Things have changed, though. It is difficult to talk about a "sense of place" in a world where everywhere strives to be the same, where people spend more and more of their time with "cyber-tribes" on social networks than with the people who live around them, where sex and sensuality are politicized. Every college student reading at an eighth grade level and natty executive who has never read a work of literature can tell you that this stuff is naive with all its eternal verities.
O.K. I'm just bitter today. I saw an ad by BP telling me that they are going to make it right.
Going to make it, right.
"I have a friend who feels sometimes that the world is hostile to human life--he says it chills us and kills us. But how could we be were it not for this planet that provided our very shape? Two conditions--gravity and a livable temperature range between freezing and boiling--have given us fluids and flesh. The trees we climb and the ground we walk on have given us five fingers and toes. The "place" (from the root plat, broad, spreading, flat) gave us far-seeing eyes, the streams and breezes gave us versatile tongues and whorly ears. The land gave us a stride, and the lake a dive. The amazement gave us our kind of mind. We should be thankful for that, and take nature's stricter lessons with some grace."
"Having a place means that you know what a place means...what it means in a storied sense of myth, character and presence but also in an ecological sense...Integrating native consciousness with mythic consciousness"
After Work
The shack and a few trees
float in the blowing fog
I pull out your blouse,
warm my cold hands
on your breasts.
you laugh and shudder
peeling garlic by the
hot iron stove.
bring in the axe, the rake,
the wood
we'll lean on the wall
against each other
stew simmering on the fire
as it grows dark
drinking wine.
How one wish the leakage had never happened. It is a bitter thought! An unforgivable disaster.
ReplyDeletethat poem...Snyder's too? Made me hungry in every sense of the word...
ReplyDeleteK, That is what BP says, too. But is a special type of disaster--a criminal one. What should happen to deter other criminals from perpetuating the same attitudes and actions?
ReplyDeleteR, Yes, it is all Snyder.