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.

i get the space in between.

tulip-beak in my garden, sometime last week.

(I know I took similar pictures last spring, but it never fails to make me strangely giddy when I see the first bulb-flowers pushing up through the soil. I love the pink-tinged beaks of the little tulip that have been digging themselves out from the cozy humid nests of soil like some sort of underground bird, mouth gaping open to take in the sunlight)

These are spring-songs -- not explicitly, but they do carry something very springlike in them. Go & listen, I have put them on yousendit & they are lovely.

Petite Suite: V. Bagpipes -- Béla Bartók (Bartók plays Bartók)

Lovely piano runs, birds hurrying about in the spring. It's all jaunty & has that loping sort of urgency that all Eastern European dances have. (His whole Petite Suite is dances, Ukrainian & Wallachian & whirling.) & I really love this recording of Bartók playing his own pieces, all crackly & gentle. Nagyon szép!

Transliterator -- DeVotchKa (A Mad & Faithful Telling)

More glorious keyboard, jumpy & running around with string-sweeps... it is a brilliant song & I am in love. However, because I am a linguistic dork, this line sticks out & pokes me: You better mean what you say /why don't you say what you mean / I never get anywhere / I get the space in between. It seems to me the narrator is really talking about the process of translation here, not transliteration -- the former deals more with meanings lost in those gaps & gulfs between subjects... whereas transliteration is the switching of alphabets, & doesn't deal so much with semantic fields. However, I don't care, because the song, his voice, makes me rather euphoric, & his use of the word really takes nothing away from that feeling.

chai cupcakes of goodness.

close-up of a thrummed mitten i am knitting... mar.17/08

Besides running a lot, & working on (or procrastinating from working on) my thesis, I have been baking a lot. This tends to calm me, as so many things are concerning me to the point where I have been having trouble sleeping... my body is definitely tired by 1 a.m. but my mind seems to think it's too good for resting & dreaming & other such healthy things. However, a chai cupcake before bedtime contains a lovely dose of sugar that lulls me into a slightly more relaxed state. I hope that these sweet things will either perk you up or calm you down, whichever you need most.

This recipe is inspired by the first chai cupcakes I made -- these little vegan morsels from the PPK. I decided experiment with another batch, to deveganizing the recipe as I am not averse to a bit of milk & egg, & also make a buttercream icing, and this is what I came up with.

The biggest difference between the vegan & non-vegan ones is the texture -- vegan = more dense, muffinlike. non-vegan = lighter & fluffier. The spice mix is the same in both!

Chai Cupcakes of Goodness

Wet Ingredients:

2 beaten egg whites
1/3 cup canola or vegetable oil of your choice
1 & 3/4 cup milk, in which 4-5 tsp. of loose black tea (something strong -- an Assam is good!) have steeped...
2 tsp vanilla extract

Dry Ingredients:

1 cup white sugar
1 and 3/4 cups regular flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 & 1/2 tsp baking soda
a healthy pinch of salt
2 tsp of ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground cardamom (make sure it's ground, not in the little pellets, or you will have potent crunchy surprises...)
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/4-1/2 tsp ground cloves (ground-ness also very important here)
a wee bit of black pepper (or a little bit more)

Icing:

1/3 cup unsalted butter
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp-ish of cinnamon
1/4 tsp allspice or nutmeg
3 - 3 1/2 cups of icing sugar
4-6 tbsp milk

Procedure:

First, pre-heat your oven to 400 F, & line a muffin tin (the large kind, with 12) with those little cupcake liners. (You can get nice recycled unbleached ones at Planet Organic, if you're interested)

Heat the milk in a saucepan on the stove until just boiling (don't let it scald!) Remove from the heat & stir in your loose black tea. (If you don't have loose tea, use 4-5 black teabags instead) Cover & let steep for about 10 minutes...

Meanwhile, mix all your dry ingredients together in one bowl, followed by the wet ones in another, adding the tea once it has steeped (filter out the tea leaves first!)

Then slowly mix the dry into the wet, & stir until there are no more conspicuous lumps.

Pour your batter into the tins, filling each liner nearly to the top. You should have enough for a dozen cupcakes. Pop them in the oven & bake for about 10-15 minutes, or until a poking-stick comes out clean... (Please check them carefully, I am only going by my oven here, which is a bit overzealous. You may need to leave them 15-18 minutes... Or, if your oven is even more overeager, just 10. Be vigilant! It would be sad to waste them...)

As you are basking in the glorious aroma seeping from your oven, you can make the icing... Start with slowly beating the spices into the butter (which should be all nice & soft first!) & salt, & then gradually adding 1-1 & 1/2 tbsp. of milk for each cup of icing sugar. Beat well! It's all quite approximate with the milk, so use your judgement as to the desired thickness of the icing. Taste often.

Once the cupcakes are done, let them cool completely before liberally applying little mountainous icing peaks.

Enjoy!

bod rahng-tsen.

red willow, lawrence lake, n. of athabasca, march 9/08.

Amnesty International: Stop the Crackdown in Tibet

I think the link above speaks for itself; I can't really think of anything eloquent to say right now that hasn't already been said. Just go and read and write a little note to the Chinese ambassador to Canada. I did this morning, and I am finding it heartening that the number of emails sent has more than doubled over the course of the day.

I've been involved for a number of years in Students for a Free Tibet, and Tibetan-related Amnesty events and campaigns -- I've been following the situation for a number of years, and while I definitely don't condone the violence against Chinese citizens in which a few pro-Tibet protesters have allegedly engaged, I think I understand how it's come to this, how people just can't take it anymore. And it's devastating how it has come to this -- but I also think it's really crucial that we look at the many, many peaceful protests spreading across the region, and the message that this sends. People are still demonstrating with great integrity, and this cannot be ignored.

More than fifty years of peaceful protest, and non-violence. I can't really articulate how angry the actions of the Chinese government officials make me -- there's been reports of unarmed Tibetans being shot, etc, and that the number of people killed is (unsurprisingly) much higher than what the officials are reporting, and the things the Chinese leaders say make me seethe, blaming the Dalai Lama for the unrest & lots of other ridiculous things, etc. Reading some of what's going on, the litany of abuses & all just makes me ill. (Not figuratively -- I mean throat-constrictingly, weight-in-the solar-plexus-ill). This feeling is accentuated by the fact I am still so disappointed in the majority of people living in Alberta for their apathy, for one of the lowest voter turn-outs in Canadian history in the recent provincial election (but that's a story for another time).

Can you imagine wanting change so badly, as badly as most Tibetans do?

So, if you're reading this (& I haven't already done so because I've been pestering you about this all day) please go support Amnesty International's efforts to help the young monks who were imprisoned after peacefully protesting the Chinese state's brutality, propaganda, and cultural genocide. Sign the standard email, & please try to add something personalized to the note. It will have more impact.

For those who believe that these kinds of messages do little good, I think it's important to remember the power of words now, especially with the silencing of media and observers in Tibet right now (removal of journalists from the area, persecution of Tibetan and pro-Tibet bloggers, etc). You can still write something even if there's a lump in your throat, like there is in mine.

So -- bod rahng-tsen! Free Tibet.


*For more information on the situation, the Students for a Free Tibet blog is updated frequently, as is the Canada Tibet Committee and International Campaign for Tibet. The latter two are excellent sources of general background information as well. Amnesty International also has plenty of information of Tibet-related information, as well as Chinese human rights issues in general.*

rambling about borshch, etc.

a pot of borshch, ukrainian xmas '07. mmm.

This article just recently brought to my attention -- it is a lovely piece of food-writing with the history as well as the politics & contemporary social context of one of my favourite things to both eat & cook: borshch! It's really interesting to me how the politics, the tensions between Russia and Ukraine permeate even discussions of the edibles of the countries. Debates over borshch ingredients easily fall into the West Ukraine - East Ukraine camps, with the former claiming its true Ukrainian authenticity, and the latter being 'too Russian' to know what real borshch would be, anyway.

& so I am sitting here (feeling rather hungry) & mulling over the myriad intersections between between food & identity -- how what we eat (& what we don't eat!) can define us socially whether it's something we consciously choose or something that is thrust upon us by those who watch us eat... I remember the attention (not always positive) received from having 'different foods' in elementary and junior high school lunches, friends with spicy lentil dals and curries or the chunk of pungent garlic sausage my mother would give to me...

And then of course the whole vegetarian issue and all that goes along with that, perhaps the most polarizing food-identity question here & perhaps the one that obviously inspires people to be the most vocal about their choices... the explanations (I remember my baba in disbelief the first time I told her that no, I wouldn't like any kovbasa...) & the defenses of the morals and ethics by vegetarians (and vegans, even more so) because of my own personal experiences with vegetable-eating, and how people reacted whenever my patterns of consumption changed.

The non-carnivore issue is perhaps the most conscious for most people in terms of food identity, but there are also the regional identities often based around what an area produces, & the pride in consuming this food (Alberta beef, etc, exemplified by the infamous bumper stickers)

And food becoming instantly recognized, nearly synonymous with a culture (haggis in Scotland, the massive kovbasa sausage in Mundare, Alberta, etc) and thus becoming a prominent marker of ethnic identity... there are many many examples of this... Food seems to also be the prominent way people attempt to experience other cultures (à la Heritage Days -- the food seems to be the definite draw there for many festival-goers) or their own cultures... A friend once remarked to me that 'we are Ukrainian, I guess, but we don't really do anything Ukrainian except eat a lot of pyrohy...')


& then in Yukon, I was taught about the necessity of having 'traditional foods' in one's diet -- people talking about how white-person grocery-store food might keep them physically alive, but it's not 'real food', they needed the food from the land, be it salmon or moose or soapberries, to really be full, sated, nourished living beings. I heard similar things from urban Inuit in Montreal, about the inherent health of their own foods, and have been told about the food networks of how when someone gets some 'country food' from a relative in the north, most of the community gets together to partake of it. Going berry-picking this past autumn in Yukon, and being given moosemeat by people in the community was very profound for me -- & I think I understood a little bit about how eating of the land reinforces a certain connection to that place.

I suppose in some ways for myself food is often very ethnically-linked, because I was taught to cook by my mother who is a fantastically brilliant, creative cook raised in the Ukrainian tradition by my baba, who ended up restaurant cook upon coming to Canada... The preparation and sharing of food is incredibly important to that side of my family -- whereas cooking and nourishing is not very important to my (Scottish) father and his relatives... & for me, cooking what my baba always made is comforting, both in the preparation as well as the sharing and the consumption. Very simply, I like to make things & feed people. It makes me happy.

As for culture and identity, I do believe that we each create our selves through the actions we choose to perform -- it is through those actions that ‘culture’ itself is reproduced & transmitted, and though it is small, and mundane, culture includes the act of making food. (I've been thinking about this even more since theory seminar on Friday -- it fits nicely with what Michael Jackson (no, not that one) talks about in 'Knowledge of the Body' in regards to the embodiment of culture, being-in-the-world through collective and common actions.

Anyway, lately I've been trying to transcribe some of the family recipes I know, as I want to make a Ukrainian-vegetarian zine... I have rambled about borshch many times in my blog, because I love it so -- one version of my recipe is here (see June 6th, 2006) & I have written about my soup-love many other times I'm sure... as well as in my beet-poem, which contains similar food-identity musings... A recipe for cabbage rolls, holubchi, is here too.

& before I cease my writing-which-is-falling-quite-short-of-lucid, here is my beet-poem, which has gotten around a lot in the past few years but apparently not into the blog...

making borshch

sawing away at the jewel-red woodgrain
of fresh rosebud beets
the juice stains my fingernails,
skin dry & papyrine from scrubbing,

earthy & pungent
from carrots & onions, scented like
the mysterious water & sacred sleep
of the soil –

& i think of my baba
& how her soup-stained fingers would be
like wrinkled pink parchments, speaking softly &
stirring, smoothing my hair –

& now my own hands, chopping
the vegetables for borshch, they become
hers, creating sustenance;

pulling up taproots, coaxing out
their subterranean blood
for nourishment, sweetness of the earth –

burjaky, chasnyk, krip i morkvy
bili pidpenky, selera i tsybulky
barabolja i zh kapusta

sing my ancestors, sending their breath
through the voice of the grasses, they
grow for us sweet dill
now shredded & stirred –

i will not reduce my culture
to its victuals, there will be no
monument to beets

like that giant forked pyrohy
nor stawnichy’s speared sausage

but i am grateful

to this garden of my foremothers, &

i cannot help celebrating these
vegetables
for these, they are my
roots –

ice-fishing.

arching water-grass, one of the chain lakes, n. of athabasca, dec.07

ice-fishers in the distance, also one of the chain lakes, n. of athabasca, dec.07

poem-draft. this poem & i need some space right now.

ice-fishing.

out on the frozen lake i watch you drop
a line down through a hole in the ice; we might
sit in silence for hours here, you & i, willing

the shadowy thoughts of fishes to notice this,
for one to sacrifice itself for sustenance – &
then the twitching of the thread, a northern pike
comes flailing to the surface –

i watch you now, bite my lip. unconscious echo
of the fish’s bleeding cheek, metallic taste of smoky air,
red willows bending, that red stain spreading in the snow –

& i can’t watch as you crack the skull on the frozen board,
thinking of the pooling in the spine, the delicacy of bones
splintering, icicles reverberating, falling off the house --

little prayer under my breath, & back to fishing.
you shuffle around, pain following in your
shaky footprints. snowbacked sedge-grass arching down
on the shores, rushes heaving under hoarfrost,

straining your back as you hunch over
that hole in the ice. & i know your ribs, your shins
are aching in this cold but you won’t say anything,
not even when its chilly hooks creep further in

& finally confront you, pull you up
from your watery black cocoon gasping
& thrashing like a pike on the ice –

oh, but pike, they’re the toughest fish, you’d say,
they’ll survive hours out of water, calmly flaring
the bloody rose-petals of their gills

& maybe they aren’t even afraid -- but
i watch you staring out over the lake, at the sky
frozen over with luminous white ice-floe clouds

& i am stricken by the cold rays on your face, do
you see it? that shimmering, dangling line, &
how your bright eyes are so hungry, so tired,
so old.

little scatterings of ashes...

rose-hip-sun, by the n. saskatchewan... jan.29/07?

(poem bits that find it too stuffy in the writing book...)

wantlessness

i)

when did i learn to stop
wanting?

woke up from dreams
of this, of clinging
like the last berry to a branch
& then

there was nothing left.

just a winter sunrise frozen,
reddish blur of a tongue
to the silver metal horizon.

kisses like cranberry pulses
clot in the woods, pulsars silent
in still snowless constellations;

a magpie flies by my window,
crisp soft flutter like
the shaking of a pillowcase,
all the longing falling away.

ii)

where do you stash
all that yearning,
trailing behind you
like a smoky tail?

trade it in for a
november cocoon
of ache & warmth,

leave it in a spruce midden,
for a squirrel to line its
winter nesting-place?

or sever the fibrous longings,
shake it out like tendrils
of rivergrass caught in a bootlace,

weave it in with
the roving in some mittens
knit it in between the thoughts,
each stitch of wantlessness

(then give it away
to someone who longs too much
for something they will never know)


iii)

when did i learn
that i’m never free
of wanting?

that it moves
like small circular
sorrows, cycles like water

down the river with the
the bone-brittle ice-lilies,
a seasonal funeral

when the snow starts falling,
the river holds its breath
& runes of frost appear

on my window &
i start to decipher a
jagged yearning,

aura blossoming slowly,
edging its way back in
to my head

with the meltwater,
slushy back alleys
in springtime coming

the creaking break-up,
rush in the gutter, see-saw
of the love-bird call

& the soft snow gives
under my boots, feels
a little too much like
my heart

i remember you well...

ice cracks, chadburn lake, whitehorse, feb. 10/08

flowers at -45 C -- whitehorse, yukon, feb.8/08

''Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.''



Dear old Leonard Cohen* said that, and it's very true. (Now, we all know how I feel about Mister Cohen, & how he stirs such great cognitive dissonance in me... But I think that this is something he's said that I can agree with wholly & without any qualifications!)



Anyway, I am very grateful to have my writing book full of ash-fragments. This makes me quite thoroughly & truly happy.



***



*I think he's written some brilliant songs (& some not so) but I really like them better when women sing them. Because a woman singing his words does wonders in messing with his slivers of misogyny, and plays with assumed gendered roles in a pleasing way.


See, there's this one:

Chelsea Hotel -- as performed by Regina Spektor -- mp3!

When he sings it, it just annoys me. When she sings it, the lines that irk me in his version make me smile, because she conveys the vulnerability, the denial of the song... whereas he sounds a bit bored, & arrogant. Oh Lenny.