David Key
On Banks Island, in the Canadian Arctic, environmental shifts are happening so fast that
the Inuvialut inhabitants do not have the words to describe what they now see
around them.
So often words are the first and
most obvious companion for a journey to the edge of Being, but sometimes they
fail us.
To run out of words is to stand at
the edge of the unknown, at the cusp of The Mystery. There is something both
frightening and exhilarating about this: The excitement of an impending
adventure, the fear of formlessness.
Where the words finish and the
white page is left, where the blizzard-filled sky meets the pure white of a
snowy horizon: at this edge we can choose either to enter a dead end of
desolation and nihilism, or a space filled with infinite possibility – the
‘potential space’ for creating a new form of consciousness altogether.
Language has it’s limits, just
like the human beings that use it. When we reach these limits, the words run
out. Now that we are experiencing the unsettling symptoms of global climate
change and of the Earth’s finite capacity to support us, should it be any
surprise to find ourselves speechless?
It’s not just the Inavialut
culture that is lost for words.
While we have been busy evolving
our post-modern languages to communicate the onslaught of technology and the
giddy ecstasy of our own apparent cleverness, we have missed the fact that the
world we have learned to describe – the world we have apparently evolved to
live so well in – is increasingly a virtual world created by seductive
marketing and the haphazard structural violence of our post-industrial culture.
A language unhitched from the
simple ecological realities of life.
English has been abused, it has
been moulded to fit an arrogant, abstract, disconnected, technocratic,
dominating and violent culture. It is less now a language from the land, more a
trade-marked and branded servant of industrialism: from text to txt.
We are left unable to articulate
the complex ecological danger we are in – a bewildering experience for our
seemingly sophisticated species. Our intellectual separation of mind from
matter and of body from spirit, has led to a chasm between our contemporary
description of selfhood and the blood and soil of our own Earthy existence.
Language emerges through humans
from land, an expression of our connection to place.
To be lost for words is a call to
reconnect with home.
The Inavialut language’s short
comings in describing a rapidly changing human ecology point not to its inability
to evolve, but to the way it connects a specific place with a specific
language. When the exotic curiosities of another land suddenly arrive, the
language cannot cope.
Lightning, Barn Owl,
Hornet, Robin, Elk, Salmon,
Wasp, Thunderstorm
These are words in English that
the Inuvialut have no equivalent for in their own language; English words that
describe things that have been displaced by climate change – change that is
exceeding the speed of industrial evolution.
Some languages are still
connected, still embedded. ‘The Okanagan word for ‘our place’ and ‘our
language’ ‘, writes Jeanette Armstrong, ‘is the same. The Okanagan language is
thought of as the ‘language of the land.”
In Siberia,
it’s a shift in emphasis that reveals the ecological change:
‘In Chukotka, where the natives speak Siberian Yupik, they use new
words such as misullijuq — rainy snow — and are less likely to use words like
umughagek — ice that is safe to walk on.’
There is less ‘umughagek’ , less
safe ground: We’re all on thin ice.
Many contemporary indigenous
languages connect to concepts in ways that are geophysical. In modern European
languages, Kenneth White calls this ‘geopoetics’ and suggests that poetry is
the path to re-engage with land.
‘More than ‘poetry concerned with the environment’, more than
literature with some sort of geographical content… Geopoetics is concerned,
fundamentally, with a relationship to the earth and with the opening of a
world.’
This is the way home: Opening
through poetry to a new consciousness. A new language of the Earth, born of the
Earth.
Poetry sits at the periphery of
language, the last linguistic outpost before silence, before blank white space.
William James wrote in 1902 that
one of the four characteristics of a mystic experience is, “Ineffability
– its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or
transferred to others.”
Poetry is the metaphysical edge of
human language, a conduit to the mystic, a place along the continuum of
expression just before the point where experience becomes ineffable.
A loss of words indicates the
presence of powers beyond human control, powers that contain human Being, along
with the collective unconscious of the whole Universe. When we meet these
forces in the physical realm, we are humbled – in any language.
Our
wordlessness is testament to this threshold and at this point the balance of
power in the socially constructed dualism between humans and Nature is
dissolved. We go, as indigenous Australians say, “back in”.
In poetry, it is not so much the
words themselves, but the whiteness around them, the spaces between them, where
the possibility of a new language lies. It’s there in The Void, in the
linguistic wilderness, that form can start to take shape around the nuclei of a
new ecological consciousness.
It’s in the physical wilderness
too that the same ecological consciousness can take root.
It’s fascinating that in the vast
white snowscape of the arctic, where the language of the Inavialut embeds them
in their oikos, their home, there lies a similar parallel ontology of white
space.
Nothingness, no-thing-ness.
To transcend the numbing complexities of human existence, the
philosopher Martin Heidegger would take his students skiing. The ski tip
breaking track in the snow, he proposed, was the closest he could get to a
description of human Being. He called the space created as the ski tip broke
the snow, ‘the clearing’.
Poetry signs the way into the clearing. Entering the whiteness of the
page parallels a journey into wilderness, deep into the choice between nihilism
and infinite possibility.
Is the poetry of the wild then, the clearing into which the new
languages of the Earth can manifest? Is our loss of words not a loss at all,
but the opening of a window into a new Earth consciousness?
David Key is a founding director of Footprint Consulting. A longer version of this post, inc references
first appeared at EcoSelf.Net
David thanks Mary-Jayne
Rust in creating this post.