Valier is about 130 miles south and across the Canadian border from Lethbridge. We are in the same ecological prairie, once inhabited by related Peoples. The oil sands are much farther north. This linked story below is an excellent description of how two different "frames" of assumption inform each other. Neither is based on resource exploitation, which is a key to the Capitalistic Oligocentric Empire building that came out of Europe and is eating the world.
“As radical as empathy and imagination can be, these qualities exist in the mind. But there is also a poetic language of embodied experience." Tracy K. Smith, US Poet Laureate. In her poems, among other things, this means sensory memory. Here she is.
Maybe POC (Twitter for "People of Color") naturally go to the sensory earth-linked frame of reference, along with their history, vivid as it is. Of course, it's easier to be the Poet Laureate if you graduate from Harvard and Columbia and your dad worked on the Hubble Telescope. Now she teaches at Princeton.
Dan Chiasson is more exactly the sort of person we expect to be the Poet Laureate: white, handsome, New England, elite schools, and somehow managing to pass judgement on POC, which seems to be the entitlement of his sort of person.
"Dan Chiasson writes of another aspect of the collection: "The issues of power and paternalism suggest the deep ways in which this is a book about race. Smith’s deadpan title is itself racially freighted: we can’t think about one set of fifties images, of Martians and sci-fi comics, without conjuring another, of black kids in the segregated South. Those two image files are situated uncannily close to each other in the cultural cortex, but it took this book to connect them."
Sci-Fi writers certainly go to the funky human senses and the evidence found by them, so they can create a new world where they can be political and talk about forbidden topics. So maybe he's right, though I didn't know before this that there was one sovereign "cultural context." Maybe he's trying to say "boxes assigned to literary work in university curricula." He's at Amherst.
My effort (non-academic) is to try to discover the deepest, most inclusive, most unconscious contexts for human meaning. My problem is that they are unconscious. As an indicator of how low I can go is my shift in understanding of what a human being is and how it challenges -- potentially destroys -- Christianity. That context begins with little clay figures modeled by a Supreme Being and repeatedly tested by the effort to be obedient until Jesus came along and showed us what a God would do.
But now that we are sifting the calcium remnants of hominins and finding their DNA code in our own cells, we see humans as self-conscious animals who keep alive the struggle for turf and wealth, just one instance of a recent phenomena that is happening on a time-line so long that it stretches back before the formation of universes. "What is man that thou art mindful of him?" is the question (at least in translation) of the sexist Psalms with their power-mongering. Clearly, we are a fleck, a mote, a tiny blip.
So now another question, "What must we do to be saved?" Stop burning coal? And then Kenner's Question: "What does it mean?" And mine, "What IS meaning?" I mean, one can FEEL meaning but no logical reasonable answer can be arrived at that is permanent. So my idea is to just abandon logic and reason unless doing the things they were meant to address, like math and kinds of science or law. Otherwise, let's dance.
There can't be just one answer for the meaning of the universe -- it depends on where you ask from. Some would say it depends upon grammar, the way your language organizes thought. I would argue that the concepts behind the grammar, the organization of the senses, is even more important, and much lousy confusing writing is due to bad thinking and even failure to perceive the world around one. That thing about being chained in a cave with your back to the entrance is about limits -- it's not a prescription for navel-gazing.
Words are not the key despite Whorf. Today's problem is that there are no words for many things we can see and feel. (Maybe you read the article about "cute aggression" which has a word all its own in the Philippines.) The fixation on words and grammar comes from discovering that different "languages" have different words for similar things, never mastering the differences between saying a thing in one language that only roughly means the same thing in another nation that speaks another language. In fact, nations and languages don't match.
So Belgium, a nation composed of three different-language-speaking peoples, is an example, but the three languages are still related to the same European Romance roots. The difficulty is nothing like trying to match antique language worldviews to modern English. Who knows what Jesus REALLY meant when he said something in Aramaic? Or even whether that specific Aramaic is accurate copy? What we read has to be at least a translation.
Today's indigenous tribes are earnestly seeking to find and bring to life their own old languages, but how can they when the sensory experiences, the time of the word's use, is gone? How can they do a ceremonial dance that imitates badgers if they have never lain on a grasslands watching one all day? Never held one struggling in one's hands? Never listened to its hissing? Never made it laugh at human hi-jinks, nodding its head and showing its teeth? It doesn't matter what one's word for badger might be. It matters that one's senses have recorded it and how it moves, what it does all day. This is not philosophy. You can't get it from a library. You can still go on the prairie and watch a badger.
Metaphor is powerful and useful when you have no word for one thing, but must borrow it from somewhere else -- say compare a badger to a coal miner. Or something more radical, emotional, political. I'll try it. (I thought the poem would be about race, but it turned out to be about drugs and "the life.")
"The badger loves the underworld.
Muscled and powered he digs the dirt.
So charming with his invitation to play.
He is in fact a small bear with powerful claws
And teeth that lock on your throat
Until you can't breathe.
To him the dark down deep
Is where the nourishment of blood is curled,
Where the hole is safety."
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