sworn to lucidity

as love is, home is (erin mouré)

2012-01-23T20:13:00.003-07:00

local foxtails in a local field, taken on solstice, dec. 2011

(Dear blog, I am sorry for neglecting you! Sometimes months go by. I still haven't finished my autumn chronology of photos, but soon...)

Mostly I just want to exclaim with great anticipation over Erin Mouré's new book, which is currently finding its way over the Atlantic to me; I vaguely knew it would be appearing, and that it dealt with her mother's childhood emigration from Western Ukraine, but I found her blog about the book the other day and it brought me such excitement I ordered the book immediately.

It's a little collection, this blog, of excerpts and related links, parts of the process of the book coming together, and already I cannot wait to immerse myself in her narrative(s). It's a book-length poem, her mother's story of 'coming from nowhere', from a place caught between the Ukrainian and Polish borders, complicated by wars and top-down struggles of exclusion/inclusion that didn't mirror the way her people felt. I am just so excited that it examines the idea of the 'local' -- tuteshnyj, in Ukrainian -- that is less about ethnicity and more about the belonging to a place, to a community of people (of beings, of entities) which is something that needs to be examined deeply and seriously, especially in this part of the world.

(if you read nothing else on the blog, read this bit -- this is the essence)

She alludes to the violence caused by ethnic and religious labels, of the various ruling powers' (Austro-Hungarian, Polish, Soviet, Ukrainian) need to categorise and create not only physical but mental, emotional borders between people, and how this was so utterly destructive. From a family considered 'half-Polish, half-Ukrainian', she discusses the trauma that this caused her grandparents, and the dismissal she even received recently about her 'ethnic heritage':

Although today’s independent Ukraine is still rife with confusions and the need for new historiography that fully admits all parts of its past (imagine here: the professor in L’viv who eagerly asked me my family name then responded flatly and without interest “that’s a Polish name,” effectively expelling me again from national territory that is just as much mine as it is hers), it does now include as its citizens everyone who lives on its territory. All, today, regardless of background, are Ukrainians. And I am half Ukrainian, of the Hamulyaks of the earth and of the Hrandyshi of the air, the tuteshni, the people “from here.” I come from people of the Ukrainian earth who trade with and recognize the legitimacy of all the peoples.

(Erin Mouré, Here.)

My own family's story is a little bit simpler, at first glance -- they lived much further away from the Polish border, in a town 'overseen' by Polish landlords but there did not seem to be such tensions between the two 'peoples'. I've heard other families from the area arguing about whether their names are 'Polish' or 'Ukrainian', but in my family it seemed less contentious -- my baba identified herself as Ukrainian, mentioning Hutsuls and Boikos (Ukrainian 'subgroups', according to ethnographers, and another issue in itself!) as what her people were often called locally ("but there were many Polish people, and Jewish people too" she said), and maybe it's because her own mother's family had Tatar ancestry and she married my grandpa who carried an old Czech name, but Ukrainian-ness itself was not something she mentioned much. The nationalist aspect didn't seem to interest her much.

(On my grandfather's side -- also from Nebyliw -- there was more tension, but in terms of religion, not so much ethnicity, with Eastern Orthodox and Jewish people being forced to 'convert' to marry Greek (Eastern) Catholics, causing some rifts when children of the 'converted' decided to take up the other faiths, etc. But I don't know the full story there, it's only becoming unearthed as of late*)

What struck me more was the way she referred to the place she was from. She didn't talk so much about 'Ukraine' -- after all, that wasn't so much what it was called when she lived there, other than for a few brief years when she was very young -- but of Nebyliw itself, her village, and of the Old Country.

In fact, one my earliest memories of this is from when I was about 4 and I was playing with my globe. My dad had been teaching me country names and I was just learning to read so I was trying to identify them. I searched and searched, but got quite frustrated and indignant when I couldn't find 'The Old Country' anywhere on the map. "But that's what she calls it!" I said to my father when he laughed at me.

This reference to the old and to the new made it seem to me that it was less important to her about being from 'Ukraine', the imagined community, but rather, it was this old country, from Nebyliw, that physical place, where there was a community of people who spoke at least three different languages and herded cows, and sheep, and planted crops and brought fish and eels to the nearby market in exchange for salt, and ran logs from the mountains down the Lymnytsya river.

And so I am eager to read the story of Mouré's mother, and the village of Hlibovychi Velkye, to better understand these border stories, the way her family experienced the local, the being from here, in a place that saw great turmoil and great tragedies. It heartens me that links to this site about a whole project aiming to research Ukraine from a non-nationalist point of view (rare in the post-Soviet regions, let me tell you!) and it gives me hope for new ways of analysing and understanding this place my own mother's multifaceted relatives came from, and understanding what I have inherited through my family's fraught history, and understanding what place meant to them.

*I also wish I had asked my own baba more about what happened in her village in WWII (it was a site of combat in WWI, when her own father died, and sometimes families were split by the border of fighting for Austria-Hungary vs. fighting for Russia), but they left shortly before things got really awful in Western Ukraine, and I wonder how much she really knew, what her relatives told her. I know some of her relatives helped hide some people from the Galician SS and from Stalinist purges at various times, but again, I don't know the whole story. (This is another reason that Everything is Illuminated destroyed me especially thoroughly, knowing that such things likely happened there too, in Nebyliw, to my relatives).

muskrat party no. 1

2011-12-05T15:17:00.005-07:00

This is the Sturgeon River in early November -- at sunset, with the first ice film glazing the still water, like mica-isinglass, the brush and sedge bleached and bowing low towards the water.

When I took these photos, the muskrats were still very active, swimming to and fro near the bridge...

There were only narrow, frosted edges of ice flanking the slow current, and the little muskrats would clamber gingerly out onto the platforms to nibble on shoots and riverplants before heading into the water again.

(This evening, the moon was full and the sky pigeon-grey)

(Small luminous pearl in the aspen-corals)

Around sundown, great numbers would gather in conferences, washing their paws and smoothing their whiskers, but never getting tooo close to one another (I did witness one muskrat-squabble, it involved snorting and splashing).

And perhaps they admired the last light illuminating their water-slicked, oily fur...

They swam like winter was approaching, busily plucking plants and traversing the channels beneath the ice sheets -- it was amazing to watch them swim beneath the translucence, the murky green water pressing up against the glass, their webbed feet pushing off the film, following the trail of water bubbles as they slipped into their bankside nests.

Muskrats don't hibernate, rather they continue to slip out from their tunnels into the flow beneath the ice to find decaying plants and small mud-buried larva; though we won't see them until the melt comes, they will follow the same water-paths under the frozen surface all winter.

They seem more at home beneath the surface than above it -- it was the muskrat, after all, who dove down in many Algonquian and Iroquoian creation stories to fetch the earth from the bottom of the great lake in order to create the land, when all the other animals had failed.

autumn chronology: beginning of november, riverlot

2011-12-03T22:16:00.004-07:00

* * *

After great pain, a formal feeling comes--
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs--
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round--
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone--

This is the Hour of Lead--
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow--
First--Chill--then Stupor--then the letting go--

(emily dickinson)

ways my father did not die

2011-11-23T00:37:00.004-07:00

field grass remnants, riverlot, early november 2011

* * *

(poem re: two nightmares, and the fact that when he dies in them, i can't wake up and tell myself that it was just a dream.)

ways my father did not die

it was not as it was in dreams:

not hypothermia, not from the cold

water seeping into the cloth that

bound his feet – he did not walk

miles and miles to the hospital

through icy pools sprawling malignant,

to die with the dark winter light

on the inside of his eyes –

brighter than that medicinal fluorescence,

than the room where we unwrap the

layers, strip his body like a sodden onion

but find him not there –

he did not die as in the second dream:

on the side of a mountain road,

gravel digging into my knees

with each spasm of his back –

his arching body contorted

like a trout diseased and whirling,

bent nearly to snapping, trying

to shift shape out of this –

to a fish to a bird to anything

that could relieve him of his

aching form, leaving me with the

pulse of absence in my arms.

i was not there. i can only believe

what they told me, that it

was swift, that he shifted away

in a last exhale that still hung

mist-like over half-lidded eyes

when we came in the early morning.

i will never know what he was

thinking. if he knew it was coming,

that silent white meteor

searing through the window, stealing

his gaze, leaving his quiet head

slumping towards the door.

i do not dream of how it

happened really: not of the day before

when i brought him blankets

and the paper, warmed his feet

and kissed his whiskers,

brought the smallest bites of

his last dinner to his lips. and

i will wake and wake again

with the ache of these remainders,

of these ways it never happened,

of the dreams that are not only

though they cannot change the dead.

my father's house

2011-11-17T15:33:00.004-07:00

geese gathering over the woods and the house, early november 2011

* * *

my father’s house is gone

and all the houses in his town

have crumbled [...]

and what will be ours

to do today

is to name everything we see --

after what we are

and who came before

and the things that run in fear

from you and me...

* * *

--from 'there will be spring', by bonnie "prince" billy, on the album wolfroy goes to town

(download and listen here. til nov. 24)

grief.

2011-11-16T01:59:00.003-07:00

whitetail. (poem sketch)

it is autumn, and he is missing. leaves

are falling, and he is not there. you

look for him in the drying clink of summer

coppers, their hollow-throated rattle, the

pecking of a flicker, search

the leaflessness for pulses of rose-hip,

an intermittent semaphore of chokecherries,

reddened eyes of the crane—you cannot stop

the shining plain of grief rising

inside you, a shoulder-blade sharp

and jutting, like under the soft skin

of a stalking animal,shifts with a

pained loping amongst bloodless grasses.

always a presence, there in the field,

waiting—for the sky’s empty weight,

falling from bent branches in the chest,

settling on the thin limbs of lung

those clouds, marrowless.

you have seen in these trees

what we are made of: sinewy nests

strangling each joint as grief attaches,

makes every breath ache. reminds us

that what connects us, moves us apart.

further and further between the birches

the last sunlight in your fingers, division

made visible. always reaching

for something that can never be touched:

grasped not with your hands, your mind,

not even in language. like the deer

disappearing, boundless into woods at sundown,

leg-splaying leap and soundless landing –

(o maybe if you are really quiet,

really still, he will come back to you)

no. just a whitetail brushing the air

with anxious snow, vanishing flag

in the aspens, absence.

autumn chronology: mid-october, lower riverlot

2011-11-15T00:07:00.001-07:00

the bright sedges by the river, sky still blue

cloud reflections in the beaver-dam stillness

shadowy muskrats, or perhaps beavers...

beaver, i think... i never got to see the tails...

in the nearby field, the old barn...

oh hello whitetails

the luminous skeletons of asters

hay-roll detail in the fading light

wandering

the moment of saturation warms me every time

shop sale

2011-11-14T00:02:00.002-07:00

annychka necklace --

vintage carnelian and coral beads from ukraine, on various textures of brass chain

A wee note to say that recently I have added a few more necklaces and such to my shop of stones on Etsy -- and that I have a sale there, 20% for the rest of the month.

To get the discount, you just put in the coupon code SNOWFALL when you check out and the deductions will be made from the regular price.

Canadian shipping is free (SHIPMEFREE is the code) and if you want local delivery for your treasures, it's IMLOCAL. Perhaps you will find something to brighten your November?

autumn chronology: thanksgiving, riverlot

2011-11-08T15:18:00.002-07:00

gold sea in the treetops

bright kalyna

mushroom mushroom

small flecks and pulses

aspen trembling copper on the blue sky

stacked hay pillows

freshly harvested field

cut wheat spindles

the gold and the red

golden fluttering

shy chickadee

autumn chronology: early october, sunset on the sturgeon river

2011-11-04T00:00:00.003-06:00

looking downriver on the sturgeon at sunset

early goose formations

two ducks and a muskrat

duck silhouettes in the shallows

early october sunset, looking upriver on the sturgeon

So i let ache ache in me, so that i do not lose you

from my eyes, let you

penetrate my seeing so gentle so i may seize you

in orbit, as sky...

Erin Mouré, from Doubled Elegy, Ethical (in O Resplandor, 2010)

autumn chronology: early october, riverlot

2011-11-03T00:00:00.000-06:00

these were asters

little red sprout-families of moss

shriveling white campion

harvest at the edge of the earth

someone's nest

there was such a gathering of robins that day i could hear them warbling 1/2 a km away...

young cedar waxwing, still in his brown feathers

little sticks of fluff

highbush drooping

through the grasses, tipis at the nechi centre

geese gathering too

nest like a hanging basket

magpie's nest in the aspens

autumn chronology: late september, north saskatchewan river valley, edmonton

2011-11-02T00:00:00.005-06:00

through the woods, aspen-carpeted

so do i.

roots and the path

tansy, thistle fluff, still-green sedge

nest of this summer's wasps

perhaps this one's home?

thistle fluffs

looking upriver from the swallow-hollowed banks

dried seed flakes of the amaranth

the last yellowing of the tansy/bitter buttons

and the sap-tipped twig waits for spring.

interlude: saturation

2011-11-01T14:11:00.004-06:00

acreage sunset, mid-september 2011.

* * *

It is an art; it is better than an art, it is a solar phenomenon in which the artist collaborates with the sun.

--Alphonse Lamartine, regarding photography (1860)

autumn chronology: mid-september, acreage west of edmonton, part 2

2011-11-01T14:04:00.002-06:00

tomato plants in the garden

mourning cloak wing

mourning cloak on sage

into the fields (not yet harvested)

autumn chronology: mid-september, acreage west of edmonton, part 1

2011-11-01T13:58:00.003-06:00

that old car again-- the datsun-aspen hybrid --in the 5th year of its documentation.

autumn chronology: mid-september, north saskatchewan river

2011-10-26T00:39:00.004-06:00

fire-rim tortoiseshell butterfly on the sand cliffs

flowers on the receding slope

gull + reflection

the leaning pines and firs

lichens on the limbs in the caragana

remnants of keillor road, looking southwest

looking northwest from the point

through the fence at the point, leaning trees at the ridge

autumn chronology: early september, riverlot

2011-10-26T00:22:00.006-06:00

grove along the back fence

elusive haystack creature

luminous thistles, early evening

hay rolls in the big field

grasses and webs

wheat just before the harvest

dried cow parsnip

blue button (or field scabious)

sunset and the harvested hay

end of july

2011-10-10T22:51:00.005-06:00

Napping mallard duck

Frost/White Heath/Old Field Aster (so many common names)

Young crow in a saskatoon bush

Goldenrod in full bloom

Chipping Sparrow

Mourning Cloak Butterfly

Lichens and bracket fungus

Burdock

A bald eagle (someone I've never seen before within the city)

Gathering cumulus

* * *

"…in the desert there is everything and there is nothing. Stay curious. Know where you are—your biological address. Get to know your neighbors—plants, creatures, who lives there, who died there, who is blessed, cursed, what is absent or in danger or in need of your help. Pay attention to the weather, to what breaks your heart, to what lifts your heart. Write it down."

(Ellen Meloy)

* * *

This isn't the desert, but the North Saskatchewan River valley, back in the middle of July, moving into the last half of summer. Right in the middle of Edmonton but I easily forget that every time I'm there. I loved my house there, just three blocks from the woods -- carrying my skis there in winter, to strap them on and head down a twisting, slick slope to the bottom on the ravine; the rest of the year, sprinting past cars crawling and grumbling through rush hour to disappear into chickadee calls and the sheltering caragana bushes.

These photos are all illustrative of the transition between July and August, a particular time in which summer has ripened fully and is not yet beginning a slow fade. The wildflowers -- asters, goldenrod, tansy, campion, harebell, thistles-- are healthy, bright, and thickly abundant, and edible plants like burdock are blooming, but hazelnuts are still green in their fuzzy, beaked shells. Saskatoons ready and bright as a young crow's eye, kalyna and chokecherry just on their way. No geese are leaving the lakes yet, and ducks sleep and sun themselves as their young ones swim nearby. Chipping sparrows have emerged, arrived on their way south from the boreal birthing grounds, and chickadees call out and chatter, everpresent residents in the sun-warm pines and birches. The clay of the riverbank is fragrantly alive with sage, with mourning-cloak butterflies resting longer, soaking in light, the border of their wings pollen-golden. In the distance, a bald eagle opening its wings over the river, as if to embrace the whole valley in its span, take it in, carry it away. In the distance, the thought of a thunderstorm, piled clouds storing lightning; in the distance a changing, in the distance--fall.

And it is autumn now, and it has been rough, this past summer. But I am so grateful to be here, in my home, for this season; to be able to walk in these places that I love so much, to remember them and honour them, is one thing that does lift my heart. When I was in the Sakha Republic, I learned a fair bit about Sakha beliefs, and I was especially drawn to the Sakha explanation of the physical, tripartite soul. You have a soul inherited from your mother (iye-kut), and a soul from the air of your first breath (salgyn-kut), but you also have a soul from the earth (buor-kut), that enters you in the place from where you are born, from where you first touch the ground. And if you stay away too long from home, you get soul-sick, if you go for decades you might even die. You need to physically return to this place where you were born to periodically receive its nourishment and energies. No matter how you adapt to living elsewhere, or even come to love other places, they cannot give you what your home-place can give you, because that is where your soul was born, that is the place your earth -soul is made of. You must go to it, honour it, and take care of it, you must learn it and know it and love it well, and allow it to replenish you.

a shop full of stones

2011-10-08T00:45:00.003-06:00

Necklaces, September 2011.

So, I finally made an online shop in which I have offered for sale some of the beads I've been making all summer. You can go visit it here, on Etsy, to see more of the above sorts of adornments. Most of the beads and artefacts are things I have gathered or inherited; the only things that are really new are the brass chains (so they are pretty sturdy!) The pieces are all connected to Ukrainian-Carpathian aesthetic; whether made of vintage beads from Ukraine or consisting of more-newly-acquired amber and carnelian, the colours, shapes and forms are all linked to the folklore and material culture of the Hutsuls and their neighbours. I have so many treasures that sit in little wooden boxes in the basement, beads and rocks and trinkets; I wanted to take them out and refashion them, recombine them and let them be worn.

These paintings by Polish painter Kazimierz Sichulski for an idea of the Hutsul women's ornamentation that I am inspired by:

A Hutsul Bridesmaid

Hucułka, 1906

Hutsul girl with a bouquet of hearts, 1906

the heart of the world

2011-09-27T23:40:00.003-06:00

This is my father, and a rainbow trout, somewhere along Carson Creek, in September 1976, when he was 28, the age I am now.

My father passed away a month ago today. He was sick, yes, for years, but this happened suddenly, too swiftly, as unexpected as it could be in this situation.

And that was at the last of the summer, and it's fully autumn now, just like in that photo; the leaves are half-turned, shaking their gold flecks all over the hazy blue stretches of sky between the hills. We've had warm days, too warm for this time of year, everything ripening slowly, bringing a richness that nourishes me but aches more than I can ever remember.

Because it's an Indian summer, a grandmother summer -- but it should be a father's late summer, when he should be standing in a chilly creek somewhere in the northern foothills, rapt with lungfuls of warm juniper-scented air and the sun singeing the back of his neck.

There is a breeze that skims the surface of the flow, over the moss, the steady rush over the quiet rocks. A single shed moose antler tinged red by the tea-coloured water. There is the aspen shake, the flutter of the fishing line, and his unshaven face squinting into the long late light of the afternoon.

I am standing there, knee deep, a little ways off, with my camera, thinking about all the places he has led me, down cut-lines and fire roads, and what he has given me there, what I have inherited, what we have shared.

* * *

There's a strange little song called The Beginning of Memory by Laurie Anderson, in which she narrates a story from Aristophanes 'The Birds'. In the beginning of the earth, all sky and sea, there was no land for the birds to light on, so they simply circled:

...one of these birds was a lark and one day her father died.

[...] what should they do with the body?

there was no place to put the body because there was no earth.

and finally the lark had a solution.

she decided to bury her father in the back of her own head.

and this was the beginning of memory.

It is in this way, through the process of the making of memory, that he lives on; he lives in me, both physically and emotionally. Even in the midst of this surreal month, in this strange liminal space between his presence and his absence, I have felt him in the muscles of my thighs as I ran, I have felt him somewhere in my gut, a melded intuition, when making decisions.

I remember the end of September six years ago when he was first diagnosed with myeloma. The weekend before he started chemo, he wanted to go driving. And so we drove up to Whitecourt, but didn't go fishing; we passed through the town, and he showed me where he'd lived when he first taught there 35 years before. Showed me where he got lost in the bush, where he first explored the trails, rattled down the gravel roads in an old Challenger, blaring the radio when they played Spirit in the Sky. We drove down the forestry exploration roads, rolling with golden larch and aspen, under a sky gone cobalt with a lost late thunderstorm, stopping to photograph things: a bridge canopied by the flight of hundreds of swallows, the swarms of migrating butterflies hovering too low over the roads. We checked the water levels in the braiding streams, investigated the trapper's cabin ruins, stretched our legs.

We'd done this many times before, for years we'd be wandering around here with fishing rods and cameras, but it seemed especially important this time, deliberate even in our ramblings. Though we spoke little, he was telling me stories, telling them once more to himself as he remembered these places and times. This was a conscious remembering, a careful, attentive trampling of a long-worn path to keep it fresh, and to show me that trail's significance so I could re-member it and tread it myself, to understand the way he had experienced it throughout his life but also to illuminate the way we shared it together.

And all I can do now is take what I have dwelling there in the back of my head, all those paths and places and run though them, these memories, to re-member what's there, manifest it as I continue to do the things he loved so much, that he has passed on to me.

* * *

“As long as I live, I'll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I'll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I'll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can.”

- John Muir, in 'A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf'.

makings

2011-08-16T13:24:00.002-06:00

This is a picture of an old Hutsul woman that I found (original source unknown) and she is all kinds of amazing, I think.

It's been a bit of a long break here, but I am still writing, or at least planning to write. Home in Canada, trying to re-culturate and prepare for departing again to Scotland come mid-September. Dealing with family illness, trying to start writing my dissertation but not being able to gather thoughts in any semblance of order.

I ache to write but can't organize my thoughts very well at the moment, due to anxiety & too many things pressing at the vessels in my mind, so in the meantime I've mostly been making things with my hands: cabled handwarmers, felt mittens embellished with beading I did three years ago in the Yukon, tiny embroideries (though I had to stop the latter because my paraesthetic fingers and tired eyes protested). And beads... I've rediscovered how meditative it can be to pry at wires and string things along without any real plan, just adding and removing until my aesthetic third eye feels that telltale warmth and satisfaction.

I was of course inspired by the incredibly ornate silver decorations of the Sakha ladies, with their tiers of amulets protecting all parts of the body from evil spirit-influence, but what I am making with my own hands is simpler and less crafted. Wandering around the Museum of Ethnography in St. Petersburg on my way home I fell in love with the ancient amber necklaces of Baltic women, and the paleolithic pendants of bone and mammoth ivory, and after seeing the myriad strands of rough amber in the market stalls, decided these needed to be recreated. Combining that with the Carpathian colours, the warm reds of coral and carnelian and the raw brass and copper zgardy, I am making jewelry that reminds me of these elements and histories. I found stray vintage beads from Ukraine and antler tips from the Yukon in my treasure boxes and then bought some unpolished crystals, and thus many afternoons lately have been spent not thinking but simply making, inspired by these remembered patterns and textures and aesthetics. Pictures soon.

mother's day!

2011-05-08T09:04:00.004-06:00

Mama at Thanksgiving, October 2009.

Mama at my age. She has shared so much with me, but didn't pass along the prettiness genes to me, alas!

Mama at age 4 or 5, with one of her many kittens named Tiger.

Happy Mother's Day to my mama -- she is the reason why I love language and words, why I travel, why I have the resolve to do what I do. She is the reason I want to be giving and generous, the reason I want to not only learn but teach. She is kind and tough and gentle, and I am so proud of her for all she has accomplished, for all of her perseverance and quiet resolve. She has helped shape my ethical and philosophical development, esp. the feminist and altruistic elements, for which I am deeply grateful. I immensely admire her resilience and her selflessness more than I can properly express, and I wouldn't know what to do without her strength and her support.

Mama, I am proud of you, and I know your own mama is too. Not to mention our horde of resourceful, brave and rabble-rousing ancestors -- from what you have taught me about them, you embody all that they aspired to, all they qualities they held so dear: resourcefulness, endurance, independence and the ability to always look forward, and cultivate hope.

aspen engine

2011-04-25T12:42:00.002-06:00

Oh look, it's my favourite motor vehicle again. (See also here, and here) I've been documenting its life over the past five years, and I finally finished a poem about it, that had lived in scraps for months and months.

* * *

aspen engine

when the car stopped driving

it rolled to rest in the back

forty, by the poplars at the edge

of the field. dead, they said.

no longer mobile. but within

weeks of abandonment,

an aspen engine slowly started

up, ignited this reclamation:

silver shoots pushing up amidst

stalled machinery, fingering the

shattered hood. eyes pried open,

& soon headlights emptied into

small portals for sparrows & the

chassis, a trellis for the twisting

blossoms of vetch. sunprinted vines

on the dash’s bleached plastic, rusted

springs of seat cushions swallowed up

in mossy upholstery. paint flakes

cling like periosteum & colonies

of sowbugs beneath the moist

deadfall of the brakes, seethe

like the memory of friction under

the foot of a driver’s ghost. now

only lichens creep with their slow

feet across the dusty windshield,

silvering filaments clustering,

mirroring the passage of clouds.

in its very heart, void of motor

the three trees grow: a burst

of new limbs to cradle the hull

as the rust comes chewing

small lamellae, claiming the skeleton

as carboniferous leaves fall in the

gravity of metal to earth. & so

this grove no graveyard for that

little green datsun, no scrapyard,

no junk heap. this is a plant,

a factory of deterioration, just a

shift in direction, shift into reverse.

fieldwork and difficulty

2011-04-17T07:51:00.006-06:00

sunset in the pines near sergeleekh, yakutsk, april 2011

So, I just read this article by Amy Pollard about anthropological fieldwork and difficulty, after coming upon a reference to it in an old notebook, something scribbled down at some pre-fieldwork seminar last year. And I just read it, & I am really torn as to whether that was a good idea or not; as much as it made me feel better about how I am currently feeling, it also made me feel worse. However, I am also feeling deeply grateful for this article, because I think it is a brave and necessary piece of writing, and it has allowed many anthropologists to speak about their experiences that they previously felt were unmentionable and had no place within anthropological discourse or even the discourse of academic life.

The section in Pollard's article regarding depression resonates so strongly: "Students criticised themselves for feeling depressed, and were criticised by others. Several students said their informants told them not to feel so sorry for themselves, saying that they were not going to be able to carry out research if they did not cheer up. Maria described how depression stopped her from feeling really interested in her fieldwork site for 12 months. Looking back, she was disappointed at the “very mechanical way” in which she had done this fieldwork, and resented the mental turmoil which had precipitated her depression."

And it's difficult, because I don't know what to say to some people when they ask me about life here, because a lot of people at home think that fieldwork is: a) basically just like going to school in another country or b) a grand travel adventure of hanging-out funtimes or c) both, and when I was last back I could say, yes, my research is... going, because it is going along pretty well, and yes there are lovely, kind people here that I am acquainted with, and I appreciate them very much and I think that everything will be fine in the end, but there is so much I have trouble expressing, to both people at home, and the people here I've come to befriend, like:

1. Dealing with a bureaucratic system so fucked up that sometimes I feel like I am in a combination of a Sisyphean nightmare + a Monty Python sketch (only decidedly not funny).

2. Trying to be assertive and anticipate when people who I think I might trust are trying to manipulate me or at the very least, take advantage of me. Giving in to demands when I should say no, then feeling guilty for not refusing.

3. Trying to explain to people, esp. other academics what it is I am doing here when they have already have very stubborn idea in their mind of a) what I am doing here and b) how what I do is not terribly worthwhile, etc.

4. Trying to explain my struggles with depression and anxiety in languages not my own, within a cultural context wherein these feelings are not often expressed and these problems dealt with very differently. (Here you do things unless you are actually dying. Haven't slept at night in days? Migraines with vomiting and aphasia? Not good enough.). The amount of energy it takes sometimes to present myself as an enthusiastic, inquisitive, flexible, useful fieldworker (teacher, helper, etc.) is more than it usually takes at home to do the whole performance thing.

5. Feeling the aforementioned depression and subsequently full of a strange sort of ennui, and then feeling guilty for feeling that way, because what is there really to be depressed about, you privileged, fully-funded, over-educated, ungrateful excuse for a serious anthropologist? You wanted to come here! etc.

6. Feeling so frustrated because I want to relate to what I am doing on a more profound level, but it just isn't happening. Of things not meeting your expectations or hopes. As well, I think half of my heart/brain is at home, and only half is here, but I am not willing to detach that other half. I can't.

7. The feeling that I am neglecting myself and my well-being in general, combined with the feeling of something a bit like Stockholm Syndrome wherein I try to justify to myself the troubling behavior of others here or the broken systems as not so bad after all.

Also, the thought of coming home unnerves me too. Because I know this has all changed me. I don't feel like myself right now, and part of that could be the depression speaking, but I also know I have changed in ways I can't even pinpoint, and I really don't know how to articulate many of my experiences. One comment in the article was "You leave and you can't really come back". I think that's true of so many sorts of leaving, and I've done a lot of leaving over the past couple of years. But I do feel like distances are growing between many people in my life, and I am not sure how to remedy this. I have been trying to keep contact as best as I can but it's difficult when both of us aren't trying. I really can't fathom how I am going to give the tidy sound-bite version of this year as expected this summer. And there's a silencing there.

Coming home also means the pressure to start writing, which at this point is starting to feel more real. (And I am afraid, because I wonder what I will write, and how much I will write and whether I will have enough to write about in the end, because look at me, only in the field for not even a year and some people go for a year and a half but I have to finish by Spring of 2013 because of the draconian British PhD laws and what if what if what if)

So while reading that article brought a certain relief and feelings of vindication and solidarity, it also makes me feel bad because as much as I can certainly recognize of myself under those ominous word-headings, I also feel weak for having some of these feelings. Yes, there's the whole ideology-of-difficulty aspect of Anthropology; I feel the pressure to do fieldwork like it's some grand feat of MANthropology that I must endure and get through with great stoicism. There's a lot of guilt and worry over my own performance, and trouble discerning what I can control and what I can't. As one person mentioned, "I felt it was all part of the rite of passage that people have to go through. [My fieldsite] was supposed to be so easy and civilised. I never felt able to say I was having a really hard time". That summarizes it well, the "Oh, but this is all just part of fieldwork!" argument that others use-- and that we use to convince ourselves. But at the same time, I also recognize that my situation has been infinitely easier than that of many other PhD students mentioned in the article. Exacerbation of my existing health problems certainly beats malaria or dengue fever... (Though the rabid dogs here have been putting me on edge lately) I have dealt with harassment and misogyny, but that's nothing compared to sexual assault. I do not fear for my life, or the lives of my friends here; I am not in immediate physical danger... though I am haunted by my father's illness at home. & I have the Internet when I am in the city and I can easily get in contact with my loved ones by phone, too. However, this also contributes to feeling silenced. “I came back and heard other people’s stories and thought [my experience] was kind of nothing.”

These are things I know I will be thinking on for quite some time, yet, I know. However, this article did provide me with a difficult but much-needed sort of solace in light of how I have been feeling as of late. And I am thinking I might pass it along to people to whom I am having difficulty explaining both fieldwork in general as well as my own experiences here, with the relevant parts highlighted... (and likely, the disclaimer that "Oh, but don't worry, it wasn't really that bad".)

photo show

2011-03-26T08:04:00.002-06:00

Recently, some Northern Studies friends here at the University in Yakutsk put together a little photo show at a gallery here in town, in order to promote their department and display all the lovely images collected by students while studying and exploring northern places. They invited me to include some photos of Northern Canada. I gave them a selection that I chose quite quickly, with some of Alberta and some of the Yukon, and they decided to display the following four... Interestingly, all of the chosen ones ended up not being truly 'arctic' latitude-wise, but are from the Rockies & the northern Alberta boreal forest... Nevertheless, here they are:

I am happy one of my hungry waxwings was selected...

(my neighbourhood, Edmonton, Jan. 2009)

Sunset on the Lesser Slave River, Alberta, August 2010.

Magic hour! I love the little luminous cloud in the top left.

The canonical Lake Louise view; I was surprised this one was selected because I didn't think it was the most interesting. However, I like the effect of the forest-fire smoke making the background hazy... (August 2010)

Bent sedge-grass at the edge of Lawrence Lake

(near Athabasca, Alberta. March 2009.)

paper cravings

2011-03-14T07:38:00.006-06:00

river-breath frozen to a branch, Athabasca River, Jasper, January 2011

In the midst of doing research here, & living rather simply (as in, my collage-box is precisely 6046km away from me, & I have pretty much no access to art supplies here), I am finding pretty much all I want to do is make things. Particularly things that involve the cutting & gluing of paper to accent the theme of words on a page, i.e. poetry chapbooks.

I have been knitting madly, which fills a certain need to do things with my hands, and this is good, and I have been trying to do more photographing, but I also have all these poems that want to be on paper. Paper in books that I can give to people! I haven't made a chapbook in years (I was about to manufacture one in Fall 2009, but then I left for Scotland, again without the collage-box) & there is one all ready & waiting to be made, & I think another one is starting to come into being. I also had another idea for a little book I want to make, about all the lovely people I know who make stuff with words & pictures & cloth & yarn & sounds & such.

I also want to make prints of so many photos, & put them in wooden frames. I want to make collage posters of poems... I want to go to an art store & feel all the fancy book-papers, the ones with thready textures, & the soft-rough edges, & the filmy Nepalese lokta leaves... I want to watch ink from the fountain pen my mother gave me absorb into the fibres... & then I will glue wool and buttons and cut-up photographs everywhere amongst the words! And rejoice!

Oy, such a longing... When I get home in the summer, one of my first plans is to make and eat a grilled sandwich with avocado, smoked tofu, & spinach with hummus on the side. Then I will sit on the floor somewhere & cut & glue things until I am sated.

habitus, part two.

2011-03-09T09:27:00.002-07:00

me in jasper, inhabiting the snowy woods. january 2011, photo by jason.

The word 'habitus' is a lot like 'habitat', and it always makes me think of a place -- the coziest, most natural little nest-niche of a place where you feel utterly at ease, at home. However, as early anthropologists and sociologists developed the term, it came to encompass all of one's cultural practices that are part of the body, the daily practices -- the non-discursive knowledge we absorb through socialization (our family upbringing, often tempered by formal education), which is then rooted to a place, of course. It is everything from tastes and bodily positions and styles and habits and routines; basically, it is all of those things that never need explanation, and perhaps evade explanation. And so we never think of them, but we always know when they are absent, when our habitus does not align well with those of others, & we realize when our own habitus has been thrown off its centre.

This is because, according to Bourdieu, the habitus is our schema, a bare skeleton that fleshes out with all our lasting perceptions, thoughts and actions. And this is how we relate to a field, a social structure or space -- through this inhabited body, this habitus.

Since arriving here in the Sakha Republic last September, I have been observing the little changes I have adapted to life here fairly well under the circumstances, I think, but I still feel off-kilter, and decentred. Of course I miss the people I love, the people to whom I can truly reveal myself, to whom I am not--when all is said & done--the foreigner, the fieldworker, the academic (even if we get along well)... I miss certain foods, as well, everything from green vegetables to the taste of tapwater in my hometown , the usual things that travelers and expatriates miss.

But I also notice more subtle things, these aspects of the habitus that are difficult to isolate. They are all tied up in how I walk differently here, much more tensely and apprehensively. How I interact with people differently (I am less assertive but far more outgoing and enthusiastic), I miss the sort of polite friendliness you can show to passing strangers and workers in Canada, but is out of place here in Yakutsk. I miss feeling a balance of power within an interaction, of feeling like I am being asked instead of told. It tires me to have to always have to fight and repeat myself to express my needs, to untangle these nuances that no one ever explains to me--never even thinks to explain-- because to them, they are part of the habitus of this culture, this place.

It's the knowing that I will always fit out, on the deepest level, even if I fit in superficially, even if I am certainly adapting, often subconsciously, to this new habitus. How I dress, how I talk and interact (requests, questions, everything), how I walk, how I approach someone. I just miss my own habitus, because all these little things add up to a larger incongruency, & I don't feel real sometimes, just not quite like myself.

And maybe I think too much, instead of just trying to be, but thinking too much is really my job right now, & so is noticing all of these things, I suppose, because in subjectively understanding the changes in my own behaviors, I can better identify what it is that characterizes the habitus (especially as it relates to communicative practice). And maybe this is different, what makes me stand slightly apart from someone moving to another country to live, to make a life, rather than to study it in minute detail -- do they notice it quite like this, beyond the initial, more overt symptoms of culture shock? I don't know. It just makes me tired, sometimes, this creeping sense of dépaysement (another lovely French word that describes how things in another country, another place, never seem quite right), which I think links well the nostalgia for a place with the longing for how you feel when you are there, when you inhabit it, you dwell within it -- a sense of (in)habitus.

habitus, part one.

2011-02-14T11:27:00.003-07:00

i am in my home. photo by jason, december 2010

Some nights
I just never go to sleep at all,
and I stand,
shaking in the doorway like a sentinel,
all alone,
bracing like the bow upon a ship,
and fully abandoning
any thought of anywhere
but home,
my home.

-- Joanna Newsom, from 'In California'.

baba yaga is my patron saint.

2011-02-12T08:56:00.004-07:00

kalyna berries, aspens, birches... top photo by me, bottom photo taken by jason. riverlot, december 2010.

Last month, Sady Doyle, wrote a wonderful post about Joan of Arc on her blog Tigerbeatdown, which is fantastic, & you should read it if you don't already (that post for sure, because it's one my favourites, but all of the blog, really!) & it inspired me, because I have been thinking of Baba Yaga a lot lately, especially as a feminist icon, and an example of patriarchal structures and those who enact them use certain methods to try to bring down powerful women, & how these methods haven't really changed. & there's this bit where Sady discusses the process of picking out a Catholic confirmation name, and choosing Joan as the patron saint she'd like to have her back, which made me smile, because, yes. From what I know of this girl and her activism, it suits her perfectly.

Anyway, of course Baba Yaga in any incarnation never has & never will be canonized, but I still wish she was my patron. & so I imagine her as grandmother and protector, dispelling the myths spread to slander her, grinding the patriarchy to a pulp in that mortar & pestle.

Poem, as usual, in progress:

baba yaga is my grandmother,

baking bread by morning:

she kneads her mottled heart,

offers it to the oven: all day it rises,

each pulse powering

the bellows that the bellows that set the forest

breathing, her avian hut

slowly stirring with the day.

she works, and works, arms a

a sinewy genealogy, layers of onion-skin

windowing over veins tracing paths,

remembering: a loaf for my mother,

and my mother’s mother, one for my

grandfather and another for the birds.

late afternoon, she shakes out her linens,

magpie wings as she flutters out, all

walnut-kneed and juniper-eyed,

from tree-tops she watches winter sun

soak the river fiery, turn the coals

in the dark furnace of her woods.

ii)

baba yaga is my grandmother,

even though she has no children.

those she shirked retort

that she’s just a spinster, a

dessicated pestle-pusher

but i have seen the red rider

leaving hoofprints in the yard

at dawn, & her corvid voice creaking

& lilting as she gathers herbs,

smirking:

don’t tell your mother

i’ve been teaching you bawdy songs!

iii)

baba yaga is my grandmother,

although no one believes it.

she’s not even a woman,

they scoff. village men say

she drinks the blood of livestock,

devours our children! robs

every nest, corrupts them, crazed

barren woman, bitter and unfed;

look at her fence! they cry,

(mistaking brambles for ribcages,

silver birches for weathered bones.)

they never remember

how all the women call for her,

have her cure their difficult infants,

coax them down that red-poppied

path, spin their linens, save their lives.

the men scorn, but she knows

their need, & how in times of

desperation they remember

that psha krev dog’s blood

is just a curse for a burned hand.

iv)

baba yaga is my grandmother

& also probably my great-grandmother.

those skeletons? she says,

those are my only relatives:

they said, bury me here, baba,

i will be fodder for your sunflowers,

i want asters & yarrow to blossom

from the hollows of my eyes!

baba shakes her head,

a handful of rich dark earth

in her fingers: everything we eat,

you know, is of the dead.

baba yaga is my grandmother,

bright forest inside of me:

& they said she is death

but i know it’s more dangerous

to create

with a mortar with a spindle

with a sharp flint spark!

to crush harm like poppyseeds

into numb paste on your tongue –

forget the macabre lanterns,

she says, you won’t need them

in the dark:

every night she sends me off as

my own talisman,

my whole skull blazing with light.

geological poem #2

2011-02-01T08:47:00.004-07:00

fossil crinoids, jasper national park, july 2010

fossil corals and other creatures, kananaskis, july 2010

When my grandmother was in the last years of her life, she often retreated into memories of her early years; she spoke of relatives and friends long since passed. English slipped away into the background, as her first language seemed more suitable for telling me about people like her grandmother whom she'd only ever known in that language. The present moments were a gauzy blur to her, and this frightened her; they were much less clear than the past times that had suddenly flooded into view, carrying her into a comforting future where she believed she would live amongst those personages again.

When my father found out he was dying, his interest in geology saw a striking resurgence. He studied it in university before becoming a teacher, and throughout my childhood we were always hunting fossils and inspecting outcroppings. However, a few years ago, he became immersed in tomes on stratigraphy and sedimentology again, and travelling in the mountains became a time for him to recite the epics of terrain formation. This past summer we drove southward through the mountains from Jasper to Kananaskis and I learned pretty much everything about how the middle Rockies formed. He reveled in telling me every detail, as he was parsing every pattern of thrust faults and reconstructing each shattered slope, reading the rocks, the story of their genesis. And it occured to me that this recounting of the story of creation, the slow transformations that made the world was a deep comfort to him; in this time of certain uncertainty, of living daily with an illness that will kill him, it calms him to dwell on understanding the story of the forces that move the earth beyond us.

* * *

when my father fell ill, he

starting reading the rocks:

in every surface crack he saw

the seismic shift in his own

marrow, a mirror of his slow decay:

it’s in the barest wavering of fingers,

pallid colour of the dry rock face.

in this sickness, he says, there’s

no great landslide: i erode.

it’s the slow slip in a steady

rainstorms, persistent wind

twinges, the shake of dead cells

rattling in a cave of riddled bone.

one by one those fragments gather:

infinitesimal ions seeking each other,

pushing through the cloudy morion,

migrations replacing the base.

my bones, he says, are no carbonate.

they’re quicker, like young clastics:

bodies of scrappy particles gathered

on land, wreathed & jointed by water.

we are all cobbled creatures, sedimentary.

clay in shale, siltstone, gritstone, gravel

and sand. smashed together by the whim

of the river & the wind.

& so he softens, despite himself. despite

the heart still quartzite, pulsing intrusion

into the limestone, those mountains of

small lost things:

crinoids and lilies and three-lobed water

insects, mollusc mantles and coral rings.

repetition after repetition in the strata,

an augury, a memory, of how

every tiny dying makes the earth.

geological poem #1

in support and solidarity with victims of sexual violence.

2010-12-20T07:50:00.005-07:00

*this is the first blog post ever in which I have not posted a picture for you to look at, because I can't think of anything to use that would adequately express my disgust.

* * *

PART 1. DOOM.

So, being in Siberia-land with slightly sketchy internet and a local newspaper that is well, rather local, I am often a few days late to what’s happening in the rest of the world these days. However, one of the blogs I always make a point of visiting when I have time, and a good connection, is TigerBeatdown.com. This wondrous compendium of feminist blogging was created by the inimitable Sady Doyle, who for reasons I shall get to in a moment, deserves an amazing amount of praise for what she’s doing right now. More on that later.

If you haven’t heard, basically some stuff’s been happening over the past couple of weeks, and I’ve been reading a lot over the past few days getting caught up, from many sources. The aforementioned Sady Doyle has already written it all, unpacked the whole situation very thoroughly and thoughtfully, so if you are not clear on the lies and offences committed by members of various media organizations, Keith Olbermann, and Michael Moore, I suggest you read her well-researched timeline post full of links that dissects said quotes, with various sources given. But first...

What went down:

Basically, there is this thing called WikiLeaks (see Google for more information), of which a man called Julian Assange was the director. WikiLeaks, in short, is an organization that publishes classified or private documents that it gets from news leaks and anonymous sources, because they are all about bringing oppression to light and giving people access to information that governments and other people in power are withholding. So, it's about freedom of speech. Some people thing he is doing good things, others think he is doing more harm than good. This isn't the debate I'm interested in now.

Recently, at the end of November, WikiLeaks began releasing a number of American diplomatic cables, including many that are confidential and secret. This made the American government less than pleased, and many right-wing Americans very, very unhappy. Thus, the US government launched an investigation into Assange.

Now, this past August, two different Swedish women in two different cities brought forth allegations that Assange had raped and molested them. Assange denied these things. At first the case, to my understanding, was put aside for a bit, but then reopened.

When this all broke a couple of weeks ago, a few things happened. One thing is that Assange and his supporters got angry, and began accusing the women of trying to damage his character, and that the whole thing was a plot against him, concocted by right-wingers/the CIA, etc. to punish him for WikiLeaks.

This is when things got really awful. This is when some men who call themselves "liberals", "progressives", people who allegedly care about women's rights, did some really, really abhorrent things. Some men took information from the cases of the Swedish women, and told some lies, which they have refused to acknowledge and apologize for. For example:

Keith Olbermann, an American political commentator and writer, then went on Twitter and posted a link that named and thus endangered the Swedish women (who are now receiving death threats from Assange's supporters). Michael Moore, you know, that dude who is infamously dedicated to exposing oppression and sticking up for the suffering, then decided to laugh about the whole thing, state that this is nothing but a smear against Assange by those who oppose WikiLeaks, and post $20 000 in bail for Assange after the U.K. took him into custody regarding the rape cases.

Here is a thorough and reputable summary of what Assange is up for, if my attempts at a concise summary are not coming through.

Neither Keith Olbermann or Michael Moore has retracted or apologized for these statements. Moore continues to Tweet about Assange, but refuses to engage. (If you want to know more about exactly what he said, or are concerned that he is being misrepresented, here are some highlights.) And therefore, Sady Doyle and her supporters have started a Twitter tag, #MooreandMe, to put pressure on Moore, and to spread awareness of what is going on.

This is the post by Sady Doyle that made me cry, that has made me seethe with anger since I read it. She's being incredibly dedicated and brave, whilst putting herself, another survivor of harassment and assault, at risk. This is why I urge you to support her, spread this information and contribute to this campaign.

These women in Sweden, like many others, have everything to lose, especially against such a powerful person. They are not bringing up charges like this for fun. In a climate in which women are shamed and dismissed for reporting sexual violence, they are risking a lot.

PART TWO. Letter to Michael Moore

I am just sickened by this. I am annoyed by the irresponsible reporting, but absolutely far beyond disgusted by the hypocrisy of Moore, and reckless stupidity of men who just run around posting and publicizing the names of the women accusing Assange of rape. How can they possibly think this is okay? These women are now receiving death threats from Assange’s supporters. How can Michael Moore laugh in the face of all this?

It hurts my brain to see that these apparently well-educated, “progressive” thinkers cannot wrap their privileged little brains around the simple fact that:

a) supporting freedom of speech, herein represented by WikiLeaks; and

b) listening to women who have been victimized and taking their experiences seriously

ARE NOT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE. Also, an individual can do a good thing, like promote government transparency and accountability, and also do a horrible thing. Doing one good thing does not mean that we should give them a free pass on the horrible one. I like freedom of speech. I also like taking people who have suffered seriously. Especially when these people are usually told incessantly that their assaults were their fault, and are thus further shamed into silence. This is just one of the many things I am sick of keeping my mouth shut about, sick of biting my tongue until it bleeds.

Right now, the so-called “progressive” left, dominated by the voices of men, is doing all sorts of things that it simply should not do. Things that are disrespectful, and dangerous, & just generally abhorrent. They are contributing to the rape culture we are living in and I will not put up with this.

Keith Olbermann, in response to the "frenzy" of people tweeting at him and asking for an apology and redaction, has shut down his Twitter. And then of course, as mentioned, there's Michael Moore. I have been a little bit disturbed in the past by his general inability to see the shades of grey in any situation, & his tendency to sensationalize, but now I have simply had it with him.

This is a draft of my letter to him (it will be edited before being sent, this is just what I am wanting to say in my head). This is a letter of which he will be receiving a variation of each day until he does what the supporters of #MooreandMe are asking.

So, Mister Moore, your friend Obermann has left Twitter, and dismissed us as a bunch of hysterics. He’s taken his things and gone home with his fingers shoved up his years. But you are different, right? You are constantly calling on people to stand up to those in power in the name of those who are voiceless and defenceless. You are asking us to show our support for the downtrodden, for those who are ignored and forgotten in times of crisis. Where are you now, when all these women and men, both cis- and trans-, who have suffered, and continue to suffer from the aftermath of sexual violence, need your support?

Yes, maybe "WikiLeaks has saved lives", as you Tweeted (Dec. 14th, 9:33pm) but right now, you are helping to ruin the lives of the two women who have brought forth this case, and by refusing to acknowledge the women and men, cis- and trans-, who have suffered sexual violence, you are contributing to the shaming that is an inherent part of rape culture.

You asked once us all in “My Action Plan: 15 Things Any American Can Do Right Now” in regard to making a change in leadership, to: “Get creative. Think outside the politics-as-usual box. BE SUBVERSIVE! Think of that local action no one else has tried. Behave as if your life depended on it. Be bold! Try doing something with reckless abandon. It may just liberate you and your community and your nation.”

Well, we are doing something. Listen to us. I urge you to pay attention to #MooreandMe and what its supporters would like you to acknowledge and understand.

I want to remind you that you can be in support of the right to freedom of speech, this right that Assange is apparently upholding with his work in creating WikiLeaks AND (yes! it’s really true) you can take a stand against rape and sexual violence. You can denounce these things for what they are – crimes. I’m sure that many times in your career you’ve been frustrated by people who won’t take you seriously. Well, guess what. That’s how most people feel after they’ve been sexually assaulted. That they mean nothing, that they are irrelevant, that their traumas can simply be ignored.

You are an extraordinarily rich man, Mister Moore. If you can afford $20 000 to help spring an alleged rapist, you can afford another $20 000 to help people who have suffered or are at risk for suffering by people like him. At the very least, acknowledge us and apologize. Admit your mistakes, and follow your own advice. As I said, we are not going to let this go.

PART THREE: WHAT YOU CAN DO

Finally, if you are a close friend of mine who is reading this and were intending to give me something for Christmas, please don’t worry about that. Instead, I encourage you with all my heart to do two things: get informed on this issue right now, and spread the word about #MooreandMe. On Twitter, on Facebook, via email, through any medium whatsoever.

Write a letter to Mister Moore. (MMFlint@aol.com, or he has a handy form on his website here.) Send him a reminder of his hypocrisy, tell him you are disappointed with his refusal to acknowledge those who are suffering, and with his refusal to apologize to those he has hurt, and to make the effort to learn a little more about why his “progressiveness” is so very regressive. Tell him that he needs to acknowledge the existence of not only the issue, but the PEOPLE affected by it. Remind him that people are not going to back down on this issue.

And please donate something, any money you can spare, to a charity that helps rape survivors and works to combat sexual violence, or to Sady and those at TigerBeatdown.com in honour of rape survivors everywhere, and the work everyone is doing to not let this issue drop and be swept aside. Far too many women I know have had to deal with rape and assault, and I want to honour their survival, I want to support them and those organizations that also provide support.

(If you're looking for something local in Edmonton to support, there's the Sexual Assault Centre at the University of Alberta.)

babushkas, baba yaga, ivan bilibin, etc.

2010-12-14T08:36:00.004-07:00

Ivan Bilibin's Vasilisa Carries a Flaming Skull...

I miss my grandmother, my baba. As of the end of November, she's been gone 5 years now, and I still miss her so much, still wish I could be coming home to her this winter to tell her what I've been up to, to show her pictures and tell her stories, to bring her beautiful silver Sakha jewelery and sing songs with her after we finish dinner. I know I will always miss her, but I've been thinking of her especially often lately. Meeting Sakha ebeler (grannies) here -- especially a friend's ebe, who reminds me of my own babusya -- fills me with such a longing.

I've also been thinking about grannies in fairytales and mythology... grannies often play important roles in Sakha tales, & grandmothers in general here are especially revered. The Sakha often do not refer to places by name, rather, in deference and respect they call them 'ebe', or 'ehe'. Rivers, lakes, and places on the land are ebe, grandmother; bears and fires are ehe. If you catch a fish in a lake, that's not a 'fish', or balyk, that's a gift from ebe. And snowy owls, those are khaar ebe, snow grandmothers...

Being in Russia--even though I am in the far East, the non-Slavic part-- has also led me to re-read the fairytales illustrated by Ivan Bilibin (see Vasilisa up there). They are intricate and breathtaking, and just... right, I always feel that sort of rightness and satisfaction when I look at them, as if this is exactly the way something is supposed to be. (I also feel that when I look at the illustrations of Tin Can Forest) They strike some deep aesthetic sensibility in me that never fails to comfort and delight me. Look at them!

Ivan Bilibin's Baba Yaga in her Mortar and Pestle

But grandmothers! Baba Yaga. The grandmother of all the grandmothers. Sometimes (especially in contemporary retellings) she is portrayed as malignant (a child-devouring, cranky old hag), but at her root, she is neither good nor evil. She's not concerned with such things; she simply is. She helps those who need help, even if that 'help' isn't what they're expecting; she gives you what you need, what you've got coming to you, whether you like it or not.

She dwells on her chicken-legged hut, & flies around in her mortar and pestle... These accoutrements are often said to betray her mixed Slavic-Ugric (Western Siberian, from the Mansi and Khanty people) roots, as huts on similar stilts are used from Eastern Europe to beyond the Urals as storehouses, homes for wooden ancestral idols, and cremation chambers. Often depicted as pointy and bony, with her own avian limbs, she is sometimes seen as the bird-mistress (esp. of magpies!), and an intermediary between worlds. Flying about in a mortar also links her to shamans who travel between the worlds; in many Ukrainian stories I've heard she dwells in a dark wood on the other side of a river of fire (the underworld) but flies up to the treetops to see what's happening, thereby reaching the world of the living. She is associated with both birthing and dying, and she spins (like any good baba!) and weaves lives and fates together; she's an ancestor, warrior, adviser, provider, and caretaker of her forest, She protects those she favours, and is basically not someone you might want to mess with.

Sometimes people have to travel to the underworld for her assistance; this is where my favourite tale comes in. I knew the story first as 'Vasylyna the Wise', but it's also called 'Vasylysa the Beautiful'.Anyway, for a number of reasons, I prefer the 'wise'; so few heroines are ever described as wise or clever, but they are always vaguely referred to as lovely, beautiful, etc. I resent this, and so would Baba Yaga, who is not so concerned with appearances (in fact, in the brilliant book by Dubravka Ugresic 'Baba Yaga Laid an Egg', Baba Yaga is the antithesis of all the sad old women fretting about aging) so my Vasylyna is Wise. Mudra. And here is her story, with illustrations by Bilibin. (please substitute 'beautiful' with 'wise' throughout).

It's not a perfect story, and not how I first heard it, because in it Baba Yaga is pretty crochety and threatening in it, as opposed to simply strict and ambiguous. However, besides including the illustrations of Ivan Bilibin (go & look at more of his pictures!), I like it for the role of the doll Vasilisa's mother gives to her at her death, the doll Vasilisa feeds (much like the treatment of idols in Siberia). Thus, her wisdom comes to her from her ancestors, the spirit of her mother who is always with her, & gives her the bravery and intuition to seek out Baba Yaga (who in this story is pretty cranky, but that's to be expected from the popular tellings). Baba Yaga gets snarky and unfriendly, but Vasilisa persists through her trials and gains knowledge. & there is really nothing better than the illustration of Vasilisa carrying a skull-lantern--the knowledge she earned in Baba Yaga's service--through the forest and using this light (given to her by her mother and Baba Yaga) against her detractors. Baba Yaga and Vasylysa are tough, resilient ladies, & the skull lantern is a potent image for me, one that I come back to in my thoughts especially when dealing with difficult people, especially those of the misogynist variety. Baba Yaga wouldn't put up with that shit, & neither would my own babusya, who is pretty much the toughest person I've known.

Ivan Bilibin's Vasilisa Enters the Forest, Sees the White Rider

Looking at the portrayal of Baba Yaga in the newer tales (as in the last hundred or so years -- not ancient!) as cranky and awful, I am reminded about a difficult truth that I have been noticing in contemporary Ukrainian and Russian society. In short, it seems sometimes as if women are not fully respected unless they are mothers; women who do not have children are seen as extraordinarily pitiful and incomplete even more so than in other countries I've lived in, and a woman who does not want children tends to be seen as particularly suspect, and potentially unstable. So yes, Baba Yaga is a babushka, but she is childless. Thus, she cannot quite be trusted! Also, she's kind of homely. Strike two! Therefore, she must be evil. Sigh.

As thus as a (quite contentedly) homely woman who (very, very happily) intends not to breed, Baba Yaga is especially my friend.

hedgehog in the fog

2010-11-23T06:47:00.006-07:00

The village of Oktemtsy, Khangalassky Ulus, Sakha Republic, in the not-quite-fog-yet-season (November 2010)

I recently saw one of the loveliest short films, Ёжик в тумане, or Ëzhik v tumane, 'Hedgehog in the Fog'. Created in 1975 by the Soviet animator Yuriy Norshteyn, and based on a fairytale by Sergey Kozlov, it's one of the most meditative, quiet, slightly unsettling but ultimately sweet little things I have ever seen. Much like my dear Moomins, the curious yet anxious Hedgehog and the other characters are philosophical little creatures, & they resist all moralizing and summarizing. Deeply existential, they quietly explore without explaining. They wonder about what happens to horses in the fog, about why the owl is so noisy, about who or what they will find there, amongst the trees; & they accept the help of a mysterious Someone so that they might find their friend to drink tea with jam & count the stars.

Here he is, lost in the fog with a satchel of jam...

Beloved by all generations since it first came out, elements have also entered linguistic culture, too; I was told by a friend here that people often refer to the film when someone is confused, or feeling altogether rather lost, saying they are "kak ëzhik v tumane", like the hedgehog in the fog...)

Please, do go watch it. It's on YouTube here. (and apparently downloadable here, but I haven't tried it as my internet can't handle it)

& if you like, you can decorate your Chrome Browser with the art here.

Photograph of the fog-horse from Leah Bolvig, here.

another gratuitous bird photo

2010-11-05T06:25:00.003-06:00

Sparrow, Yakutsk, early October 2010.

Here is another bird-picture I like. Sparrow-take off!

Also, I can't remember if I mentioned it, but I am indeed making blog-posts about living in Yakutsk on my old Scotland blog. More photos there! Not all of birds, I promise.

sleepy sparrow

2010-10-29T09:00:00.003-06:00

Nesting in a sunny nook on the Sakha Teatra fountain... (Yakutsk, Sept. 2010)

Oh, did I wake you with my camera-shutter? Let me pick you up & put you in my flannel pocket!

(Yakutsk, Sept. 2010)

It's getting colder in Yakutsk, down to about -20C now, and the cheeky little sparrows are getting spherical.

sviristeli!

2010-10-15T06:17:00.002-06:00

Yes, more little waxwings, sviristeli,* perching on ash and red-currant trees in the Zalog area of Yakutsk. More of them, because as I said, these creatures make me a wee bit less homesick. I never saw one last year in Scotland, & perhaps that's why I suffered such an acute sense of dépaysement** the whole time.

*that's Russian for waxwing, sviristel'. I don't yet know the word in Sakha.

** new French word I learned that I love... It refers to the sense of disorientation you always feel when not in your home country. It's more than homesickness; it's the feeling of never quite adjusting to living amongst the new scenery, even after you start to feel at home.

waxwing silhouettes

2010-10-15T06:05:00.002-06:00

Waxwings again, Yakutsk, October 2010.

Silhouettes in autumn afternoon sun. I love when the wind ruffles their head-feathers, giving them wee mohawks.

waxwings on wires

2010-10-15T05:56:00.002-06:00

Bohemian waxwings on wires, Yakutsk, Sakha Republic, Russia. October 2010.

I wish I could express what a comfort it is to me that my favourite bird lives in this city. It's subtle things like this that make me feel a little more at home.

communication

2010-10-05T08:33:00.009-06:00

Graffiti on the giant grey sphere (the moon, I think) on Kirova street, Yakutsk, Sakha Republic, Sept. 2010

Sakha language graffiti on the stone in the old town, commemorating the city's founding, Yakutsk, Sakha Republic, Sept. 2010

More moon-ball graffiti, Yakutsk, Sept. 2010

Dear blog (which is nearly 5 years old!), & blog-readers, if you are out there,

Contrary to what it may seem, I do still intend to write things here! Yes! However, in the past month, I've been a little busy, packing up & travelling off to Siberia (the Sakha Republic/Yakutia -- I'll be based in the city of Yakutsk) where I'll be for 9 more months, doing my PhD research in (linguistic) anthropology.

As for exactly what I am up to, I am still not so good at the little research-in-a-nutshell descriptions, but mostly I tell people I am interested in their experiences of bi- and multi-lingualism (in this case, Sakha-Russian, primarily, with some other local languages possibly thrown in the mix, like Evenki) in terms of how they live their lives through language. And of course, how processes like urbanization affect these sorts of things, all the politics, global, federal, local, etc. But lately, I've particularly been trying to discuss how through language and communicative practice, we experience, and express the world. We make connections, create relationships through language. And I am interested in the choices people make when they use language, in terms of what influences those choices, and in turn how those choices shape their lives, & the lives of others.

I will be blogging here, anyway, but mostly posting poetry & photos & such. But I hope soon to start a Yakutsk-blog in particular, which will probably be mostly image-based (to give myself a break from all the language work, perhaps) or tell you small stories about the quirks of quotidian life here as I discover the place.

But there's no blog set up yet, as this past month has been hectic & I have been trying to settle in & get started. In the meantime, some Tove Jansson, from Moominland Midwinter, on how sometimes it is difficult to make connections, to make our words & our selves understood:

(but first, if you want to make yourself understood -- at least a wee bit -- in Sakha, you can see a list of basic phrases here!)

A herd of small creatures with spindly legs came blowing like a wisp of smoke over the ice. Someone with silvered horns walked stamping past Moomintroll, and over the fire flapped something black with large wings, which disappeared northwards. But everything happened a little too quickly, and Moomintroll never found time to introduce himself.

"Please, Too-ticky," he asked, pulling at her sweater.

She said kindly: "Well, there's The Dweller Under the Sink."

He was rather a small one, with bushy eyebrows. He sat by himself, looking into the fire.

Moomintroll sat down beside him and said: "I hope those biscuits weren't too old?"

The little beast looked at him but didn't reply.

"May I compliment you on your exceptionally bushy eyebrows?" Moomintroll continued politely.

To this the beast with the eyebrows replied: "Shadaff oomoo."

"Eh?", asked Moomintroll, surprisedly.

"Radamsah," said the little beast fretfully.

"He has a language all his own, and now he believes that you've hurt him," Too-ticky explained.

"But that wasn't my intention at all," said Moomintroll anxiously. "Radamsah, radamsah," he added imploringly.

This seemed to make the beast with the eyebrows really overcome by rage. He rose in great haste and disappeared.

"Dear me, what shall I do?" said Moomintroll, "Now he'll live under our sink for a whole year more without knowing that I just wanted to be friends with him."

"Such things happen," said Too-ticky.

a land not mine

2010-08-17T19:27:00.004-06:00

driftwood sculpture, lesser slave lake, alberta, august 2010

sunset & reflection, lesser slave lake, alberta, august 2010

* * *

A land not mine, still

forever memorable,

the waters of its ocean

chill and fresh.

Sand on the bottom whiter than chalk,

and the air drunk, like wine,

late sun lays bare

the rosy limbs of the pinetrees.

Sunset in the waves of ether:

I cannot tell if the day

is ending, or the world, or if

the secret of secrets is inside me again.

Anna Akhmatova

(this translation by Jane Kenyon)

ice-fishing ii

2010-08-06T16:15:00.004-06:00

my father & a feisty perch on a lake, near st. albert, jan. 2010

skeleton of water hemlock, near st. albert, jan. 2010

field grasses by a lake, near st. albert, jan. 2010

It is August, and I have neglected posting for two months now, I know. After I defended my PhD fieldwork proposal in mid-June, I have been summering at home in Edmonton in preparation for going to Siberia for aforementioned fieldwork. I've been making things & taking photos & thinking about things, but not really sitting down long enough to do much with them. This is a recently finished-after-many-months, very unseasonal poem.

* * *

ice fishing II*

arching sedge bows low on the

shoreline, weeping into the snow.

slice my finger open on the auger,

cut skin gaping, a flared gill.

your lake lies in winterkill,

a thousand trout white bellies up

& bursting like cold willow

stems, flickering in the dark water,

snowflakes frozen to the sand.

there are two worlds here, in

the water: one obsidian sharp,

one soft as amber. from land

i call, how are you, down there,

father? but the voice i hear

is wasp’s nest hollow, awake

and gasping for air. how

do i lure you, now, out of

this dark season? where weeds

sway as if shadows only in the

memory of bent light? o

father, it was just a leech**,

you know, who sucked a small

hole in the sky’s white flesh, let winter

bleed out, suffuse into sun –

* * *

*ice-fishing I is in the March 2008 archive (scroll down for March 13th entry)

** the leech is part of a dän k'è story i heard in the yukon, & you can read about a lovely film that incorporates the story here.

poem draft about seashore at night; pictures of seashore in the day.

2010-06-02T18:30:00.003-06:00

aberdeen beach at bridge of don, early evening, may 2010

the waves at night come like

small pale hands that spread

their fingers, soothe the sand:

the sea a grandmother i never knew

who puts the shore to bed: turns

the rocks over and over again,

worry polishing stones in shaken

palms, smoothing a coverlet

of froth. in the lessening light

her hair feathers out, white winter

cirrus, frost on the marram-grass,

prayers in a soft littoral whisper.

stand there, barefoot, sand beneath

a cupped sole, tides sucked up

by the shelled mouth of the moon,

each wave like a memory,

remembering comes inland:

skims cerebral ridges in the sand,

a piece of driftwood, inscribed with

runic toothmarks of that old

golden retriever, ever rushing

out & fetching as the waves recede,

reside. she hums a tune you

don’t recognize, like waves it’s

ever the same, it’s never the same

break twice: creeping waters will

comfort, endanger, wash

mussel shells lying butterflied,

their split spines salt-stuck, haunted

tide-marks lace your legs. but hush,

now, hush, her hands brushing

your brow, pebbles trace

each trailing thought to

renew, erase, recreate.

why i love tove jansson (part one of many, i am sure)

2010-05-06T19:55:00.004-06:00

waterfalls of dry grass & moss on slate, patricia lake, jasper, march 2010

I can't believe I've never written about her in this blog before, because I've been in love with her writing for at least a year now... but Tove Jansson is incredible, & I'd like to attempt to explain why. I could write a lot, I think, about her brilliant Moomins*, which basically are existentialist novels for children, or analyse exactly why I want to be just like Grandmother in The Summer Book when I am old... but I'd rather let her words simply be, because that is what they do. They are simple & draw you into their truths, small little truths that suddenly sprawl open, refreshingly & widely & sometimes painfully, but they leave you with such a calm, such a reassurance, because this is what is & you have to be tough & that is beautiful in & of itself.

So I imagine I'll be returning to her words in the next while, because they are giving me a lot of comfort at the moment, but for now, an excerpt, from my favourite Moomin book (thus far), Moominland Midwinter:

On the other side of the lamp, someone had dug herself a cosy hole, someone who lay looking up at the serene winter sky and whistling very softly to herself.

"What song is that?" asked Moomintroll.

"It's a song of myself," someone answered from the pit. "A song of Too-ticky who built a snow lantern, but the refrain is about wholly other things."

"I see," Moomintroll said and seated himself in the snow.

"No, you don't," replied Too-ticky genially and rose up enough to show her red and white sweater. "Because the refrain is about the things that one can't understand. I'm thinking about the aurora borealis. You can't tell if it really does exist or if it just looks like existing. All things are so very uncertain, and that's exactly what makes me feel reassured".

*If you grew up without Moomins in your life, you should probably remedy that & meet them, & go find the books immediately. Then find someone with whom you might enjoy reading them aloud, it's the best way. & don't bother watching the animated shows. They are a disappointment & are generally devoid of all philosophy & charm.

letter from deeside (poem)

2010-04-29T17:42:00.004-06:00

old pasture fence, kinloch rannoch (not deeside) , april 2010

poem draft.

letter from deeside, march 12.

in the backseat of a car rolling through deeside
the air is shocked with starlings; across the field
rooks peck away in the melting, & i will that
distance to melt, bring you here reeling beside me.

i want us to be the earth that piled the stones
here, in long crumbling fences dreamed
up between the roots, the yearly remembering &
forgetting held in the rings of trees;

i want to walk with you in those peripheries
beyond the edge of the fields, into the margins
of this country, among the soft yellowed bones
of sleeping grasses and the tea-coloured burn;

where the land is the same colour as spring
where we come from, the place where you are
now & the place that is ours & no longer
as we remember, shifting like a solar glory

over the peaks of our peregrinations, on
the river like sun-beaten copper, weaving
between the bare birches & overflowing
the trembling spring sands of the bank.

sometimes i just want the stillness that
can never be, for it’s too much an ache,
this passerine life: never perching anywhere
long, perpetual migration between continents—

but in the backseat of a car rolling through
deeside i suddenly felt you near me, curling
around gently my fingers like the soft claws
of a bird, wings shaking out breath:

& i felt then a nearness i never imagined,
& i felt myself touch with your own hands.

this is what i am made of.

2010-04-25T17:47:00.007-06:00

this is my home; the land i am made of.
(a home for pollen)
(a home for seeds & vitamins!)

(a home that longs for water to visit)

(a home for wind)(this is a boll, a weevil's home)

(a forest of old wheat bones)

(a vast home, at the edge of the earth)

(cones, the tiny homes for seeds)

(double-storied home for magpies)

(a home for buds & leaves)

From Erin Moure's poem 'The Unseizable Elegy', in her new book O Resplandor:

VIII

To spring from our own earth

in the very sowing of such light; though winter

now ices lichen at the oasis of our dawn, spring

will write the length of laughter.

Springing from my own centre
where, human and alone, i'm haunted

by the net of love,
or purely and simply when winter
falls away and spring

is misting space in a wide circle
seeding hearts intimately
with the space of love's own unseizable margins.

Amazingly there is a cure

in spring,

the knowledge of seeds that speak life in the sowing

as earth already speaks of earth.

But more urgent than anything
we are seeds, we are
what wanders in all partings still,
and our place is also in the light that streams from eyes
of from a field, the field of grasses
grown before our eyes -- us with our ourness
not yet undone, though some say it hardens as do molten metals,
yet we still sow fire with our beings
to help us work in work's torrent
in the place of cherished tremors
in which our work is yet to be born.

More urgent than anything

we are seeds, and implicated

in the rising of our own selves as we hazard a way outward

to where exaltation rises,
to where parting bears the name of spring.
To be in being and laud the phenomenal, again and again

laud the phenomenal.

To be yet in being

these seeds spring up for us, unseizable

in our own earth.

geological poem #1

2010-03-03T17:58:00.003-07:00

(all photos taken in Kananaskis, near King Creek canyon / Iyarhe na kiska (Goat Mountain)

& Marl Lake, for the loon, June 2009)

poem-in-progess.

when my father sleeps

when my father sleeps, he dreams
of the loon’s vertiginous whooping,
the strength of bones so unhollow:

envies that solid skeleton, a watery
gravity pulling it close to the earth
as he searches in the swirls of clay, ready

to remake a world. when he sleeps
he dreams he is rich like the marl
in the fens, made of sweet grey milk

to feed emptied bones, karst-ridden;
he doesn’t know where the waters go
when they disappear beneath him,
into the cerebrum of unknown crust.

when my father sleeps, he is deep
below the earth, watching fossils calcify,
haunted by the pressure of the core.

with each mottled fragment, he marvels
at the sightless molecular migration,
minerals gathering together, unifying

those million mayfly lifetimes. when
my father dreams, it’s all equal:
everything so swift to a rock.

nothing is briefer, more sudden,
more painful on the surface. the loon
dives, no one lingers more than another.
we all sleep early, sleep young.

montréal, decembre 2008

2009-12-06T15:00:00.001-07:00

Photos above taken in Montréal, early December 2008 (right 'round this time last year, to be precise) ... ice storm. Funny how things are unearthed.

au coin d’hutchison & lajoie

you said: we’re in montréal, &

it’s snowing! not côte des neiges,

but mile-end, unlost now

in a neighbourhood of white.

parapets fog-veiled, muffled sky

falling down, a soft shy

rabbit down, translucent

boulangerie window beacon

beckoning on past lajoie & up –

je t’ai dit : quand le ciel est gris,

tes yeux sont plus bleus

& plus lucides – stop at the

épicerie, our pockets full of

clementines, & my hands, they

are full of your hands as the street

pulls us past a sculpture garden

frozen to the tracks, icy bicycle

sarcophagi, then a pigeon whirlwind,

like grey flakes upward flying,

a shivering drunken choreography

in the wind. we follow home

the dark coattails of the hasidim,

flitting winter moths in a haze

of soggy pollen, seeking window light.

* * *

late at night, an ice storm.

chimes of frozen juniper clink

on panes, basement bell choir

lulling us to sleep. outside

the snow falls, turns to rain

just above the tallest trees,

then ices on the ground, encases

the house. you reach out

for me in sleep, twining branches

of a frozen sumac, eyelashes

on my skin like snow brushed

from a railing, breath in my ear.

we change state. somewhere

we sublimated, went solid to air,

fell as snow & gathered here

& i am bursting. how do i

speak of the wild & quiet

beside you, when there is no more

space to be contained. &

hush, hush, do you hear it?

the icicles are singing – ascending,

descending the eaves like

a row of organ pipes, a hundred

roofs wide, making a remedy

for cryptic aching, a mouthful

of snow, the inner melting, trop

de la neige & de l’eau pour

un petit cœur assommé

revisiting the reclaiming

2009-11-22T18:31:00.003-07:00

I've written about this car before, a long while ago (see October 9, 2006) but I feel compelled to post about it again... I recently re-photographed it, and was then further inspired to re-blog by this artwork, by Tin Can Forest (who I wrote about rather recently -- see March 13, 2009). A work like Autopust: Farewell to Cars (on the right is Nabozhnik), with forest spirits reveling & wrecking, sets my heart fluttering... An end to the personal motor vehicle! Tak!

And so this is a gentler reclamation of my mother's first car. Can't remember why she stopped driving it, I think my cousin drove it after her, finally it rolled to a stop out back on the acreage by the treehouse... and the hood came off, the engine was removed, and three, four, five persistent aspen sprouted up through the rusting cavity.

It's one of my favourite reminders that everything belongs to the earth. No matter how we change, shape, adulterate, mould, alter the materials we have -- even the most built, the most manufactured things the earth takes back eventually, slowly deconstructing. Held in place by the tangled fingers of vetch twisting about the disintegrating metal, this car waits to become rusted ashes. Chewed up by the silver lichen teeth, slowly engulfed in moss and leaves, the shadows of the growing trees.

At a recent seminar in my department, the head of the school here discussed his dreams for the future of anthropology and archaeology. Among many things, he called for a re-envisioning of time scales, of what it means to create, be created, to be & become. He wanted us to look beyond the conventionally given dates & times of when things came into existence, & to focus on the process of becoming, not of Aristotelian mixing of form+substance=conception, a single moment of creation. Nothing is fixed, everything is fluid & changing even as there is some underlying stability, recognizability. Rain, waves, rocks, humans, all like this.

So things are always becoming; everything is a process. There is a past-ness ever carrying on into the present & looking to the future -- what is a desk, he said, but perhaps a phase in the life of an oak tree? & so a car might be a phase in the life of metal, a phase in the life of rock, mineral, dust.

(& if I'd had a sword with me that day, (& a steadier tripod-like surface), I most definitely would've re-enacted this.)

aftonland, eveningland

2009-11-13T18:20:00.005-07:00

sunset in august, north saskatchewan river valley, edmonton

Last weekend, I went to a concert at St. Machar's -- 12th century church in Old Aberdeen -- and listened to the choir Con Anima sing works by Arvo Pärt, Veljo Tormis, Pēteris Vasks, and Per Nørgård. It was magical -- the singers played with the space well, clustering around the pews, so close you could hear their stolen breaths, or stood all at the back of the church in the darkness with candles... when you couldn't see them, it was like the stones themselves were singing. I was introduced to Tormis's Estonian polyphonous lullabies, as well as the work of Nørgård, a Danish composer. I was not as struck by his composition, but his piece -- Aftonland (evening land) -- was based on the words of the Swedish poet Pär Lagerkvist, and they are a wonder. His plainspoken words are autumnal, elegaic, the calm acceptance of dying, ending, slow slip into shadow -- & the eternality of life not in the heavenly Christian sense, but in the good old pagan way of celebrating the beauty of decay: sowing of new seeds in the ground where the dead lie, & the ground is the very flesh of your ancestors. who provide the harvest for you. My heart flutters at the mention of the earth remembering; that's something I've recently be writing about. The earth remembers everything, because everything is of the earth.

(Another absolutely perfect song like this is Smog's Permanent Smile (lyrics here) -- decomposition has never been evoked so eloquently)

leaning sunset trees, north saskatchewan river, edmonton, august 2009

From Aftonland (words by Pär Lagerqvist, selected by Per Nørgård) -- English translation

Some day you will be one of those who lived long ago.

The earth will remember you, just as it remembers the grass and the forests,

the rotting leaves.

Just as the soil remembers,

and just as the mountains remember the winds.

Your peace shall be unending as that of the sea.

and

III.

Let my shadow disappear into yours.

Let me lose myself

under the tall trees,

that themselves lose their crowns in the twilight,

surrendering themselves to the sky and night.

IV.

[...]

Into nocturnal ground you lower

the life which seems laid waste,

like the sower returning

to the earth which he sees open

the harvest that he has gathered.

midsummering

2009-11-11T18:30:00.005-07:00

saturated light, near the solstice, the river valley, edmonton, june 2009

This was started a long while ago, right about when the photo above was taken, days before summer solstice... but only finished recently. Even though I'm coming to appreciate the Aberdeen landscape -- green woods, sinuous river, smooth sand, the singing of the sea -- I am missing home & the places I've made, the places I am made of.

midsummering

summer in the pines

& there’s sap tang

on quick tongues now,

pulse under lips &

the heat rising from

the slow breathing

of the river: between

the boughs the waxwings

hover, yellow tailfeathers

bright & sticky as caragana,

fingered sage, tangles in

the thicket of your hair.

summer & the water

below’s a smear of green

mirror, a streak of sweat

trailing a cheekbone,

& these shaking hands

caked in soft clay:

we coax the forest floor,

rustle the brush, push

each other deep

into the earth now,

pressed to a heart’s mossy

membrane, aspen-trembled

backbone. tell the woods:

remember, remember

us, in the spaces between

the roots & dark matter,

feathers & the nesting,

the water, the air.

dwelling on the web.

2009-11-11T18:24:00.003-07:00

the waves bringing presents, the beach north of the bridge of don, aberdeen

This is just to say that I am still blogging here -- this is still a home for poems & photos & other intriguing things. But I am also posting here, at Among the Heather, writing mostly about Scotland, where I am studying now.

against meat, by jonathan safran foer

2009-10-15T15:56:00.003-06:00

combine in the wheat fields at the edge of the earth, riverlot 56, september 2009

old goldenrod in a field, riverlot 56, september 2009

If you are reading this, you should next go read this essay, 'Against Meat', by Jonathan Safran Foer. It's an excerpt from a book that'll be appearing later this year -- a well-woven piece regarding the evolution of his ethic of vegetarianism. Being thoughtful about the food I consume is very important to me, and thus so this was especially resonant.

It was truly moving -- he entwines family history and memory with the meanings of food in such a brilliant way. Also, the portrayals of his grandmother make me weep a little. That's my baba, there, the Greatest Chef of all time, & probably the most generous person I've ever known:

My grandmother never set a place for herself at family dinners. Even when there was nothing more to be done — no soup bowls to be topped off, no pots to be stirred or ovens checked — she stayed in the kitchen, like a vigilant guard (or prisoner) in a tower. As far as I could tell, the sustenance she got from the food she made didn’t require her to eat it.

I come from a culture that values food (growing it, harvesting it, preparing it, eating it, but primarily, it feels, sometimes, sharing it) dearly -- eating often becomes celebratory. Feeding someone is a deeply gratifying privilege, and something you do with great enthusiasm.

Due to experiences of famines, poverty, and long, regular fasts, eating meat is often especially revered -- it it richness, wealth, both literally & symbolically. My baba certainly felt thus, and her (& my mother, I think, even still) were quite puzzled why I felt it was important to be vegetarian, why I did not want to eat more nice fresh kovbasa, I'd loved it since I was small! Why didn't I want chicken in dill cream, why did I want just mushroom sauce & not the meatballs? But Safran Foer's portrayal possesses great nuance and understanding of how deeply traditions can hold you, but also how they can change, and how they essentially must change & be created anew:

Some of my happiest childhood memories are of sushi “lunch dates” with my mom, and eating my dad’s turkey burgers with mustard and grilled onions at backyard celebrations, and of course my grandmother’s chicken with carrots. Those occasions simply wouldn’t have been the same without those foods — and that is important. To give up the taste of sushi, turkey or chicken is a loss that extends beyond giving up a pleasurable eating experience. Changing what we eat and letting tastes fade from memory create a kind of cultural loss, a forgetting. But perhaps this kind of forgetfulness is worth accepting — even worth cultivating (forgetting, too, can be cultivated). To remember my values, I need to lose certain tastes and find other handles for the memories that they once helped me carry.

& perhaps above all, I love how simply & bluntly he explains his ethics -- his stance summed up in this small excerpt below is beautifully echoed through out his piece, which, above all, is about celebrating reverence for life.

Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or a cat. Turkeys have been so genetically modified they are incapable of natural reproduction. To acknowledge that these things matter is not sentimental. It is a confrontation with the facts about animals and ourselves. We know these things matter.

every separation a (perma-) link

2009-10-09T15:31:00.002-06:00

kalyna (high bush cranberry) berries ripe again, riverlot 56, september 2009

Jason kindly gave my poem book (see entry below) a more permanent home on the internets, so you can view it there too after the download I created expires.

every separation (a link): poem book

2009-09-28T13:58:00.002-06:00

golden sunset light on the river-water, the north saskatchewan, august 2009

golden-light on my skirt, photo-mishap, my yard, august 2009

In my posting absence, I've made this; it's a chapbook of poetry called every separation (a link). It was intended to be distributed in collaged & photocopied form, but alas, mishaps with my free photocopying source meant that it was not to be, right now. I left for Scotland and so further attempts at the paper incarnation will have to wait until Christmas time, I think. Meanwhile, I really really want these poems to be enjoyed, so please do download the pdf version, and let me know what you think. (The link will be available for just 2 weeks, so if you try to download it and it has already disappeared, please email me -- jenanne dot f at gmail dot com -- & I can send you the pdf instead).

This cycle of poems has been emerging for over a year. For a little more light shed upon their creation, this is the preface to the collection:

A little over a year ago, I was struck by a certain theme that kept recurring in my words. Within the poems I was writing, I noticed a consistent fascination with the space in between -- the inherent separation between everyone & everything else.

It was the space between people; between people & other beings; between people & the land they dwell within; between people & conceptions of some unifying force or element. It was the fascination with the paradox that matter is made up primarily of spaces between particles that mysteriously & delicately keep everything from flying apart.

I realized this fascination with those spaces between also dwelt at the root of my interest in language and translation. I am captivated by the way we constantly attempt to bridge the spaces between ourselves through language; language – be it spoken, signed, written, sensed, embodied or visualized – is perhaps really all we have to connect our separate beings with anything else that exists.

Simone Weil wrote in Criteria of Wisdom (‘Metaxu’, from Gravity and Grace): “The essence of created things is to be intermediaries. They are intermediaries leading from one to the other, and there is no end to this […] We have to experience them as such”. In this book, poems are the vehicles of connection. Weil believed that poetry was something natural and inherent to human communication, and helped to establish a direct, profound connection between people through its conveyance of internal experience and feeling. For Weil, as created things like poems pass through those spaces between us, they allow the barrier of space to become a connection; an absence becomes a presence. This is the paradox of metaxu:

“The world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time, it is the way through […] Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication […] Every separation is a link.”

If we were not so separate, there would be no reason for connection, for communication. We cannot make bridges without that space to build them in. As painful as these gaps between our solitary little beings are, it is this lacuna that makes language -- & all the transcendent things it can do -- necessary & possible.

This books is a cycle of poems: a collection of little songs inspired by folk songs and dedicated to holidays traditionally celebrated by Ukrainians. At their very centre, these holidays are all elemental feasts, marking changes in the earth. Though over the last thousand years they have become elaborate syncretic constructions, their pagan integrity remains intact under layers of Christian influence. Fertility rites involving fire & water & ritual purification persist on a midsummer holiday now consecrated to John the Baptist, Ivana Kupala; Spas’, the Feast of the Transfiguration still involves the offering of the summer's first fruits back to the earth that provided them.

Despite the Orthodox theological overlay, at their roots all of these ritual celebrations basically serve the purpose of reuniting those who observe them with a trinity of elements -- the whole earth, all one's ancestors, & some sort of universal presence or animating force -- as well as with each other. Every feast gathers people together, allows them to confront their singularity & separation and then unify, by focusing their energy on some common purpose.

These celebrations commemorate return & transformation, separation & reunification. These poems are little bridges across metaxu, flying in the spaces between all things that brought them here.

August 2009

Edmonton

ivan kupala poems i)

2009-08-06T23:18:00.001-06:00

overexposed wildflowers taken from the ground up, riverlot 56, july 2009

i)

pid sosnoju spala ja
(skazala stara baba)
shyshka mizh nohy vpala –

years ago, said the old woman,
i found the very centre
of the earth: a knotted heart

bursting into a greengreen
green catherine-wheel of leaves
from each pale birch limb

of my body; legs curved
& split swallowtailing as
clever fingers of trees

grazed breezes nipping
at the hem of my skirt –
i remember, she told me,

& i get so homesick now,
my veins heavy & yearning,
thick grey roots of silt – for

how the core rustles, deep
in the cambium a stirring,
how the summer quakes

& holds: sweat sap-sticky
& thunderclouds like dark
ripe berries in the hills

& the mouth says zbyraj mene!
pluck me while the sun
gets under your skin,

nestles in the tangle
of your belly & births
a hundred swallows flying

out from that swirling hollow,
that well, a whirlpool
made of old old light

ivan kupala poems ii)

2009-08-06T23:15:00.000-06:00

lone dandelion, charles simmonds park, edmonton, june 2009

ii)

midnight now. & the dark
wavers with the fires of blue
moths, thoughts the colour

of lightning. in this heat
i can’t sleep for trying
to remember what he said

it was like:

a whole meadowful of ferns
all pulled up by their roots
at once –

one fell swoop, sage-white
fingerlings hanging breathless,
all aching for water –

& i go warm now, feel the
salty streak of my cheekbone,
the flooded field of my mouth.

ivan kupala poems iii)

2009-08-06T22:54:00.003-06:00

luminous cow parsnip, riverlot 56, july 2009

me in the wildflowers, riverlot 56, july 2009. photographed by jason.

iii)

weave a wreath of
yarrow, mallow –

(koło jana)

weave a wreath now
& i will follow

(- tam dziewczęta się schodziły
sobie ogień nałożyły,
tam ich północ ciemna naszła)

for how (your) words
bend willow, how (your)
words fill hollows –

(nocel mała, kopiel moja)

you pull me,

(koło jana, koło jana)

taut veins running hard
with sap tang & pulse
to the rivery resonance

of (your) voice –

arch in me;

(nocel mała, kopiel moja)

gather hypericum,
fold / unfold
the leaves sun-heavy

& logostrophic, weave
a wreath of gentians,
fireweed, burn those

full kernels that burst
when heated – turned
to the warmth of (your)

yes

(tam na górze ogień gore,
na tej górze dwoje drzewa.
jedno drzewo, boże drzewo,
na tym drzewie kolebeczka)

* Polish lines are from Orkiestra Sw. Mikołaja's "Pieśń sobótkowa" -- song for Ivana Kupala / Midsummer Night

ivana kupala poems iv)

2009-08-06T22:51:00.003-06:00

not robins, but cedar waxwings, riverlot 56, july 2009

iv)

she said it was like
two robins

their red breasts of sun
fluttering against each other
til there was but a blur

of wing & beat & beak
& shriek, a tangle

in the belly, a mouthful
of water spit out in song

mothertongue

2009-07-13T00:01:00.000-06:00

baby canada geese! gooselings! hawrelak park, june 2009

Poem I also meant to post a while ago. Written for my mother, but I haven't given it to her, because I am a silly goose.

mothertongue

i)

when i was just a whisper,
embryonic utterance
on the tip of the tongue,

she read to me. stories
all night in her sleeplessness,
sunday mornings spent in song.

she called out to me
& so i grew, morpheme
by morpheme, words

spoken & sung, vitamins
to nourish the spark of a
cell, a neuron, an eyelash, a lung

that would one day force the air
out through my small shocked larynx
& i would cry out, born –

all that water rushes through
the space between us, snipping
of a taproot, blood becoming my own.

ii)

& we are separate, so we speak:

a mother long long before us
gathered berries. cradled
her clinging baby, placed her

in the whispering grasses, first
hummed to calm her, sang to link them,
stop her crying:

the very first syllables signs
of comfort, soft fur of the belly, low thrum
of blood in the neck, messy kiss.

& words became the inchoate strings,
chords echoing umbilical &
made us language, let us love

that distance between us –
whispering aspen with its
round rippling tongues, buds

alight in us, axons blossom.
these words grow
us bundles of connective tissue,
regenerate heart to bones to sinew --

there will be words for when i
cannot hold you, to
connect and make anew:

iii)

mama, i may never make
another body
out of my body

but i can make words
my descendants,
they are nesting nascent

inside of me
waiting to unfurl
their green candles,

a cadenza
of voiceprints
reverberating

like gravel footfalls
on a path by that river,
their long arms

reaching like willow
branches, scattering
their morphemes

in stanzas like
swift-blossoming seeds --
mama, these poems

i made for you,
your words are their
ancestors:

they are your
grandchildren, &
they love you well.

(o poisoned delicate world)

2009-07-12T22:34:00.003-06:00

illuminated unfolding ash leaf, n. sask. river valley, edmonton, may 2009

I've been meaning to write about how much I am loving Erin Mouré's poetry since I saw her speak in the middle of May... She spoke at the Poetics of Numerousness conference and had many things to say about the practice of translation (she is a renowned translator of French, Portuguese, Galician and Spanish) that resonated with me.

She described translation as another part of her own reading practice, and her belief that all poetry consists of multiple languages. She described her work as a 'poetics of hospitality', an idea that I find particularly beautiful. In this approach, writing multilingually/ translating are her way of 'opening the door without expectation'; it is opening oneself to being changed, and letting language happen and alter you. I've been quite inspired by this and have been applying this to the way I plan to present Ukrainian language excerpts in a chapbook I am currently working on.

In her work, I am always fascinated by what she translates and what she does not -- and how well the languages meld and blend together. To me, they feel like some sort of masterfully unified polyphony, as if the different languages are not alternatives to each other, but essentially important voices in themselves while at the same time being part of the whole. The choice of using one language or another is crucial; what is being expressed in one could not have been expressed in the other. Interestingly, some people are annoyed & confused by this -- but to me, it never feels foreign or strange, even when I have only superficial knowledge of one of the languages she uses.

I love her early poems in Wanted Alive (1983), as well as Little Theatres (2005), as the latter was my first introduction to her. However, right now, I highly recommend O Cadoiro (2007) -- poems inspired by medieval Galician cantigas. Of them she writes in the postface:

"They are a fount [...] which are but small plaints, rustlings, a ruxarruxe, an altermundismo or 'otherworld-wantingness' where habitation is possible but tenuous, for though poems recuperate, they do not solve".

I appreciate the longing in her poems, as well as how open they feel. They do indeed recuperate, they heal like little fingerprints of smeared balm, but they don't solve anything, they question & ruminate. They are humble songs, & pretend no authority, offer no answers, only the experience.

Here is one of my favourites from O Cadoiro (Erin Mouré, 2007):

Were it in my power to love such world
In my honesty, and curve
of my ribs around such heart I have
or lung for breath, and alive
here, wanting world as she
to be in me

A creased grave-shroud is my foreboding
A careen or fall, and would you want me ever
world, for it is world I feel such weight for
forlorn or moving forth, though such a world
be questionable, warring, some
privileges at odds with their own mastery

and mastery of me
and yet kindness is ever all I dreamed of, from
you world. Vast vagueries.
I love you still.

Poisoned, delicate world. I love you still.

[940] #995
Erin Moure

spring says

2009-05-25T11:47:00.004-06:00

crows over the north saskatchewan river, early april, 2009

I have trouble with early spring, with a deep anxiety that seeps in with the first rivulets of melt. I'm fine now, now that it's mid-May, & the ground is dry & the river is bluegreen with summery silt. Now that there is green, there is sap-sticky air, now that the leaves have decided it is safe to unfurl, that tanagers are nesting & frogs sing coarse & elusive in the bogs.

This sort of panic is similar to the kind I feel in the mornings, especially when I wake suddenly -- I hate feeling pushed, thrust into some newness, out into something that feels stark & full of ambivalence. Not when I'm cozy in sleep, in winter, in rest -- I feel abundant then, rich & creative & safe. By mid-morning, I'm fine, because there will be purpose & direction & distraction. I'm just always a little uneasy of april's white skies, being dragged from hibernation, thrown into an unknown not quite awake, a wasteland not quite ready to change & grow.

* * *

spring says

spring says go now,
be born! & we are
pushed from

winter’s soft womb
with lungs full of blood
& amnion, a sticky cry to

separate us swift
from our hibernation,
our wantlessness, shift

us into beings with
sightless mouths open
always, desirous to reunite.

but the rough tongue
of the wind comes
like pinebark on skin,

harsh papillae of mother
cat on her kitten, licked
fresh & hairless –

go now, spring says,
now you are born!
but you are bare

& lost & red-willow
shocked, caught now
in the dialogue of air

& rock, exposed
to the crumbling language
of erosion, slow Os

leave your lips calcified,
a headlong slide
into the river,

cracked skull
shining on the wet
wash of ice. spring says

go, out under the
sky unheld by anything.
plagued by wordless

ache for the everything
we once had, we are
ghosts with eyes open,

grit our teeth in silent
yearning. go now, into
the spring & try to find

a way to survive, to
free yourself. admit that
you are wanting. admit

that you need.