"Place" isn't a verb?
{but how can the word "place" not be a verb?}
I sigh, wishing we could rewrite Territory as actions and movements.
As thresholds and transitions, of spaces, bodies, and times. Vast and tiny.
Of overflowing porous flesh.
Let us remember Places as dynamic webs in permanent metamorphosis.
In entangled and contextual transformations.
Breathe with wind.
River with lymph.
Kin dancing.
I call on each Place's tones, textures and polyvocal expressions to touch us.
For us to touch them.
I call for Places to be recognised as verbs again.
Verbs of regional wisdom, with the power to give narrative back to local voices and memories.
Skin with earth.
Stones with bones.
Sea with conscience.
I claim Places as ecosystemic territories of diverse collective relationships.
Like origami in a dream, eternally unfolding. Without ending.
We commune with impermanence.
We tune in to mutation.
Without capturing.
Wings with scales.
Claws with roots.
We embrace mountains.
May we incubate the intimacy of the ecological and primal verbs that cross and envelop us.
That makes and unmakes.
That anchors and dissolves.
Through and by us.
From the howling of the wind to the melodies of the birds.
From the roar of storms to the rumblings of the intestine.
Eggs and cocoons.
Wombs and graves.
Leaving the vacuum of modernity's saturated white blindness, which violently ignores the fact that Places have always been primeval verbs in essential unfolding, we improvise on raw mythology.
We pray to sacred ground.
Pulse in reverberation.
We remember each other in banal symbiosis.
In creation and decomposition.
Because, after all, Places have always been verbs.
In the English language, Place is also a transitive verb (indeed!); this piece was translated from Portuguese, where we also have the verb “to place” (posicionar).
But the original, territorialized word is “Lugar,” meaning place (and with no other specific translation into English that I’m aware of) but with no implicit or possible movement; Lugar is the Portuguese word connected to place and space, land and soil. There is no verb for Lugar.
{Although, in Portuguese, there is the verb to localise and territorialise, there are differences between Place [Lugar] and Local. Both words come from the Latin locále or locus, but Place [Lugar] is generally used as a noun and local as a noun or adjective. As an adjective, local refers to a place, meaning "pertaining to a certain place." I want to note that these verbs and adjectives are used as situated references of context, i.e. where something is or is to be found; just as a compass tells us locations and directions. What I'm trying to do with this heart-cry is different: I'm taking on Place as a metamorph, as the primordial verb of the space-time in which life unfolds, not just as an orientation/localisation reference. Place, as a multiple territory of sovereign ecosystems, where life unfolds through the interconnection of numerous entities. Place as a living being, as kin, harbouring the world's stories —stories that are not about us individually, but affect and pass through us viscerally}.
Thank you 🙏