#outside works

[morrak]

Another grab from Heckenberger’s The Ecology of Power: Culture, Place, and Personhood in the Southern Amazon, A.D. 1000-2000 (2004).

Here, he lays out relations between prehistorical villages based on satellite imaging of the settlements and their roads, excavation, and oral history (especially myth). The point isn’t to illustrate formal hierarchy or polity, but rather to use it as a reference for relationships that are smaller (among chiefly factions, families, and even within families) and larger (so far, regional relations among more distantly related peoples).

As before, fractal personhood. By drawing comparisons between social entities at different scales, he’s driving at an explanation of how the concepts mutually explain and reinforce themselves in daily life and ritual. I expect there’s some impending discussion of how this has preserved a pseudohistorical record of deeper ancestral tradition, and hopefully a swing at post-colonial shifts in lifeways and demography.

I think. I don’t know how anthropology this punchy works, and I definitely don’t have the qualifications to be reading this in particular. It’s been fun so far, in any case.

[morrak]

The entire cellar of our house was filled with food. All the Blackwood women had made food and had taken pride in adding to the great supply of food in our cellar. There were jars of jam made by our great-grandmothers, with labels in thin pale writing, almost unreadable by now, and pickles made by great-aunts and vegetables put up by our grandmother, and and even our mother had left behind six jars of apple jelly.

Constance had worked all her life at adding to the food in the cellar, and her rows and rows of jars were easily the handsomest, and shone among the others. ‘You bury food the way I bury treasure,’ I told her sometimes, and she answered me once: ‘The food comes from the ground and can’t be permitted to stay there and rot; something has to be done with it.’ All the Blackwood women had taken the food that came from the ground and preserved it, and the deeply colored rows of jellies and pickles and bottled vegetables and fruit, maroon and amber and dark rich green, stood side by side in our cellar and would stand there forever, a poem by the Blackwood women.

Each year Constance and Uncle Julian and I had jam or preserve or pickle that Constance had made, but we never touched what belonged to the others; Constance said it would kill us if we ate it.

— Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)

[morrak]

Fingerbone was never an impressive town. It was chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere. That flood flattened scores of headstones. More disturbing, the graves sank when the water receded, so that they looked a little like hollow sides or empty bellies. And then the library was flooded to a depth of three shelves, creating vast gaps in the Dewey decimal system.

The losses in hooked and braided rugs and needlepoint footstools will never be reckoned. Fungus and mold crept into wedding dresses and photograph albums, so that the leather crumbled in our hands when we lifted the covers, and the sharp smell that rose when we opened them was as insinuating as the smells one finds under a plank or a rock. Much of what Fingerbone had hoarded up was defaced or destroyed outright, but perhaps because the hoard was not much to begin with, the loss was not overwhelming.

— Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (1980)

[morrak]

Moynihan and Rodaniche, The behavior and natural history of the Caribbean Reef Squid Sepioteuthis sepioidea. With a consideration of social, signal, and defensive patterns for difficult and dangerous environments. (1982)

‘(Rather like a Turkish battle fleet [...])’

I’m now picturing a flotilla of pugnacious Carribean squids — quite out of place in the Gulf of Patras, you’ll agree — rendering useless Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s left arm.

[morrak]

— Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (1980)

Aside: @strawberrycinema, how many hands has this copy passed through, exactly?

[morrak]

Neither Scott nor Bill could remember a senescent octopus at the aquarium becoming aggressive. They usually just turn unresponsive and vacant, which, Bill told me [...], was now happening to Octavia. ‘Three weeks ago her behavior changed,’ he said. ‘Usually, you know, she’s in the top corner of her tank. Now she sits on the bottom or in the window by the brighter light. She eats, but she takes the food and runs back to her corner. Sometimes she won’t come over at all. She just sends out an arm. In the mornings, she seems really white. She was always an exceptionally red octopus. But now she’s faded. She’s pale.’ [...]

Not long after that, Octavia seemed to lose her zest for interaction. As much as I longed to see her, I dreaded seeing her decline. I had, of course, seen humans I loved in similar straits. [...] I had seen this in our first border collie, when she was sixteen. She’d wake my husband and me in the night, crying and frightened, as if she couldn’t remember where she was or who we were. I’d lie on the floor with her and stroke her and kiss her till the light came back into her intense brown eyes, as if her soul had returned from a journey.

— Sy Montgomery, The Soul of an Octopus (2015)

[morrak]

— Franz Kafka, Diaries 1911 (trans. Joseph Kresch; 1948)

[morrak]

‘Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy’, Robinson writes at one point [in Housekeeping (1981)]. Against the use-value of buying and owning, there is the dream-value of merely looking and fingering. Meanwhile, the sentence itself ambiguously slips both ways ‘through the world’, keeping the doors in or out ambiguously open. Is the ‘spirit’ that passes alive or dead? Do we even know which is which?

—Angela Leighton, Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature (2018)