On
Writing
Rob
Budde
I will politely refuse to.
Living language accepts nothing less.
“Creativity” is not what it’s made out to
be.
A chunk of outside gets in.
I sit and listen and a relationship with
the creature becomes.
When hope fades, then some real work gets
done.
In the early 90s Fred Wah showed me the
sentence and other forms.
Words misspeak.
A name will sometimes create power over.
Something like the Dakelh word for word.
When I write “Hoolhghulh spoke to me,” I do not mean
in words or an established discourse. The plant did not say “do not touch me or
I will impale you with spines” or some such message (although at that moment
that would have been helpful, from my perspective). And I do not mean that the
plant “spoke to me” in some vague new age sense of “it moved me” spiritually.
Indeed in previous communications about this personal/ philosophical event,
listeners or readers (administrators and colleagues) just assumed the
later—that I was emotionally or psychologically affected, that it had nothing
to do with the plant’s agency. This is a misinterpretation of the event, to my
thinking, and reduces its potential revolutionary implications. It involved
agency that was not mine and the plant moved me. It called in a way I do not know
how to explain.
This meeting of two species took place on the eastern
slope that ran down to a small lake about six kilometers long. This lake is in
the Fraser River watershed and is affected by clearcuts and logging roads in
the vicinity. In a stretch of
spruce-balsam forest in between clearcuts, the stand of individual plants (even
though all connected) ran along a small intermittent streambed and a gap
created in the forest canopy by some blow-down. Along with Hoolhghulh there was
growing a variety of healthy fungi, ferns, and mosses. There was a well-worn
black bear trail nearby that seemed to run from a den to the water. The
individual I speak of was grandfather.
Hoolhghulh spoke to me. A new grammar. A reasserted
relation.
Writing really has
nothing to do with writing.
The conservatism
that dominates Canadian letters makes it difficult to say.
How to arrange the
sound-image so the world is affected.
I nearly died when
I was 22. I was going to stop living and writing gave me a way out. A way of
being.
My writing these
days is closely connected to activism and a deep dissatisfaction with culture
as is. I am working on a (loosely defined) eco –poetic and –critical piece
called “Panax” that is a documentation of my growing relationship with a
plant-creature called Devil’s Club / Oplopanax Horridus / Hoolhghulh.
Conventional forms have gone out the window so I am calling the writing “a
relationship.” Writers informing the work are Ken Belford, Sonnet L’Abbé,
Laurie Ricou, and Adam Dickinson.
Here’s the thing:
when I despaired, writing reorganized what was. In the face of ecocide, writing
can reorganize what is.
I live on Lheidli
T’enneh territory and the work I do is partly to repay that debt.
how to write—row
to height—try to tow—hot to trite—who ought why—trout wow!
Electrically
connected to the needs of the place.
the myth of community
so I
stepped off the stoop into
culture,
expecting something
there to
give and receive and
weave with
the weft
and left to
my own origins,
concepts
where I reside,
the soil I
inhaled, hush, but
such was
not the case
and skin
and gender and
class met
me at the end of the street,
threatened
my life, sent
complaints
to my third employer,
whispered
in jubilant webby groups,
then erased
the traces, and eased
to my side
to console me.
from
“Panax”
oh—
no like knowledge—oh
against th—
with an op—
(caught up—
(the abrasion of—
(trans—
(loss
an old
growth
pine/spruce/balsam
context a fine spray of
light
the register of the thing
ness, and then some
thing else
there
leaves, leaving / outside
conscious of—
oh, this is where
the the
begins (ow
cultural
contact zone an opening
opened up thigh
aporia oplopo panax panics
pan para
(ow what the
who
