Before class:

Required

• First, spend five to ten minutes making a list of all the thoughts that come to mind when you think of water. This can be a list of words, maps, sketches, or anything else you like. Please make the list by hand with a pen and paper.
• Once you have finished your list, read Jeannette Armstrong’s poem “Water is siwlkʷ” (2013). We will discuss this poem and your listing practice in class.

Recommended

During class:

Note: This theory is under construction by the author.

The verb supporting the theory of corrugation is “folding.” Corrugation, is what happens when experience folds into ideas folding into experience. What happens when encounters accrete affective and sensory matter. What happens?

One of the things that happens can be read in this very short story. I suspect other things happen too. I suspect thinkers who think in realms I’ve never thought to think about have been thinking about this. Possibly for millennia.

Memory is an important element here. In their explanation of memory Kathy Absolon and Cam Willett (2005) highlight the synesthetic qualities of corrugation.

“Memory is more than a mental process of recalling facts, experiences, and information. Human beings also have a capacity for sensory, physical, spiritual, and emotional memory. Physical or body memory refers to the body’s capacity to remember how to skin a moose, snare a rabbit, or where to pick medicines. Sensory memory is the kind of memory where smells, sounds, or tastes evoke vivid memories of other times, people, and places. These memories, for example, come alive when we smell a burning fire and remember the cabin our grandparents lived in. Spiritual memory is the extrasensory perception or connection we have with the spiritual world. Some say that déjà vu is a form of spiritual memory and that at a spiritual level we are remembering the earth journey our spirit was shown prior to our birth. Emotional memory rests in our hearts and in our capacity to remember emotional connections with other people. We associate feelings from the past with feelings in the present and we make assumptions about feelings in the future. Holistically, our memories are activated when we locate, and through location we re-member, reconnect, and recover our very identity” (n.p.).

Jeannette Armstrong’s poem was chosen as a reading for this Day because it accretes. Water is one word and also everything. “Water Is Siwlkw,” the poem begins, simple enough. Then, in a block of ecstatic ekphrastic text the water accretes: “fertile plains and deltas,” “jagged mountains,” “loam and luxuriant life;” “Condor wings,” “green depths,” and “the yearly procession of thunder beings.”

So, make a list of all the thoughts that come to mind when you think of water.

What about if you go encounter water, intentionally? Record that encounter, revisit that record, add words that you can provide but water does not need. What about in the meantime while you’re taking those steps? What if your sibling calls, intentionally? What if they don’t?

After class:

• Continue your Attentive Repetition practice and Log entries.

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