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.
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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."
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