Resonance

I was on my way home the other night from school and heard a documentary on the CBC Radio show Dispatches that reaffrimed a lot of things for me. The feature documentary was about a young boy in Chile who, at the age of 8, presented an assignment on the Selk'nam people of Tierra Del Fueggo. The link to the documentary is here (Dispatches), click the icon under February 1st titled "listen to Jen's documentary."

Over the next few years, the boy, Gilbert, dedicated his young life to studying the language by reading the Selk'nam dictionary and by listening to old recordings made by Catholic priests (how ironic). The last speaker of the language, prior to Gilbert learning, died in the 1970's. There is a curious, if not entirely amazing resonance here, one that has lept an entire generation and found an ear that was directly connected to the heart. I think that most definately this could be considered true ecolinguistics. Missionaries, colonizers and the great effort to modernize that which is deemed 'parochial, archaic and uncivilized' had such a great effect at deforesting not only entire cultures, but also entire languages, the timeless vessels of cosmogenic expression.

The effect is quite similar to taking an axe to the axis mundi, or an entire forest ecosystem of axis mundi. But, here we see, quite evidently, that a seed remained, and in true fashion it has been patterned after what ancestral knowledge dictates is the form of being. This is resonance, and as W.H. Auden once said, "A culture is no better than it's woods."