This installation piece was a collaboration project for the Chase gallery group show "Telling the American Story". I worked with Salish Student/Teacher Jessie Fountain and Slam Poet Mark Anderson. Our project was inspired by the Salish language. It deals with the
difficulty of how language and myth come together to create a
metaphysical subconscious level to how we understand our world.
Linguistic Anthropology
In a picture
two wolf dogs are fighting
over the white snows of Siberia.
People watch, huddled by burn barrels.
There are breathing techniques
that can help a person deal with the cold.
Inuit hunters have used these
for hundreds of years
during their long winter months
so much colder than people
are meant to survive in.
To hunt caribou they don polar bear skins
and crawl near the herd, inhaling
and exhaling
until a single herd member approaches,
curious to find out
what is this funny albino lump in the snow?
The hunter springs up
and stabs the caribou with a curved knife
under the shoulder blade.
The caribou does not die immediately
but is overcome by shock
and lets the hunter safely walk it home
where it is to be slaughtered.
Linguistic anthropologists suggest
that we can measure
what is important to a people
by observing where their language is specialized.
I wonder if the Inuit have a word
for a caribou's will-less trance.
Or if they have omitted this from their tongue,
eager to believe that such a thing
cannot happen to people.
The French are such existentialists
that they have invented a word,
Jamais Vu,
for when something becomes suddenly unfamiliar.
A philosopher sits at the base
of the Eiffel Tower
in a striped shirt and beret
writing the word "lonesome"
again and again
until it loses meaning
and he doubts that it is at all a word
to begin with.
Narcissus stares into a pond
until he no longer recognizes his own reflection.
He is damned then, by his own nature,
to obsessing over the question
"who is this most lovely face in the water?"
This thought comes to symbolize
the entirety of his being
until it too, like the word lonesome, loses meaning
and he lapses into non-existence altogether.
I remember once writing a love letter
and not having any of the words I needed:
"You are the type of snow
I could fall right through.
I am a songbird's locked jaw,
a diminuendo in blue,
a chunk of ice that breaks off
and floats quietly into the ocean.
