Coyote book calling

Having moved on from an intense season of eco-art, straw-bale building, and storytelling, then capped it with a brief holiday up on the Bruce Peninsula (guest of a long-time storyteller who also manages the Bruce Peninsula Bird Sanctuary), I came back to the Big City and began the meltdown of starting to organize my massive book holdings.

Books -- those reformulated trees garnished with ink and glue -- are not, for me at least, simply household objects like pots and pans and furniture that are separate from my embodied self. It is not possible to pick up a book to catalogue it on LibraryThing without reading it and so reentering it and when reentering it, knowing that it might be the same physical item, but a completely different "river". The text is fluid, as I was reminded earlier today when I came across the copy of an article that was passed on to me by a friend who is a poet and editor from one of her friends who is a poet and editor/publisher, about the way a poetry book's organization affects the reader. The essay is "Dynamic Design: the Structure of Books of Poems" by Natasha Saje, from The Iowa Review (Fall 2005). Caught up in the significance of the phrase "how structure complicates meaning" has real bearing on my involvement with the books I gravitate towards whether they be poetry books or books about Buddhist ecology or desert landscapes. The reader enters the book as much as the words and pictures of the book enter the reader. It is a mutual process, it changes each time the book is opened to be read and the reader is open to the act of reading.

And the entire process leads to the reader writing her own book, spurred by the reading or readings.

All the above my excuse for not posting to this or my other blogs of late, since the writing that takes place has not been happening on this (or these) sites.

There is nonetheless a relevance to ecology, call it human ecology, because I eschew the word "environment": the concept of the human as somehow separate from the environment is much the same as the reader apart from the book.

More musing on this later, since I'm determined to head out to an exhibit of handmade books by the Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists Guild, at York Quay on Toronto's Harbourfront. The exhibit closes day after tomorrow, and I want to see how book artists have transformed what we so crudely call "nature" into books.

moving on . . .

"Spring clean-up" is late hereabouts, and involves not only sweeping dead beetles out of the large enclosed rear enclosed porch but also trying to organize the stacks of books and papers as well as tidying up my corner of cyberspace.

One of the books retrieved from a pile to place on a shelf of kindred nature/ecology/earth wisdom/environmental/land art books included the essay that inspired the title of this blog, which I had begun with such noble intentions three years ago and has been mostly moribund in all that time. Earlier this year my involvement in an "ecological artmaking project" at the Royal Conservatory of Music led me to set up another blog to track some of what we did over the ten-week period, culminating in performances at Earth Day and other local venues. Now that the process -- or at least my involvement with it -- has ended (it now seems), I intend to copy here, section by section, the contents of the artmaking blog, in order to refer to it and/or add comments.

Walking

My personal "landscape" project still not really begun. Inspired by reading about Hamish Fulton's walking through countryside (also John Grande's interview of him in Art Nature Dialogues) I thought of starting an individual suburban walking project. Hamish of course interested not at all in urban landscapes.

Kathleen Vaughan wrote a PhD dissertation about the walks she made in her neighbourhood with her dog. I have no dog (family allergies) and still after 22 years here do not consider this suburban enclave a "neighbourhood" in any meaningful sense, but still think a geographical scoping of this middleclass comfort zone could provide me with some grounded feeling of place. A "psychogeography" (as in e.g. Debord) as it were.

Yesterday I lit on Richard Long's site by typing in "walking as an art form", also noting one statement he makes:

"Walking itself has a cultural history, from Pilgrims to the wandering Japanese poets, the English Romantics and contemporary lon-distance walkers."

My first "textwork" would be an account of an unremarkable walk-to-get-to-places from the suburbs downtown to the Canadian Opera Company for a lecture plus DVD showing of Dialogue of the Carmelites (Strasbourg production -- thinking now if at as a tragic final walk for the nuns. . . ), then along Front St. to St. Lawrence Market, streetcar and subway hop to meet daughter for tea then via Cumberland to Bay St. subway Lost and Found in hunt for gloves lost earlier in transit, thence homeward. Noting the varieties of walking involved:

trudging: through deep drifts of new snow on yet-to-be-cleared sidewalks
hiking: up the long hill to the subway station
leaping: over puddles of slush at street corners
speed-walking: to get to the COC on time given subway delays
purposeful walking: to get to St. Lawrence Market to buy bread en route to Union Station
fatigued shuffling, including careful walking: up sloppy slippery steps from Museum stop to Wymilwood
strolling: from Bayview no. 22 bus northbound along the street of snow packed down by cars, finally reaching home towards twilight

If I were to compose a haiku for each type of walking, the experience might be artistically elevated into a haibun.

Most of the day however was devoted to time-motion walking on a map preordained by city streets and transit routes. On the beaten path, except where breaking trail through snow, and only one other set of bootprints. Should have recorded that with a camera.

On my list of books to read: Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust; Robyn Davidson's Tracks; and Thoreau on walking.

Meanwhile, in the ordinary course of the day, there is still the ordinary act of walking.

A simple glass of water

Hiatus in posting here: or: now stepping into a different river.

Strange to think of writing pieces for a web log as something apart from daily life, but the demands of the latter indeed claim priority over the state of mind required for the former.

The Heraclitean river has kept on flowing, and is an apt metaphor for what prompts me to dip my toes in again. In stimulating conversation with a woman who is a passionate activist devoted to the implementation of environmental studies in the curriculum of Ontario schools, my thoughts returned to this fledgling blog. Although it has been sitting on the shelf, what belongs here remains integral to my life but it is simply that in this life, everything is “integral”: connected, essential, downright inseparable. Right now the kitchen awaits cleaning and that in itself relates to water and its part in every action every day. I always keep a glass of water by my computer, reminding myself from time to time to take sips because this body with its major component being water, needs refreshing on a regular basis. I need water to cook, to make tea, and to clean everything from dishes to clothes and floors and body, also to give to plants even now growing indoors in the weak winter light. Each time I turn on the tap I marvel that water is readily available here, flowing pure and clear, and if need be, almost instantly hot.

Although water is a necessity of life, it is in too many parts of the word a luxury, and the lack of it in readily available potable form causes immense suffering and death.

When I sent my environmental activist friend a copy of a poem about drinking water – an eloquent, profound, simple poem – she excitedly asked for it to be posted to the list serve where she daily posts news on all manner of issues related to learning about how to green our world. I have delayed for days, not for lack of will, but because I realized that I had so much to say about water, having come across yet more writings and poems in the past week, and wanting to send off not just one poem. This poem, however, will be a beginning, a “sip” only, a slip into deeper waters.

I hope Ross Leckie won’t mind my sending out this exquisite poem from his collection, Gravity’s Plumb Line, published by Gaspereau Press in 2005. I recommend the entire book for (to quote the publisher) “his poems bring the lushness of natural abundance in contact with the process of comprehending its intricacies.” For me, his fine attention in luminous language to the dailiness of our human activities, so rooted in habit and place, expands our awareness of who we are, where we are, and what we do – even the simple act of drinking a glass of water.

A GLASS OF WATER

When you say you need water you are speaking
of the ordinary, not the fine spray of a nozzle
wisping the delicate petals in the garden,

nor the faint drizzle that is not quite fog, not quite rain.
You are likely thinking of a glass, of a liquid
sliding over that itch in your throat.

But then you notice the glass itself is water.
Its waves rippling, you can see the flow of it,
its little turbulences, its shallow remembrance

of silicon dioxide. It is, as the physicists would say,
"a supercooled liquid, rather than a true solid."
If you drop it, it sounds like an ocean against the rocks.

There is too much water, we think. We need
to take it away in drains, sewers, sluices and pipes.
But sometimes there is a thirst like a pair of scissors

cutting across the fabric of the throat. Then water
seeps into a sheet of paper and infiltrates its fibres,
gently tugging them apart and language

dissolves. It soaks the very air we breathe,
humidity as thick as a wool suit on a summer's
day. A glass of cold water has the capability

to condense droplets right out of the air.
It is so innocuous sitting there on the table.
It belongs to everyone, its sweat on a thick day

seems a sweat without work, an imaginary ease.
So many have never seen a glass of water,
they have so little of it. Will we ever hold

it in our hands again in this form of amnesia?
You forget its dribble into the future. It is the pure
source of the present, its transparent anguish.

[53] & [54] – in Ross Leckie’s Gravity’s Plumb Line, Gaspereau Press, 2005. © Ross Leckie