nothing happened in 2008, but the next year when
we were in Hawai’i for my sister’s wedding, we had dinner at a restaurant with
an aquarium. If it was your birthday, a diver would swim into the massive tank
to feed the fish while you were eating, and hold up a birthday sign adorned
with lettuce and seaweed; all the manta rays and wrasses and triggerfish would
then swim up and nibble the vegetables in your honour. Needless to say, he was
most pleased with this one. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">So his birthday—while never terribly important for him—feels
probably more momentous for us. I’m finding it especially difficult because
last year, his last birthday, in some ways was the most noticeable beginning of
his severe decline in health. I had
arrived home from fieldwork shortly before, and would be away camping on the
actual day, so I remember on the 21<sup>st</sup> planning to make homemade
pizza for him, one of his favourite things that I cook. Despite his lack of
enthusiasm for celebrations, he has never lacked an appreciation for a good
meal, and being true to my maternal lineage, giving someone nourishment makes
me happier than anything. So generally birthday gifts from me included dinner
requests.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I made the pizza to his specifications, and it was so sad,
he could hardly eat them. It upset him too. The next day he was too tired to
come out to lunch with his mother, and his appetite was even more depleted. On
his birthday, two days later, he slept most of the day. And though he’d certainly
lost the desire to eat many times over the course of his treatment, this seemed
different, more acute than other times. This was only a month and four days
before he passed away. And i<span style="background-color: white;">t’s hard now, not to think about all the feelings of last
summer, of witnessing all the suffering he went through and how it was really
impossible to do anything to make him comfortable, to make him happy, to make
anything a little easier for him. It’s also difficult for me to believe that it
has almost been a year already since he left.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The seasickness of grief continues to come, sometimes when I
might expect it, other times catching me fully unaware. This is fine with me. I
need to, I want to grieve. I don’t suppose there will ever be a time when I
won’t grieve for him; I still miss my grandmother, my baba, who passed away six
and a half years ago now, and I think of her every single day, because she shaped me, and now she is in me, somehow, I can feel it. However, the
grief with her was never as acute as it is for my dad, and one of the main
reasons is that she was ready to die. She said so herself, she told us months
before she was ever in the hospital; she told us she missed her own mother, she
missed her husband, and she’d see them soon, because she wasn’t planning to
live another winter. But my dad wasn’t ready to go at all, and for some reason now sometimes he seems further away. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I still search for ways to explain to people that I am still
grieving. I try to get over my resentment and frustration with people who just
don’t get it, that grief is not a post-funerary sprint that’s intense but quickly
over. It’s also not something to just ‘get it all out’ and then ‘get over’. I
try to remind myself that the loss of very close people is something not
everyone has faced and sometimes experience is the only way to understand. I
try to restrain from punching someone in the nose/exchanging harsh words when
they say (sometimes with kindness but other times with a weird sort of
dismissal and condescension) something like: ‘it’ll get better in time’ or
‘time heals all wounds’ or another variation on that platitude. Time has little to do with these feelings. I
know that in time my grief will change, it will manifest itself differently and
it will not necessarily feel as it does now, but I will never stop grieving.
And I am not going to apologize for that. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">A memory from last summer that is both incredibly painful
and also immensely dear to me is the evening before the morning he died. We
thought he was getting a little better, because for the past two days he had
been able to eat a few bites of food, and drink a little more too. I’d helped
him eat before, adjusting the straw in his glass, cutting things up for him
over the past days, but there was something so striking, so shattering about
that meal that I never realized would be his last: I was cutting up the chicken
parmigiana into tiny little pieces, and he would open his mouth like a baby
bird (or human, I suppose) and I would feed him each little bite as my heart
just broke, thinking of how he fed me just like this when I was little. Here
comes the airplane, into the hangar! I think I was shaking. I was so
devastated, yet so profoundly grateful that I could help him—that he would
allow me to help him—with this. And he
was eating! He ate more than he had for a week, I think, and he was so pleased,
and so was I, and I promised him I’d come the next morning to help him with his
lunch. But he passed early in the morning, and that was it. No more meals
together. What I would not give to cook him something, share another dinner
with him, what I would not give--<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">So his birthday this year – how do you celebrate with the
dead? In the Ukrainian tradition, there are always graveside picnics, eggs and vodka, along with special favourites of the person you are honouring. But that wasn't my dad's heritage, and he never liked a huge celebration anyway. So out of respect for his character, there was no big party for this
one, his 64th. But I went down to the ocean, to the mouth of the Don river where I could see the currents of freshwater streaming out as the ocean lapped in as the tide rose in dialogue. And I lit a candle, and left black licorice (the Pontefract cakes I'd always buy him at the sweet shop), and chocolate with almonds melting beside the flame. I had a dram of whisky in his honour, drank to him and shared it with the sea, then let the tears come. And this sharing of food with him was a nod to the lunchtime that day after that never happened after he passed. (<i>Because I still need him, and I will still
feed him, when he is 64</i>.)</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span id="goog_1823958836"></span><span id="goog_1823958837"></span>jenannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00546283561186929597noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18468247.post-21041056623390623452012-07-28T18:42:00.002-06:002012-07-28T18:44:50.688-06:00haar... (photos + poem)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I took all of the following photos one early morning in late May this year after a night of insomnia and heightened anxiety. The haar, the thick fog that rolls in off the North Sea, was permeating the 4:30am world as I went for a walk because I was claustrophobic inside, and too panic-y to be still. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I walked down my street, over Broad Hill and down to the ocean, which I could not even see until I was right there, the tide high, waves reaching out for me. I heard a pair of ravens, distant starlings, the usual chorus of a hundred gulls, but otherwise it was only water, footsteps on sand and grit.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I am not a morning person; I am most alert and alive and creative in the hours between 7pm and 2am. Thoroughly an owl, not a lark. Often morning itself brings me terrible anxiety. But there was something so new and calming about this morning, empty of humans but for me, and the vast whiteness, of the sky and sea mixing their substances, rolling themselves out over the land. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">It felt like the very beginning of the world, and I was watching the land forming, as waves were receding, surging, shaping the shore. Gulls emerged, spectral. Sun burning a hole in the thick fabric, the limitless haar breathing and spreading, bringing life to everything. It felt so deeply calming, as if I could see everything as it was. Just tidal ebb, tidal flow. Simple, all the materials of the earth laid out before me. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">A wonder, to remember this is all we are made out of, that we all crawled up out of the sea, this sea-mind that dreamt us, assembled us, connected every atom of us. It calms me, to remember that this is all we are. </span><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haar_(fog)">haar</a></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">i)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">every morning the sea remembers <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">how the world began: there was <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">something it couldn’t touch with <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">the wet tendrils of its cerebrum, so it<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">reached out, cracked swirling and white<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">spilling from a grey heron’s egg.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">every morning the sea becomes<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">the exhale of the sun on the ocean,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">burns a breath-hole in the haar</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">that flows amongst the scatterings <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">of earth, befalls the land with its<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">thousand tiny fingerings in the folds<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">of every wave, recreates a memory<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">of how our lives began: a rolling <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">of broken mica, shell and stones<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">moulded together in the materializing<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">hands of the waves. on the shore, we <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">cobble ourselves together,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">& every morning go forth <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">out of this, shapeless & nameless,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">collecting our parts:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">ii)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">first, your lungs grown of knotted wrack<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">and rockweed, black tang of the first breathing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">the sea turns in you, thrown with the heave of the wave, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">find your limbs hanging on a drifted tree.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">now crawl out of this, make gestures like waking.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">mouthful of air and water, the same substance,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">like a heartbeat’s double voice, &<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">in your blood & spit the world is singing:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">once you were this, & never only this<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">so move landward, quietly creeping:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">the ghost crab’s memoried carapace,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">the smeared flesh of a jellyfish<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">and the curved foreleg of a lamb’s quiet remains,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">wool on the bones blowing in the wind.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">iii)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">does it frighten you, that<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">this is all there is?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">a sea-sky & the land that<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">became of them, indifferent<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">to your meanings, to fervent belief.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">does it frighten you, that<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">there is nothing to hold to?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">out of the fog the waves stretch<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">and crumble in succession, a <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">never-ending grasping at the shore.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">does it frighten you, that<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">there will never be any stillness?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">it is all false, & we are in this. the <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">sea knows there is no horizon, no<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">heaven hidden past the <i>soulka</i>:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">only ever-shifting rolling of the swell.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>* soulka - in the Orkneys, esp. the island of Sanday, this refers to the ocean horizon, in particular where one starts to see the curvature of the earth </i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">iv)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">somewhere out in the skyless<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">whiteness, dark water births<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">a sparkling: first, whitecaps<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">breath out spectral gulls, skimming<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">the surface as winged mirrors. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">morning here is every morning, the <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">world turning into un-sleep, scattering <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">light over stonecrop and campion, rolling <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">glow into sand, into the bones of us<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">as we go crawling in, our raw hearts pulsing<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">as jellyfish in the tide-pools of the chest: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">go out with the ebb now, as the gorse grows<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">flowing over the stones, bursts in yellow <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">over the folds of the land, a dark prickling <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">unfurling over stone, into starlings<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">spreading back into the whiteness<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">of the water indivisible <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">and overtaken by the sky</span></div>
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<br /></div>jenannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00546283561186929597noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18468247.post-49499812431395588232012-06-15T16:36:00.000-06:002012-06-15T16:36:19.716-06:00last year in taatta<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpqjcdqm-JTqhVTcYWkIhQYIS28zf7fYrHbVZjSrl19xvjkpUDflbuBWXCzUMCU6jcYk1SpLB3AB7P89sP-U6qLBi1RWXISWL2-_TJo60UFbog0y4rEDFlGJ1kEMV5INTFDQw-/s1600/DSCF8268.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="228" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpqjcdqm-JTqhVTcYWkIhQYIS28zf7fYrHbVZjSrl19xvjkpUDflbuBWXCzUMCU6jcYk1SpLB3AB7P89sP-U6qLBi1RWXISWL2-_TJo60UFbog0y4rEDFlGJ1kEMV5INTFDQw-/s320/DSCF8268.JPG" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>sunset on the road at tüngülü, menge khangalas ulus, june 2011</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">These are photos I took almost exactly a year ago, last June, when I was still in Sakha, and hadn't yet lived one of the most difficult, surreal years of my life. I was nearing the end of 10 months in the field, and that was a strange time too; I was anxious and sick and weary, and frustrated, too, yet sometimes now I find myself thinking of these people and places with a smoothed-over, glowing nostalgia. I wish I was back there, sometimes, with all the confusion and overwhelmed-ness that life doing fieldwork in Siberia entailed. I wish, above all, I could have appreciated the moments there more, without worrying so much about what I was doing; wish I could have dwelt with ease in a succession of presents without feeling so scattered across time, across space. But considering my father's (lack of) health at the time, considering what I was carrying with me (that I always carry with me), I am trying not to be angry with myself, trying to be compassionate to what was roiling about within me at the time.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOphYSAJJMoIAbp4-gUg5sdHeOI2tYCs1Soc9lFvNZ5EmvmZRqxdTnBAks4TVAR7DQ06apjJKLU5cMfTa8gCixpYH4XJzifQdGN029gEvWzIouVrrexBaBhXC8sS4KPkhljvbk/s1600/DSCF8288.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><img border="0" height="228" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOphYSAJJMoIAbp4-gUg5sdHeOI2tYCs1Soc9lFvNZ5EmvmZRqxdTnBAks4TVAR7DQ06apjJKLU5cMfTa8gCixpYH4XJzifQdGN029gEvWzIouVrrexBaBhXC8sS4KPkhljvbk/s320/DSCF8288.JPG" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>we are in a very old church tower, chörköökh, taatta ulus, june 2011</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I am lucky I got to create some beautiful relationships, and explore lives, share with people in Sakha. As difficult it is right now, to think too far into the future (months at a time, now) I do look forward to at least planning a visit back there in less than a year's time. Even if I felt out of place, never fully connected during my time there, now I am beginning to understand the impressions made, what my experiences there carved into me. The parts of the place and people that moved into me, and those into which I moved. I didn't fully comprehend them at first, these pieces I carry with me, but they are becoming clearer and sharper now. These realizations have emerged gradually, but now it seems that I am stopped mid-thought by their clarity: it's like how you must hear bird songs repeatedly before you come to associate them with their singers, the way they suddenly begin to come forth from a background of muddled, inchoate sound and call to you singularly and simply, like newly-learnt words in a language emerging from the chaotic flood of speech. Like the moment when you begin to feel a language becomes something you can really live in, not only something you use.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5JBbtb7deBFPFhG-v2yRFmwJom0nV19gMXG42qeDZYg3jBDdccYVBtfHRcjl63nlW36J709CTDeSP-QYNvms8BkRNKvePHpLn_-djQ07YlI3eDBF84X8mwbPyn0YWo48yEJBl/s1600/DSCF8315.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><img border="0" height="228" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5JBbtb7deBFPFhG-v2yRFmwJom0nV19gMXG42qeDZYg3jBDdccYVBtfHRcjl63nlW36J709CTDeSP-QYNvms8BkRNKvePHpLn_-djQ07YlI3eDBF84X8mwbPyn0YWo48yEJBl/s320/DSCF8315.JPG" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>chörköökh, taatta ulus, june 2011</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Yesterday, I spent the afternoon talking with my supervisor's cousin, Saaska, who was visiting Scotland. He's from Sakha, with roots in Taatta, the place where all these pictures were taken just a year ago. He's a kind, funny, serious man, a shaman of sorts, a ritual specialist. An <i>algyschyt</i>, perhaps to be most precise: a blessing-giver. And many of the blessings he bestows are those of sound. Of music, played on the <i>khomus</i>, most beloved of instruments for Sakha people. It heals, he says, it's good for you. It has the same power that some shamans would traditionally carry in their drums. And we talked too, about speech and silence, the powers they can carry and convey to us.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9KtJZZiub4CP6HG78A-8ttJ17iErTA2PcjmwqZTyVGZtRbqyG38E7BjIOXBzHEcNlzs1rNnXZUKWVU377NW-gIg1oIc2P4SaqcBVa58C-Ocv8yb87qwbgna8KIvqVAeyb8231/s1600/DSCF8322.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9KtJZZiub4CP6HG78A-8ttJ17iErTA2PcjmwqZTyVGZtRbqyG38E7BjIOXBzHEcNlzs1rNnXZUKWVU377NW-gIg1oIc2P4SaqcBVa58C-Ocv8yb87qwbgna8KIvqVAeyb8231/s320/DSCF8322.JPG" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;">field in an alaas near chörköökh, taatta ulus, june 2011</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">One of the most important beliefs for many Sakha people is that language is <i>ichichileekh</i>; that is, words possess a spirit, an <i>ichchi</i>, the same as a river or place or a fire. Saaska told me that part of that spirit arises out of the sounds themselves, the resonance of vowels, and part of it from the intent of the speaker. His thoughts on it sparked something brilliant for me in terms of the structure of the first chapter in my dissertation, but perhaps more crucially, they reminded me of why language (and studying it, learning it) inspires me so, and why I was drawn to anthropology over linguistics. That words are magic, that they carry a power with them, inherent to what they CAN do, and there is beauty in their linguistic forms--those permutations of sounds, and their morphosyntactic weight--but there has to be the speaker to fully realize their power. A word is empty without the speaker, and a speaker needs that system to make meaning.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj41dhwzgZB06p9KLCfznQRD5IUCnYin5mNDJQyqj1le_CHIIlY6iwiuIsd-7S6mgSl2IllZJenlyAQsgckQb92ujQLzVEPNodoKcVaVqLyVlifzs7rm0ClBre5fj5QwZHpy2jm/s1600/DSCF8332.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj41dhwzgZB06p9KLCfznQRD5IUCnYin5mNDJQyqj1le_CHIIlY6iwiuIsd-7S6mgSl2IllZJenlyAQsgckQb92ujQLzVEPNodoKcVaVqLyVlifzs7rm0ClBre5fj5QwZHpy2jm/s320/DSCF8332.JPG" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;">birchbark baskets, chabychakhtar, in a summer dwelling, or uraha, chörköökh, taatta ulus, june 2011</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I always knew that I left pure linguistics behind because there were no people in it, but what Saaska clarified for me about how words possess their <i>ichchi </i>illuminated in a way that solidified my reasoning. And it gives me the push to take the hard stance on it and remind those generativists that you know, you can't study language without people. And just studying their brains and those synaptic potentialities doesn't count, Chomsky and Pinker et al.; it's like trying to sever body and mind. Your 'pure' science, formal linguistics, is fundamentally incomplete until you take into account the context of every utterance, the whole of communicative practice, the spirited word. You cannot have one without the other, at all.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiN9xM59yloms5kmZKK0Y-TlGsjWFhxEkDJYqRLNJWF-Pil15qij-MVT7lFrmNnc1g2hVK7dbYpfJhmXnopilA-c-wwsl1kQjflKfvy7nO6zdBqS3qhg9Yu9qyjUTxjJ0TkbEX0/s1600/DSCF8335.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiN9xM59yloms5kmZKK0Y-TlGsjWFhxEkDJYqRLNJWF-Pil15qij-MVT7lFrmNnc1g2hVK7dbYpfJhmXnopilA-c-wwsl1kQjflKfvy7nO6zdBqS3qhg9Yu9qyjUTxjJ0TkbEX0/s320/DSCF8335.JPG" width="240" /></span></a></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;">so many sylgy n'urguhuna, chörköökh, taatta ulus, june 2011</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">But Saaska, yes. So nice to speak with someone who knows Taatta, knows this place that I never spend so long in, but felt so deeply. Such lushness, there in the early summer, between two great rivers, the Lena and the Aldan, up at 62 degrees latitude an oasis dotted with </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alas_(geography)">alaas</a></i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">es, Sakha heartland, home of the word. Place of so many respected </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">olonkhohut</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">s, those who recite </span><a href="http://www.unesco.org/culture/intangible-heritage/35eur_uk.htm" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">the epic <i>Olonkho</i></a><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">, and so many of those who first put Sakha words on paper, the first Sakha authors who suffered so much under the Stalinist regime but whose words are still heard.</span>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEix8kdu6Xs5HASTIxEoJAQqXfBl_8qjeoqNtZKjaydBY9YokUOD2OUh7L0FdrhP0CwLZKvwFHIRoq_ODcR-Ho_8hnMrrID6I8TqVsxWV31TF3pnI_rK3FyKZ3U41T0Jwxc8C4UE/s1600/DSCF8362.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEix8kdu6Xs5HASTIxEoJAQqXfBl_8qjeoqNtZKjaydBY9YokUOD2OUh7L0FdrhP0CwLZKvwFHIRoq_ODcR-Ho_8hnMrrID6I8TqVsxWV31TF3pnI_rK3FyKZ3U41T0Jwxc8C4UE/s320/DSCF8362.JPG" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>sacred tree, an al-luk-maas, with offerings, orthodox church in background, chörköökh, taatta ulus, june 2011</i></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlBvB0duZwAODB65-gyA1kWQxxFIW8pkvMhMDvVIv8ySa0LooPNnDqd41EPdaq3uMOAXJy4hPkXfZl-xhxA90g5VzPxRRgzqLpizKwnE5wuV0fOd7RoJxvcb7jkRkmOgM7oqR4/s1600/DSCF8393.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlBvB0duZwAODB65-gyA1kWQxxFIW8pkvMhMDvVIv8ySa0LooPNnDqd41EPdaq3uMOAXJy4hPkXfZl-xhxA90g5VzPxRRgzqLpizKwnE5wuV0fOd7RoJxvcb7jkRkmOgM7oqR4/s320/DSCF8393.JPG" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;"> sylgy n'urguhuna (wood anemone) and sir simeghe (forget-me-not) in oyuunskii's alaas, taatta ulus, june 2011</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I was not long in Taatta, but I think perhaps because of two particular days there I remember it so well: one of the worst migraines of my life, complete with panic, aphasia and vomiting that culminated in an injection of some very heavy painkillers from the village doctor, a woman who in my delirium I accused of being the 'horse doctor'; followed by one of the most idyllic days of that year, in which I traipsed through the countryside with good friends, visiting places where they grew up, and then lay upon the earth listening to the birds, eating fresh food (oh my goodness the butter, and the wild garlic), bathing in a banya, and feeling some of the first flickers in what had been a long while of feeling good, and whole, and pure. And a feeling of re-inspiration, of remembering why I was doing what it is I do. And somehow I feel now that encapsulates the whole fieldwork -- the struggle, and then the re-dedication, the reward.</span>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXKZUJM6Dt-drw-UB16gtnZGk4Q6qINtjKfG1cbMCPdjI2lnAvoxW9uJCGjSsXYu4_qC2JnV5_bPKyexdNN9M2tHgc2tqWBg9BkyRPe2NlH8IHAgckDTw5OoR7gcDXtFFyLNG2/s1600/DSCF8376.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXKZUJM6Dt-drw-UB16gtnZGk4Q6qINtjKfG1cbMCPdjI2lnAvoxW9uJCGjSsXYu4_qC2JnV5_bPKyexdNN9M2tHgc2tqWBg9BkyRPe2NlH8IHAgckDTw5OoR7gcDXtFFyLNG2/s320/DSCF8376.JPG" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>horse in oyuunskii's alaas, taatta ulus, june 2011</i></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyQ4ZToYt9bQxvXpuvgaMqZGRQLzIeUEYis9MSN7dor557uBBFLMykPbFIxstz4eaCnfMHEVz_yuJtynU1HhwOHiQ_tyT2KKT_6GEEEDaly5Gmkuh9_WYj_WexDM5EOIuIlre0/s1600/DSCF8424.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyQ4ZToYt9bQxvXpuvgaMqZGRQLzIeUEYis9MSN7dor557uBBFLMykPbFIxstz4eaCnfMHEVz_yuJtynU1HhwOHiQ_tyT2KKT_6GEEEDaly5Gmkuh9_WYj_WexDM5EOIuIlre0/s320/DSCF8424.JPG" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>weeping birches + sunken bridge, oyuunskii's alaas, taatta ulus, june 2011</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I mentioned Saaska's explanations about why </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">tyl -- ichchileekh</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> (language has a spirit) because remembering that re-inspires me too, especially at a time when I am amidst the slogging of writing, the fits and starts, the flows and barriers of trying to construct a doctoral dissertation. When I am pushing myself to remain submersed in the middle of my notes, my data, and produce a narrative out of months of accumulated experience, and at the same time live the uncertainties of an early academic life, where I am also forced to constantly plan ahead, plan where money will come from, plan the next steps in a path that I am ultimately not quite sure of, within the confines of a socio-economic climate that doesn't really place a high value on the work that I do.</span>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>a kulluruut, or wood sandpiper, in oyuunskii's alaas, taatta, june 2011</i></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEWMOdTCDo01kkV64HXpxPvyZIIddT0u9YGmXx1AHlLM9wUid8kMP592xko_LaGga-_Zi0rTchl9Ri40cALyaI3aKOJd-mZyFnhAMr2UbwwB80U3FyXJndmY6mObIdRwV7wUwe/s1600/DSCF8434.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEWMOdTCDo01kkV64HXpxPvyZIIddT0u9YGmXx1AHlLM9wUid8kMP592xko_LaGga-_Zi0rTchl9Ri40cALyaI3aKOJd-mZyFnhAMr2UbwwB80U3FyXJndmY6mObIdRwV7wUwe/s320/DSCF8434.JPG" width="240" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>forget-me-nots, an old serge at the balaghan in platon oyuunskii's home alaas, taatta ulus, june 2011</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I question what I'm doing a lot, its meaning and sense, and why I put myself through what I do. Why I ever thought it was a good idea to do what I'm doing. Why did I decide when I was twelve years old that a PhD and a life in academia was what I was going to do with myself? I knew nothing then, nothing about that, nothing about anything. I know a little more now. I try to remind myself that deep down I know that what I am doing has significance, that it can be meaningful. That I can give it meaning. </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Tyl -- ichchileekh.</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> Language has a spirit.</span>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijHVBFtohU1JQRvTMgYkycl_UaVc1OO7PkxNXNPrcZhmazJ8gTbU_m_Deq_q84nrUgjJ-wgAOeiGD42OMnrJjkBHFaAD6096mYklzdmNp1LGp2AkmtJnU4vUSpCPClxFv4miOA/s1600/DSCF8449.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijHVBFtohU1JQRvTMgYkycl_UaVc1OO7PkxNXNPrcZhmazJ8gTbU_m_Deq_q84nrUgjJ-wgAOeiGD42OMnrJjkBHFaAD6096mYklzdmNp1LGp2AkmtJnU4vUSpCPClxFv4miOA/s320/DSCF8449.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>memorial monument to platon oyuunskii, one of the first sakha writers, at his home alaas in taatta, june 2011</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>monument to an olonkhohut, rest stop at the border of taatta ulus, june 2011</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I do believe we need to understand how language works, how communicative practices shape us, and how we shape the world through language. Shape our relationships, the way we relate to each other. Shape the transmission of knowledge, and ideas, and meaning. And I think there's a lot to be learned from understanding communicative practices in the context I'm writing about, in a northern place, through the lens of mobility and changes, of resurgence and resilience, of following trajectories and reflecting on how they shape peoples' lives in the midst of social processes on a broader scale. I think it's worth something, to learn about these things and to transmit and share that knowledge with others, to teach. That's something I know I want to do, along the way.</span>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>al-luk-maas, the world tree. yhyakh site, ytyk-küöl, taatta ulus, june 2011</i></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNCx12ZFpo5LXdsA2V2a9hjVpQmovxoXP-ZGt0a672jc7GlzfAhe2wGTgLRz5lJdlwcELRFsRAOweBsu38WNpCopYbjoHl93Wp17rpEss8MQ5LQ_dyv8-dz8EAqgjoXJTWdwzM/s1600/DSCF8463.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNCx12ZFpo5LXdsA2V2a9hjVpQmovxoXP-ZGt0a672jc7GlzfAhe2wGTgLRz5lJdlwcELRFsRAOweBsu38WNpCopYbjoHl93Wp17rpEss8MQ5LQ_dyv8-dz8EAqgjoXJTWdwzM/s320/DSCF8463.JPG" width="215" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">wagtail on the serge in the yhyakh site outside ytyk-küöl, taatta ulus, june 2011</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Of Taatta, I remember the sound and silence of the field. The wind in the grass like the sound of the </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">khomus</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">'s tongue plucked. The cuckoo calling, the soft snorting of horses, their footsteps swishing in the green spilling out across the </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">alaas</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> like the memory of water. Saaska and I also talked about silence in relation to speech, and the fear of silence in many cultures that leads people to try to fill it with half-formed, ill-thought words for the sake of making sound, and he compared this to the way some people try to fill a silence within their mind by immersing themselves in surface noise, material distractions in most cases, because of that terrifying quiet. 'So then they will have all these things', he reasoned, 'but then they will not hear the sounds that matter'. </span>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;">o. by the taatta river at the rest stop between taatta and churapcha uluses, june 2011</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I try not to listen to criticisms of what I do -- the endless questioning of what I am going to DO with a PhD now, of accusations of the ivory-tower cloisteredness -- because I do believe that understanding how people speak can tell us a lot. And it sounds simplistic, but I do often retort to those who insinuate my work is useless that they should think about how we might accomplish things (you know, building fancy bridges or cars or being lawyers, etc, all the valued professions that deal with money, and basically anything at all) if we did not possess linguistic abilities. So, you know, it might be a good idea to understand what communicating in certain ways might mean to people, yes? I am not trying to say that being a researcher and teacher of/about communicative practices is better or more noble than anything else, but I am indeed saying that it's just as essential as any of these other jobs. That's all.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6Miwglro_PT1dO1oqE4nKMhtlIdcBvrqQuwcYJuzb-UAzr3M3A4qqyNY9CowLlPkqaGz66FgJUQ5Ir13LCndonV4tZjQ50ssM1Hwk6D9FVXK27bNTgn27ndDXLaect9dxBdla/s1600/DSCF8487.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6Miwglro_PT1dO1oqE4nKMhtlIdcBvrqQuwcYJuzb-UAzr3M3A4qqyNY9CowLlPkqaGz66FgJUQ5Ir13LCndonV4tZjQ50ssM1Hwk6D9FVXK27bNTgn27ndDXLaect9dxBdla/s320/DSCF8487.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">cows and horses grazing by the side of the kolyma road, tüngülü, menge-khangalas ulus, june 2011</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Saaska said, 'I like what you do,' meaning me and his cousin, my supervisor, as anthropologists, 'because your job is to listen to stories, to socialize and converse, yes, but always to listen'. And I don't deny that it's always nice to hear that about your chosen profession, but it strikes me particularly because those words really served as a reminder to me of the dialogic aspect of language, of again, how the analysis of language as interlocking syntactic systems is nothing really until you consider it in relation to other parts of that system; how existence itself is dialogue. I learned during fieldwork how the old pre-Russian-contact traditional Sakha greeting, </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">kepseen</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">! (speak!) emphasized the invitation to dialogue, to share the the sound and spirit of the words: let them fly like birds out into the spaces between us.</span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 22px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 47px;"> Tyl dorghoonookh, tyl ichchileekh buolar. </i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 22px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 47px;">The word has sound, and so it has spirit -- and I will always listen.</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">o. waits for the ferry on the east bank of the lena river, june 2011</span></i></div>jenannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00546283561186929597noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18468247.post-191809393067696952012-06-11T15:52:00.000-06:002012-06-11T15:52:05.019-06:00every single night (fiona apple)<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/bIlLq4BqGdg" width="560"></iframe><br />
<br />
Look! Fiona Apple made a new song, and it's about my brain.<br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">Every single night i endure the flight</span><br style="background-color: white; clear: left; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">Of little whims of white flame</span><br style="background-color: white; clear: left; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">Butterflies in my brain</span><br style="background-color: white; clear: left; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">These ideas of mine percolate the mind</span><br style="background-color: white; clear: left; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">Trickle down the spine</span><br style="background-color: white; clear: left; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">Form the belly swelling to a blaze</span><br style="background-color: white; clear: left; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;" /><br style="background-color: white; clear: left; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">Thats where the pain comes in</span><br style="background-color: white; clear: left; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">Like a second skeleton</span><br style="background-color: white; clear: left; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">Trying to fit beneath the skin</span><br style="background-color: white; clear: left; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">I can't get the feelings in</span><br style="background-color: white; clear: left; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;"><br />...</span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">Every single night's a fight</span><br style="background-color: white; clear: left; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">With my brain</span><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;"><br style="clear: left;" /></span></span></i><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;"><br style="clear: left;" /></span><br />
This is approximately how I feel when I can't sleep, which is often lately, and usually because I am thinking too much, and am too anxious to stop thinking, etc. My hypnogogic hallucinations (transitioning from wakefulness to sleep) don't feature quite the same calibre of visual imagery; though I think being more of an aural/oral mind I get the linguistic equivalent. Often when I am really tired, and I can no longer make sense of my thoughts, I tend to experience what feels like multiple conversations going on in my head and I can't follow a single one, and usually the content is about as surreal as what's pictured here. So I appreciate the visual of the octopus on her head, because that's what it feels like, all those tentacles of twisting thought, head squeezed, too many things, unable to sleep.<br />
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I also enjoy the touch of the man-bull in the bed -- totally a minotaur in the labyrinthine brain. Best just to embrace it and hope for the best, it isn't going anywhere...<br />
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Also, isn't she lovely? That voice! The clever orchestrations, and turns of phrase. Someone I listened to in high school, who I can listen to without cringing...<br />
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<br />jenannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00546283561186929597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18468247.post-16401158083431067032012-06-09T18:26:00.003-06:002012-10-11T19:20:53.340-06:00because.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;">My dad, in Kananaskis, June 2009</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>“…I search desperately to find the obvious meaning…” </i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">– July
24<sup>th</sup> entry from Barthes’ Mourning Diary.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">i.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">My dad’s sense of humour was (or perhaps is? Does your
particular brand of amusement as a genre die with you?) always a bit weird. My
mama often said that even after knowing him nearly 40 years, she still didn’t
always know when he was joking. My mama tends to appreciate a good pun most of
all, and while my dad too was fond of wordplay, most of the time he was just
silly. He took great pleasure in the pure absurdity of the surrealist joke,
which I remember him teaching to my sister and me when we were quite little. He
told us that when he was our age, this had been quite the fad in his elementary
school. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">These jokes could be relatively basic, where you ask someone
a known riddle-beginning, like “Why did the chicken cross the road?” But, when they
give the assumed, predictable response, or tell you they don’t know, you say
something like, “No! Because elephants don’t make pancakes!” And then you cackle
wildly with glee, as Caity and I would do, for a very long time When we got
tired of this ‘Why…’ and ‘Because’ formula, we’d then play with the syntax, so
not only were our responses non-sequiturs, but our phrasing rather
idiosyncratic:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>Q: What is the difference between a camel and a pie? (etc.)</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>A: Fish pee in a lake! (and so forth…)</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">These jokes came to resemble ridiculous parodies of koans; we’d
say each word very slowly and with great gravity, partially because we were
just making things up as we went along, and also because we were trying not to
laugh, and also because it was funnier that way. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">When I was a bit older, my dad and I would go on long drives
to the mountains to hike and camp. On these journeys, I’d inevitably be
reading, and from time to time I would tell him interesting tidbits of
information that came up in a book, or things I’d think of while looking at the
scenery. We were both quite content with silence, or with music in the background,
so often these little snippets of fact came out of nowhere (or out of something
I said hours earlier), often leading to hilarity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">For example, at one point, we have a conversation about what
the difference is (in English) between legumes and other vegetables. 100km
later I remark, seeing a field of clover: ‘Did you know that clover is a
legume?’ </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">These sorts of random remarks then became new go-to phrases
for surrealist-joke punchlines. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Aside from his surrealist jokes, my dad also had a repertoire
of about three otherjokes, which he’d often repeat to us, over and over again.
‘Did I ever tell you the one about the—‘ ‘Yes!’ These jokes then became
monstrosities, compound variations that were basically a series of intertextual
references of joke fragments. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The purpose was not to understand them at all, of course,
but simply to delight in one that was particularly well-timed and reached new possibilities
of ridiculousness in the remixing of the standard elements. My favourite trick
was to pretend to begin asking something serious:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>‘Dad?’ </i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>‘Yeah?’</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>‘I was wondering if I could ask you a question?’ </i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>‘Sure, of course!’</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>‘What did the bicycle with egg on his face say to the little
boy as he rode around the block on the horse?’</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This could go on for entire trips, until he finally got
weary of my persistence and made threats about making me ski the rest of the
way to the mountains, or walk back home. I’m not always good at letting it go. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">ii. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I mention these jokes not because they are funny outside
of the context, or the moment, outside of what we shared, but because summer is
coming and I am filled with such yearning and swallowed-stone sadness for our
fishing and hiking trips, that I sometimes feel like I am going to choke, what
I wouldn’t do to be able to go again, I can’t even articulate. I can’t. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Because it’s getting harder to deal with, because time does
not soften grief, but sharpens it with the edges of his absence; time pulls at
me, slowly unravelling the realization that this is real, that I am truly not
inhabiting an alternate timeline. Because I feel nauseous sometimes with the
vertigo of that understanding, and because sometimes when I am up awake, unable
to sleep, my mind is plaintive, I am such a child again, with the persistent
and infinite ‘why’, trying to make sense of this: <i>Why is he not here? </i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Because when I am faced with this, I tell myself that
perhaps many things work as the smallest atoms do; on the broader scale, there
are causes for things, but the smaller things get the more a-causal everything
becomes. An element may have an established half-life, but it is utterly
unpredictable when an individual atom will decay. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Because perhaps when you ask why your father died as he did,
the best answer you can even hope for is something along the lines of ‘<i>because
elephants don’t make pancakes</i>’, and then you can laugh so as not to weep.</span></div>
jenannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00546283561186929597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18468247.post-85800834860155588852012-06-04T16:05:00.002-06:002012-06-04T16:10:38.643-06:00scottish sunshine, pt. 1<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Seaton Park along the Don, Aberdeen, mid-May, illuminated beech and maple leaves, sweet cicely, river run, small creatures, and such light! </span>jenannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00546283561186929597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18468247.post-85929532754778669142012-05-06T00:00:00.000-06:002012-05-05T19:52:32.188-06:00on solaris: the ocean, the other<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">1. Every time I am down by the ocean, the nearby North Sea, I think about </span><a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=1qTr-6G2E7cC&pg=PT1&lpg=PT1&dq=solaris+by+lem&source=bl&ots=mD9kS3LmSt&sig=Euw5fT7bR0gZtezB5wu4IoKXtoQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=z9KlT-eeDs_E8QOwiuHdBA&ved=0CHQQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=solaris%20by%20lem&f=false" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Solaris</a><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">. This might not be an obvious connection, I suppose, but I've been mulling it over a lot since I came back to live by the sea, and I think I can trace all the threads, now. </span>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Since I never grew up around the ocean, it is still especially mystifying to me. I am still learning about tides, the ebbs and flows, the surging and sucking pull of the moon. Still learning to recognize the lapping patterns of waves on the sand, the coal-black yet shiny mica rippling up, the wind- and wave-tossed pebbles piling in ribbons stringing the shore. I watch the birds interact with the water, shaking feathers in the surf, watching dunlins and sanderlings scurry back and forth, out and in, mirroring the crash and flow of the waves. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">When the tide is high, the white crests riding and the sun is burning out silver patches into the horizon, there is a certain ominousness there, out on the bay. Not frightening, but there is something immensely grand about it, that leaves a lingering reminder that this is something too vast, too physically and metaphorically deep to grasp or understand. The sea becomes something cerebral, and I mean that literally -- it seems as if it is a vast mind, a brain, in its opacity. Speculating about the expanse and its nature is much like attempting to think about your own consciousness; I feel the same nausea sometimes, with it, a true sea-sickness, similar to that I get when I ponder the whys and wherefores of the universe, or the intangible aspects of the process of death. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />We like to think the sea is predictable, too, mapping and measuring the tides, for example, and publishing tables, etc, sending out submarines to survey its topology, model the trenches and abysses, the underwater mountain ranges and depressions, and the depth of the water that fills and covers them.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> But there is only generality, there only ever can be. We might think we know where the waves will reach, what the water will do -- but every wave itself is utterly unpredictable, a constant singularity forming and reforming in the midst of infinite pluralities, that never-the-same ever-the-sameness. And it is like a mind, every wave like a flicker of consciousness, flowing, breaking, reconnecting. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">When I was very young, I think I was under the strong impression that water was alive. Why else would we talk about 'running water'? Water in lakes, I supposed, was just resting for a while. Sleeping, perhaps. When I learned about languages that classified rivers as animate and lakes as inanimate nouns, I remembered my early belief, and realized I still hold something of that conception. I think of how I interact with ocean, when I am there wandering along the very edge, and the waves are frothing in, long rippling arcs of foam spreading over the smoothing of the sand -- I think of the unexpected waves that seem to reach farther in, reaching out to touch my feet, grasp at me, at the little twig-legs of the frantic sandpipers, the small wavelets rushing in to meet me, it seems, as I pass by. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">And it is this moment of contact, between myself and this great ocean, this unknowable mass, that makes me think of Solaris. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">2. S</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">o when I talk about Solaris,</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(novel)" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I am mostly thinking about the book</a><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">by</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Lem" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Stanislaw Lem</a><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">, and its planet that is a lifeform, alive and sentient, covered with an ocean that seems to be breathing, acting, reacting, thinking. Like the ocean that seems to surge close to me as I walk along, washing my boots in the waves, Solaris sends out 'mimoids' and other strange shapes and forms, in attempt to communicate with the scientists who are poking and prodding it with x-rays and all manner of instrument, trying to understand something utterly non-human and thoroughly unintelligible.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">And when I talk about Solaris, I am of course also thinking about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(1972_film)">the film by Tarkovsky</a> (not Soderbergh! Don't even pay attention to that!), even though Lem wasn't completely pleased by that attempt at interpreting his work, and parts of it I feel are horribly melodramatic -- but n</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">evertheless, </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEOfJQX2qdQ&feature=related" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">this fan-made film trailer for Tarkovsky's Solaris</a><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> is actually quite beautiful and gives decent sense of what we are dealing with, here.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">So -- Kris Kelvin, a psychologist, travels to a space station orbiting the planet Solaris to investigate some troubling reports that recently came to light, as scientists studying the planet -- a sentient being -- seem to have caused some great disturbances in their attempts to communicate. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Like the uncertainty principle of quantum physics, in which studying subatomic particles essentially affects the subatomic particles themselves, communicating with Solaris affects the planet itself. (How do you separate the observer from the observed? I don't think you can, especially not here.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">And then as Kelvin starts to settle onto the station, puzzled by the other scientists' allusions to the 'constructs' and the 'visitors', he is visited by his wife, Hari, who died ten years previously. She committed suicide after he left here. And now here she is, not quite aware of who or what she is, either. No one really knows. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">3. </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Not long after my Dad passed away at the end of last August, I had a number of different dreams, in which he appeared in different forms. Most of them were not traumatic dreams, though some of them did involve repeated dyings. The most disturbing of all, however, was one in which I saw a person identical to my father walking through a great wave of people. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The crowd thinned as we approached each other, and I opened my mouth to speak, smile, but when I looked at him, he didn't see me. He couldn't see me at all, perhaps he couldn't see anyone. This image of my Dad, exactly as he had been, grey sweatsuit and feathery hair, just as he was the day he left home for the hospital for the last time, floated past without acknowledging my presence. He just kept walking, eyes unseeing of me. I tried to reach out, and received nothing. The residue of this dream ached for days. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The dead returning to us in their human form is of course a common and terrible wish -- something perhaps we yearn for even as it terrifies us, because we know it will never, ever suffice, it can only distort. And perhaps we know that even if possible, there would be no great revelation, maybe not even recognition; Hari certainly can't provide anything for Kris. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>"I hoped for nothing. And yet I lived in expectation. Since she had gone, that was all that remained"</i> (Lem, in Solaris, p. 204, trans. by Kilmartin and Cox).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">For me, it was as if this dream was illuminating a great rift, the space between those living and those passed on in our daily lives, that there something so unknowable and incomprehensible, things we just cannot grasp with our mind's little hands, even if we try to make them as fluid and flexible as the surface of Solaris.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">4. </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">There is a lot I could say about Solaris. There are even quite obvious parallels to doing anthropology and fieldwork that I suppose I will write about sometime. But right now my thoughts are about the self, and connection, and communication, and how we aspire to understand ourselves through the Other.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In a key scene, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YARi25_5Egw&feature=related">which you should watch here</a>, Dr. Snaut has Kris Kelvin read from Don Quixote. A little later on, Snaut denounces science (and its professed aims of exploration and understanding of other life forms) as useless here.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>"We have no interest in conquering any cosmos" he proclaims. "We want to extend the earth to the borders of the cosmos. We don't know what to do with other worlds. We don't need other worlds. We need a mirror. We struggle for contact, but we'll never find it [...] Man needs man".</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">As Lem apparently once said about his Solaris ocean, <i>'</i></span><span style="line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i style="background-color: white;">I only wanted to create a vision of a human encounter with something that certainly exists, in a mighty manner perhaps, but cannot be reduced to human concepts, ideas or images'.</i> <span style="background-color: white;">And so here, they are trying so hard to communicate with Solaris, and Solaris is attempting to reply, sending them these visions, these simulacra, more mysterious unknowable forms -- it is indeed acting like a mirror, sending people manifestations of memories they try to control, forcing them to face people and circumstances they might prefer to keep hidden, that they strive to suppress. These are the words it uses to communicate, by showing the characters parts, elements of memory, that are of themselves. </span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Solaris is not only about the limits of our abilities to understand things that are alien, non-anthropomorphic, that are not-us, that are so wholly Other -- but that we are never really looking for the Other. In the other, we only want to understand ourselves, our own lives as humans, both on a collective and individual level. And we always look to others. We move into that between-ness -- as <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Levinas_Reader.html?id=ydMzH7KzUwQC&redir_esc=y">Levinas</a> noted, <i>'between-ness functions as the fundamental category of being'</i> -- and we seek ourselves.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The simulacra are not of Solaris, they reveal nothing of Solaris except that perhaps it, too, is trying to understand itself through its encounter with the humans. By isolating memories that are painful, strong, and evoke emotion, is it trying to illuminate its own nature? Or is that supposedly foreign ocean just a repository of all our memories, the things we cannot understand, the truly un-fathomable?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Like death, like the ocean, Solaris is the ultimate Other. It attempts to <i>'offer that world to another'</i> (<a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=yo2RKtKESCMC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false">Levinas</a>) through its alien speech, attempting to communicate through these strange resurrections,invocations of the humans' memories that they, unconsciously, have offered to the planet. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">So many summations of Solaris, both book and film, always state that it's all about something like the 'inadequacy of communication between humans and non-humans', but I think it goes further than that. The futility of communication between humans and Solaris is telling, yes, but it is just another simulacrum, that pair, for human-human attempts. We can never really understand another mind, human or non, perhaps. </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">We will never know all of the ocean, ever, just as we will never know all of another human's mind, no matter how close. </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">But we will always try, and we need to do this. It's the only reason we exist. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>all photos taken in late February, early March 2012, Aberdeen City Beach.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>jenannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00546283561186929597noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18468247.post-70243440560142582842012-05-05T16:19:00.001-06:002012-05-05T16:19:16.795-06:00nesting<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Nest amongst willow and kalyna, lower Riverlot, late October 2011</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Last autumn, when the leaves fell, I began to collect nests. Amongst the bare bones of the birches and aspens, and nestled in the elbows of the high-bush cranberry bushes at Riverlot, abandoned homes became visible and I documented them all.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> <i>Fallen nest, upper Riverlot, December 2011</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Some had fallen onto the snow in the windstorms, small dried slivers of grass in the hatchings unraveling, revealing how the spaces had been insulated with moss and tufts of fuzz. </span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Wind-fallen nest (same as above), upper Riverlot, December 2011</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">It looks tragic, but not all birds ever return to their old nests; some, who lay two batches of nestlings each summer even build separate creches for each group. Most grown birds (those that do not build inside holes) do not shelter or sleep in them, either. They are just small refuges for the flightless young ones, until their wings are strong enough.</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Magpie's nest, upper Riverlot, early October 2011</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">All the magpies here have been busy for the last month, scurrying around selecting twigs for their new hutches, which take weeks to construct and often involve multiple stories. But they too will use these homes only once; they may nest again nearby, however, and dismantle their old nests, selecting the best bits for prized parts in their new nooks.</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Magpies made a hoop-like nook at upper Riverlot, early October 2011</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">If a nest remains un-recycled, sometimes other species of birds who don't seem to fancy the construction process will select one that has remained intact, often for a season or two, proving its safety and durability.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">(Thinking of these nests, I think of my own life over the past three years, never living anywhere for more than a year, and generally less than. 9 months in Scotland, 3 in Alberta, 10 months in Yakutia, 6 in Alberta, another 4 in Scotland, with so many flights back and forth in between. I am more than migratory...)</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Another cranberry nest, upper Riverlot, early October 2011</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">No one is really sure why birds tend to not return, even those that stay the winters, preferring instead to reconstruct and deconstruct, an endless process of nesting and re-nesting. Even the passerines, the perching birds, are not still for long. Most of their lives are movement, settling and sleeping are just small blinks, flutters of the eye in the path of a long flight.</span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">(Dipper's?) nest in the rockledges at Grotto Canyon, near Canmore, early January 2012</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I like to think that perhaps they are just better at cultivating and making peace with impermanence, mindfully hastening the change. Each carefully placed twig and tuft is like the pouring of sand into a mandala that is never meant to last; whether it is the wind or hand or claw that sweeps it away, shakes out their wings, and flies on.</span></div>
<br />jenannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00546283561186929597noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18468247.post-49021489322664149692012-04-18T21:34:00.002-06:002012-04-18T21:38:43.357-06:00adrienne rich. <img src="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/uploads/authors/adrienne-rich/448x/adrienne-rich.jpg" />
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Adrienne Rich. (Source: <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/adrienne-rich">The Poetry Foundation</a>)</div>
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Adrienne Rich, <a href="http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=432">source of this blog's title inspiration</a>, and a poetic influence of mine, passed away a few weeks ago (March 27, 2012). Since then, I've been thinking about her often, at first only as she was a favourite author, but then because I was recently confronted with news about her support for a trans-exclusionary radical feminist.</div>
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I haven't always found myself in agreement with her ideologically, especially when her conceptions of feminism and sexuality got a bit too essentialist for me. And perhaps I should have suspected that she might well follow that essentialism a little too far off the path into a pool of bigotry, but I was still shocked when I discovered that she--someone who confronted the overlap between sexism, classism, and racism and thus seemed to support an early intersectionalist incarnation of feminism--could support transphobic radical feminists.</div>
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The incriminating quote that is circulating the internet can be <a href="http://sadybusiness.tumblr.com/post/20235165001/adrienne-rich-has-been-a-very-special-friend-and">read about here</a>; in short, Rich seems to have been quite profoundly involved the process of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janice_Raymond">Janice Raymond's</a> book 'The Transsexual Empire'. I've not read anything by Raymond, but if you scroll down in that Wiki article you'll see some pretty sickening quotes in that book. Her book, as I've learned, has had a lot of destructive impact on the way trans* women are treated in the world, its arguments used as a basis to justify countless theories as well as directly exclusionary policies that seriously diminished the well-being (physically, mentally and emotionally) of many trans* individuals. And this is simply unacceptable to me. </div>
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I can't seem to find any evidence that Rich ever spoke about her involvement with Raymond's book. It baffles me, in some ways, because she showed in other cases that she was never revisited these associations she had with the woman who wrote that book; she was definitely in a position to speak out and clarify her involvement, and for someone who stressed accountability and responsibility in all her writing, this upsets me. As Rafe Posey put it in <a href="http://rafeposey.wordpress.com/2012/03/29/my-complicated-mourning-rip-adrienne-rich/">this piece</a>, "<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 23px; text-align: -webkit-auto;">I can’t just think, “Oh, well, she was a poet, and she changed poetry, so her views on trans women are private and don’t matter.” That would be dangerous, and it would also be untrue".</span></div>
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I too am disturbed that I am only discovering this now, that it is only being talked about now, because that is a reflection of the erasure of trans* women's voices, and also an indication of Rich's scholars and more dedicated readers that they thought they could just ignore this aspect of Rich's impact and not confront it, question it, or critique it. There is this implication that it 'doesn't matter' that she supported such abhorrent beliefs, because she did other supportive, proactive things. I can't do it. I can't let that slip.</div>
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Someone said to me I was being ridiculous, judgmental, even, that I couldn't just appreciate the creation without the creator.. But I can't overlook these things. I believe we are whole people, and we are accountable for all of our actions; we can't separate, bifurcate ourselves. I also believe we have a deep connection to what we create, and what we say, what we express. Doing or saying some good things does not let the bad things slip quietly away out the back door untouched and unchallenged; we need to all personally confront those things. And she didn't do that. She was silent. And as Audre Lorde wrote, 'your silence will not protect you'. Adrienne Rich reinforced for me that poetry is a political act, and it is especially for this reason I am so disappointed in her. </div>
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I can't repeat enough what the post on <a href="http://yrwelcome.wordpress.com/2012/03/29/adrienne-rich-and-transmisogyny-we-can-begin-by-acknowledging-that-it-matters/">You're Welcome</a> states: We can begin by acknowledging that it matters. All the things people say and do matter. Yes, of course we are all flawed, but what does that mean? To me, it just reminds me that we all need to confront all the messy hatred and stubborn beliefs in ourselves. </div>
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For a woman who wrote that we must 'read and write as if our lives depended on it', it saddens me that she didn't seem to realize by her writing she was further condemning the lives of others. Where was the responsibility, the lucidity she swore herself to, in all of this?</div>
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I am curious to know, if anyone is reading this, how others reconcile these kinds of complexities in what people make, and the beliefs and statements they might otherwise express. I just feel sad and nauseous when I think about her now; she wrote some beautiful, powerful things, but I can't look at them in the same light any longer. This has happened before, with figures and creators that I have admired to a lesser extent, but I guess, in mourning her, I am also mourning the loss of the role of her poetry in my life. </div>
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<br /></div>jenannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00546283561186929597noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18468247.post-45456678665203297182012-04-07T01:18:00.001-06:002012-04-07T01:18:12.991-06:00tennessee williams, on poetry<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: xx-small;"><i>sign on broad hill, aberdeen, february 2012 -- part of an primary school art project challenging all the prohibitive signs in the neighbourhood. they are all very poetic in their own way.</i></span></span></h4>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Tennesee Williams is not really my friend at all (bit of a misogynist, that one) but I came across a quote of his recently that resonated with me, especially as I am in the midst of writing my dissertation, the process of writing an ethnography, and I am determined to produce academic writing that is inspired and creative, something full of image and life, something poetic. So this is a good reminder, because no matter what genre I am writing, I think I am a poet at my core. That is what I write, what I create.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">I'm a poet. And then I put the poetry in the drama. I put it in short stories, and I put it in the plays. Poetry's poetry. It doesn't have to be called a poem, you know.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, <i>The Paris Review</i>, fall 1981</span></div>jenannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00546283561186929597noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18468247.post-4095314594938830582012-03-18T17:49:00.002-06:002012-03-18T17:57:52.034-06:00haunting, part 3/3<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQzDBlVtAI9szY5ZghpaymaWswSSNgK_hdE8QlMa99eNJkGhdbyuauFpGdmLR6WNag1otJJfSrHFQq-inABEhZKTF3dQlXBq0gfB0sirmU2BjuVB31A7kvrb4w3kM_vGT1xRBT/s1600/reflection+and+the+moon.JPG" style="font-style: normal; font-size: 100%; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia, serif; "><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQzDBlVtAI9szY5ZghpaymaWswSSNgK_hdE8QlMa99eNJkGhdbyuauFpGdmLR6WNag1otJJfSrHFQq-inABEhZKTF3dQlXBq0gfB0sirmU2BjuVB31A7kvrb4w3kM_vGT1xRBT/s400/reflection+and+the+moon.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5721389488878517634" /></a><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; "><span style="line-height: 18px; "><span ><i>reflection on upper grassi lake, canmore, january 2012</i></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;font-style: normal; font-size: 100%; line-height: normal; "><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; ">***</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; font-size: 100%; line-height: normal; "><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; "><span ><a href="http://sworn-to-lucidity.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/haunting-part-13.html">Haunting, 1/3</a></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; font-size: 100%; line-height: normal; "><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; "><span ><a href="http://sworn-to-lucidity.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/haunting-part-23.html">Haunting, 2/3</a></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; font-size: 100%; line-height: normal; "><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; "><span ><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; font-size: 100%; line-height: normal; "><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; "><span >I suppose it’s the very nature of death itself that confounds me, unknowable to anyone, perhaps even as it is happening to you (and then perhaps its very nature, its essence is rendered utterly irrelevant, at the only moment it would be possible to know). And it’s really silly, because again – how can you ever really know how it feels for anyone else? Ever, about anything at all? Perhaps it hurts because it is the incomprehensibility of death mirrors the true understanding of anyone other than yourself (and even then, it can be tenuous). <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; font-size: 100%; line-height: normal; "><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; "><span >A few weeks ago I sat through a seminar about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Levinas">Emmanuelis Levinas</a> and how the lecturer wanted to use him in creating their new vision of anthropology; it didn’t sit well with anyone (do not tell social anthropologists that objectivity exists, e.g.) but I was happy that it reminded me about Levinas who I hadn’t really thought about in years. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; font-size: 100%; line-height: normal; "><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; "><span ><a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=yo2RKtKESCMC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false">Levinas wrote of our solitude of Being</a>, and about the Other. How we can only know through the Other (in that they are a sort of mirror), the Other can never be completely known. We do the best we can to comprehend other beings; like yet like Simone Weil (another philosopher-friend of my soul) noted, every separation is a link. We come into Being and until we die (de-create) we try to reach out through that space between to understand. We do this through language, through speech, as Levinas wrote it “brings the world to the other, thereby creating a common world”. Speech is “the offering of a world to another”. I wrote in my journal last fall, in scribblings for a poem, that ‘death reveals the failures of language’; and it was such a comfort to see this feeling reflected in his words.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; font-size: 100%; line-height: normal; "><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; "><span >Our deaths are not really ours, thinks Levinas, but our consciousness comes from how we are haunted by the other’s death. And death—death makes you feel so helpless, it seems to me, because it others the Other; that is, in destroying the Other it destroys all hope of understanding. You no longer have a mirror to help you understand yourself; you no longer have your conversational partner with which to gift the world and receive a certain comprehension.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; font-size: 100%; line-height: normal; "><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; "><span >But we have to live with this, these hauntings, and by expressing, acknowledging them, I think we can free ourselves, if only partially, from these places where language, where everything we rely on to make sense of the world breaks down. </span><span ><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>jenannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00546283561186929597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18468247.post-79469198231670921452012-03-18T17:27:00.004-06:002012-03-18T18:18:22.273-06:00haunting, part 2/3<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJr7tl6AxIExzibj55-xmZEND9F-j0hehRi_5jJ2vlW2X70BUwsBCEftUop-xDcD4e_yF6CmHrCQux2coZbDy7odRiuq0i7W70V6lDQosRhTyhmk33vEIG-lZwU-p_uJu9LNR7/s1600/willows+on+water.JPG" style="font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJr7tl6AxIExzibj55-xmZEND9F-j0hehRi_5jJ2vlW2X70BUwsBCEftUop-xDcD4e_yF6CmHrCQux2coZbDy7odRiuq0i7W70V6lDQosRhTyhmk33vEIG-lZwU-p_uJu9LNR7/s400/willows+on+water.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5721384219474093986" /></a><div style="text-align: center;"><span><i>willows on water, upper grassi lake, canmore, january 2012</i></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; "><span>***</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; "><span><a href="http://sworn-to-lucidity.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/haunting-part-13.html">Haunting, 1/3</a></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; "><span>And I am haunted. I don’t know how to express this, sometimes. How it still stops me in the middle of the day, and I am overcome by it, how it catches up to me just before sleep and I cannot because of thinking of him.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; "><span>Mostly I am just struck again and again by the last day I spent with him, how we did not expect that it would happen so suddenly; it is the knowledge—and that I must ultimately accept that knowledge—that I will never have any idea what he was thinking or feeling when he did pass. Or if he even knew he was passing; a ‘massive cardiac event’, they called it, occurs so quickly you are often dead before you could even become cognizant anything is happening to you.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; "><span>It’s not about being there when it happened; unlike my mother, I am okay with the fact I did not witness his death because I do know he would have wanted it that way. He was very private in his suffering; my mother and I (and one day, my sister) were the only ones he would allow to come see him in the hospital. He would not want others to be there to see him go. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; "><span>***<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; "><span>In my notebook I wrote a few weeks after my dad passed (Sept 15 2011): <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; "><span>It scares me when I can’t quite remember those individual last days, the little details of the time I spent in the hospital with him. All I can distinctly feel is the ache of it, of seeing him too fatigued to even speak much, of his confusion, and the helplessness of knowing there was so little I could do. Bring him another blanket, take the water glass and tilt the straw up to his lips, adjust the oxygen tubes, remove his glasses and carefully fold him onto the nightstand before he fell asleep again. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; "><span>I try to remind myself my being there helped him; I would think of how indignant I was initially when I came home from Scotland the first time and he didn’t have much to say to me, but feeling better when Mama told me that it just made him happy I was there, he just appreciated my presence there, with him, being silent together. I know it helped him, but that too makes me ache. How he would call me to help him walk up the stairs when he was still at home; then, the afternoon before he was taken by ambulance, to just sit in his room with him, because he felt so anxious, his breath was short, and he was afraid. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; "><span>I am trying to construct a narrative of his last day. Of talking to him that morning; he was sitting up, sort of staring at the newspaper when I came in. How he asked me if Jack Layton had died, and I said, yes, he had. “That was fast,” he whispered, eyes widening. I told him I was going to postpone going back to Scotland right away, to stay home for a bit and help him when he got out of the hospital. How he got alarmed, and annoyed with me, told me to go hurry up and finish my PhD, but then softened and told me how much he appreciated me offering to stay. He slept a little while, and I did the millionth crossword puzzle I’d done that week. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; "><span>Mama came, we found out it was not amyloidosis causing Dad's present state. Good news, yes. I left, went to meet Jason after work and cried on the sofa in SUB because despite the supposed good news I was realizing something I couldn't even begin to articulate. Went back to the hospital, to see him while he had his dinner—I cut the chicken parmigiana into tiny little morsels and fed them to him, his last meal. My heart was breaking at this, into tiny pieces at the full circle I felt had been turning since he got sick, the slow turning that I was already parenting my parents. But I made jokes about airplanes. I promised I would come early and be there to feed him his lunch the next day. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; "><span>And Mama and I came, and we rubbed cold, swollen feet together, covered them in more warm blankets. I kissed his mountain-man whiskers, told him I loved him. He said it again to me, thanked me as I walked out the door. He waved to me, a slow opening and closing of his palm, the way he always did lately, too tired to move any more.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; "><span>I need to remember these things. I need to because it just pains me so much that I will never know how it was when he died. I woke up the next morning to Uncle Ron throwing pine cones at Jason’s window and I was struggling to understand why I heard his voice and put clothes on and see him standing there with Mama telling me that Dad had passed away.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; "><span>And it pains me so much that I will never know. I want to know, I have this need to know because if there is anything that ever comforts me it usually involves knowing. But I will never know his last moments, whether he was even conscious, if there was any struggle or raging, of if it was just a sleeping exhale, a ceasing unaware. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; "><span>And what he told Mama after I left, about the brightest light he’d ever seen, earlier that morning while sitting in his chair before I came, there with the curtains drawn and through the window the most striking whiteness. Was that extra love and goodbye he sent to me as I left the room his way of telling me he knew? Did he know it was coming? Did he understand that light as a premonition? (Mama told him he was dizzy, needed to eat more) <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; "><span>I just want to know if he knew, and I know I won’t, I can’t. These narratives we construct are just ways to try to convince ourselves, comfort ourselves. I know death has little to do with the one dying, really. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; "><span>When it all comes down to it, I am relieved, relieved I could be there, could say what I needed to say. Deeply honoured that I was close enough to him for him to allow me, ask me to care for him in those last days. I cannot convey, as much as I try, how much this means to me. To be there felt sacred. He gave me life, and he gave me so much in my life that has made me. I wish I could have given so much more, but I am thankful I could give this much. It was all that could be given. I know this.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; "><span>But still, I just cannot bear the thought of him hurting, that he may have suffered in the dying, because I know he was suffering before. I can’t stand that. Can’t handle that. Cannot. Haunted by that.</span></span></p>jenannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00546283561186929597noreply@blogger.com0