For two sessions in August, as the first session of the pilot course Learning Finnish through the Arts, I gathered with fellow Finnish-learners, and two Finnish language teachers, in the forest of Mustikkaama in Helsinki, Finland, to share my artistic practice as a way of learning Finnish.
I have developed this attentional and sensory embodied practice for the past 4 years primarily as a way of cultivating relationship with the natural world. Now, for the purpose of learning Finnish, I draw upon the practice as a method of inner inscription. This language practice also takes inspiration from the “songlines” of Aboriginals, the first peoples of Australia (Neale and Kelly).
Aboriginals travelled Country using internal maps to navigate. These maps were formed by connecting sites of knowledge embodied in features of the land. Everything that they stored in their internal mindbody also had a specific place in the land that it lived. They would walk these songlines and repeat the songs, stories and dances that they had created to encode the knowledge in each site. Walking the land was a device to remember and pass on knowledge, much of which was essential to survive both physically, culturally and spiritually. Each landmark became like a living text.
The invitation embedded in my practice of “Narrative Mapping” is to first encounter the story of a place through its natural elements as a kind of primary language– the texture of a rock, the voice of a bird etc. In this way, language learners become archivists with a responsibility to keep alive the embodied experience of the primary language, the language of the things and actions themselves.
Walking becomes a way of carrying the Finnish language back to the land. “Narrative Mapping” begins with walking while narrating observations and actions. In each site where we are compelled to stop, we first engage the elements intimately with our senses while speaking their names. This is a method to inscribe the language in our mindbody through direct, sensory embodied action. At the same time, the words learned and repeated become embedded in that place and in our memories – our flesh interacting with its flesh.
According to neuroscience, our neurons associate abstract knowledge with any place where the knowledge is talked about and learned at the same time the place is evoked (Neale and Kelly 88). In this way, “Narrative Mapping” is a way to build internal maps where language and landscape co-emerge.
This practice is all about the how of language learning, to cultivate relationship with both ecological and cultural layers of the land. The first way I propose to do this is by adopting the mindset of a child on an adventure exploring with curious wonder a new world where you do not yet know the names for things. This is an invitation to approach the Finnish language as an exciting tool for relating to and discovering this new country where any small word or interaction can unlock a multitude of connections.
Another way is to explore the sonic landscape of words. By staying with a word in repetition, perhaps echoing it back and forth with your partner while both touching and engaging the thing you’re naming, you can begin to relate the sonic texture in your mouth with the sensation of what you’re touching. Qualities of words and matter begin to (re)entangle in ways that instead of memorizing translations, you begin to inscribe words whole. Sammal (moss) feels soft and rounded in your mouth and so you associate this sound combo with the soft, green pads growing on the rocks.
Drawing on imagination, we may invent further meaningful relations that help to form a stronger connection between the sounds/taste/tone of the word and the qualities of the element, the thing itself. In a similar way, saying the verb while performing the actions, helps the sounds of the verbs be encoded into the sensations of the particular movements in the body.
Karkea (rough)– feel the roughness in your mouth similar to the edges of jäkälä (lichen) interacting with your fingertips. We can now think of connections to other words with similar letters and sounds. For instance rakkaus (love) is not soft and sweet as we might think the word for love should be, but it has this rough edge, again with these “k”s. What does this indicate about the culture and how people might relate to love?
Finally, this practice is so much more than a way to learn Finnish. It is about belonging and assimilating to Country; language becomes a pathway to the culture that is embedded in and emergent out of the land. To take root in a new land and begin to belong to a place, we must know the story about this place, meet it with our own stories and recognize a kinship in these relational encounters. The aboriginals had this idea:
“Animate and inanimate both form part of a web in which each component sustains the land and keeps the archive alive. Every single thing has a place and a kinship with humans. If it exists, it has a place to belong.” (Neale and Kelly 46)
So we might ask – how do I walk this land in a way that I am part of the map, one element as nature in nature, so also I am the map? How can I intimately touch this place and begin to forge my own belonging, by bringing my accent into the accentedness (the multiplicity of accents) of this place? In these ways we begin to recognize ourselves as embodied archives in the interlocking story that composes this country (a story of indigenous, native and immigrant alike).
Neale, Margo, and Lynne Kelly. First Knowledges Songlines: The Power and Promise. Thames & Hudson Australia Pty, 2020.