EcoLit 313

Circulating in the English Department just now is an essay that just appeared in Inside Higher Education: Humanities in the Digital Age. It seemed to me to intersect quite intriguingly w/ the piece by Thomas Berry which we're reading for Tuesday, and the language is quite amazingly (ironically?) 'eco'--for instance, the claim that
"It all starts with where scholars live and work natively: in their departments…Currently, digital initiatives …spring up accidentally like weeds [well, Michael Pollan will soon have something to say to us about that conceit!] around particular faculty, areas, or projects. We propose an organic strategy for integrating digital initiatives into core departmental research, teaching, administration, and staff work…."

 

I wrote my first web event for this course in iambic pentameter. It is pastoral, romanticizing the passing of time, the activities of nature, and my place in it. Anne questioned my use of a “very conventional poetic form.” For one I like poetry and I like that it can paint a picture without having to have me in it as an active character- I tried to make my voice more passive. It also seemed to me to be structured, like our assignment of the walk was, yet also fluid and wandering, like the walk was. Perhaps I used iambic pentameter to foreshadow our reading of Mentz on Shakespeare’s ecological tongue; or perhaps I simply did not have the words.

Having read the theories and ideas put forth by so many authors on what an ecological tongue or literary style might be, I now have some new tools with which to experiment in my imaginings of the ecological.

Let’s see what comes out when I try a retelling of my walk in a sci-fi mode…

FIRST TELLING

Where weathered rock and flowing water meet

When hot, moist air retreats at summer’s end;

Above, the vivid boughs do speak of fall

While underfoot the earth prepares for sleep.

The sparrow hops upon the iron rail

While under trees cicadas speak their death.

SCI-FI TELLING

               It has rained and the garden is very wet. There are no crows.  The only sound is a damp thickness of  cricket sound, thick as an invisible soup through which my ears have to wade.  As I become accustomed and tuned in to them, I hear they are not just an undifferentiated "them", but a symphonic multitude, a chorus of legions of crickets under blade and under leaf, under bush, and under tree.  I will search and perhaps find none. I have searched before.  Their communication ( I believe that we can make that assumption) has a comforting effect on my nervous system.  Theirs is a soft blanketing sound, an unobtrusive  blend with the soft swish of leaves in a soundless breeze. We hear  the air’s effects.  The effect of its movement on surrounding things.  Everything is connected.  Everything has an affect on something, or someone else.

               I have heard myself claim to myself that if a garden sound is not beautiful, in the sense to which I have become accustomed by small song birds, then I would prefer it to be unobtrusive.  That is to say banished.

              Do I prefer unobtrusive people? Unobtrusive plants?

So I am not the best artist in the world, as evidenced by this watercolor. However, I really wanted to use the tools Nan put at my disposal. I found, though, that the brush was not the right instrument for me. I ended up using my fingers to create this. It made me feel much more connected to the paper, and was much eaasier to mix the colors I needed. 

I also decided to paint ontop of a page of Gary Snyder's essay. I loved his garden metaphor for good writing, and wanted to incorporate it somehow. I tried painting on just a regular piece of paper, but decided it didn't quite caputer our class notions of language and reprsentation. I'm not quite sure how it connects, seeing as I was painting and not writing, but I like the way it turned out.

The first few minutes of my third trip to my spot followed the basic general format that I had followed in my previous observation periods. I sat on the bench, taking into account how there were growing splotches of color in the tree leaves above the Nature Trail, noting the relative isolation of the spot being interrupted by early morning runners, noticing the mushrooms starting to grow around the bench, hearing the car horns as a traffic jam started to form on Haverford Avenue, and looking for other aspects of my location that were not the same as the previous week’s visit. But after a while of this, I kept thinking back to the alien world in Vaster Than Empires and More Slow and our class discussion about potential forms of plant sentience.  By constantly thinking back to these subjects, I started considering whether my surroundings had a form of sentience and wondering if my presence at  the bench was being registered by an alien mind? I began asking myself more and more questions regarding this concept such as:

                - Did the leaves and pine needles lying on the ground share the same manner of sentience the trees they came from hold and lost that sentience when they fell from the trees or did they possess a separate form of sentience than the trees they come possess?

This week, I share in Sarah's distance predicament. I always thought Rock was rather close to where I live, but apparently that distance is subjective. Last week, when I was perfectly able, the tree was not far at all. This week, with an injury, I might as well have walked to Brecon. By the time I got there, standing for too long became difficult and sitting on the tree was the worst of all. I had no hope of climbing it. I stood on the ground in the shade of the damp tree for as long as I could, but after a while I had to go back to my human den to lie down. What if I didn't have a comfortable, soft white bed to fall into? What if I, like any other species, had to live in the wild? I would choose this spot. It is shady and secluded from predators and outside influences and I would probably deal with the pain of my injury and climb the tree until I was hidden more and until I found a comfortable branch. I would have to put up with all the spiders and who knows what else that I have chosen to eliminate from my human-space room, but I would be used to them. It would be okay.

The pinecones continue to be an interesting thing to look at. I found they are especially interesting from the ground, where I have never really looked at them before. I am not yet sure if this matters in my decision to choose a new wilderness home to lie down in.

It took me three tries to get to my spot today. I sat in the Pembroke arch, watching the rain, waiting for it to let up. Every time I would think the rain had stopped, I would venture tentatively out, hand first and body second. It wasn’t raining heavily, but I had intended to draw. I was determined to find the exact moment in which the rain would pause, allowing me to carry through with my plan. I wanted to defy the rain.

 Finally, after at least fifteen minutes, I realized there was no way I was going to win against the rain. I sat dejectedly on a plastic bag in my spot, feeling rather lost. What now? Is this where the narrative of “man vs nature” emerges? We make plans, but ultimately the rain is a reminder of how little can go according to that plan.

This clip is from the 1979 documentary, The Secret Life of Plants, directed by Walton Green. I don’t know how I feel about this particular clip (his ideas get more crazy towards the end), but if there is any validity to it, it’s fascinating .

I’m having a hard time getting out of my brain. Call me self-centered, but I have always found that the best way for me to understand something is to apply it to my own experiences. It’s not that I’m not noticing things at my site today- I am. I’ve observed how the colors of the growth around me look duller in the rain. And how browns and oranges are starting to intermingle with greens. I notice the flock of birds that I’ve startled while walking to my spot. But today my mind keeps coming back to one idea.

We talked last class about the possibility that trees are sentient beings. And why not? What if plants can feel things? Can trees communicate? In the most basic chemical way, yes, many can. A forest of Aspen trees is completely connected by hundreds of miles of underground runners. Certain kinds of mushrooms are also one organism, connected underground. Do plants feel emotions like people do? Can they empathize? Do they desire things? I wonder if scientists will ever figure this out. This topic is captivating to me and I would love to learn more about it. 

Unethical?