Evidentia

On a visit to Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, I had the chance to talk to Damien Iquallaq, one of the great young Inuit stone carvers. He showed me some of his carvings, and answered a few questions about what motivates him to be an artist.

This interview with musician Emily Doolittle is all about the fantastic music that European blackbirds and humpbacks make.

She was the widow of Mauritania:
A woman who wanted to press her mouth on this sea of ochre dunes,
Lie in these purple hollows and dream
Spread out her arms in the sand like angel wings,
Like spikes of fated desire,
Feel the heat and dry wind invade her body.
Listen to the hot sand tingle along the ridges,
Invent enchanting secrets, beautiful secrets worth savouring,
Drive from her mind any sort of finality.

This poem tells how a medicine man, the grandfather of the Mohawk-Oneida women’s rights pioneer Mary Two Axe Earley, saved my grandfather Frederick C. Grant’s life in 1893, in Wisconsin. The story was told to me by my grandfather, and subsequently by Mary Two Axe Earley in 1984, at her home in Kahnawake, near Montreal. Mary’s mother Juliette Smith Two Axe was an Oneida nurse, Juliette’s father may have been Jacob (Doc) Smith, the Oneida medicine man mentioned above, while Mary’s father Dominic Two Axe and her paternal grandfather Martin Two Axe were Mohawk medicine men.

You loved me in the temple of love,
Among stunted columns and broken goddesses.

Her eyes had grown accustomed to cut through appearances

Along the horizon, I see that yellowish northern glimmer
and closer to us, under a gloomy sky,
disappearing into the still hazy twilight,
icebergs of all shapes.

There is in my heart a secret place:
I returned there at ten past four
Repicturing in the cold of night
As if on a panel of light floating before me
All the sweetness of the first days …

There … A blue sphere,
wandering in the abyss of endless night,
like a sigh from the depths.

There is a lot of concern about the effect of global warming on ice caps, particularly in the northern hemisphere. What is the state of the Greenland ice cap? An interview with the glaciologist Ken Jezek.