I think my first section is finished. It is Me Bastard, You Bastard, an extension of and enrichment (I sincerely hope) upon an essay David Hamilton published many years ago in The Iowa Review. It was after I read the kernel of that essay aloud to a small group of poets and writers I had invited to Iowa to discuss the end of Yugoslavia that the Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun exclaimed, “This should be a book!” I have been trying for many years to follow his suggestion.
The second section, or a subsequent one anyway (the book is still in search of its definitive form) is called Kin. It lends itself to memoir to some extent, but I’ve also been after something else, an ecological sensibility, a way of writing about the non-human world that connects meaningfully with the worlds of people, the built world, the aesthetic world, the world of human relationships. I’m trying to cross (“bastardize”) the categories of nature and culture.
I remembered yesterday a short piece by the biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer on the need for a new pronoun in English, something to replace “it” in the context of living beings that (who) are not human. She’s bothered by the idea of calling them “it.” She wonders what it would be like if someone referred to her grandmother that way. Look, it’s cooking soup. It has gray hair. You get the idea.
She suggests the pronoun “ki” instead. It comes from a word in Anishinaabe that’s much longer (bemaadiziiaaki), so she takes just the end and uses that to refer to a tree as “ki.” (I don’t think she knew when she started calling a tree “ki” that this is actually the Japanese word for a tree!). Then she says, we need a plural form for this word, and she makes it “kin.” (The whole essay is here.)
She’s doing a bit of what anthropologists refer to as “sentient ecology” in this, which she might have been aware of — there’s a lot of literature on this in anthropology circles, along with variations on her idea of developing a language that seeks to unify rather than maintain the human-nonhuman dichotomies that have tended to divide up the world rather than bring it (correctly) together, often with tragic consequences.
I love the idea and the word she’s chosen, which I plan to use in something like the sense she proposes. But it leaps a bit where I think we need to be more circumspect. Her call that we “learn the grammar of animacy” is one I welcome, but must the grammar of animacy automatically be the grammar of intimacy? There are animate beings who are so close to humans as to be practically kin, and then there are those that would just as well eat us. The vast majority, however, are completely indifferent to our presence, even if we might have feelings about them ranging from wonder to ickI
Two grammars is what I hear, one that recognizes the living, connected systemically, complex, not something we could replace easily if we lost it; another that brings things closer and is better characterized by what my friend Predrag called blizkost, which my friend Mike translated as “intimacy.”
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Russell Scott Valentino 