My usual hesitation sitting down to write something here almost lames me again: how to make a distinction between what "belongs" in writing about the environment (a word I find ever more useless) when it seems that it is inseparable from everything else that goes on in a life every day. How to separate attending to the flour moths that have invaded the bird seed then moved on to the grains stored in the kitchen to flutter throughout the house. How to converse with the driveway-paving sales guy who ignores the polite sign on the front door asking that salespeople not disturb us, who pursues his sale pitch with the cold wind chilling the house as he insists he can pave our driveway cheaply --"only $2300" [!] (after I've told him that paved driveways are undesirable for rain run-off that should not flood the sewer system) if only I sign the paper now and pay later, because after all, our house is only a "tear down" in a neighbourhood where McMonster houses are the rage. How in fact live a life that is committed to attention to "ecological issues" in a culture in which daily experiences are divorced from simply being a creature among creatures caring about our fellow-creatures' well-being?
The problem of talking about "environmental" or "ecological" issues is the aura it gives them of being somehow "out there", as if we're not all in the soup together.
There's a nearby book emporium (one of those industrial-strength chain stores with a massive footprint), the only bookstore in these far reaches, where I can go to browse the news stands for any periodicals of interest. Saturday's hunt yielded a rare copy of The Sun (January 2010) with an interview of Sandra Steingraber, "On How We've Made The Environment Dangerous To Our Health." Her next book, to be published in the spring of 2011, concerns "the ecology of childhood", saying what should be common sense: "Our food becomes us; it becomes the bodies of my children: their muscles, blood, and brain tissue." Except that even that basic knowledge seems to have been lost from the press of daily life as well as how such knowledge connects to being part of the world where the food is grown, where it comes from, who does the work of growing it, what kind of water the food absorbed, who buys it and sells it (whether water or food), what kind of food do children eat at school, what kind of food is advertised on television, and the list goes on to expand to every aspect of being alive, of being alive in this world now. Except that now, such explorations have become aspects of "environmental studies" with the weight of scientific studies and arguments and economics, with no space for an argument for joy and connection and sensual pleasure.
What my "ecology" of childhood included was the smell of laundry taken down from the clothesline; homemade bread baked in unglazed clay flour pots for the crust and the special flavour; family expeditions on Sundays to the creek where people got together to wash their cars: no soap, just buckets of water hauled up from the creek, rags for washing and rags for drying, the kids chasing gophers or at creek edge looking for tadpoles; planting potato eyes in the garden and digging little trenches for sweet pea seeds; playing baseball in a vacant lot until after sundown.
Many people have written eloquently about the possibilities for transforming our lives in small ways, and many people are restoring the simplicity of our lives. People are reading Steingraber and her informed and passionate writing, people are reading Utne Reader for the essay by David Barash's insight that "our relationship to the natural world is a Ponzi scheme" -- how we are ripping off the natural world out of greed and lust for profit. And some people may find a copy of World Pulse and its stories about women changing bit by bit the way they are transforming their lives, from political action to fair trade. All valuable pieces of writing -- but even for a writer, words are not enough, they are often "out there" and not where we live.
Where we live is in our imaginations and daydreams as well as our anxieties, and the language that addresses the limits of language -- poetry and fiction that restore connection rather than itemizing the problems we face -- can keep our internal fires alive, balance the intellectual awareness of the crisis talk about climate change, and take us out of ourselves.
More of this next time -- the mail has arrived, tea needs to be made, birds need feeding, and a few seeds to start sprouting, as well as other writing to sink into.
I want to explore the importance of language older than words -- not (just) the essential book by Derek Jensen but communication beyond the use of human language.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Thursday, January 21, 2010
birdwatching at midnight
Getting caught up on reading the blogs of others when I'm too baffed for my brain to send messages accurately to my fingers. One of the blogs I read includes a 10-second video of a redstart and, for poetry loving birders, a list of names for pigeons that Rimbaud noted when in England.
In a state of being-too-tired-to-write but not-wanting-to-go-to-bed, I decided to look on youtube for anything appealing on "birdwatching in winter" and found one filmed by someone with (probably) frozen fingers in Southern Ontario, and with music by Sigur Ros, appropriately.
Task for first light: scrub out the bird feeders, open the garage, see if the resident chipmunk has left any seeds, and give the feathered locals some breakfast.
In a state of being-too-tired-to-write but not-wanting-to-go-to-bed, I decided to look on youtube for anything appealing on "birdwatching in winter" and found one filmed by someone with (probably) frozen fingers in Southern Ontario, and with music by Sigur Ros, appropriately.
Task for first light: scrub out the bird feeders, open the garage, see if the resident chipmunk has left any seeds, and give the feathered locals some breakfast.
time to plant seeds again
If I felt keen to begin yet another unfinished novel, it could have as title perhaps: What happened to last year? Not as mysterious as Last Year in Marienbad, but now that I recall, not much happened in that film except some beautiful black and white cinematography, whereas my past year was typically event-full, and my determination to spend more time writing, indeed: to devote myself to getting writing done, dominated.
Over past months much of my writing time has been interleaved with a lot of reading, in the areas of poetry, poetics, cultural theory, and -- yes -- ongoing reading in the areas of deep ecology, environmental art, and climate change. That left little time for posting to a blog, and at last count I think I have about four blogs begun on various burners, all of them sitting and barely simmering, just taking up space in the ether.
One of the frustrations of sitting at a desk at home or at a library, continuously tapping at a keyboard or scribbling with a pen, is the isolation from what we habitually call the real world, as if the act of writing somehow is not itself "real" and when humans set aside time to write from our hearts and minds, that the words we write are not not real, and therefore have no "meaning" unless they appear on television or newspapers or magazines or some form of published media. Some of the finest reading I've found is on blogs written by people who are variously wise, witty, informed, passionate, eloquent, and more than anything else, dedicated to sending their words out into the world to find their own communities of readers. The process of committing time and thoughts and language to the void is daunting: many of the sites I explore are created with lavish dexterity that boondoggles me, and few blogs that I follow elicit comments of substance, possibly because so many of the readers are spending their time writing blogs themselves. Yet there is a kind of mycelium created by all this languaging that creates a sense of engagement in matters of importance to our collective culture. Therefore, rather than commenting on posts by others, I will return to this fallow blog and start writing here again.
I owe this growth spurt to email conversations with a couple of west-coasters who are reliably passionate about our planet and our fellow creatures. One of them is a non-blogger albeit a generous communicator, writer/editor, community activist, circle-dancer and ongoing inspiration. The other is an educator in the best sense of the word, in her ability not only to devote herself to "finding out" but also to passing it on with a generous spirit, and for anyone wanting inspiration in green education I recommend the resources of her blog.
With some temerity, because this is a work in progress, I'll post here something new that arose from a much larger piece I'm working on. On a later post, I'll elaborate.
Continuous birth*
"people do not always agree about what is alive and what is not"
- Tim Ingold
from dust blown through rain
a mucky birth
bursting to flow
nested in weeds
among tadpole swerves
grown into frog-rich
rivulet voicing
ripples and splash
through curves
running open
running long running
wider rainfall nurtured
banking and overflow
captured and stilled
in a lake built under a bridge
life source choked
now to narrow passage
un moribondage
a stagnant sinking
corseted by thick-turfed roof
far below a fashioned course
for good walks ruined :
bridged silted and silenced
the buried creek barely breathes
dreams of rebirth
January 16/2010
(revised January 21/10)
n.l.
*from words in an essay by Tim Ingold, “Rethinking the Animate, Re-Animating Thought” – also the epigraph; and acknowledging Mark Twain’s definition of a golf course. The words un moribondage (morbidity) from a poem by Douglas Oliver for the resonance of bondage in it.
Over past months much of my writing time has been interleaved with a lot of reading, in the areas of poetry, poetics, cultural theory, and -- yes -- ongoing reading in the areas of deep ecology, environmental art, and climate change. That left little time for posting to a blog, and at last count I think I have about four blogs begun on various burners, all of them sitting and barely simmering, just taking up space in the ether.
One of the frustrations of sitting at a desk at home or at a library, continuously tapping at a keyboard or scribbling with a pen, is the isolation from what we habitually call the real world, as if the act of writing somehow is not itself "real" and when humans set aside time to write from our hearts and minds, that the words we write are not not real, and therefore have no "meaning" unless they appear on television or newspapers or magazines or some form of published media. Some of the finest reading I've found is on blogs written by people who are variously wise, witty, informed, passionate, eloquent, and more than anything else, dedicated to sending their words out into the world to find their own communities of readers. The process of committing time and thoughts and language to the void is daunting: many of the sites I explore are created with lavish dexterity that boondoggles me, and few blogs that I follow elicit comments of substance, possibly because so many of the readers are spending their time writing blogs themselves. Yet there is a kind of mycelium created by all this languaging that creates a sense of engagement in matters of importance to our collective culture. Therefore, rather than commenting on posts by others, I will return to this fallow blog and start writing here again.
I owe this growth spurt to email conversations with a couple of west-coasters who are reliably passionate about our planet and our fellow creatures. One of them is a non-blogger albeit a generous communicator, writer/editor, community activist, circle-dancer and ongoing inspiration. The other is an educator in the best sense of the word, in her ability not only to devote herself to "finding out" but also to passing it on with a generous spirit, and for anyone wanting inspiration in green education I recommend the resources of her blog.
With some temerity, because this is a work in progress, I'll post here something new that arose from a much larger piece I'm working on. On a later post, I'll elaborate.
Continuous birth*
"people do not always agree about what is alive and what is not"
- Tim Ingold
from dust blown through rain
a mucky birth
bursting to flow
nested in weeds
among tadpole swerves
grown into frog-rich
rivulet voicing
ripples and splash
through curves
running open
running long running
wider rainfall nurtured
banking and overflow
captured and stilled
in a lake built under a bridge
life source choked
now to narrow passage
un moribondage
a stagnant sinking
corseted by thick-turfed roof
far below a fashioned course
for good walks ruined :
bridged silted and silenced
the buried creek barely breathes
dreams of rebirth
January 16/2010
(revised January 21/10)
n.l.
*from words in an essay by Tim Ingold, “Rethinking the Animate, Re-Animating Thought” – also the epigraph; and acknowledging Mark Twain’s definition of a golf course. The words un moribondage (morbidity) from a poem by Douglas Oliver for the resonance of bondage in it.
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