to all the places that i have known.

berry-picking, september 2007, near the summit of tthe may, near kwanlin (whitehorse)

slopes of tthe may, looking over the täga shäw (yukon river) to täghur män (marsh lake), september 2007

I'm done my Masters thesis. (When I say 'done', though, I just mean the writing part, not all the defending & whatnot... & besides, it still needs a rather thorough edit, as I'm sure I left some sentences rambling on to nowhere or falling off cliffs or something) But anyway, I am basically finished. 49, 538 words to sum up 4 months of fieldwork and a whole year of thinking... & this leaves me with very little to say right now.

On top of the mental tiredness, & brainfuzz left from three days of pretty much writing straight through, I am left with such a strange sadness & such nostalgia. It was just a year ago Friday when I headed up to Whitehorse for the first time to start my research, & it was autumn & that weekend I picked itl'ät & jenächür zhür, lowbush cranberries & crowberries, on Tthe May, Grey Mountain & saw the land unrolling coppery before me. (see above) & I had just started. Just started my first anthropological fieldwork & I was terribly anxious & terribly hopeful. I barely knew what I was doing, but eventually things happened & everything unrolled & swept me away & then I wrote 150-something pages about it.

& it's not that I'm finished now. What I learned, the experiences I opened myself up to having -- these things will continue to inspire & inform my future research. I'm just finished this year, this massive project that devoured my head for awhile.

The friends I met there, who helped me so much, who were so kind & gave so much of themselves, I miss them tremendously... & I just hope that what I wrote something with integrity, something that does some justice to the people I worked with. I hope when they read it, they find something illuminating they didn't consider before about the dynamics of their language situation. I just hope they see the hopefulness, the vibrancy that I saw.

I am so grateful to the people I worked with that it makes my heart hurt with that inchoate little choking, like I swallowed a rose hip whole & now they write me, they say, the berries are coming out, when are you coming back?

& it's hard, because oh, I wish I could go now! Go roaming the lava-red lichen slopes, go to the school & listen to the kids sing in Southern Tutchone... It won't be for awhile yet. The berry bushes will be under a few metres of snow by then. I hope they put save some in the freezer for me...

* * *

Have a song. It's a good song for driving on the Alaska Highway between Haines Junction & Whitehorse. I know that road well.

Ed is a portal (mp3) -- Akron/Family (Love is Simple)

(I have no idea why Ed is a portal. But I do enjoy the lines:

To all of the places that I have known [repeat, etc]

Now that my body's grown the lonely heart poetry
Droning in hearts becomes songs that all objects
Sing to each other like friends telling stories

It's all the same story)

it is summer, & life is good to me.

double rainbow, mid-july, university ave & 115th st.

my kitteh-friend down the block. i call him nosfercatu, due to his little snaggle-tooth fangs. ahem.

i didn't mean to cut myself in half here, but i often misjudge distance & height when taking photos of myself from ground-level. i still like this one though, especially the billowing in my skirt. in my alley, also middle-of-july.

End of heatwave, back to tea-drinking & moccasin-wearing on the hardwood, bedsheets cool again, at least temporarily. Summer's going swiftly now, unravelling into autumn -- I look forward to this, having missed the season here last year, as I was in the north... & there fall-time is blood-red tundra & coppery mountains for just two weeks before the wind changes & the rain comes & the leaves disappear. & that was beautiful & intense, but I am excited for a long, languid season, because it's going to be the last one for me in this city for a while. In a year's time, I'll be most likely moving somewhere (Aberdeen? Chicago?) to start my PhD. So, in recognition of the crazy acceleration of time that I've been feeling, I am going to go on long meandering walks crunching every single leaf very mindfully, & spend a lot of time on my steps every night, inhaling the smoky apple-cider air. Of course leaves will fall wherever I go, & Aberdeen will smell like the sea & Chicago will hopefully smell like something other than big-city-pollution. But they won't be my autumn smells or textures, they won't be home, & I am just feeling so attached to here, to my city, my landscape, my geography, & I want to savour it.

This has been one most favourite songs over the past few months for a number of reasons, and I've been meaning to post it for a long time. I was introduced to Pepi Ginsberg's music by a particular lovely person... & also, there are delicious lines in here that I want to eat: it is day, breaking underneath our feet. & her voice is just like that cherry wine (come on come on cm'on) she sings of in the opening line. & oh the strings' chromatic scales loping along together with the horn, one struggling to catch up, skipping over sidewalk cracks... it is morning & movement & holding onto things, to joy.

Pepi Ginsberg - In my bones (mp3)

river hieroglyphs

rivulets in the sand, north saskatchewan riverbank, may 1/08

birdprints along the north saskatchewan, edmonton, may 1/08

the second part of first fruits, rough draft.

two)


whitemud cracks on the riverside
pushing my fingers into cerebral folds
to touch exposed thoughts:

terrestrial through the roots,
slash of weeds a bursting backbone,
siltgreen summer river running wide

& our fingerprints leave barely
an impression on the soft skin
of the shore, a grip

on the river’s hips:
there in the shallows scrawled
avian hieroglyphs, those

footprints create the world,
leave us a story:
the currents are full of strange birds

carrying mouthfuls of earth,
swallows diving swift, divide
the land from the water from sky,

from you from i –

beneath the trees they scatter
a thousand tiny moss-hairs,
scarlet-tipped & reaching

up up up!
but it’s a comfort,
this separation, this

being made of dust.
we’re a thousand trees gone to soil,
all sweet & liminal in flesh

this transfiguration
of the wind-stirred sap & light
all dripping down

to where we lie there
on the sleeping bank, i press
myself into you,

the valley of ribcage to ribcage,
the whole of the earth’s
beating heart pushing back --

whale magic.

evening view from the front window of the lodge, shrine of st. thèrese, juneau, ak, june 5/08

(whale in the distance)

I keep meaning to tell stories from the beginning of summer, from my trip back up to Whitehorse. During that time, I also went on an excursion down to Juneau, where I accompanied the traditional dance group from the elementary school where I did some of my fieldwork. I felt so lucky to be asked along to accompany the dancers to Celebration 2008, where they'd perform in this gathering of coastal peoples, connecting as the inland relatives, historic trading neighbours of the interior. I was so grateful they would think of me, & also so excited to witness this gathering & see the dancers and language students perform. While the whole trip was very powerful, a fitting culmination to my fieldwork, there is one particular thing I can't stop thinking about, a story I want to keep telling, because I feel so honoured that I was there to witness it.

We stayed at a retreat lodge, a little ways up the coast from Juneau, on a beautiful stretch of land by the gentle bay, which we soon discovered was frequented by eagles & herons & cormorants, otters, seals, as well as humpback whales. The night we arrived, the dancers had practiced for their next day's performance out on the lawn between the lodge and houses. Long pre-solstice shadows twisting amongst the drumbeats, endless coppery gleaming of the water. & the whales seems to be attracted to the sounds, as they circled at the edge of the bay, loud exhales mixing with the singing, mist rising up thick in honey-ambered light.

The next night, it poured. Sitting in the living room of the lodge, we were finishing dinner, writing in journals. Some of the kids were singing, practicing songs for the next day. Then someone saw a shape out in the bay & we were pressed up to the rainy glass, watching for the steam amongst the raindrops. Two whales were there, breaching up in the spray. A few kids rushed out onto the porch, leaning over slippery railings, & then one boy came barrelling out down the steps, one of the dancing drums tucked under his arm, headed for the shoreline.

& that's when all the kids followed, & began to sing. They headed out for the point, under the dripping cedars, clambering gingerly over mussel-slick boulders to the very edge of the land above a cutbank. & they sang their dancing songs, their songs in Southern Tutchone. A welcome song, a potlatch song of power passed down from an old matriarch. They sang without anyone leading, anyone guiding. & everyone joined in these land-locked songs carried down to the coast for whales who had probably never heard anything like this before.

They were close; we could see their barnacle-riddled skin, their tiny abalone-shiny eyes in their wet slate faces. They were breaching; later one dancer's father, who was Inuvialuit & had hunted bowheads along the North Slope, identifed them as a mother whale teaching her baby how to dive deep, resurface, to play in the whitecaps tossed up by the storm.

& the kids kept singing, a song they'd just learned about having to leave a country behind, not knowing when you might return. & it soon became apparent that the whales were moving closer, closer to the rocks, their wild exhales mixing with the drumbeats & the crashing of waves on shore. Our breaths, sliding between our phrases, could they feel our hearts, connected? They're coming, someone might have yelled, keep singing! & the whales came closer, closer, ebbing out again, but still staying near as long as we sang.

Even now, months later, if I'm really quiet, I hear us yelling out hoarsely, I feel my raw throat & the tears pricking in my eyes. I see them all standing there, slipping on the rocks, soaking, their hair plastered down like black seaweed. Even now, I am overcome with memories of this rich act -- I am still in awe of the kids, their spontaneous instinct to sing for these animals, the way their hands flew up to carry the sound, just like the Elders do at potlatches. Still in awe of how the whales responded, coming closer, the connection between our voices & their groans & watery breathing, the connection made of songs.

I've told a lot of people this story, & not everyone gets it. Maybe I don't do it justice, Maybe they have trouble believing that whales would react this way, but really, it's not a matter of believing, it doesn't need to be analysed. It goes deeper than that. It just was. It happened.

These kids sang in Southern Tutchone for the whales, picked up their drums & their language, made the language live in a way it should. They chose it over English; they reconnected with a usage of their native language so rare now, though their Elders still speak of it -- the conversations between people and animals, between any beings. And the whales responded, somehow, there was a connection there, an affirmation in their curious motions, something that made my knees go weak & my whole body warm with rain & tears.

Right now, I think of all of my time in the Yukon over this last year, & all I can think of is that one song they sang: Oh my friend, I'm leaving your country, (I'm right at that place where the mountains dissolve into the horizon), I'm looking back and wondering, my friend, what can I do to go back there again?

first fruits.

over-ripe cherries on the floor, july 2008

first fruits

one)

wish i could tell you
how the land fills me: the
space between the branches & the
& the crumbling cliffbanks, pale
birch arms & the blue gesture
of your gaze, double-fruited
branches to our mouths:
(стояла вішня над водою)

how this decreates you
into a honeyed green haze of
leaf & light: the silty hum of
thunderstorm a waxy blossom
caught in the crisp polyphony

of grasshoppers,

(вишня стояла, свічка палала),

a singing bowl of gold-red cherries

in my hands.

let me feed you the first
fruits of summer communion,
cherry juice dripping through a
jungle of freckles on my arms,
(свічка палала, іскра упала!) our
rosepetal tongues separate bright
flesh from the stone: spitted pits

between our kisses
fall fecund in the rivery silt:
(іскра упала, річенька стала)
& they set root there in the sand
where you & i, we’re waiting
for some sort of transfiguration,
to become the sweetest saplings
of next spring

* * *

* the ukrainian bits come from a folksong that talks about the creation of the world. in the beginning there a cherry tree stood over the water, it burned like a candle & a spark fell to earth, creating a little rivulet. later in the song, god bathes in the water, puts on his robes & wanders up the mountain to dream the earth into being.

poetry & politics

water beneath sarrail falls, kananaskis, june 25/08

red willow branch, cascade on king creek, kananaskis, june 24/08

another king creek tributary cascade, kananaskis, june 24/08

A lovely friend sent me a book earlier this week -- Girl meets boy, by Ali Smith & I just finished devouring it during all my work-breaks & travelling today. Oh my goodness. Such a perfect book to be swept into -- a fantastical remix/retelling of Ovid's story of Iphis & Ianthe which melds gender fluidity and the politics of water. It's one of a series of myths reinterpreted by contemporary authors... Anyway, I was on the ever-treacherous St. Albert bus coming down Groat Road when I read the penultimate page, which flowed so gorgeously that I got little tears in my eyes & I didn't even care that I was on the bus with the snarky Mister Mulletman driving:


"Rings that widen on the surface of a loch above a thrown-in stone... Nothing more than what happens when things come together, when hydrogen, say, meets oxygen, or a story from then meets a story from now, or a stone meets water meets girl meets boy meets bird meets hand meets wing meets bone meets lights meets dark meets eye meets word meets world meets grain of sand meets thirst meets hunger meets need meets death meets life meets end meets beginning all over again, the story of nature itself, ever-inventive, making one thing out of another, and one thing into another, and nothing lasts, and nothing's lost, and nothing ever perishes, and things can always change, because things will always changes, and things will always be different, because things can always be different.



And it was always the stories that needed the telling that gave us the rope we could cross any river with. They balanced us high above any crevasse. They made us be natural acrobats. They made us brave. They met us well. They changed us. It was in their nature to".



-- Ali Smith in 'Girl meets boy', p. 160.



Such a sweet, joyful, subversive book, about the impossibility of controlling something that can't be controlled, whether water or identity, something too fluid to be contained. Anyway, I wish I could be more articulate about it now, but alas, still too fresh.

I loved the puns too. Oh my goodness, she is clever.

Anyway, so nice to read a story again, & this was just the perfect story for me at this very moment. Thank you, Miss Arwen.

I need more stories, stat! Saramago's 'Blindness' is next on the list...

memory/mouth

by the bay, outside juneau, ak. june 5, 2008

So, I've a long list of things that I have been meaning to post in this space, very long, likely rivalling the length of my thesis bibliography, but at this point, the words are still tangled up elsewhere. I have stories from Alaska, from the mountains here, and poem-fragments piling up, fattening my notebook. But I am so consumed with my thesis (all its words words words) & many many thoughts of all things various & sundry, so not much is surfacing here, yet. But soon.



I was reading Valzhyna Mort's poetry again today, the textures of her words tend to crack away at me, clamshell smashed open on rocks by hungry, urgent crows, devoured.



(untitled) - from her book 'Factory of Tears'



uspaminy

dva

pal'tsy

yakiya

zasunuli

u

rot

lyosu*





memory

two fingers

thrust

into

the mouth

of

life



-- valzhyna mort





*cyrillic + blogger = not friends today, so i transliterated.

letter to a friend in greenland

moss-hairs on a log in the river valley, early may 2008

This next little poem bit I wrote a while ago. It's a response to/was inspired by this poem by Oksana Zabuzhko, 'Letter from the Summer House'. I remember my mom telling me that when she went to the Ukrainian museum in Chicago last year, there was a display about Chornobyl that made striking use of these words.

A friend and I had been talking then about an English course where you write poems to a poet (in response to their work), experiment with the reverberations of the words... and I wanted to experiment with this, just to see... Anyway, Zabuzhko's poem was nibbling at my brain, and I was thinking about a friend from Greenland & the melty North & the ducks that fell in the oil, puddle universes & spiderweb-connections, & running in the snowstorms of late April, etc. I just feel haunted, sometimes, by the intrinsic connections exposed by disastrous or extraordinary happenings, make me think of the Gaia hypothesis, how they bring the distant near.

Anyway, I don't know about a lot of it, haven't edited much, but it is something, for now.

letter to a friend in greenland

dear _____________,

there’s been another summer snowstorm, here.
may’s new leaves, grassy month stunned
by the sudden tornado-ing of snow.
spiders & their frozen silks dead on the doorstep.
in my garden, the twining clematis
shadows twist up the stucco, their
brittle hairs shaped by the ache of frost.

friends in inuvik said they’ve seen
polar bears wandering down the dempster
this year, there’s nothing for them at the edge
of the floes. tourists mistake them for
furry SUVs, chasing confused caribou
up past tsiigehtchic.
no one knows where they’ll go.

i don’t know. maybe it’s like erika said:
we live as fleas on the back of this
great green doe & she’s just scratching us,
trying to shake us, gain her balance
as she picks about the lichens, all we do
is suck her dry in the summer heat,
itch & etch herself into her soft skins

& lay ourselves a clutch of eggs, never sated.
where i am, people are discontented
nestlings, spending their breath
squawking about the price of oil.
a blizzard comes, five hundred ducks
go down over the tar sands. immense
dark waters a false harbour where the

trees ebb and fall, boreal tide gone out
silent into a sticky black lake. walking
along the cracked sidewalks of the city,
cars splashing past; everything is much
closer than it appears. the world turns
to meltwater puddling over the sidewalks
& alleys, but a drought dries up our cells,

twitching with ache half a world away.
crops fail, & i think sometimes i feel it in my cells,
earthquaking its way along the human
fault line. i’ve been thinking of you, worrying
about your own epicentre on that
melting, fishless coast. will you

write soon, have you had to leave to nuuk for work?

this morning i found a frozen
spider’s web, illuminated in the ice, stretching
beyond the telephone wires, the clinking metal
of my fence, its silvery nets – that great doe scrapes away
at the soggy permafrost, under a may snowstorm,
& the wind that twists in the twining clematis
is the same air that’s a cyclone somewhere –

mad baba skillz

little flowers in the 10 pm sunlight on the cliffs, whitehorse, yukon, june 11, 2008

(Hi blog, I remember you!) I has occured to me that of the 25 days so far this month, I have only been home for 5 and half of them... meanwhile I have amassed a pile of stories & many many things I shall hopefully find time to post soon. But for now, this is an incredibly endearing 2 minutes of animated video to the song Kolomyjka Nowa, by Orkiestr sw. Mikolaja. Go rejoice in the the triumph of the knitting of Carpathian grannies over colourless mass produced goods!

Also, happy belated solstice -- another song by Orkiestr sw.Mikolaja, Piesn Sobotkowa (mp3 on yousendit), for the feast of Ivana Kupala. Traditional purification & fertility rituals of midsummer centered around water & fire transferred to a day set aside for St. John the Baptist, very convenient, yes :)

Anyway, the round-singing & harmonies & repetition are hypnotic & delicious. Listen, listen!

sane-making

russian chokecherry blossoms... illuminated leaf-veins! my parents' house, may 28/08

ghost hands piano-ing, my parents' house, may 31/08

These past few days I have worked on finishing up a rough draft of my thesis. Though there will be many more long days spent revising it, fighting with it, forcing it to behave over the next few months, it is a liberating feeling to have 140 pages of words out of my head. & there is a growing sensation of clarity now -- when I read bits of it now, I see I actually have ideas in there, swimming around in a muddle of tangents. It's reassuring. & I feel a bit more sane, now. (& I'm Yukon-bound tomorrow, which is even better...)

Whilst I was writing, I was so grateful to be house-sitting at my parents', for they have my piano. & I sat & played whenever I needed breaks, & I experimented with my audio recorder.

Here, I am playing Erik Satie's Gnossienne #3... I realize my way of playing it is more... ponderous, perhaps, than most recorded versions... I suppose since 'gnossienne' is a dance from Knossos, perhaps it should run along a little quicker. But I have this narrative in my head, about minotaurs & labyrinthine forests & echoes, & I think it is necessary to slow it down & play with the weight of each note....

I also recorded various things, like my favourite Chopin prelude (#6) & a haphazard version of Radiohead's No Surprises, & it was good fun, & sane-making indeed.

the singing tree, & other tangents

the muddy sturgeon river, a.k.a red willow creek. st. albert. may 30/08

This weekend a friend of mine took me to a pond in my hometown that I did not know existed! A sprawling swamp, green haze & still water. We attempted to catch frogs, but they eluded us -- though I did catch them on my audio recorder, singing their nighttime sonatas accompanied by what I think is a grebe:

39 seconds of frogs & birds & rustling

We also saw a muskrat, and a fox waltzing down the bikepath with some sort of rodent-like dinner in its jaws, and red-winged blackbirds with their urgent echoes: we found an old nest perfectly woven onto the side of a cat-tail, yellow grasses & dried berries & eggshell-remnants inside.

I climbed an old willow, all sunset branches, & there was a yellow warbler, calling, flashing about in the uppermost leaves. It reminded me so much of climbing in my grandma's crab-apple tree, & hearing the robins singing: it reminded me of a book I read a long long time ago, that I loved when I was about eight: The Singing Tree, by Kate Seredy. The singing tree in the story refers to the world tree in Hungarian folklore -- the unseen bird in the tree is 'singing up the world', keeping all the levels in balance, coaxing the branches to hold up the sky, telephone to heaven.

The book is set in Hungary during WWI, and at one point, I think I recall one character tells the story of a long, harsh crawl made by a battalion -- they travelled days without seeing any signs of life, neither human nor animal, and then one morning, there's a tree standing in the middle of a wide plain & it's full of a flock of birds, all singing...

I actually read something really good in the newspaper, as well. The Hay-Zama Lakes Wildland Park in Northern Alberta, which has been designated as a Ramsar Wetland site, and has been a protected area since 1999, is going oil/gas free! The oil companies are now forbidden to drill any more wells as of right now, and will have to have pulled out of the area completely by 2017. Stewardship of the park is being turned over to the Dene Tha' First Nation based out of Chateh, who will now be responsible for its continued protection. They have amazing plans for ecotourism there now, leading horseback and dogsled expeditions on the old trails, & birdwatching at the lakes (it's on 4 major migratory routes). This is incredibly promising. It makes me hopeful.

Also -- this reminds me of a really good book on Dene Tha' epistemology -- philosophies of meaning & experience: Ways of Knowing by Jean-Guy Goulet. I read it originally for a paper in linguistics class in which I was writing on language and meaning, hermeneutics & why truth-conditional theories of meaning are not universal (rather, Western industrialized-culture specific), using Northern Athapaskan languages as a base. & it was one of the many resources that pushed me into Anthropology, because I realized I was more interested in the usage of language by people, for purposes, than just the wonders of syntax.

i can haz nostalgia plz?

edmonton-lilac yesterday, alley at 112th & 82nd-ish street

I am having a bad case of nostalgia lately. This probably has something to do with the fact that I am in the midst of trying to finish off a 130-page thesis draft, and am therefore wishing I could periodically escape to another time & place... & since all my words are being used up in that 33 000+ monstrosity, & I am also slightly sleep-deprived, I am feeling everything really viscerally. Fewer words, more somatic impact. The smell of lilac blossoms makes me oddly euphoric... and also thrusts a bundle of Denmark-memories into the forefront, as that's where I was last year in the middle of spring. Coupled with an almond danish pastry (ah, wienerbrød!) I ate the other weekend (that was delicious, but not quite the same as the ones I ate there) I am experiencing little rushes of nostalgia for my weeks in København.

For the last while I have also been fascinated by the etymology of the word 'nostalgia' -- originally coined in the 17th century as a medical diagnosis for acute homesickness... (from the Greek 'nostos', home, and 'algos' pain). Nostalgia, I think, is a broader concept, than just a terrible wistfulness for one's birthplace or hometown or country, etc. Homesickness results from being placed in new/strange circumstances, away from the familiar, being caught in something lonely or isolating. But home, in the sense of nostalgia, is two dimensional -- it goes beyond places to include times, as well. I think we create little 'places' for ourselves throughout our lives, collections of experiences in various space-times that we dwell in, and these are our homes. When someone talks about 'that time in their life', a bounded unit or a certain stretch on a continuum, that is a home.

I was gone a month there, but I carved myself out a little home: at that old university building by the embassies in Christianshavn where the seminar met each day, flocks of bicycles at morning rush-hour, all-day conversations with all the people from the conference whilst we wandered everywhere & had beer & ice cream while dangling our feet over the canal & went for dinner & talked & walked back to the hostel & talked & had tea & talked & got up & did it all again. Total academic ecstasy, passionate people & feeling such an emotional-intellectual unity, synthesis. Lilacs & elderflowers & chesnut blossoms, the sea, the slant of light on the Kastellet moats at 8 p.m. on a May evening. The language of swallowed vowels & hoarse rustling, musicians at the Rundetaarn, cobblestone cloister-acoustics & the constant spray of fountains.

I would like to go back there someday, to Copenhagen -- but I also know it wouldn't be like going home, in the conventional sense, because 'home' is subject to time, just like everything else. My 'home' there has faded, it left with me when I flew away. Believing you can return to something, recapture it completely -- I think that's perhaps what causes the pain in nostalgia; I know that I can't, so while I long for it, it doesn't really hurt. Rather, this nostalgia ,with its lilac & almond pangs of longing, adds an aspect of richness to what I am feeling now, here, in the present time & place. It's the recognition of remembering, the acknowledgement of what I carry. & I am tremendously grateful for that. & despite the little pangs, there's also a satisfaction in remembering these things. They're still there, with you. & that is a lovely comfort.

& I always think of when my mama read me Tennyson's Ulysses... 'twas a long time ago, junior high, I think, but I still remember her repeating what she told me were her favourite lines:

I am part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'

Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades

For ever and for ever when I move.

the world is everlasting.

birch-shadows on newly hung prayer-flags, my yard, last saturday

tulips like great red teacups, last saturday

I rediscovered this song deep within my musical folders... It is all vintage Regina, silly & endearing, before she got all glossy-sounding. & she has some good advice for us to follow, to simplify things:

Well maybe you should just drink a lot less coffee
And never ever watch the 10 o'clock news
Maybe you should kiss someone nice
Or lick a rock or both

I already avoid the television-news & the coffee, & as for the kissing, 'twould be nice!
& I have licked rocks. It's useful for mineral identification, you know. Quartzite has a pleasant taste...

Regina Spektor -- The Ghost of Corporate Future, Soviet Kitsch (mp3)

I remember once my friend & I concocted a little short film in our heads to this song... I wish I could remember the details better, & whose idea it was... I do recall it being set downtown, and herds of businessmen in suits would be out in the streets, hurrying somewhere... & it would turn out that the place they were so driven to reach was the edge of the swimming pool by city hall... & they would all stop short, waiting, looking a bit confused, & then one would jump in... & the rest would gleefully follow.

translating & transfusing

lily pollen

hybrid lily on my kitchen table, a present from my sister

I've been reading a lot of Ukrainian poetry lately to soothe my thesis-addled brain, and I came across this quote by Oksana Zabuzhko, an author I enjoy (from her webpage)

«Переклад улюблених поетів – то немов переливання крови: таким робом всотуєш у себе невловно й невимовно нові, відмінні від твоїх способи почування, приховані під машкарою чужої мови».

«Входить Фортінбрас»

And now, I translate:

"The translation of one's beloved poets is much like getting a blood transfusion -- it opens you up to new ways of feeling that are nearly imperceptible and had til now been disguised by a foreign speech"

from her essay 'Enter Fortinbras'.

I love that analogy very much -- the act of translating being one of transfusing oneself with these new feelings and ideas, and through this process incorporating them into our own senses and understandings. Reading Valzhyna Mort has also got me inspired to do more translating lately, as well. It's something I've always enjoyed doing since I started studying the language formally at university in my undergrad days, when I was introduced to many Ukrainian contemporary poets and writers. I fell in love with certain pieces that made their way into my canon of favourites, and I wanted so much for non-Ukrainian speakers I knew to be able to appreciate them. So I set about to make my own translations to share. In some of the cases, I discovered there were English translations in existence already -- but I still felt compelled to create my own. I think it is similar to the reasons Oksana Zabuzhko gives in that quote . The process of transcribing infuses me with some of those beloved words, so I benefit from the act of doing so... But it's not all that selfish -- at the same time, I transfuse some of myself into my translation, so that my new piece carries a bit of myself as well. And that's what I wanted to share with people, I suppose. A bit of my own self carried in a new text, that might somehow encode how much I loved the piece, how much I related to it. There can never be too many translations, I don't think.

I've done three pieces -- two poems, 'Poets have no gender' by Halyna Kruk, and 'A Definition of Poetry' by Oksana Zabuzhko; one short story by Mykola Vinhranovskyj, 'White Flowers'. & there are more I want to do! I've posted them in here at some point in the last few years (see this month's archives for Kruk, this month for Vinhranovskyj) but I may make a little zine of totally unauthorized translations for giving to people I like who I think would appreciate these pieces. (My ultimate dream would be to inspire someone to learn Ukrainian to read these bits in their original language... 'tis always better, despite what any translators & their love can do. There's always the uncapturable space within, in between, that never can quite be captured, conveyed, retransfused into the new rendition.)

ranishnya rosa

My thesis has eaten up most of my words, so here is a singular little crocus, which I found sprouting all by itself in a little hillock on campus. It was all alone, in the middle of the grass, & I was rather excited to see the wee splash of purple! I wonder how often it is noticed. & who decided to plant it right there in the middle of the grass.

Also, here is a video from a Ukrainian group called Haydamaky, for a song called Meni Rozkazhe Ranishnya Rosa. It's a bit of a schmaltzy-sounding song, I warn you, (considering the title refers to feeling a lot like the morning dew on the grass where one had a lovely little tryst one night) but I mention it because the video has incorporates snippets from Serhiy Paradjanov's Tini Zabutykh Predkiv / Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, which is probably my favourite film ever. So watch it, & pay attention to the scenes projected all over the concrete walls, and that are occasionally interspersed (& also be amused by their singer, Oleksandr Yarmola, who looks a lot like a Ukrainian cousin of Jean-Luc Picard! with a moustache)

I saw Tini Zabutykh Predkiv again when it played at the Metro's Ukrainian film festival a few weeks ago, & it never fails to enchant me. I love the details, the ethnological-documentary feeling, the crazy motion of the camera that can seem jerky as Hutsul dancing, and appropriately sweeping at once, befitting the mountain landscape & its presence throughout the film. I love the portrayals of village religious life, the pagan beliefs shining through the thin layer of beaten-gold Orthodoxy. I love it, even if it isn't completely faithful to the story by Mykhaylo Kotsiubynskyj and some of the nuances of his writing don't come through in the dialogue. I love its use of folk songs, some of which my baba used to sing. I love how so many of its image have left indelible imprints on my eyelids, like Marichka's hand pressed to the window on Christmas Eve -- or near the end, with the shots of the red willow branches looking strikingly like pulmonary arteries, scarlet & frozen. I love it because even though the legend that inspired the story is rather sentimental, it's sentimental in a way that is rough and yearning and tragic (so very, very Slavic) and I love it because it examines outsider-ness & connections to nature/ancestors & inability to live within societal confines. I love it even though most people I make see it are rather confused by it (the subtitles aren't great, I know, and there are so many references to obscure folkloric elements) but I am happy that they have seen it, even if they can't quite appreciate why I love it so much.

So yes, you can see why it makes me glad to see it pop up in a music video.

Also, it just came out on DVD (Arwen, did I tell you that it also includes a documentary about Paradjanov and Tarkovsky!!! and a feature about the songs used...) Anyway, I still recommend that you should all track it down. (I will watch it with you if you like, and I will give you better translations of the subtitles & answer questions about what all the people with their fancy moustaches & funny costumes are doing...)

absurdity.

lone coconut gazing out over the n.saskatchewan, may 2, 2008

A whole coconut, contents intact, was found washed ashore on the river last week. It didn't seem to have been in the water very long... Very random. My verdict is it was the swallows ;)

Other speculation is certainly welcome...

(just substitute Edmonton for Mercia. It makes perfect sense)

Arthur: We have ridden the length and breadth of the land in search of Knights who will join me in my court at Camelot. I must speak with your lord and master.
Guard: What, ridden on a horse?
Arthur: Yes.
Guard: You're using coconuts!
Arthur: What?
Guard: You've got two empty halves of coconut and you're banging 'em together.
Arthur: So? We have ridden since the snows of winter covered this land, through the kingdom of Mercia, through —
Guard: Where'd you get the coconuts?
Arthur: We found them.
Guard: Found them? In Mercia?! The coconut's tropical!
Arthur: What do you mean?
Guard: Well, Mercia's a temperate zone!
Arthur: The swallow may fly south with the sun, and the house martin or the plover may seek warmer climes in winter, yet these are not strangers to our land.
Guard: ... Are you suggesting that coconuts migrate?
Arthur: Not at all. They could be carried.

-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail

sun in my lungs.

(a not-so-great-at-all video taken with my camera last winter, but you can see the swoop of the waxwing flock & hear them calling...)

I think what I've always liked best about running is how when I first set out, I am acutely aware of every muscle/tendon/nerve/fibre in my body... but after 8km or so, I've completely forgotten my body again. I think my body is especially responsive to endorphins, & I've always been blessed with the ability to reach a runner's high rather quickly. & so soon, I am just of the spaces between footsteps, breaths; there is such a boundlessness that I love.

(poem-draft that explains it)

running the body remembers
the winter days when i held
the whole sun in my lungs,
pulmonary fires light the bellows
of the heart, glowing echo of
a river’s crackly breathing.

running i remember my body,
re-member its limbs & its lilt,
music like a jaw-harp sprung
the pluck of the veins
and the foot’s muted drums
& then it’s lost again

to the swoop of the flock
of waxwings midstep
each stride a sharp breath,
wingbeats disappearing into
sunlight, embalmed with the
inhale, exhale into ash:

running i slip aside like ice
moving swiftly downriver,
each stridelength leaving
bones dissolved and avian
& i am ready, headcocked
with reflexes slight as lightning,
beleaguered arms becoming wings.

running i outrun myself,
through the body i am left
with boundlessness, i am
chased by my own trail
of muddy footprints, through
the slush & april smoke,

running i pull apart
with each exhale, inhale,
tiny little balled-up stars
in my pulse, between the cells
and myself, that white pulsar,
earthbound instrument left burning

as a thought, a stalk of rivergrass,
lit like silver aspen candles
on bleached white branches
& reaching like a birdflock,
breath held on treetops then
exhaling into giddy blue sky --

we ourselves were the language.

little seed pods left on a plant, the river valley last week.

little burrs like barbed-wire stars. river valley, last week.

So, I met someone at the bookstore the other day. First I encountered her whilst flipping through an anthology of 'New European Poets' and seeing her name come up as both translator & author a number of times... Then when perusing the literary magazines, a whole article and interview with her! & thus I became acquainted with Miss Valzhyna Mort and her new book of poems, Factory of Tears.

So yes, Valhynia Martynava is a Belarusian poet and translator, now living in New York City, who plays the accordion when she is not writing poems that get stuck in my throat & melt into something that tastes halfway between borshch & tears. She writes about her grandmother, the political tumult of her home country, loneliness & lustiness, & perhaps most compelling to me, language. She writes in Belarusian -- a bold & significant move, for where she comes from, the language is drowned out by Russian, pushed into the cracks in the floors at the homes, whispered in the countryside by 'the peasants'. But she is passionate about reviving her language, still in the same danger of being silenced as it was under the Soviets, & there she is, reclaiming it, winning prizes for her readings all over Europe. (You should listen to this video of her reading even if you don't understand a word of any Slavic language -- pretend it's music. Her style is really powerful.)

And it's the lines from 'Belarusian I' that haunt me the most. In this poem written from the voice of her grandmother, she writes:

when we discovered we ourselves were the language
and our tongues were removed we started talking with our eyes
when our eyes were poked out we talked with our hands
when our hands were cut off we conversed with our toes
when we were shot in the legs we nodded our head for yes
and shook our heads for no and when they ate our heads alive
we crawled back into the bellies of our sleeping mothers
as if into bomb shelters
to be born again

(Valzhyna Mort, translated Joseph Cortese)

& it's such a tribute to how poetry persists, poetry in Eastern Europe is flourishing. Grown from a long line of dissident poets that used words as their only weapons, their new descendants in Ukraine and Belarus and Russia that have inherited this dedication to employing potency of poems in their new revolutions... & I've heard poetry readings in Kyiv can be standing-room-only, now. (Would that could happen here!)

But yes, Valzhyna. I love.

* * *

Also, I love this song: Fierce Little Lark by Shearwater, recorded live for a Daytrotter Session. That tremulous resonance in his voice is chilling & so lovely I could weep. Such sparse cryptic words, all choky in the throat:

we lay at the waterline... & fish with our fingers, & breathe in the night, so wild, so humble & storied... but all for a lie! all for a lie, oh all for a lie, i told you...

the fierce little lark has his eye upon you... the poplars are swinging so wild, & the wasp at the window, the spoon in your hand... & dog who is always watching... but all for a lie! all for a lie, oh all for a lie, i told you...

macadamia!

stencil on a bus bench, 75th-ish ave and 109th st. especially for bryna.

sigh. darned gravity! on the footbridge in hawrelak, going over the river to laurier park.

This is pure silly, & also rather interesting to me, in terms of etymology. In this little sketch by the absurdist comedians The Vestibules, they list off words that they take great joy in pronouncing & repeating, e.g// bulbous! bouffant! blubber! macadamia! gazeeeebo. (Just go listen and be filled with glee... I love it when people have such fun with language) & while enjoying this (& subsequently infecting myself with a rather powerful earworm) I was also struck by the number of words they used that were derived from Latin, and how few came from the Germanic substrate of English.

A little bit of checking with my etymology dictionary confirmed my suspicions (from the Latin suspectionem, suspectio, via Old French suspeçun) -- funny words in English seem often to be Latin-based. In fact, their only funny word that was part of Middle or Old English and therefore most likely Germanic was blubber (from blober, a bubble). The rest are direct borrowings (mukluk and iglu from Inuktitut, beluga from Russia), words of unknown but likely Scottish dialect with Gaelic influence (shindig, hullaballoo), a few more directly French (bouffant and gabardine) and then the whole plethora (also from the Latin, inspired by Greek) of Latin-via-French: superfluous, tuberculosis, foible, ploy, plethora, spatula, gazebo, galoshes...

So this makes me wonder -- what is it that makes French and Latin-derived words funny to English speakers, even if these words are a pretty regular part of our language. Why aren't our old Germanic words funny? Is it that they are so basic, less superfluous (from the Latin superfluere, 'overflow') like house and anger and hunger and sleep? Do these old words have fewer syllables?

I can understand why the more direct borrowing like 'mukluk' and 'beluga' sound amusing, because they contain sound patterns not found commonly in English. But for the Latinate words, they have been in English a long time and have mutated much more to fit English sound patterns, they are undeniably 'English' words. So it can't be the foreign-ness aspect, I don't think.

Do they lack the 'u' and 'oy' sounds that for some reason, sound amusing? The psychology of why words sound funny or grating has always fascinated me... Like how certain words I cannot stand to hear. I hate the words 'torque' and 'torso', I flinch when I hear them. Yet 'tornado' and 'torment' don't bother me.

I am sure somehow has done some research on this. But anyway, I have been wondering (while I should be working. Sigh.)

* * *

On a slightly related note, I've also been reading a lot lately about phonosemantics and sound symbolism -- the idea that basically morphemes are not the smallest meaningful units in a language, but the phonemes, the basic sounds, have meanings as well. That perhaps, unlike Saussure's arbitrary sign, the sounds of the words themselves have meaning.

Onomatopoeia is one type of sound symbolism, clustering (e.g. words in a language with similar meanings contain similar sounds) and iconity (e.g. looking at words are that also have similar meanings, and looking for regular changes in sound to accompany semantic distinctions) One linguist, Margaret Magnus, makes an interesting case for iconicity, in the words step, and stamp, and tamp and tramp. To sum it up, she feels that 'mp' makes a word more 'intense', as in step vs. stamp, and the r in tramp extends the tamp action which refers to one bounded location as opposed to one that is extended over space/time. Anyway, she has a fascinating webpage that is worth a look. I haven't had a chance to read it all yet, however... There's a neuroscientist too, Ramachandran, who discusses sounds as metaphors for images, and cross-modal synaesthesia... and I need to track down John Mitchell's book 'Euphonics: A Poet's Dictionary of Enchantments'... It would be very interesting to see what he says, because this is something Iam always aware of when writing... in poetry I think we are most definitely aware of the inherent phonosemantics of our language, even subconsciously, as poem-making is really just about figuring out the recipes for phrases, combining the word that best captures meaning and essence with the words that taste the best when said together.

Anyway. I was supposed to be doing work? Yes, I was. More on all this later, I will finish my half-formed thoughts.

PS: Gourd is a really funny word. But it has to be said 'goooooooooourd' for maximum funny.

only our feet all the more surely trample our earth.

spring melt, river valley path, april 8th/08

aster skeletons, river valley, april 8th/08

Living in this province makes my brain hurt. This is not a new revelation, but it has been hurting extra much since the whole first-nuclear-power-plant-in-Alberta business appeared last year. Actually, it would still hurt even if I lived in anywhere else, because the very fact that a lot of people think it's a really good idea to build a nuclear power plant outside of Peace River has a lot of impact beyond provincial borders. The fact they want to build one enough to make my brain hurt, but it's not only that it is some misguided attempt to reduce greenhouse emissions (which does not work anyway!), it's to help power the oilsands! So we can get all the oil out of the ground faster & destroy the atmosphere & the boreal forest even sooner, & as a bonus, increase the health hazards with upping the already high carcinogen levels that are popping up all over Northern Alberta. Super.

I can never get over these sorts of decisions. Sometimes I would just like to ask the people who make these decisions if they like their children or their grandchildren very much. Most people would say they do, & yet this kind of myopic, linear stupidity abounds. Seven generations? More like a month, a week.

* * *



Ko man dosi mamulite, par muzigu dzivošanu
Izplaukst zelta abelite un ka rita migla skan
Ko tas dos tev mamulite, ka tavs delinš nenomirst,
Atbildes nav
Tikai kajas drošak savu zemi min…


What will you give to me mother dear, for eternal life
The little golden apple tree blooms, and rings out like morning mist
What does it give to you mother dear, that your little son doesn't die
There is no reply
Only our feet all the more surely trample our earth



This is Joanna Macy's story about her creation and use of the Elm Dance, set to the Latvian folksong above.



* * *



This was inspired by the work of the musical group Kitka (along with the super-amazing Ukrainian avant-garde folk musician Mariana Sadovska); for their production of Rusalki -- Songs Between Worlds, they travelled to villages in Northeastern Ukraine to collect songs about the rusalky, the spirits of the earth/water/seasons (generally a creative force), but also associated with untimely death. As noted in this article here, these villages where the rusalky song tradition is the strongest also happen to be some of the hardest hit by the Chornobyl disaster twenty-two years ago. I have always been in awe of the rusalky songs, & haunted by the tradition of the Provedu Rusalok, & this coinciding of resilient songs & resilient earth somehow encourages me a little.



And so, I write things. (Not finished yet, as usual)




i)

on the shores of lac cardinal
a black moth flutters, over
the water, in the leaves of red poplars
& slick as a sturgeon she is down
in the shadows, singing under the ice –

i live at the bottom of the river
with indigenous sorrows growing
in my belly, soft earth in my fists
singing my way into the fields,
green thursday, first thunder –

ten years from now, a sky
glows with the eerie exhale of neon,
phosphorescent mushroom stalks
rising above the lake, electron spores
crashing & flowing on their way north –

there where the earth lies oil-black,
where you strip away the strata, peel
back the skin & pillage for plasma, suck
greedy at the bitumen pooling
under tar-black grass –

but i am still there, braiding
strands of mosses, sealing the cracks
& coaxing the beaks of crocuses out
from the moist nests, underground
birds with wide mouths searching for the sun –


ii)

i am not sure what they call
me here, but i think
they know me.

i didn’t stow away in a
seed packet, sewn in the hemline
of your baba’s coat –

i was always here,
autochthonous little song,
a thought, a green-ness

rusalka-rusalochka,
zelenka-zemlyanynochka,
from the pripyat’ to the peace;

did you know they
still sing to me, even in
chornobyl, those hearts strong

around the wormwood &
i send the black grasses creeping
back over the concrete

& oy vilitala halka! the jackdaws are
circling, clawing at the resonant
black earth beneath their feet

iii)

& here you are,
with your addiction,
province with the finest caviar;

& it’s never enough
when you know there’s more,
so slit the belly of the fish

dig in that curved knife
& scoop out the black-gold,
split a million atoms

because you think it will help.

o chorna voda!

& i will rustle along
the lakeshore, your children
are playing there

with thyroids like brittle
snailshells, cracked calcium
dissolving into a cooling pond;

frogs float dissolute and distended
in the swamp, silent throats bulging
up like moons, something’s wrong,

something is very wrong.

o chorne zillia!

& i am keening in the hollows,
deflated balloon of a crow’s chest,
blackened antlers of a moose.

o chorno byl’.

iv)

you’re the man in
a little house in a little town
by lac cardinal
& your wife strokes her belly,
baby’ll be with you soon

& you are waiting
for what they told you
would be the trickle-down
but if you listened beyond
the reactor’s humming

you’d hear it’s only
water torture, dripping flash
of that vast black-gold
endlessly running out.

& one night i’ll have to
come to you, come to your
window & its foggy breathmarks,
a baby in my arms, croaking
out a pulse;

later, at the hospital,
your daughter arrives, her
throat swollen, unsinging
& you remember that reflection,
crumbling into ash & earth

& if you listen, i’ll
be singing to her, i’ll tell her
you’ll all be gone soon,
& she will become the earth
without you

o chorna voda, chorne zillia
vona zi mnoyu

she’s a white swallow now
she’s the last green shoot
pushing its way through the
asphalt, she’s a quiet, growing
earth you’ll never see





* * *



notes:



rusalka-rusalochka -- a rusalka

zelene-zemlianynochka -- green dweller of the earth

oy vilitala halka -- the jackdaw alit

chorna voda -- black water

chorna zillia -- black grasses

chorno byl -- black stalks, the mugwort plant (often translated as wormwood) -- in Ukrainian belief, sometimes seen as a plant that keeps the rusalky away

vona zi mnoyu -- she's with me



-- lac cardinal is the proposed site of the nuclear power plant.

-- chernobyl fallout apparently caused genetic defects in swallows, one of which caused albinism

-- chernobyl heart is a degenerative cardiac condition contracted by many children living in the area hardest hit by the explosion

skin & earth

skeletons of growing things from last year, some sort of aster. river valley, april 8th/08

new moss under the snow, river valley, april 8th/08.

i have a lot of poems living in the form of poem-cocoon-fragments right now. my thesis is a little bit draining right now & prevents other things from getting written all at once... but i made another vesnianka; this is probably my favourite sort of ukrainian folk song = sympathetic magic for growing things! (of course, formatwise, this is not really a vesnianka, there's no refrain or anything, but it was spontaneous, & in the spirit of things, growing things should not be constrained by a framework. so, yes.)

skin & earth

i wish
my skin gave birth
like the earth’s,

to tulips unfurling
from bulbs, curled
like fetal sparrows

ready to push their
reddish beaks hungrily
through the ridges

of my collarbones,
soft freckled soil
of my chest.

april grit
under my fingernails
sprouts cedary mosses,

a bliss of juniper berries
like crow’s eyes,
birthmarks on my cheeks.

i wish
spring let me wake
with pasqueflowers

pushing purple bells
up through the soft
pulp of my heart.

* * *

last april's vesnianka-bits

til you get to the core

self-portrait (upside-down) in a puddle, a few weeks ago, 112st & 80th ave, i think.

I interrupt my thesis-writing to post this: the little film for the song Wanderlust, by Björk.

I am leaving this harbour

Giving urban a farewell

Its habitants seem too keen on God

I cannot stomach their rights and wrong

I have lost my origin

And I don't want to find it again

Rather sailing into nature's laws

And be held by ocean's paws

Oh, Björk, how you delight & terrify me! Travelling downriver on the backs of lovely felted musk oxen in what looks to be Greenland, escaping your stagnant harbour only to find there is an old mud-woman in your packsack, who wants to wrestle... because she is all the self, all the ancestors you wished to leave behind... & the river spirit, rising up in front of you, mountainous, looking like a Southeast Asian lion dancer, carving new channels with its brilliant paws, guiding you into... & oh the ending! Snapping at the straps of my heart. Because this is all magic, & I - I just get it. Beautiful.

Wanderlust

Relentlessly craving wanderlust

Peel off the layers

Until you get to the core

the space in between, part II.

the puddle universe two fridays ago, an alley (near 112th st & 82 ave, i think)

puddle-world-tree, 112th st & about 78th ave. it's not there anymore, of course. such temporary portals...

I should be working on my thesis, but instead I am reading about Simone Weil, listening to Orkiestra Sw. Mikolaja, & knitting a sock, (almost all at once). Besides thinking about my thesis too much*, I am thinking about words, & language in general, about connection & expression... & spaces in between. Tangentially spurred on I think by Michael-Jackson-the-existential-anthropologist's writing about embodiment, I've also been writing in my notebook about Weil's concept of 'metaxu' -- that which separates and connects at the same instance -- in relation to how I think about language, and words, poems specifically.

Anyway, this bit is nice:

"The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real. It is the same with the act of love." -- Simone Weil, in 'Gravity and Grace'.

I wish I could have tea with her.

* * *

*I am even having incredibly transparent dreams lately about my thesis. In one, my mother & I were in a little village somewhere, called Acornshe. (cf. Shäwshe, aka Dalton Post, I'm sure of it.) & I was showing her the significance of the linguistic landscape, and rambling about matrices & indexicality & symbolic power, as there were signs in a mixture of Southern Tutchone & English.

(If dreams are for sorting and recycling thoughts, I hope this means the writing will flow more smoothly.)

I has also had another one about showing my mother a caribou-skin drum, but this one was less straightforwardly thesis-y & I am still unravelling all the levels.