Statues of salt

Statues of salt
whats that sound
its a train i recorded going form portland to tacoma

the focus of this video is native American issues.
the poem i write with it goes as follows
a man surrounded by four walls of flesh in the house of illness.


he walked with a coat made of headaches.

the rotted wood crumbled before his inquiring hands. behind the black wood lay a few twisted grubs. my fingernail punched their soft white flesh.

on the other side of the evening
he approached the repeating mirror .

it always stuttered the same ugly face. his own .


on the other side of the night
he built his totems with his own hands his hands now splinted and scared from carving his own face.
the subject is native identity and forced memory
take for example prousts remembrance of lost time and involuntary memory.
the way memory's that are not necessarily ones we chose to remember but seem to remember us so to speak.
a memory that is like a shared cultural memory created by a sometimes single but most times multiple representation ( for example a photograph a movie etc)
the memory becomes something form the outside preformed and placed inside of your senses.
and we unknowingly take part in the coununation of a cultural stereotype or media construction . it than begins to form things liek jokes everyone in the culutre can get ( for example
the video its self is a about two representations of the native American
one is the European view of a people in some kind of historical Nobel savagery a romantic static image n time . even the modern native is seen in this light liberals and the right alike. see the Indian in this historicized light of 19 century untouched way colliding with modern American integration
so you have 2 constructed images of the native American as the tee pee buffalo hunting plains Indian which is the dominant view. which hides other types for tribes and their lifestyles. i.e. inuit and Salish tribes and Apache in the southwest.
so in short you have these 2 very static constructed images created by Europeans of native American as a historicized late 19 century static image removed form reality like a novelty image sold and resold over and over again .
but thsi is avery social approch to unvoluntary memory this will be my starting point to a much more subjective approch to memory time and consccousness.