Silko expresses a constant theme - that ‘memories dreams and names of places live on regardless of their physical location’. This is restated by Jackie Brookner - “Sustainable technologies are... a small part of our humanness; it is a small part of what makes us care about what we care about. To affect values, to create desire, to make people care about something, you have to affect people’s hearts, and bodies, our unconscious dream lives and our imaginations. This is the work art can do so well.” The sentiment is re-stated by Lucy Lippard in a slightly different way. She says that artists are attracted to ancient art and sites because what is signified is not the thing itself but the secure linkage to the pattern/place of making. In other words there is an indeterminate ‘territory’ of making. This territory is verb and is wildly exciting- like lightening.
In the story about the boy who was named for the Grandmother and he catches a lot of fish -Grandmother always did catch a lot of fish. Grandmother’s name is a good place if you want to catch a lot of fish. The name Grandmother connects the whole story. And yet the story interferes with thoughts of reality. Just as Basia’s ‘stories of water cannot be contained in one place’, but they are water and they are a place. There is a way to go in. We feel connected as if we WERE the signifier and signified all at once. It is an endless hall of mirrors I guess.
I think we need places to tell stories from and yet we crave to arrange these stories as if they were written on our own skins.
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