Explorations in Environmental Writing

/volume 2 /Fall 2010

A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. [Thoreau, Walden]

[provide the url link to your final project (posted on your blog) by commenting/replying below; include the title of your project in the reply]

Consider this poem by Denise Levertov, “The Almost-Island.”

Or this:  a poem that–it seems to me–echoes back and forward through thoughts we have been encountering. In any case, it takes me back to my first post in this class–thinking about literature from the field-guide view, which led me to thoughts of a world that will someday live without us. It is W.S. Merwin, currently the U.S. Poet Laureate, and like Wendell Berry, considered one of America’s important voices in literary environmentalism.

For the Anniversary of My Death

BY W. S. MERWIN

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day

When the last fires will wave to me

And the silence will set out

Tireless traveler

Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer

Find myself in life as in a strange garment

Surprised at the earth

And the love of one woman

And the shamelessness of men

As today writing after three days of rain

Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease

And bowing not knowing to what

Another way to put this is that in your own environmental writing in this course–in the first two writing projects and now the final project–you too will be enacting an ecological perspective. Or, that is something I want you to consider and develop. Here is a way to think about that. There is a heuristic (in classical rhetoric: a model or structure to generate or organize thinking for an essay, argument, project, a device for invention) known as the particle/wave/field heuristic. I summarize it below by way of the rhetoric book Form and Surprise in Composition: Writing and Thinking Across the Curriculum by John Bean and John Ramage [they take the heuristic from the Young, Becker and Pike's Rhetoric: Discovery and Change]. They suggest it as a method that helps develop an argument on a given topic by enabling the writer to switch perspective systematically. You can use this for any topic, though you will notice that it seems particularly apt for writing about topics related to environment and ecology.

Particle: First, take your topic X and view it as a static, unchanging entity (particle): note its distinguishing features, characteristics; consider how this entity differs from other similar things. For example: Thoreau on farming, particularly as he discusses it in “The Bean Field.” Or Berry on farming as discussed in “The Making of a Marginal Farm.” Think of this as specific ideas and statements made; specific quotations; deliberate reading of the material of the matter. We did something like this with the first project, reading deliberately like Thoreau.

Wave: Second, view the same topic as a dynamic changing process (wave): note how it acts and changes through time, grows, develops, decays. How does Thoreau’s view on farming change or develop elsewhere in Walden? Do we see the same vision in the end as at the beginning? What are some changes you observe? Think of this as places where you find echoes and contradictions and traces of the ideas or earlier statements. We did something like this with Dillard and the second project, Two Views of the Same.

Field: Third, view the topic as a Field, as related to things around it and part of a system, network or ecological environment. What depends on X? What does X depend on? What would happen if X doesn’t exist? Who loves (hates) X? What communities (categories) does X belong to? For Thoreau on farming: what does his vision of farming depend upon–what ideas does it belong to? Who would love this idea? Who would hate it? What is X’s function in a larger system.

This “field” view, I would suggest, has something crucial to do with Berry’s and Silko’s “pattern,” with Dillard’s complicated senses of seeing, with Leopold’s thinking like a mountain, with Abram’s idea of the more-than-human. My contention is that all good writing, whatever the topic, is ecological in this sense to the extent that a compelling and meaningful argument/essay/thesis (call it what you will) needs to move dynamically between focus on particulars and some sense and awareness of a larger field that informs the perspective, even when it can’t be always in view. A good argument or exploration is aware of what it is not focusing on–and needs to incorporate that into its perspective.

As Thoreau puts it: a truer discipline for a writer is to take two views of the same. Or as Berry suggests, a good argument (identifying a problem and attempting a solution) is ecologically minded when it solves for pattern.

….Speaking of poetics and ecology, Moriah Purdy, the Assistant Director of the Writing Center, will be joining us to disucss her work in ecopoetics–and help us think about ways that we can develop the ecology of our writing for the final project. Moriah’s poem Decayless can be found here. Her blog, with some recent field notes for work in progress, is here.

But what if the uneasiness of the reading is not just a problem of our focus, a problem of our cultural difference or distance that we bring to the novel?What if it is also a mark of its environmental orientation. In other words, what if a lesson of this novel’s environmental perspective–what makes it ‘green’–is the loss of our own perspective? Silko uses the word entanglement to describe the struggle Auntie has in reconciling the old instincts of family and native tradition, and particularly, of “sensitivity” with the world, with Christian traditions and English words separating her from that older world :

But now the feelings were twisted, tangled roots, and all the names for the source of this growth were buried under English words, out of reach. And there would be no peace and the people would have no rest until the entanglement had been unwound to the source. [64]

Reading this passage, I thought of the famous concluding paragraph of Darwin’s Origin of Species, where he turns to the image of entanglement to reiterate his vision of nature’s biodiversity and its developmental difference from the prevailing view of separate, individual creation of species.

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Yariability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse: a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of lessimproved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.

Entanglement, from the evolutionary or ecological perspective, is necessary, fundamental. And note that with Darwin, we have a vision of natural development that is also spiritual, creative. In fact, reading this passage at this point in the course, you might well hear and see the likes of Thoreau, of Dillard, of Berry, of Leopold. I think of Thoreau looking at the sandbank, seeing in the thaw a prototype for nature’s entanglement of life and death, bowels and beauty: Walden was dead and is alive again. What else might you hear or see in this notion of entanglement?

And if we see Silko here as well–hear the problem of Tayo’s entanglement in the context of nature’s entanglement, that suggests to me that a lesson of the novel is that we need to understand the entanglement of roots, but not solve it. In some sense, I think we see that Auntie’s desire to untangle things is as problematic as the desire to destroy. Entanglement is a form of intricacy. And intricacy in the imaginative world of story, as in the natural world, dies when it stops shifting. “Things which don’t shift and grow are dead things,” Betonie tells Tayo (116).

Isn’t that kind of entanglement, call it weaving, the heart of a good story?

For a related perspective, consider this poem by the Native American poet Joy Harjo, “A Map to the Next World.”

Antaeus and Hercules

These days, if you put “environmental mythology” into Google, you will end up with various links to some heated discussion about the myths of environmental crisis (global warming, etc). I have in mind, rather, Thoreau’s understanding in “Walking” that we (particularly in the West, in America) are lacking a mythology adequate to the expression of Nature and the wild. That we need more mythology, not less, in order to be “in sympathy with surrounding Nature.”

I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild ["words...with earth adhering to their roots"]….  Mythology comes nearer to it than anything. How much more fertile a Nature, at least, has Grecian mythology its root in than English literature! Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted, before the fancy and imagination were affected with blight. [278]

From Thoreau’s perspective, to explore the “mythology” of Silko’s ceremony–the Native American world view as Momaday calls it–is to consider the novel as a candidate for the kind of adequate, imaginative or poetic expression Thoreau is in search of. And note that Thoreau imagines  the American (New World) lack  of natural imagination as a metaphor (or is it metonymy, more material) of soil exhaustion. Perhaps Ceremony (which deals in many ways with exhaustion and with drought) is native American mythology: a story about the need for stories in America with earth adhering to the roots. Think of the passage early in the novel–Tayo’s encounter with the healer Ku’oosh: we learn there that the fragility of the world is tied up with the ability of words to contain and convey their complex origins. So, storytelling is a way of being responsible to those words. Storytelling, in other words, is also a way of saving the world.

So, what are the myths and stories we have that relate to the natural world, to the earth, to the environment? What can we learn from them? A partial listing of myths and stories, to which I invite you to add others [comment below]:

• Antaeus
• Apocalypsticism (ends)
• Creation Myths (beginnings)
• Gaia
• Prometheus
  • Pandora

Films and Fiction that focus in some crucial way on the environment–and as to how we might define such crucial focus, consider Buell’s categories.

• Avatar (film)
• The Bear (Faulkner)
• Ceremony (Silko)
• Prince Caspian/Narnia
• Safe (film)

Antelope Canyon

Lawrence Buell, a scholar prominent in the development of environmentally focused literary criticism, argues that there are four components of an “environmentally oriented work.” The following is taken from his book The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Harvard UP, 1995). As we read and discus Silko’s Ceremony, consider where and whether these characteristics are prominent in the novel. Additionally, as you being to explore (and what I call ‘compost’) ideas for your final project, you can use these categories to develop the environmental orientation of your project.

1. The nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history.
   1. examples: Forster’s Passage to India; any novel by Thomas Hardy
2. The human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest.
   1. example: Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” in contrast to Shelley’s “To a Skylark” or Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale. “
   2. “Cradle is more concerned with the composition of a specific place, and Whitman’s symbolic bird is endowed with a habitat, a history, a story of its own.”
3. Human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical orientation.
   1. example: “By this standard, Wordsworth’s ‘Nutting’ comes closer to being an environmental text than his ‘Tintern Abbey,’ insofar as the function of landscape in the latter is chiefly to activate the speaker’s subjective feelings of rejuvenation and anxiety, whereas the former reminiscence prompts him to retell a self-incriminating tale of his youthful violation of the hazel grove.”
4. Some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a constant or a given is at least implicit in the text.
   1. Susan Cooper’s Rural Hours … is a more faithful environmental text than any or her father’s Leatherstocking romances (Last of the Mohicans, etc)    [The Environmental Imagination, 7-8]

Old Uranium Mine, Laguna Pueblo

Some links for further reading and context for Silko and Ceremony:

• Silko biography and basic summary of Ceremony [wikipedia]
• Silko essay, “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective”

Alphabetic writing can engage the human senses only to the extent that those senses sever, at least provisionally, their spontaneous participation with the animate earth. To begin to read, alphabetically, is thus already to de dis-placed, cut off from the sensory nourishment of a more-than-human field of forms. It is also, however, to feel the still-lingering savor of that nourishment, and so to year, to hope, that such contact and conviviality may someday return. (196)

Google may be making us stupid (as one recent article on the effect of the internet on our brains proclaims), but writing long ago made us too human. Abram’s vision thus takes up a problem of nature writing–how to write about nature in a form that isn’t nature, that can only be culture–and takes it to a place we haven’t been before. It would seem that from his perspective, humans need to find ways to stop being so human. Or, to use his language, realize that they are “more-than-human.”

Abram is co-founder of a group called the Alliance for Wild Ethics. Perhaps one way to consider Abram is to link him back to Thoreau’s “Higher Laws.” Or, related to Thoreau, to Emerson’s notion (from Nature) of an “occult relation” between man and the natural world. The footnote on page 829 indicates another, more recent context for Abram’s understanding of a fundamental relation between humans and the natural world: the Gaia hypothesis, in which the entirety of the earth is viewed as a living organism. Thus Abram suggests that what might be viewed (or discounted) as primitive, animistic worldviews (the natural world as rife with spirits) actually anticipates concepts emerging in contemporary ecology–and ecological philosophy, one branch of which is known as Deep Ecology.

So, we find ourselves alienated from nature in our cultivations, but also find relationship through that sense of alienation. We become the Other. Or as Abram cites Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis, we breathe “a world that is the breath and bones of our ancestors.”

Phenomenology is a philosophical (and also psychological) concept that Abram takes up in his thinking (he is partly trained as a philosopher), extending the work of an important French philosopher, The Phenomenology of Perception (1945) by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Here is a useful summary from Wikipedia of the argument:

The central thesis of the book is what Merleau-Ponty later called the “primacy of perception.” We are first perceiving the world, then we do philosophy. This entails a critique of the Cartesian cogito, resulting in a largely different concept of consciousness. The Cartesian dualism of mind and body is called into question as our primary way of existing in the world and is ultimately rejected in favor of a intersubjective conception or dialectical concept of consciousness. What is characteristic of his account of perception is the centrality that the body plays. We perceive the world through our bodies; we are embodied subjects, involved in existence. Further the ability to reflect comes from a pre-reflective ground that serves as the foundation for reflecting on actions. In other words we perceive phenomena first, then reflect on them via this mediation which is instantaneous and synonymous with our being and perception in,as,and with body, i.e. embodiment.

This might be a stretch, but think of the greeting of the Na’vi in Avatar as phenomenological in a very basic way: I see you. Think about ways we can apply this rethinking of perception back to our study: to Thoreau, Burroughs, Dillard, Leopold. In Abram’s vision of perception, what makes it ecological (rather than just psychological)? And with that in mind, as we begin Ceremony, we can ask: is this also a book about ecological perception? about embodiment?

In “The Making of a Marginal Farm,” a well-known essay that is first published in The Orion magazine, we see Berry focus on loss and restoration, on land and love, on responsibility and reclamation–in both the cultural and agricultural senses of those words. [Indeed, the subtitle of one of his many collections of essays is: Essays Cultural and Agricultural] The idea of loving the land seems crucial to Berry’s vision. So, too, being responsible to the land on which we live, the place from which we are from. We heard this initially from Leopold. As Berry puts it memorably, he is not talking about a pastoral vision, about “living an idyll.” What he has in mind is something more…basic, if not boring:

One’s relation to one’s subject ceases to be merely emotional or esthetical, or even merely critical, and becomes problematical, practical, and responsible as well. Because it must. It is like marrying your sweetheart.

What do you make of Berry’s notion of love as a model for environmental ethics?

Seems to me that in both cases, the case of mourning a loss and the case of marrying a sweetheart, there is a relation to the natural world (not the world made by machines) that Berry seeks that locates responsibility in some sort of heartache or love. What could that mean? One answer could take us back to “Solving for Pattern.” Berry has in mind a responsiveness that he names pattern–and defines, in some specific senses of the term, organic. Another answer could take us back to Thoreau: “I love a broad margin to my life”-though for Thoreau, that also means not farming all the time. When we read Silko’s Ceremony, I think we might usefully revisit this language of margins and love, and see if we find in her vision of land, informed by the cultural and agricultural histories of the Native American southwest, a related picture of responsibility.

Berry’s essay “Preserving Wildness” picks up on lots that we have been exploring–most recently, our discussion of ethics and value. This is an essay to return to and think more about and use, perhaps, as a mentor for a final project. For now, I would highlight for our initial discussion of Berry two places where he elaborates further his understanding of love and of margins. In both cases, in redefining and repurposing some words we otherwise and more commonly (Thoreau might say, too cheaply) use, I think we also find an example of his underlying premise, that the natural and the cultural, the human and the non-human natural world, for better and for worse, are inextricably linked.

523: I would call this a loving economy, for it would strive to place a proper value on all the materials of the world, in all their metamorphoses from soil and water, air and light to the finished goods of our town and households, and I think the only effective motive for this would be a particularizing love for local things, rising out of local knowledge and local allegiance.

529: Looking at the monocultures of industircal civilization, we yearn with a kind of homesickness for the humanness and the naturalness of a highly diversified, multipurpose landscape, democractically divided, with many margins. The margins are of the utmost importance. They are the divisions between holdings, as well as between kinds of work and kinds of land. These margins–lanes, streamsides, wooded fencerows, and the like–are always freeholds of wildness, where limits are set on human intention.

Living in these margins, marrying one’s sweetheart may not be as boring as I had presumed.

I am compelled by the line that follows her rather playful (and humorous–now look what you made me do) invocation of religion.

We are people; we are permitted to have dealings with the creator and we must speak up for the creation. God look at what you’ve done to this creature, look at the sorrow, the cruelty, the long damned waste!

Dillard seems to have a different sacrifice in mind–or a different attitude to the sense of sacrifice that she identifies with nature. Different, at least, than the interpretation of the same passage that I found on a religious blog. Where the sacrificial offering reflects man’s dominion. In any case, no hint of the anger at God that Dillard shows.

What do we make of Dillard’s spirituality, her invocation (as here) of specific religious perspectives? Does her spiritualism fit with her naturalism? Are environmental perspectives and religious perspectives compatible?

I might suggest this late line, speak up for the creation, almost as the thesis and argument of the book. Finally, we get it. But it is not the creation, it seems, of any one province: not exclusively the Hebrew Bible’s God, not Christian creationism, not Romanticism’s sublime nature, not science’s perfectly economical machine. It’s the creation of the giant water bug (notice how it comes back, along with the cat) eating the world. It’s Emerson; but the emphasis is not on transcendence (remember his transparent eyeball from 1836 Nature) but the totality of vision. “All of it. All of it intricate, speckled, gnawed, fringed, and free.” We have got to take (eat) it all, for better and for worse. Where does this leave us?

The creator goes off on one wild, specific tangent after another, or millions simultaneously, with an exuberance that would seem to be unwarranted, and with an abandoned energy sprung from an unfathomable font. What is going on here? The point of the dragonfly’s terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork–for it doesn’t, particuclarly, not even inside the goldfish bowl–but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, fringed tangle.

I see her writing as such a fringed tangle, replicating a kind of texture that she finds in the movement between her thinking and her observing, like the movement between creek-water and creek-bank. Fractal texture might be a word for this. Here is the definition of fractal from the OED–see if you hear anything of interest. The entire book as a fractal? One of the descriptions I have heard to describe a fractal helps me make sense of Dillard’s writing: the idea is that when you continually magnify an image of a border (coastline, or say the edge of a cloud), each successive larger/closer image will have a pattern something like the first one. So, reiteration without exact repetition; a loop that spirals; intricacy built upon a simplicity that is beautiful and unfathomable.

Math.

[a. F. fractal (B. B. Mandelbrot 1975, in Les Objets Fractals), f. L. fract-us, pa. pple. of frangre to break: see -AL¹.]

A mathematically conceived curve such that any small part of it, enlarged, has the same statistical character as the original. Freq.attrib. or as adj.

1975Sci. Amer. Nov. 144/3 It seems that mountain relief, islands, lakes, the holes in Appenzeller and Ementhaler cheeses, the craters of the moon, the distribution of stars close to us in the galaxy and a good deal more can be described by the use of generalized Brownian motions and the idea of the fractal dimension. 1977 B. B. MANDELBROT Fractals i. 1/2 Many important spatial patterns of Nature are either irregular or fragmented to such an extreme degree that..classical geometry..is hardly of any help in describing their form… I hope to show that it is possible in many cases to remedy this absence of geometric representation by using a family of shapes I propose to call fractalsor fractal sets. 1977Sci. News 20 Aug. 123 Sets and curves with the discordant dimensional behavior of fractals were introduced at the end of the 19th century by Georg Cantor and Karl Weierstrass.1978 [see snowflake curve s.v. SNOWFLAKE 7]. 1984Nature 4 Oct. 419/2 Parts of such patterns, when magnified, are indistinguishable from the whole. The patterns are characterized by a fractal dimension; the value log₂ 3  1·59 is the most common. 1985Ibid. 21 Feb. 671 Mandelbrot has argued that a wide range of natural objects and phenomena are fractals; examples of fractal trees include actual trees, plants such as a cauliflower, river systems and the cardiovascular system.

A fractal image: like Dillard’s sycamore tree vision? Or perhaps the creek, seen from space?