The Silence of Sasquatch: Toeing the Dark Divide

Is Sasquatch our longing to retrieve an innocence lost when we learned how to slaughter or domesticate animals for food, magic, and anthropocentric love? Digging through the middens of human culture for discarded scraps of disquieting questions, Sasquatch emerges as an uncanny totem for what is difficult to see but is conceivably there.

Although the Dark Divide retains it's geography "in the middle of a diamond formed by Mounts Rainier, Adams, St. Helens, and Hood," in Washington and Oregon states, it is the artificial divide between species that's addressed here, and what George MacDonald calls " the creature that comes most often to the front."

These sasquatches discretely sense their death, and thus transmit a culture. Yet it is not what it is to be Sasquatch that motivates this project, but where they "cease to be subjects to become events." The tie that binds species to each other is the liminal state in which they dwell.

The writer is "an experimental man (who thereby ceases to be a man in order to become an ape or a beetle, or a dog, or mouse, a becoming-animal...)" However, man or woman, before we can know what experimental means, we must already no longer recognize ourselves "as human in any finished or even vertical sense."

There is one famed and blurry movie, a plethora of footprints, some obvious hoaxes, volumes of tall tales, tracked mainly in laymen circles. My plan is to draw on a habitat in which Sasquatch displaces those "dark, compelling presences that pose an ultimate choice between everything and nothing," while balancing on the limen of the Dark/Divide.

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links the five texts of twelve fragmented and distributed stories. What is Massive may also be Unknowable. An Artifact can be Hidden, or a trope that can Transform be Watchful and also a Psychopomp. The Other is Odorous and Hirsute, its incomprehensible language is the essence of Silence; mythical as a Lunar body, foreboding as a Solar eclipse.

"The instrument of the search will determine the nature of what is found, and the instrument is the human mind," with texts, paratexts, images, invaginations,

dreams , cryptozoology,
transpersonal psychology,
eco- and psychogeography,
in wilderness, park, and city living twelve stories and countless mythologies high.

My appreciation begins with ecologist and writer Robert Michael Pyle, whose book, Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide, opened the territory for this project. As Bigfoot's range is worldwide, my gratitude extends to John Kielty Bell, England; Fatima Lasay, The Philippines; Regina Célia Pinto, Brazil; and Reiner Strasser, Germany. In Canada, literary critics Alan Bourassa and Pamela Gravestock kindly allowed me to quote from their respective work. Back in the USA: Tracy Dillon, Chairman, Department of English, Portland State University, and scholars Michael Rothenberg, Anthony Chiavello, and Ralph H. Lutts. To psychologist James Hillman, Bigfoot investigator Autumn Williams, and digital artist Millie Niss. To Pamela Causgrove, for her encouragement, and opening invaluable resources to me. And to Kevin Campbell, for decades of friendship, insight, and fascinating discussions.