In
early summer, trees are sweating from the
effort of trying to walk North with "_heavenly
stems and earthly branches," after
10,000 years down south. Rocks rise from the creek. Singing to
the resonant air, the
whole question of
the so-called 'primitive mind' which shamanism has so often been
taken to exemplify, seems to lie exactly in an image of the person
and knowing subject which, paradoxically, has no place for a 'mind'
and associates 'mental' events with moist
eyes glittering in a light that also reveals billions of dark things
recently hatched. Each
plant, every stone, embodies the ecology of its place, and beyond...
I
am this creek,
a puppet made of trees,
mud mixed overnight
with leaves.
Thus, I
followed a twisty path that included the "rough-soul
tradition" of misleading signs, until I arrived
at a hardscrabble landscape, where the
Eskimo language, being polysynthetic, isn't composed
of little words chronologically ordered, but of great, tight
conglomerates, like twisted knots, within which concepts
are juxtaposed and inseparably fused. Such
conglomerates are not 'verbs'
or
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'nouns' or even
'words'; each
is a linguistic
expression for an impression
forming a unit to the Eskimo.
Thus, 'the house is red'
in Eskimo is phrased 'the-house,
looking-like-flowing-blood-it
is'; the sequence may indicate "no
one knows what's connected
to where."
Where
do you dream
How come you’re so late
to catch on?
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