Canoeing the Milk River: A Theory of Lines (original) (raw)

The long poem of walking, or the line reconsidered

Sparked by philosopher Michel de Certeau’s assertion that maps as we know them today are insufficient for describing space as it is constituted by the actual practice of walking through it, I have engaged in a “relationship” with a 1.25-kilometre stretch of a mixed-use recreational trail near to my home in Guelph, Ontario, for four years and counting. This ongoing experience — corporeally, intellectually, affectively — has fundamentally challenged my conception of the trail. Anthropologist Tim Ingold asserts that most maps ever drawn by humans have been ephemeral, traced into the air by hands, etched in the sand by a finger, or scribbled onto​ a scrap of paper by gestures that at once producing the map and replicating the journey. In this presentation, I reflect on my relationship with the trail and consider how alternative approaches to mapping it as I have come to know it might look or sound, and, especially, how one body itself might perform it for others.

Footprints on Water: The Shadow Lines

In connection with the partition of the subcontinent, the narrator in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines (1998) sardonically observes: ". . . they had drawn their borders, believing in that pattern, in the enchantment of lines, hoping perhaps that once they had etched their borders upon the map, the two bits of land would sail away from each other like the shifting tectonic plates of the prehistoric Gondwanaland". 1 Unfortunately, "the lines" hold their "enchantment" not only for those who believe that "there [is] something admirable in moving violence to the borders" (SL, 233), but for all of us, because we are convinced that lines can demarcate human perceptions, as we cannot organise our experiences in order to perceive the world other than by drawing lines. The novel however, explores the arbitrariness, the shadowiness, the constructedness, and the porousness of all boundaries that segregate human experiences and implicitly establish hierarchies. These lines and hierarchies are regarded as essentialist notions endowed with positive meaning. But meaning, as Derrida points out, is eternally elusive, because it is defined by difference, by negativities. So what is derived in the name of meaning is only an effect of a meaning, a "trace", like a footprint which communicates its meaning only through the absence of the referent. Moreover, these effects of meaning are also continually shifting so that all that we have are not really marks of footsteps upon the solid dusty earth but merely footprints on water.

Luther, Katharina. Stream Wordling Diffractive River Poetics in Alice Oswalds "Dart"

Talisman Cluster on Materiality and Poetry, 2018

Stream Worlding: Diffractive River Poetics in Alice Oswald's Dart You don't know what goes into water. Tiny particles of acids and salts. Cryptospiridion smaller than a fleck of talcum powder which squashes and elongates and bursts in the warmth of the gut. Everything is measured twice and we have stand-bys and shut-offs. This is what keeps you and me alive, this is the real work of the river.-The Water Abstractor in Alice Oswald's Dart Diffraction/intra-action-cutting together-apart (one move) in the (re)configuring of spacetimemattering; differencing/differing/ différenacing-Karen Barad, "Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together Apart" Water is one of the clearest, most transparent, natural elements. So transparent that it almost appears empty. But do we really know "what goes into water"? Can we perceive these "[t]iny particles of acids and / salts" (Oswald 25)? While the water abstractor's voice claims that we cannot, Alice Oswald's long poem Dart as a whole unveils water's transparency as false to show every (non)human material component of the river Dart, in Devon, England, as it flows from its source into the ocean. In Oswald's long poem, it is within and along the river streams through which Dart dwellers, local myths, science, and social realist systems materialize and even speak. Through the flow of different voices, which re-and disappear throughout the poem, Dart rhizomatically maps multiple agential processes through which the river Dart creates relations between water, soil, plants, animals, humans, and ultimately literature itself in endless, radically open feedback-loops. Here, the "real work / of the river" is to constitute entangled objects, subjects, meanings, and words. Thus, Dart's river streams do nothing less than create worlds off and on the page, "float[ing] a world up like a cork / out of its body's liquid dark" (Oswald 28). The basic problem that Dart's creative force then proposes is how a river on the ground in Devon, England, can be materially entangled with the voices of Dart dwellers on the page in Oswald's long poem. In short: how can river-matter come into literature and out again?