ABSTRACT
The weave of memory and matter is a map into the enchantments of Gerald Vizenor’s uses of language. Image, imagination, and memory work in his words to unique effect. To set Vizenor’s or any writer’s texts in the context of memory may at first seem obvious. Yet of course drawing attention to the air we breathe together is ultimately the purpose of much art and analysis. As art may defamiliarize the familiar, so may theory do the difficult work of articulating the obvious: “Theory is a critique of common sense, of concepts taken as natural” (Culler 15). Newton codified gravity, but once the theory seems clear, then the questions proliferate. Quantum mechanics upset classical Newtonian mechanics, even as both remain relatively valid, apparently telling different stories. Probing memory itself conjures questions of matter and mind, of energy and consciousness, of time and space. Especially through recent studies in redefining material dynamics of mind, and the mental dynamics of matter, we may reread Vizenor’s words as recasting fundamental structures of subjective and objective experience. Categories break down that would separate language and land, memory and ground, and we may see through these theories some of the aesthetic and ethic in Vizenor’s art. The very value of survivance in Vizenor’s world becomes embodied in the tribal shadows of his words. Further, I suggest that the critical and “autocritical” discipline of Vizenor’s tropes, the fine analytical edge beneath his figurative neologisms, owes its focus partly to his keen attention to this imbrication of meaning in a layering of language and land. “Imagination is a presence; our being in a sound, a word; noise, ownership, and delusions remain” (Vizenor, “Crows” 101). Language matters because the abstract and the concrete are so interwoven that aesthetics are ethics and ethics are aesthetics, and an artist pays attention to that interplay with every keystroke.
