last year in taatta

sunset on the road at tüngülü, menge khangalas ulus, june 2011

These are photos I took almost exactly a year ago, last June, when I was still in Sakha, and hadn't yet lived one of the most difficult, surreal years of my life. I was nearing the end of 10 months in the field, and that was a strange time too; I was anxious and sick and weary, and frustrated, too, yet sometimes now I find myself thinking of these people and places with a smoothed-over, glowing nostalgia. I wish I was back there, sometimes, with all the confusion and overwhelmed-ness that life doing fieldwork in Siberia entailed. I wish, above all, I could have appreciated the moments there more, without worrying so much about what I was doing; wish I could have dwelt with ease in a succession of presents without feeling so scattered across time, across space. But considering my father's (lack of) health at the time, considering what I was carrying with me (that I always carry with me), I am trying not to be angry with myself, trying to be compassionate to what was roiling about within me at the time.

we are in a very old church tower, chörköökh, taatta ulus, june 2011

I am lucky I got to create some beautiful relationships, and explore lives, share with people in Sakha. As difficult it is right now, to think too far into the future (months at a time, now) I do look forward to at least planning a visit back there in less than a year's time. Even if I felt out of place, never fully connected during my time there, now I am beginning to understand the impressions made, what my experiences there carved into me. The parts of the place and people that moved into me, and those into which I moved. I didn't fully comprehend them at first, these pieces I carry with me, but they are becoming clearer and sharper now. These realizations have emerged gradually, but now it seems that I am stopped mid-thought by their clarity: it's like how you must hear bird songs repeatedly before you come to associate them with their singers, the way they suddenly begin to come forth from a background of muddled, inchoate sound and call to you singularly and simply, like newly-learnt words in a language emerging from the chaotic flood of speech. Like the moment when you begin to feel a language becomes something you can really live in, not only something you use.

chörköökh, taatta ulus, june 2011

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon talking with my supervisor's cousin, Saaska, who was visiting Scotland. He's from Sakha, with roots in Taatta, the place where all these pictures were taken just a year ago. He's a kind, funny, serious man, a shaman of sorts, a ritual specialist. An algyschyt, perhaps to be most precise: a blessing-giver. And many of the blessings he bestows are those of sound. Of music, played on the khomus, most beloved of instruments for Sakha people. It heals, he says, it's good for you. It has the same power that some shamans would traditionally carry in their drums. And we talked too, about speech and silence, the powers they can carry and convey to us.

field in an alaas near chörköökh, taatta ulus, june 2011

One of the most important beliefs for many Sakha people is that language is ichichileekh; that is, words possess a spirit, an ichchi, the same as a river or place or a fire. Saaska told me that part of that spirit arises out of the sounds themselves, the resonance of vowels, and part of it from the intent of the speaker. His thoughts on it sparked something brilliant for me in terms of the structure of the first chapter in my dissertation, but perhaps more crucially, they reminded me of why language (and studying it, learning it) inspires me so, and why I was drawn to anthropology over linguistics. That words are magic, that they carry a power with them, inherent to what they CAN do, and there is beauty in their linguistic forms--those permutations of sounds, and their morphosyntactic weight--but there has to be the speaker to fully realize their power. A word is empty without the speaker, and  a speaker needs that system to make meaning.

birchbark baskets, chabychakhtar, in a summer dwelling, or uraha, chörköökh, taatta ulus, june 2011

I always knew that I left pure linguistics behind because there were no people in it, but what Saaska clarified for me about how words possess their ichchi illuminated in a way that solidified my reasoning. And it gives me the push to take the hard stance on it and remind those generativists that you know, you can't study language without people. And just studying their brains and those synaptic potentialities doesn't count, Chomsky and Pinker et al.; it's like trying to sever body and mind. Your 'pure' science, formal linguistics, is fundamentally incomplete until you take into account the context of every utterance, the whole of communicative practice, the spirited word. You cannot have one without the other, at all.

so many sylgy n'urguhuna, chörköökh, taatta ulus, june 2011

But Saaska, yes. So nice to speak with someone who knows Taatta, knows this place that I never spend so long in, but felt so deeply. Such lushness, there in the early summer, between two great rivers, the Lena and the Aldan, up at 62 degrees latitude an oasis dotted with alaases, Sakha heartland, home of the word. Place of so many respected olonkhohuts, those who recite the epic Olonkho, and so many of those who first put Sakha words on paper, the first Sakha authors who suffered so much under the Stalinist regime but whose words are still heard.

sacred tree, an al-luk-maas, with offerings, orthodox church in background, chörköökh, taatta ulus, june 2011

 sylgy n'urguhuna (wood anemone) and sir simeghe (forget-me-not) in oyuunskii's alaas, taatta ulus, june 2011

I was not long in Taatta, but I think perhaps because of two particular days there I remember it so well: one of the worst migraines of my life, complete with panic, aphasia and vomiting that culminated in an injection of some very heavy painkillers from the village doctor, a woman who in my delirium I accused of being the 'horse doctor'; followed by one of the most idyllic days of that year, in which I traipsed through the countryside with good friends, visiting places where they grew up, and then lay upon the earth listening to the birds, eating fresh food (oh my goodness the butter, and the wild garlic), bathing in a banya, and feeling some of the first flickers in what had been a long while of feeling good, and whole, and pure. And a feeling of re-inspiration, of remembering why I was doing what it is I do. And somehow I feel now that encapsulates the whole fieldwork -- the struggle, and then the re-dedication, the reward.

horse in oyuunskii's alaas, taatta ulus, june 2011

weeping birches + sunken bridge, oyuunskii's alaas, taatta ulus, june 2011

I mentioned Saaska's explanations about why tyl -- ichchileekh (language has a spirit) because remembering that re-inspires me too, especially at a time when I am amidst the slogging of writing, the fits and starts, the flows and barriers of trying to construct a doctoral dissertation. When I am pushing myself to remain submersed in the middle of my notes, my data, and produce a narrative out of months of accumulated experience, and at the same time live the uncertainties of an early academic life, where I am also forced to constantly plan ahead, plan where money will come from, plan the next steps in a path that I am ultimately not quite sure of, within the confines of a socio-economic climate that doesn't really place a high value on the work that I do.

a kulluruut, or wood sandpiper, in oyuunskii's alaas, taatta, june 2011

forget-me-nots, an old serge at the balaghan in platon oyuunskii's home alaas, taatta ulus, june 2011

I question what I'm doing a lot, its meaning and sense, and why I put myself through what I do. Why I ever thought it was a good idea to do what I'm doing. Why did I decide when I was twelve years old that a PhD and a life in academia was what I was going to do with myself? I knew nothing then, nothing about that, nothing about anything. I know a little more now. I try to remind myself that deep down I know that what I am doing has significance, that it can be meaningful. That I can give it meaning. Tyl -- ichchileekh. Language has a spirit.

memorial monument to platon oyuunskii, one of the first sakha writers, at his home alaas in taatta, june 2011

monument to an olonkhohut, rest stop at the border of taatta ulus, june 2011

I do believe we need to understand how language works, how communicative practices shape us, and how we shape the world through language. Shape our relationships, the way we relate to each other. Shape the transmission of knowledge, and ideas, and meaning. And I think there's a lot to be learned from understanding communicative practices in the context I'm writing about, in a northern place, through the lens of mobility and changes, of resurgence and resilience, of following trajectories and reflecting on how they shape peoples' lives in the midst of social processes on a broader scale. I think it's worth something, to learn about these things and to transmit and share that knowledge with others, to teach. That's something I know I want to do, along the way.

al-luk-maas, the world tree. yhyakh site, ytyk-küöl, taatta ulus, june 2011

wagtail on the serge in the yhyakh site outside ytyk-küöl, taatta ulus, june 2011

Of Taatta, I remember the sound and silence of the field. The wind in the grass like the sound of the khomus's tongue plucked. The cuckoo calling, the soft snorting of horses, their footsteps swishing in the green spilling out across the alaas like the memory of water. Saaska and I also talked about silence in relation to speech, and the fear of silence in many cultures that leads people to try to fill it with half-formed, ill-thought words for the sake of making sound, and he compared this to the way some people try to fill a silence within their mind by immersing themselves in surface noise, material distractions in most cases, because of that terrifying quiet. 'So then they will have all these things', he reasoned, 'but then they will not hear the sounds that matter'. 

o. by the taatta river at the rest stop between taatta and churapcha uluses, june 2011

I try not to listen to criticisms of what I do -- the endless questioning of what I am going to DO with a PhD now, of accusations of the ivory-tower cloisteredness -- because I do believe that understanding how people speak can tell us a lot. And it sounds simplistic, but I do often retort to those who insinuate my work is useless that they should think about how we might accomplish things (you know, building fancy bridges or cars or being lawyers, etc, all the valued professions that deal with money, and basically anything at all) if we did not possess linguistic abilities. So, you know, it might be a good idea to understand what communicating in certain ways might mean to people, yes? I am not trying to say that being a researcher and teacher of/about communicative practices is better or more noble than anything else, but I am indeed saying that it's just as essential as any of these other jobs. That's all.

cows and horses grazing by the side of the kolyma road, tüngülü, menge-khangalas ulus, june 2011

Saaska said, 'I like what you do,' meaning me and his cousin, my supervisor, as anthropologists, 'because your job is to listen to stories, to socialize and converse, yes, but always to listen'. And I don't deny that it's always nice to hear that about your chosen profession, but it strikes me particularly because those words really served as a reminder to me of the dialogic aspect of language, of again, how the analysis of language as interlocking syntactic systems is nothing really until you consider it in relation to other parts of that system; how existence itself is dialogue. I learned during fieldwork how the old pre-Russian-contact traditional Sakha greeting, kepseen! (speak!) emphasized the invitation to dialogue, to share the the sound and spirit of the words: let them fly like birds out into the spaces between us. Tyl dorghoonookh, tyl ichchileekh buolar. The word has sound, and so it has spirit -- and I will always listen.

o. waits for the ferry on the east bank of the lena river, june 2011

every single night (fiona apple)

Look! Fiona Apple made a new song, and it's about my brain.

Every single night i endure the flight
Of little whims of white flame
Butterflies in my brain
These ideas of mine percolate the mind
Trickle down the spine
Form the belly swelling to a blaze

Thats where the pain comes in
Like a second skeleton
Trying to fit beneath the skin
I can't get the feelings in

... Every single night's a fight
With my brain


This is approximately how I feel when I can't sleep, which is often lately, and usually because I am thinking too much, and am too anxious to stop thinking, etc. My hypnogogic hallucinations (transitioning from wakefulness to sleep) don't feature quite the same calibre of visual imagery; though I think being more of an aural/oral mind I get the linguistic equivalent. Often when I am really tired, and I can no longer make sense of my thoughts, I tend to experience what feels like multiple conversations going on in my head and I can't follow a single one, and usually the content is about as surreal as what's pictured here. So I appreciate the visual of the octopus on her head, because that's what it feels like, all those tentacles of twisting thought, head squeezed, too many things, unable to sleep.

I also enjoy the touch of the man-bull in the bed -- totally a minotaur in the labyrinthine brain. Best just to embrace it and hope for the best, it isn't going anywhere...

Also, isn't she lovely? That voice! The clever orchestrations, and turns of phrase. Someone I listened to in high school, who I can listen to without cringing...

because.

My dad, in Kananaskis, June 2009

“…I search desperately to find the obvious meaning…” 

– July 24^th entry from Barthes’ Mourning Diary.

i.

My dad’s sense of humour was (or perhaps is? Does your particular brand of amusement as a genre die with you?) always a bit weird. My mama often said that even after knowing him nearly 40 years, she still didn’t always know when he was joking. My mama tends to appreciate a good pun most of all, and while my dad too was fond of wordplay, most of the time he was just silly. He took great pleasure in the pure absurdity of the surrealist joke, which I remember him teaching to my sister and me when we were quite little. He told us that when he was our age, this had been quite the fad in his elementary school.

These jokes could be relatively basic, where you ask someone a known riddle-beginning, like “Why did the chicken cross the road?” But, when they give the assumed, predictable response, or tell you they don’t know, you say something like, “No! Because elephants don’t make pancakes!” And then you cackle wildly with glee, as Caity and I would do, for a very long time When we got tired of this ‘Why…’ and ‘Because’ formula, we’d then play with the syntax, so not only were our responses non-sequiturs, but our phrasing rather idiosyncratic:

Q: What is the difference between a camel and a pie? (etc.)

A: Fish pee in a lake! (and so forth…)

These jokes came to resemble ridiculous parodies of koans; we’d say each word very slowly and with great gravity, partially because we were just making things up as we went along, and also because we were trying not to laugh, and also because it was funnier that way.

When I was a bit older, my dad and I would go on long drives to the mountains to hike and camp. On these journeys, I’d inevitably be reading, and from time to time I would tell him interesting tidbits of information that came up in a book, or things I’d think of while looking at the scenery. We were both quite content with silence, or with music in the background, so often these little snippets of fact came out of nowhere (or out of something I said hours earlier), often leading to hilarity.

For example, at one point, we have a conversation about what the difference is (in English) between legumes and other vegetables. 100km later I remark, seeing a field of clover: ‘Did you know that clover is a legume?’

These sorts of random remarks then became new go-to phrases for surrealist-joke punchlines.

Aside from his surrealist jokes, my dad also had a repertoire of about three otherjokes, which he’d often repeat to us, over and over again. ‘Did I ever tell you the one about the—‘ ‘Yes!’ These jokes then became monstrosities, compound variations that were basically a series of intertextual references of joke fragments.

The purpose was not to understand them at all, of course, but simply to delight in one that was particularly well-timed and reached new possibilities of ridiculousness in the remixing of the standard elements. My favourite trick was to pretend to begin asking something serious:

‘Dad?’

‘Yeah?’

‘I was wondering if I could ask you a question?’

‘Sure, of course!’

‘What did the bicycle with egg on his face say to the little boy as he rode around the block on the horse?’

This could go on for entire trips, until he finally got weary of my persistence and made threats about making me ski the rest of the way to the mountains, or walk back home. I’m not always good at letting it go.

ii. 

I mention these jokes not because they are funny outside of the context, or the moment, outside of what we shared, but because summer is coming and I am filled with such yearning and swallowed-stone sadness for our fishing and hiking trips, that I sometimes feel like I am going to choke, what I wouldn’t do to be able to go again, I can’t even articulate. I can’t.

Because it’s getting harder to deal with, because time does not soften grief, but sharpens it with the edges of his absence; time pulls at me, slowly unravelling the realization that this is real, that I am truly not inhabiting an alternate timeline. Because I feel nauseous sometimes with the vertigo of that understanding, and because sometimes when I am up awake, unable to sleep, my mind is plaintive, I am such a child again, with the persistent and infinite ‘why’, trying to make sense of this: Why is he not here?

Because when I am faced with this, I tell myself that perhaps many things work as the smallest atoms do; on the broader scale, there are causes for things, but the smaller things get the more a-causal everything becomes. An element may have an established half-life, but it is utterly unpredictable when an individual atom will decay.

Because perhaps when you ask why your father died as he did, the best answer you can even hope for is something along the lines of ‘because elephants don’t make pancakes’, and then you can laugh so as not to weep.

scottish sunshine, pt. 1

Seaton Park along the Don, Aberdeen, mid-May, illuminated beech and maple leaves, sweet cicely, river run, small creatures, and such light! 

on solaris: the ocean, the other

1. Every time I am down by the ocean, the nearby North Sea, I think about Solaris. This might not be an obvious connection, I suppose, but I've been mulling it over a lot since I came back to live by the sea, and I think I can trace all the threads, now. 


Since I never grew up around the ocean, it is still especially mystifying to me. I am still learning about tides, the ebbs and flows, the surging and sucking pull of the moon. Still learning to recognize the lapping patterns of waves on the sand, the coal-black yet shiny mica rippling up, the wind- and wave-tossed pebbles piling in ribbons stringing the shore. I watch the birds interact with the water, shaking feathers in the surf, watching dunlins and sanderlings scurry back and forth, out and in, mirroring the crash and flow of the waves. 


When the tide is high, the white crests riding and the sun is burning out silver patches into the horizon, there is a certain ominousness there, out on the bay. Not frightening, but there is something immensely grand about it, that leaves a lingering reminder that this is something too vast, too physically and metaphorically deep to grasp or understand. The sea becomes something cerebral, and I mean that literally -- it seems as if it is a vast mind, a brain, in its opacity. Speculating about the expanse and its nature is much like attempting to think about your own consciousness; I feel the same nausea sometimes, with it, a true sea-sickness, similar to that I get when I ponder the whys and wherefores of the universe, or the intangible aspects of the process of death. 

We like to think the sea is predictable, too, mapping and measuring the tides, for example, and publishing tables, etc, sending out submarines to survey its topology, model the trenches and abysses, the underwater mountain ranges and depressions, and the depth of the water that fills and covers them.


 But there is only generality, there only ever can be. We might think we know where the waves will reach, what the water will do -- but every wave itself is utterly unpredictable, a constant singularity forming and reforming in the midst of infinite pluralities, that never-the-same ever-the-sameness. And it is like a mind, every wave like a flicker of consciousness, flowing, breaking, reconnecting. 



When I was very young, I think I was under the strong impression that water was alive. Why else would we talk about 'running water'? Water in lakes, I supposed, was just resting for a while. Sleeping, perhaps. When I learned about languages that classified rivers as animate and lakes as inanimate nouns, I remembered my early belief, and realized I still hold something of that conception. I think of how I interact with ocean, when I am there wandering along the very edge, and the waves are frothing in, long rippling arcs of foam spreading over the smoothing of the sand -- I think of the unexpected waves that seem to reach farther in, reaching out to touch my feet, grasp at me, at the little twig-legs of the frantic sandpipers, the small wavelets rushing in to meet me, it seems, as I pass by. 


And it is this moment of contact, between myself and this great ocean, this unknowable mass, that makes me think of Solaris. 

2. So when I talk about Solaris, I am mostly thinking about the book by Stanislaw Lem, and its planet that is a lifeform, alive and sentient, covered with an ocean that seems to be breathing, acting, reacting, thinking. Like the ocean that seems to surge close to me as I walk along, washing my boots in the waves, Solaris sends out 'mimoids' and other strange shapes and forms, in attempt to communicate with the scientists who are poking and prodding it with x-rays and all manner of instrument, trying to understand something utterly non-human and thoroughly unintelligible.


And when I talk about Solaris, I am of course also thinking about the film by Tarkovsky (not Soderbergh! Don't even pay attention to that!), even though Lem wasn't completely pleased by that attempt at interpreting his work, and parts of it I feel are horribly melodramatic -- but nevertheless, this fan-made film trailer for Tarkovsky's Solaris is actually quite beautiful and gives decent sense of what we are dealing with, here.



So -- Kris Kelvin, a psychologist, travels to a space station orbiting the planet Solaris to investigate some troubling reports that recently came to light, as scientists studying the planet -- a sentient being -- seem to have caused some great disturbances in their attempts to communicate. 


Like the uncertainty principle of quantum physics, in which studying subatomic particles essentially affects the subatomic particles themselves, communicating with Solaris affects the planet itself. (How do you separate the observer from the observed? I don't think you can, especially not here.)


And then as Kelvin starts to settle onto the station, puzzled by the other scientists' allusions to the 'constructs' and the 'visitors', he is visited by his wife, Hari, who died ten years previously. She committed suicide after he left here. And now here she is, not quite aware of who or what she is, either. No one really knows. 

3. Not long after my Dad passed away at the end of last August, I had a number of different dreams, in which he appeared in different forms. Most of them were not traumatic dreams, though some of them did involve repeated dyings. The most disturbing of all, however, was one in which I saw a person identical to my father walking through a great wave of people. 


The crowd thinned as we approached each other, and I opened my mouth to speak, smile, but when I looked at him, he didn't see me. He couldn't see me at all, perhaps he couldn't see anyone. This image of my Dad, exactly as he had been, grey sweatsuit and feathery hair, just as he was the day he left home for the hospital for the last time, floated past without acknowledging my presence. He just kept walking, eyes unseeing of me. I tried to reach out, and received nothing. The residue of this dream ached for days. 


The dead returning to us in their human form is of course a common and terrible wish -- something perhaps we yearn for even as it terrifies us, because we know it will never, ever suffice, it can only distort. And perhaps we know that even if possible, there would be no great revelation, maybe not even recognition; Hari certainly can't provide anything for Kris. 


"I hoped for nothing. And yet I lived in expectation. Since she had gone, that was all that remained" (Lem, in Solaris, p. 204, trans. by Kilmartin and Cox).


For me, it was as if this dream was illuminating a great rift, the space between those living and those passed on in our daily lives, that there something so unknowable and incomprehensible, things we just cannot grasp with our mind's little hands, even if we try to make them as fluid and flexible as the surface of Solaris.

4. There is a lot I could say about Solaris. There are even quite obvious parallels to doing anthropology and fieldwork that I suppose I will write about sometime. But right now my thoughts are about the self, and connection, and communication, and how we aspire to understand ourselves through the Other.


In a key scene, which you should watch here, Dr. Snaut has Kris Kelvin read from Don Quixote. A little later on, Snaut denounces science (and its professed aims of exploration and understanding of other life forms) as useless here.


"We have no interest in conquering any cosmos" he proclaims. "We want to extend the earth to the borders of the cosmos. We don't know what to do with other worlds. We don't need other worlds. We need a mirror. We struggle for contact, but we'll never find it [...] Man needs man".


As Lem apparently once said about his Solaris ocean, 'I only wanted to create a vision of a human encounter with something that certainly exists, in a mighty manner perhaps, but cannot be reduced to human concepts, ideas or images'. And so here, they are trying so hard to communicate with Solaris, and Solaris is attempting to reply, sending them these visions, these simulacra, more mysterious unknowable forms -- it is indeed acting like a mirror, sending people manifestations of memories they try to control, forcing them to face people and circumstances they might prefer to keep hidden, that they strive to suppress. These are the words it uses to communicate, by showing the characters parts, elements of memory, that are of themselves. 

Solaris is not only about the limits of our abilities to understand things that are alien, non-anthropomorphic, that are not-us, that are so wholly Other -- but that we are never really looking for the Other. In the other, we only want to understand ourselves, our own lives as humans, both on a collective and individual level. And we always look to others. We move into that between-ness -- as Levinas noted, 'between-ness functions as the fundamental category of being' -- and we seek ourselves.


The simulacra are not of Solaris, they reveal nothing of Solaris except that perhaps it, too, is trying to understand itself through its encounter with the humans. By isolating memories that are painful, strong, and evoke emotion, is it trying to illuminate its own nature? Or is that supposedly foreign ocean just a repository of all our memories, the things we cannot understand, the truly un-fathomable?

Like death, like the ocean, Solaris is the ultimate Other. It attempts to 'offer that world to another' (Levinas) through its alien speech, attempting to communicate through these strange resurrections,invocations of the humans' memories that they, unconsciously, have offered to the planet. 


So many summations of Solaris, both book and film, always state that it's all about something like the 'inadequacy of communication between humans and non-humans', but I think it goes further than that. The futility of communication between humans and Solaris is telling, yes, but it is just another simulacrum, that pair, for human-human attempts. We can never really understand another mind, human or non, perhaps. We will never know all of the ocean, ever, just as we will never know all of another human's mind, no matter how close. But we will always try, and we need to do this. It's the only reason we exist. 

all photos taken in late February, early March 2012, Aberdeen City Beach.

*

nesting

Nest amongst willow and kalyna, lower Riverlot, late October 2011

Last autumn, when the leaves fell, I began to collect nests. Amongst the bare bones of the birches and aspens, and nestled in the elbows of the high-bush cranberry bushes at Riverlot, abandoned homes became visible and I documented them all.

 Fallen nest, upper Riverlot, December 2011

Some had fallen onto the snow in the windstorms, small dried slivers of grass in the hatchings unraveling, revealing how the spaces had been insulated with moss and tufts of fuzz. 

Wind-fallen nest (same as above), upper Riverlot, December 2011

It looks tragic, but not all birds ever return to their old nests; some, who lay two batches of nestlings each summer even build separate creches for each group. Most grown birds (those that do not build inside holes) do not shelter or sleep in them, either. They are just small refuges for the flightless young ones, until their wings are strong enough.

Magpie's nest, upper Riverlot, early October 2011

All the magpies here have been busy for  the last month, scurrying around selecting twigs for their new hutches, which take weeks to construct and often involve multiple stories. But they too will use these homes only once; they may nest again nearby, however, and dismantle their old nests, selecting the best bits for prized parts in their new nooks.

Magpies made a hoop-like nook at upper Riverlot, early October 2011

If a nest remains un-recycled, sometimes other species of birds who don't seem to fancy the construction process will select one that has remained intact, often for a season or two, proving its safety and durability.


(Thinking of these nests, I think of my own life over the past three years, never living anywhere for more than a year, and generally less than. 9 months in Scotland, 3 in Alberta, 10 months in Yakutia, 6 in Alberta, another 4 in Scotland, with so many flights back and forth in between. I am more than migratory...)

Another cranberry nest, upper Riverlot, early October 2011

No one is really sure why birds tend to not return, even those that stay the winters, preferring instead to reconstruct and deconstruct, an endless process of nesting and re-nesting. Even the passerines, the perching birds, are not still for long. Most of their lives are movement, settling and sleeping are just small blinks, flutters of the eye in the path of a long flight.

(Dipper's?) nest in the rockledges at Grotto Canyon, near Canmore, early January 2012

I like to think that perhaps they are just better at cultivating and making peace with impermanence, mindfully hastening the change. Each carefully placed twig and tuft is like the pouring of sand into a mandala that is never meant to last; whether it is the wind or hand or claw that sweeps it away, shakes out their wings, and flies on.

adrienne rich.

                              

Adrienne Rich. (Source: The Poetry Foundation)

Adrienne Rich, source of this blog's title inspiration, and a poetic influence of mine, passed away a few weeks ago (March 27, 2012). Since then, I've been thinking about her often, at first only as she was a favourite author, but then because I was recently confronted with news about her support for a trans-exclusionary radical feminist.

I haven't always found myself in agreement with her ideologically, especially when her conceptions of feminism and sexuality got a bit too essentialist for me. And perhaps I should have suspected that she might well  follow that essentialism a little too far off the path into a pool of bigotry, but I was still shocked when I discovered that she--someone who confronted the overlap between sexism, classism, and racism and thus seemed to support an early intersectionalist incarnation of feminism--could support transphobic radical feminists.

The incriminating quote that is circulating the internet can be read about here; in short, Rich seems to have been quite profoundly involved the process of Janice Raymond's book 'The Transsexual Empire'. I've not read anything by Raymond, but if you scroll down in that Wiki article you'll see some pretty sickening quotes in that book. Her book, as I've learned, has had a lot of destructive impact on the way trans* women are treated in the world, its arguments used as a basis to justify countless theories as well as directly exclusionary policies that seriously diminished the well-being (physically, mentally and emotionally) of many trans* individuals. And this is simply unacceptable to me. 

I can't seem to find any evidence that Rich ever spoke about her involvement with Raymond's book. It baffles me, in some ways, because she showed in other cases that she was  never revisited these associations she had with the woman who wrote that book; she was definitely in a position to speak out and clarify her involvement, and for someone who stressed accountability and responsibility in all her writing, this upsets me. As Rafe Posey put it in this piece, "I can’t just think, “Oh, well, she was a poet, and she changed poetry, so her views on trans women are private and don’t matter.” That would be dangerous, and it would also be untrue".

 I too am disturbed that I am only discovering this now, that it is only being talked about now, because that is a reflection of the erasure of trans* women's voices, and also an indication of Rich's scholars and more dedicated readers that they thought they could just ignore this aspect of Rich's impact and not confront it, question it, or critique it. There is this implication that it 'doesn't matter' that she supported such abhorrent beliefs, because she did other supportive, proactive things. I can't do it. I can't let that slip.

Someone said to me I was being ridiculous, judgmental, even, that I couldn't just appreciate the creation without the creator.. But I can't overlook these things. I believe we are whole people, and we are accountable for all of our actions; we can't separate, bifurcate ourselves. I also believe we have a deep connection to what we create, and what we say, what we express.  Doing or saying some good things does not let the bad things slip quietly away out the back door untouched and unchallenged; we need to all personally confront those things. And she didn't do that. She was silent. And as Audre Lorde wrote, 'your silence will not protect you'. Adrienne Rich reinforced for me that poetry is a political act, and it is especially for this reason I am so disappointed in her. 

I can't repeat enough what the post on You're Welcome states: We can begin by acknowledging that it matters. All the things people say and do matter. Yes, of course we are all flawed, but what does that mean? To me, it just reminds me that we all need to confront all the messy hatred and stubborn beliefs in ourselves. 

For a woman who wrote that we must 'read and write as if our lives depended on it', it saddens me that she didn't seem to realize by her writing she was further condemning the lives of others. Where was the responsibility, the lucidity she swore herself to, in all of this?

***

I am curious to know, if anyone is reading this, how others reconcile these kinds of complexities in what people make, and the beliefs and statements they might otherwise express. I just feel sad and nauseous when I think about her now; she wrote some beautiful, powerful things, but I can't look at them in the same light any longer. This has happened before, with figures and creators that I have admired to a lesser extent, but I guess, in mourning her, I am also mourning the loss of the role of her poetry in my life. 

tennessee williams, on poetry

sign on broad hill, aberdeen, february 2012 -- part of an primary school art project challenging all the prohibitive signs in the neighbourhood. they are all very poetic in their own way.

Tennesee Williams is not really my friend at all (bit of a misogynist, that one) but I came across a quote of his recently that resonated with me, especially as I am in the midst of writing my dissertation, the process of writing an ethnography, and I am determined to produce academic writing that is inspired and creative, something full of image and life, something poetic. So this is a good reminder, because no matter what genre I am writing, I think I am a poet at my core. That is what I write, what I create.

I'm a poet. And then I put the poetry in the drama. I put it in short stories, and I put it in the plays. Poetry's poetry. It doesn't have to be called a poem, you know.

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, The Paris Review, fall 1981

haunting, part 3/3

reflection on upper grassi lake, canmore, january 2012

***

Haunting, 1/3

Haunting, 2/3

I suppose it’s the very nature of death itself that confounds me, unknowable to anyone, perhaps even as it is happening to you (and then perhaps its very nature, its essence is rendered utterly irrelevant, at the only moment it would be possible to know). And it’s really silly, because again – how can you ever really know how it feels for anyone else? Ever, about anything at all? Perhaps it hurts because it is the incomprehensibility of death mirrors the true understanding of anyone other than yourself (and even then, it can be tenuous).

A few weeks ago I sat through a seminar about Emmanuelis Levinas and how the lecturer wanted to use him in creating their new vision of anthropology; it didn’t sit well with anyone (do not tell social anthropologists that objectivity exists, e.g.) but I was happy that it reminded me about Levinas who I hadn’t really thought about in years.

Levinas wrote of our solitude of Being, and about the Other. How we can only know through the Other (in that they are a sort of mirror), the Other can never be completely known. We do the best we can to comprehend other beings; like yet like Simone Weil (another philosopher-friend of my soul) noted, every separation is a link. We come into Being and until we die (de-create) we try to reach out through that space between to understand. We do this through language, through speech, as Levinas wrote it “brings the world to the other, thereby creating a common world”. Speech is “the offering of a world to another”. I wrote in my journal last fall, in scribblings for a poem, that ‘death reveals the failures of language’; and it was such a comfort to see this feeling reflected in his words.

Our deaths are not really ours, thinks Levinas, but our consciousness comes from how we are haunted by the other’s death. And death—death makes you feel so helpless, it seems to me, because it others the Other; that is, in destroying the Other it destroys all hope of understanding. You no longer have a mirror to help you understand yourself; you no longer have your conversational partner with which to gift the world and receive a certain comprehension.

But we have to live with this, these hauntings, and by expressing, acknowledging them, I think we can free ourselves, if only partially, from these places where language, where everything we rely on to make sense of the world breaks down.