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.

well-organized thoughts.

the auriol range of the kluanes, haines junction (dakwàkàta), feb. 19/08

haines junction sunset, feb. 19/08

1. Fieldwork

I have about a week of fieldwork left now... & I just came back from a week in Haines Junction (Dakwàkàta) & I know I have lots & lots of information (& more surveys to come trickling in) but I don't know... I still find it hard to really think about my data while I'm still in the midst of gathering... I wish I could write more about my fieldwork but it's just so difficult, to be immersed in it & trying to process it at once. Sometimes my thesis feels like a branching plant that's growing at the speed of a sped-up time-lapse photograph, all these new questions springing up all along the edges, & I worry, do I have enough information? Should I pursue that? & not only is it growing, it's shifting, transforming, & maybe I have too much. Or not enough. It's hard to say. But I'm enjoying myself. Even if I can't think straight. I swear I learn more in a week in this situation than I do in a month of being in classes...

2. Grandmothers

If my Баба were still alive, she'd be 93 today. This week, sitting with the Elders in Haines Junction as they worked on sewing a traditional ground-squirrel robe, I was missing my grandmother especially much. All the ladies, with their smiles & swift hands & irreverent humour.... I felt so fortunate to be able to watch them creating this, & so nostalgic... One woman in particular reminded me of my grandma, the way she teased me, her sense of humour as she sewed the skins together, joking that the first row she made could be a 'gopher miniskirt'... I couldn't stop seeing my grandmother's hands, knitting, embroidering, & her hands themselves -- skin gone soft & olive-coloured, paper-birch with aching gnarls. I look study my own hands -- all wind-chapped, now -- & wish I could show her the Athapaskan-style beadwork I've been doing... Is she there? Sometimes I feel like I have assimilated so much of her, her memory... I feel her most strongly whenever I am making something with my hands... Other times there is still that overwhelming faraway...

3. Language/Land

Southern Tutchone country is called 'dasi keyi' dän k'e -- my grandfather's country, or occasionally 'dasu keyi' -- my grandmother's country. This makes me feel the need to go with my mother to Nebyliv, to my own grandmother's village in Ukraine, take her ashes there, as soon as we can. But when?

4. Birds & Dreams

It is just a coincidental quirk of the language, but it makes me very happy that the words for 'my grandmother' & 'my bird' are nearly phonetically identical in Southern Tutchone.

In my dream last night there was a barn owl calling in a tree. I was drawn to it, but then the owl's eyes glowed red (like a mothman, eep) & so I got out of there rather quickly. Then in another part of the dream I was reading a book, & then became the character in it. In the front yard of the house where I grew up there were three birds in a tree... one was a meadowlark, the other two I wasn't sure. I tried to get closer to them, & then they turned into girls, their wings becoming long long hair & I had to braid the meadowlark's black hair.

5. Quietness.

On the drive home from Haines Junction in the middle of the night, the post-ecliptic moon was full & clear. The massive snowdrift mountains were all visible, & the road was lined with the charcoal-smudge shadows of bluish highway pines. Only two cars passed in two hours... the only other creatures were restless elk milling about the Takhini valley, & there was just such a stillness, a quiet bowl of earth under this silvery scraggly-clouded sky, sometimes frozen, sometimes flowing, everything bright & soundless & still. Often such quiet feels so delicate, so ephemeral, but this was overwhelming, immovable, felt like it could not end. Feeling my own smallness swallowed up in such immensity is so lovely; I find that feeling held by the land so wholly can sometimes be more deeply comforting than human touch.

frostfingers

redpoll finches nibbling on old seeds, by the river, whitehorse, feb. 8/08.

frost on weeping birch, whitehorse, feb.8/08.

Friday it was -45 C & I was having a difficult day anyway, but the sky was so blueblueblue... & I had to walk outside, I had to take off my mittens & take photos of the little puffed-up redpoll finches nibbling on the aspens & the frost on the weeping birch... all against that blue, sun-infused blue of the sky & the long grey-blue shadows of noon-light stretching all over the snow...

& I was feeling discouraged with my research progress that day, but at the same time I really knew there wasn't anywhere I'd rather be, anything I'd rather be working on,

& the wind coming off the river left my bare fingers burning, but that was worth it too.

constructions of possession

Mt. Sima framed in frosty trees, sunset, Whitehorse, Feb. 2.

Sunset with Mt. Sima in the distance, looking over the frozen Tagà Shäw (Yukon River) with all the ice fog-riverbreath, Whitehorse, Feb. 2/08

A friend who teaches the Southern Tutchone language told me something he really loved about the language was the way in which you would express the sentence 'I have a girlfriend' (or boyfriend) -- Äghajel (Däk'än) ye kanid'a = 'I am walking around with her (him)' (lit. a woman or man)

It's such a lovely image, walking around with someone. None of this possession business, that I have, my this/my that/mine.... just accompanied movement... a togetherness.

there where you have landed --

bright shadows on midday snow, ridge above lu zel män (fish lake), yukon, jan.27/08.

from a ridge where we snowshoed, above lu zel män, yukon, jan. 27/08.

From an Atlas of the Difficult World -- Adrienne Rich

I know you are reading this poem

late, before leaving your office

of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window

in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet

long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem

standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean

on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven

across the plains' enormous spaces around you.

I know you are reading this poem

in a room where too much has happened for you to bear

where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed

and the open valise speaks of flight

but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem

as the underground train loses momentum and before running

up the stairs

toward a new kind of love

your life has never allowed.

I know you are reading this poem by the light

of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide

while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.

I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room

of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.

I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light

in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,

count themselves out, at too early an age. I know

you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick

lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on

because even the alphabet is precious.

I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove

warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in yourhand

because life is short and you too are thirsty.

I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language

guessing at some words while others keep you reading

and I want to know which words they are.

I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn

between bitterness and hope

turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.

I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else

left to read

there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

animal mother & crow.

arctic maidenhair, banks of the tagà shäw (yukon river), late october 2007

looking over kwanlin (whitehorse) & the tagà shäw from the trail to long lake

* * *

Those are just two of the six million other pictures that I took while in the Yukon this past autumn but still have not yet posted... I am returning in just eight days, now, for the second part of my fieldwork & despite the fact I still have another six million little things to do before I leave, I am very, very excited. I'm so grateful for the opportunity to go up again... & I miss the people -- I miss interviewing & asking questions & photographing & filming (so tired of being chained to a computer), I miss learning the language from actual speakers (not tapes), -- & I miss the land terribly...

I felt so at home there so quickly, much more so than I have ever felt in any other place in such a brief time, really. There is something about the northern boreal & plateau that just swallows you up, engulfs you, makes you feel as if you are just as vast.... this feeling struck me swiftly, & still remains with me, even now.

* * *

(poem fragment)

animal mother, she speaks dän k’e
sibilants that carve riverine & gentle,
like a herd breathing over the land,
cool spreading stream of the tagà shäw
singing over rocks, down the valley
from the marshy glacial lake in the sky

crow carries a voice, bubbling
up sulphury, call hollow as a cave,
blue ice & a spirally sinuous consonance
rolling over the land’s knobby vertebrae, his
wings smoothing out her tired back.

animal mother, her rich arms of a mountain,
cradling you even in the crumbling loneliness
is the land that swallows you whole
takes you away from the white silences
singing owl-lullabies

lets you burst through the goat-fleece sky
like a rose-hip, bitten-lip thorns along the silty cliff
with rivers of aspens shaking copper into spring
& the strangest kind of understanding
of this tongue you’ve not yet heard

* * *

'Animal mother', as her name suggests, created a number of important animals in Southern Yukon traditional stories... a number of the stories are told by angela sidney in 'life lived like a story' by julie cruikshank, a book I highly recommend... it was one of the prominent things inspiring me to focus on a Yukon Athapaskan language for my MA. the way it frames the life histories of three Southern Yukon women is deeply respectful & compelling. The way it presents the traditional narratives embedded in these women's stories reveals so much about local understandings of place, history, belonging & the transmission of knowledge.

long quiet highway (or, zen & the art of crying)

flowerhead in the snow, river valley trails, late november 2007

more flowerheads, river valley trails, nov.07

* * *

I actually made resolutions this new year; this is a rare occurrence, mostly because my natural new year's rhythm seems to fall on one level in September at the beginning of the academic year, & on another level in the springtime, in late March, when everything's melting... so it's always seemed odd to me to have a new year in the middle of winter, when my resolve for a lot of things tends to be hibernating. Nevertheless, I made resolutions, one of which is to

*read more books that have nothing to do with my thesis!

This is not to say that I don't really enjoy thesis-reading, because I do, & I read a lot of books that are only tangentially related on various linguistic anthropology things & the like. But I need to remember to branch out a little more. I have quite the list picked out, and I am excited to lose myself in something other than Language and Symbolic Power for awhile.

This afternoon I finished reading 'Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America' by Natalie Goldberg... which was part memoir, part 'Zen & the Art-of-just-sitting-down-and-writing'... I've never read any of her other books about writing (like 'Writing Down the Bones') in which she specifically discusses writing practice as a form of Zen practice (akin to zazen, or sitting meditation) but I found what she spoke of to be compelling and refreshing, as well as comforting in the strangest way. She is such an unpretentious writer, & she writes of the littlest details in a way that does not try to make them into BIG SYMBOLIC THINGS, but just presents them as they are, important and profound in and of themselves. Here she tells of a moment she experienced whilst teaching a grade six class in Taos, New Mexico.

"I stood up in the middle of 'Please, please, be quiet' and suddenly stopped. The place where my chest was sore -- it was opening, opening, red and enormous like a great peony, and it was radiating through my body. I felt the blood flowing in my hands and legs. I turned and looked out the winfow. I looked at the smoky appearance of the spring cottonwoods near the parking lot. Any day now they would break into leaf. There was a spindly Russian olive near our window. Suddenly it looked beautiful. Then I had one simple vision: I saw myself wandering in autumn fields and I felt that nothing, nothing else was important..." (Natalie Goldberg, in 'Long Quiet Highway', p.58-59)

* * *

A strange thing happened today while I was reading. I started crying about three-quarters of the way through the book, not because it was particularily sad, or intense... I can't even identify a page or a line that catalysed it... it was just strangely moving in its simplicity, so much so that before I was really cognizant what was going on, I was sitting at my kitchen table, weeping, and I couldn't stop. Not of sadness, or anything in particular. Just crying for the sake of crying, and it felt surprisingly good. I wasn't even terribly alarmed, I wasn't worried, wasn't wondering if I was going crazy, wasn't even trying to pin down my weeping on a reason. I just sat there, content in the stripes of late-afternoon sun coming through the red venetian blinds, crying until I was finished crying. & then I felt tired, & a bit strange, but oddly refreshed, like I'd just run very hard in the cold. & I am not really sure what to make of this, I know I'll read the book again & probably be able to discern what brought on this profound bout of tears, but right now it just seems a very fitting reaction, for a book about writing, & living: the importance of the unanalysed, the momentary being-not-thinking of Zen.

poems from edge of the earth

dusk at the field at the edge of the earth, november 2007

the edge of the earth, nov.2007

old wheat stalks... looking a bit like underwater corals or fronds of some sort... nov.2007

high-bush cranberries in the forest by the field at the edge of the earth, nov.2007

* * *

poems in various states of poem-finishedness, out to get some air... i've also written about the edge of the earth here, back in january 2006 when i first discovered it... (see very bottom of page)


i)

down beyond the last of the houses
where suburbia bleeds out
its last paved streets we found
the field at the edge of the earth.

over the rise, the trampled wheatstalks
waving again pure, treeless sky,
there is no curving horizon to remind you
of the earth as an oblate spheroid,

no geographers to remind you
that there is no abyss, just another dip,
remnant of an ancient riverbank
swimming in yellow skeletons of rye.

we just found the field that
snowless december, funeral-weary &
wandering in the woods not knowing
whether we escaped ghosts or

sought them. tried to feel a quiet
hand in the ice-fog settling, dancing
on the earth that held them, held
us in its dizzying spherical waves,

snapped pictures of our fuzzy forms
whirling in the frost, running up over
the illusory slope until we felt them,
there, on the periphery of our breathing,

in the suggestions of our flurried movements,
the bend of the tired grass spines,
creeping up on the hill’s rim
our sparse tears, the fingers of the wind --


ii)

at the edge of the earth
lie the bleached skeletons of wheat,
still spines curving under sleep-weight,
blue smoke of winter;

deep underneath,
my ancestors dream seeds:

from those tightly curled embryos
they arise and fly as skeins of geese
unravelling, a living memory
in that ragged purl of a v,

a migrant blanket
moving over cloud-gates &
continents, pulling us over
the edge of the earth –


iii)

at the edge of the earth
i lie fallow at dusk
waking & wondering
what holds me here?

born here i was made
of this dust, mixed with
star & pulsar, consumed it
& consuming, water & soil:

a river breathing ice
on its edges, my baba
with handfuls of that dark
matter, nodding at the mass

in her hands as we
planted, & i still sow her
carrots & poppies, wondering
what holds me here

when those i love are scattering,
slowly shifting in their orbits,
in distance, til our fingers can’t touch,
in words, til soon we’re unintelligible –

when i rise there are deer
dashing over the crooked fences,
whiteflag tails trace a camera-flash
of their paths over the night fields,

never looking back as they
run leaping, spreading themselves
wide over
the edge of the earth –

it's a new year and i'm glad to be here, so let's sing...

the shores of chain lake, north of athabasca

(blistery sun, north of athabasca)


I can’t sleep when I think about the times we’re living in, / I can’t sleep when I think about the future I was born into (...) / And the pain that we left at the station will stay in a jar behind us. / We can pickle the pain into blue ribbon winners at county contests.
('2080', Yeasayer)

* * *

Let’s play this one out, until it explodes / Into a thousand tiny pieces / What’s the story universe /You are melody in numbers / You were shapes you were rhythms /There are signs that we can learn / Place over the heavens / To predict how long we’ll burn /How long will I last? (...)
('Thousand Tiny Pieces', Sean Hayes)



* * *



Happy New Year! з Новим Роком! That is really all for now...



Here are some songs I find appealing... (lyrics above). I feel exactly like both of them at once.





2080 (mp3) -- Yeasayer (All Hour Cymbals)



Thousand Tiny Pieces (mp3) -- Be Good Tanyas (Hello Love)



(Also, both of these CDS are lovely & most definitely worthy of purchase, in case you are wondering)

in quietness, & time

ashberries, hanging in the river valley (taken a few weeks ago)
(ice lilies freezing up on the north saskatchewan, taken a few weeks ago)

Something I've been thinking about a lot lately is those moments where everything seems to fall into place & you know that what you are doing right then is exactly what you are supposed to be doing... those moments when everything is flowing, & you don't even really understand why, or how, it all got this way, because maybe there were a lot of tumultous or troublesome things, or even just the most subtle, unnoticable things... but somehow, you got here & you know you are exactly where you are supposed to be, doing exactly what it is you know you should do.

It's about feeling synchronous & connected, because so many things had to come together, an infinite number of things, really, for this to all fall into place. & I suppose this is really how I understand fate, or destiny -- it's not predestination, not a predetermination, as such, but just an understanding of how everything is unified, and connected. & those moments where you know, you feel a sense of visceral connection, are like little enlightenments (as in Buddhism -- being able to see the entire intricate infinitesimal web of things, all at once).

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in Letters to a Young Poet:

'Destiny itself is like a wonderful wide tapestry in which every thread is guided by an unspeakably tender hand, placed beside another thread, and held and carried by a hundred others'

I don't think that tender hand comes from anything outside of ourselves -- we are the ones who guide ourselves (as much as we are ever ourselves, as part of something greater than us) & weave ourselves in alongside so many other threads... & I just find myself constantly comforted when I experience those clear moments where I realize where I am right now amidst those nets of connections, & those inexpressible little pulls & tugs on the web that ground me, reassure me that I am doing exactly what I should, right here, right now.

Palaces and stormclouds
The rough straggly sage and the smoke
And the way it will all come together
In quietness, and in time...

-- Joanna Newsom, 'En Galop'

you do not have to be good.

(top: geese flying south over the sturgeon river, mid-november. bottom: sturgeon river half-frozen, sunset)

* * *

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

~Mary Oliver

* * *

This is really very lovely... I can't believe I didn't know much of Mary Oliver's poetry before. It is so honest & comforting... I especially like: You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

chickadees and cars

this kind of light is sustenance.



walking in the cold a few days ago, i recorded some of the soundscapes i moved through --



chickadees & cars



the delicious muffled creaking of the snow, squirrels



as i walked by the river, singing to myself



i tried to get the ice lilies crunching on the river, & the sound of a magpie flying over ahead (wings flapping like the soft shake of a pillowcase) but they were too subtle, too ephemeral, too far away...

grandmother-salmon

(at tthe yanlin -- canyon creek -- off the alaska hwy, southern tutchone country, yukon, sept.07)

When I was doing my fieldwork, I would often start to feel completely overwhelmed -- drowning in so much rich and substantial information that I wasn't even sure what I was submersed in anymore -- there was just so much to take in. Something that always reassured me, though, something would always appear to remind me that yes, in the midst of all of this, there is sense, and unity...

Slowly I am piecing everything together, of course, and coming up with more and more fine-tuned questions. & it never fails to inspire me, hearten me, when I hear these stories, these little things that remind me I am on the right track:

the tightlywoven sense of community, the love for the language, & the bonds, experiences with language shared between children and their grandparents, especially their grandmothers --

(little themes that are mirrored in my own experiences, these resonant threads that keep surfacing boldly throughout my own life with such cohesion...)

& i marvel so gratefully at all of this! what i have been able to experience, what has been shared with me... so many people taught me so much, & i just want to give back, and give back.

mostly i just know she's there, with me, watching me.

(щиро дякую)

* * *

grandmother salmon (notes for a poem, not yet done, etc)

"They say when the fish go up the river their great-great grandmother is at the head of the creek. And that's why they go up to visit the great-great grandmother, that fish. They come back to the same place."

-- Elder Kitty Smith.

(i hear my teachers saying i hope
my grandchildren come speaking to me
dän k’e)

& i am listening to äsua annie ned
in my headphones, & wishing
she was alive so I could meet her
but she’s that salmon grandmother
now, waiting at the head

of the river, maybe she’s sitting there,
beading slippers while she talks to
my own knitting grandmother, who’s
singing 'kazalo divchatko'
while annie whispers her fish-sounds

conversing with silt, slipping into
a dream, waiting for the summer
when her children’s children's children
will leave school, come swimming upstream
she’ll hear their th’ tl’ ch’! & the bubbling ɬ

they’ll say dännch’e, äsua? &
she’ll smile through the swells,
strengthening, äshea! nigha shäw nithan!
for finally her words have returned
to her, finally all of them will speak –

oh, don't bend the branches, i am grieving...

(I know I've posted this picture before, but it is one of my very favourites of my grandma, Anne Pechanec / моя баба Анна М. Пехник.

February 22, 1915 - November 26, 2005 / 22ого Лютого 1915 - 26ого Листопада 2005)

* * *

It's been two years; still understanding how someone can be here & not here all at once, how I can still feel wholly suffused with their presence & their being (in thoughts & dreams & birds & trees & my mother & my heart, myself) & yet still miss them, still ache.



Ta j vylitala halka, oy, z hliboko yarka

oy, vylitala druha z zelenoho luha...



Ta j sila-vpala halka, oy na zelenij sosni

ta j na zelenij sosni, na hiltsi rozkishnij...



Oy, ne khylijsja hilko, oy, bo tak meni hirko

ne khylijs' na more, oy, bo tak meni hore...

-- ukraïns'ka narodna pisnya.

* * *

and the jackdaw flew off, from the deep little ravine
& another flew away from the meadow

and the jackdaw alit and tumbled from the top of the green pine-tree,
on the top of the pine, luxurious branches of a wedding-tree,

oh, don't bend the branches, i am grieving...
oh, don't bend towards the sea, i am too full of sorrow...

-- ukrainian folk song

'dark bird' performed here (click to get mp3 from yousendit) by alexis kochan & paris to kyiv

* * *

comfort language part two

rosehip & sagewort, on the rocks at tthe yanlin ('water flowing through the rocks'), southern tutchone country, yukon, sept. 29/07

last autumn flower, tthe yanlin, s.t. country, yukon, sept.29/07

comfort language, part two (draft)


three days before her death
my baba spoke her last;

she sang after me,
repeating the words of a
folk song i was coaxing out
of her, trying to see if she
remembered, if she still
flickered beneath the slow
breathing & candle-ash sighs –

the erosion of english
had left her old tongue
emerging on the surface, like
the colours on a pysanka
after the wax slowly melts
away –

o kazalo divchatko
moje holubiatko!

her head on the pillow,
& she was smiling.

how the softest needles
embroidered those words,
the timbre of her voice
cross-stitched across a pillowcase
into my head –

scho virno kokhaje mene!

how she is still singing
those words now, over and over
& maybe

this can finally let us all
rest.

in support of linguistic diversity, & multilingualism.

Naalen ('water flowing around') mountain, Southern Tutchone country, Yukon. September 29, 2007.

So a long time ago, almost a year ago, I wrote some little counterpoints to this essay that... annoyed me. & mystified me... as I really couldn't quite believe the linguist who was writing it was actually saying the things he was saying (a lot of respect I had for him disappeared rather swiftly). But anyway... & I suppose I was in an argumentative mood, so I felt compelled to write responses. Then I put it away, because really I only did it for myself, to make it stop irking me, but now I just found it whilst going through some older files and I decided to post it now, because the topic of 'dying languages' has been popping up a lot lately... It is a little snarky, perhaps, but it's how I feel. & I really do think it was an irresponsible article -- there is SO much that he is overlooking! So much...

Here I have italicized quotes from him that I am addressing... Again, the full piece of his writing is here.

* * *

“Surely easier communication, while no cure-all, would be a good thing worldwide. There's a reason the Tower of Babel story is one of havoc rather than creation.”

Yes, the Babel story is one of chaos – but seeing multiplicity & diversity as chaos is but ONE of the many myths and folktales dealing with the creation of different languages. Many are quite neutral about multiple languages, or even see it as a positive solution that arose from too much fighting when everyone spoke the same language. (I personally like the image from the Gunwinggu language of Northern Australia, who speak of a Dreamtime goddess giving each of her children a language as a toy to play with, leading to their descendants speaking these diverse tongues) Regardless – it’s really narrow to look at diversity as only chaotic. Really unfortunate. I’ll return to this.

“Languages are hard to learn for adults, especially ones as different from English as Native American ones. In Pomo, the verb goes at the end of the sentence. There are sounds it's hard to make when you're not born to them. For busy people with jobs and families, how far were they ever going to be able to get mastering a language whose word for eye is ‘uyqh abe?”

I find this especially ignorant coming from a linguist who apparently speaks other languages, & should also not be forgetting the immense capacity we possess to adapt, & to learn and maintain multiple languages. Yes, it’s certainly easier when you’re under 10, perhaps, but it’s far from impossible even when you’re much older. Easier communication is certainly a goal, but it can be attained by everyone becoming multilingual, not reducing human speech to ONE language. Just because McWhorter believes that learning a language is difficult, doesn’t mean that people who do strongly value learning a certain language for whatever reason, is going to let a pharyngeal consonant or some different verb placement rules stop them? Clearly McWhorter has never been in the situation of learning a language much different from English. He severely underestimates the cultural value of language and is just repeating popular beliefs about the ‘difficulty’ of language learning. If you want to learn a language – especially if you are, for example, of a minority group like the Pomo speaking an indigenous language – you may have any number of reasons for motivation that could be sacred, ancestral, etc, that transcend the busyness of daily life. From my own recent research in the Southern Yukon, I have witnessed a number of different strategies that busy people incorporate into their daily lives to make practice a part of their routines and this too helps motivate them. (I must be sure write about this as a bigger part of my thesis!)

...Supposedly one's language determines one's cultural outlook. But a simple question shows how implausible that notion is. To wit, precisely what "cultural outlook" does English lend its speakers? Thinking about the broad heterogeneity of people using this language, it is obvious that the answer is none, and the academic literature on the topic yields little but queer little shards of faint support for the "language is culture" idea. Which brings us back to languages as, simply, languages.

This, frankly, is pretty flippant. I can't believe it, really. Is he just trying to play devil's advocate here? Firstly, it seems he hasn’t been reading much anthropological linguistics lately, as there is plenty support for the ‘language is culture’ idea (I can make a reference list quite easily!). I am no extreme linguistic determinist – I don’t think that language itself is the sole determiner of what you can think about, or how you think – but I can cite both literature & anecdotes aplenty that show how language can certain shape our thought. Anyone fully bilingual, or even having seriously studied another language, been immersed in it & conversation could tell you how they speak or write or even structure thoughts differently in their various tongues. Different vocabularies, structures do affect us. Yes, if we try, if we invent new words, coin new phrases, we can talk about anything in any language. But some languages (in both their structure and content) are designed better for talking about certain things that are culturally relevant, and that makes it very difficult to deny the reciprocal relationship between language and culture.

Maybe Inuktitut doesn't have as many words for snow as we used to think, but if you'd like to talk about seal hunting -- or caribou hunting, if you're a Northern Athapaskan, I promise its not hard to find specialized vocabulary for this. In many cases, language and traditional environmental knowledge are deeply interlinked, and many conservationists are looking to not only cultural practices but to the languages spoken by those cultural groups to better understand ecological systems -- place names are a perfect example of this -- names often encode meanings of the practices performed at a particular place. To learn these places is to better understand how to preserve the balance in that system.

(A new book has just come out, by K. David Harrison, and it discusses much of what I just alluded to --

& then his query as to what cultural outlook does English lend its speakers? Yes, it’s a vast & heterogeneous popit's called 'When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge'. I highly recommend it) ulation that speaks this language, & thus McWhorter shuts it down all straw-person-like. Really, maybe he should be asking: what cultural outlooks (PLURAL!) do the different varieties of English (PLURAL!) lend their speakers? East Indian Englishes, First Nations Englishes, all are diverse ways (PLURAL!) of speaking.

Also, if we want to look at English as a global language – for many it is a language of commerce, of business, etc. That’s definitely going to be a reciprocal force in affecting one’s cultural outlook. Languages are not simply languages. Just because most contemporary Englishes (as opposed to the power of the word in say, Old English, e.g. see Beowulf) do not lend a spiritual value and power to the act of speaking, as say, the contemporary Sakha language does, does not mean we can impress our beliefs about language on others. Languages are vessels for beliefs. To allow them to be eliminated for the sake of thinking that we’ll all communicate better is simply colonial. Thus I squirm when he says things like:

Yet the extinctions cannot be stopped, for the most part.

Yes, it can be difficult to reverse language shift, but it can be done, & will continue to be done. I don’t disagree with McWhorter when he implies that language death is natural and part of diversity. This is true. Languages do die out. No one speaks Gothic or Sogdian or Anasazi anymore. However, if people wish to stop their language (& their culture) from being wiped out but colonialism and dominant cultures and languages, they need to be supported. It is not too late, & it is not a worthless task. There will always be many people who believe that it’s natural to let even their own native tongue disappear, & many others who will devote their lives to keeping that language alive. Ideologies differ cross-culturally and within any given group from one culture. However, I feel it’s my responsibility not to contribute to another’s language death; as a linguistic anthropology student I want to ally myself with people who are working to revitalize their languages and cultures.

Maybe despite many people best efforts, 90% of our 6000-ish languages will disappear and we’ll only speak one or two someday. But it’s also a natural part of language growth that the cycle of language creation would begin again, groups splitting off creating dialects turning into languages. That wouldn’t stop. Diversity would recreate itself, in the grand scheme of things. (He should know this! He studies creoles!)

For those still uncomfortable given that this single language would be big bad English, then notice how that discomfort eases when you imagine the language being, say, Lenape.

Um, no I am not less comfortable imagining the world language being Lenape, or Edo or Kirghiz or Maori or Ukrainian. Any one of these languages being the sole human method of communication means that we lose the other nearly-6000. Simply, that disturbs me. There are different insights to be gained from different languages, different ways of speaking and communicating, & you don’t have to subscribe to some extreme version of linguistic relativity to comprehend that.

If people truly come together, then they speak a common language.

You need only look to places where people apparently speak the same language (Serbo-Croatian in Yugoslavia, English in Northern Ireland, Kinyarwanda in Rwanda) & have certainly not been creating togetherness. Truly coming together, in my mind, is learning to respect and understand diversity, not eliminating it, and this certainly includes becoming functionally multilingual.

* * *