When I was still a child I held in my hands a slightly curved arc of yellowed bone that had small holes drilled into it. The holes swirled across the surface like a flattened, elongated S. It was a moon map that one of my relations had made long before my life began.  Keyed to a particular bit of horizon, the drilled holes marked the rising point of the moon as it wended its way over the course of a bit more than a month. I’ve never seen another, and have yet to make one myself, but I can still feel the bone in my hands. It made a huge impact on me, although at the time, and for decades after, I could not have said why. Even now, as I think I am beginning to understand it, its power over my imagination is still largely beyond my linguistic mind – as all good symbols should be.
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Sometimes not only are we not part of the conversation, sometimes we are not even on the same playing field. I think Brian O’Nolan may have felt like that as an author. When he submitted (as Flann O’Brien) The Third Policeman to his publishers it was rejected as too fantastic. The manuscript sat on his sideboard chastising him (as I think of it) for the next quarter century and during that time he told friends that enquired of its fate that the manuscript had been irretrievably lost. It wasn’t published until after his death, and now, of course, it is considered “a masterpiece.”
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This post started out to be about two things. The first is a book by Louis Owens called Bone Game and the second is a documentary called Genghis Blues.  I’ve known about Owens for a long time, and love his books. I rarely re-read but there are a few books that have comforts for me that reach so deep that re-reading seems mandatory. I have also known about Tuvan throatsingers for some years and have some CDs. There is even an article about it in Scientific American. I had, however, never heard of Paul Pena (horrifying I know) and never seen the movie Genghis Blues.  There was something about it, something that so strongly made me think of Owens that I dreamed about them last night and so here I am, figuring it out at the keyboard.
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In the last few weeks I have been rather ill and as a consequence I have been inside for much of that time. This morning, when I went outside just for the sake of being outside, I realized how much of a toll living in has on me.

You should understand that at various points in my life, starting when I was a teen, I have lived out.  I spent a couple of years on the road as a kid, just wandering around the country. Technically, I suppose I was homeless, although I could have gone to my mother’s house had she not been such a madwoman.  I have to tell you that it was not terrible. I was not suffering, in fact they were wondrous years full of discovery and learning.  As an adult I have lived in cars and vans (with children and pets) for long stretches of time. These were not terrible years either and both my children are better people for it too (even according to them). This is what I call living out.
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Imagine this:

Can you imagine living in an environment where you can change directions in your life without the fear of losing your home, your car, or whatever else you depend upon? You could choose what you do based on what interests you and know that that the job will give you enough to live well? Jeez. What a civilized notion. Jealous.

The movie Precious starts on November 6 and I want to watch it. I just don’t know if it is a good idea.

Just the trailer is enough to open that jagged well of pain. It’s not that I went through anything nearly as bad as that character but how do different pains get weighed? How do my childhood memories of what some people will do match up to what some girls go through? There is no way to answer that, which leads me to believe it is really the wrong question.
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Sometimes there is a book that is so exactly matched to one’s contours that reading it is a bodily experience. It’s ideas, phrases, arrangements of revelations, so much like ourselves that, like sucrose at the attachment of sucrase, we cannot help but be metabolized.

For me one of those books is The Botany of Desire. In honor of the upcoming harvest festival, I have just reread the essay in that book called “Desire:Sweetness Plant:The Apple.”
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In the May 29-June 3 2009 The Pacific Northwest Inlander there was an article called “Saving Salish.” It’s the language (well actually the name of the group of languages) native to my relations.

The excerpt reads:

Salish isn’t just a language of words and grammar. It’s a bridge between generations – a link to culture and identity – and for the Kalispel, it’s dangerously close to being lost forever.

I am used to hearing Salish spoken at ritual events, and I know some of the people involved in the attempt to rescue the language at the Spokane. But here in my apartment in Vancouver, reading the Inlander, the thing that really gets to me is imagining losing my ability to read Shakespeare or Chaucer or any of the other seminal writers that express what it is to be who we are as English speakers.

Imagine that. Imagine losing the ability to reach out into our past, losing Shakespeare. Arguably, we would lose ourselves. To whom would we then belong?

It has the most amazing sense of belonging.

OK so someone tells me that part 1 of this post contradicts the post called “Talk to plants and proud of it; some of them even answer back.” Here’s my analysis:
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