SubscribeOctober 22nd, 2009
Social status and human happiness
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.
October 19th, 2009
Watching Precious?
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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September 20th, 2009
On the eve of the harvest: plants and people
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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September 19th, 2009
The heartbreaking possibility of losing your language
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?
September 15th, 2009
Music/movie oh my oh my
It has the most amazing sense of belonging.
September 14th, 2009
On plants, intent and belonging, part 2
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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September 14th, 2009
Lovely commercial on youtube
Actually saw this posted on Pharyngula first, who saw it on India Uncut who got it via email from Deviyani who got it from ??? I love the way these things move.
September 13th, 2009
On plants, intent and belonging, part 1
In the opening sections of The Secret Life of Plants the authors speak of Raoul Francé. Writing in the first decade of the twentieth century, Francé says that plants can move, can reach for things they want. At the time this is news, and stunning in its implications. But what are they, those implications?
Tompkins and Bird:
Plants, says Francé are capable of intent: they can stretch toward, or seek out, what they want in ways as mysterious as the most fantastic creations of romance.
Earlier in the passage the authors have cited the ability of a tendril plant to move toward a support, and change course if that support is moved. That kind of observation leads to the idea that plants have intent. I understand the leap; if it were a human being faced with such a need, our movements almost certainly would be accompanied by the intent to seek what we need to grow. I get sleepy at work, my hand reaches for the tea cup and along with it goes the experience of intending to stay awake. It’s natural for us to assume the universe does things the same way we do, but one of the possibilities that come with having the capacity to reason (or the intent to reason) is its use in questioning such assumptions.
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September 4th, 2009
Talk to plants and proud of it; some of them even answer back
I am in a hotel room. It’s civil twilight, just before dawn. The day of the wedding, the air is cool coming in the open windows, the sky as it lightens looks clear. This morning at 10 we will drive up to the reservation to start the visiting process.
When I crossed the Columbia yesterday and pulled off the road at the horse monument (yesterday’s posted photo) I could smell the sage brush. It’s a smell I find incredibly welcoming; I felt welcomed, like by a relative. It’s exactly the same feeling I get when I run across a friend I haven’t seen in ages, that quick glad burst of happiness, the sense of familiarity, belonging, family.
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August 29th, 2009
That other home
I am going back to the Rez for my niece’s wedding in few days. Regardless of what I might have wished for in a world totally under my control, and probably regardless what some of my Indian relations might have wanted, the Rez is my other home. And that’s largely my niece’s fault.
The thing is that I am not Indian. She is my niece, she is very fierce about this, but we are not related biologically. I have no treaty card, no status, not the right amount of melanin, and the wrong way of thinking about some really important things. This is what makes me suyapi (means both “backwards person” and “white person”).
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