Writing Nature
Burning Lines - Forest of Mirrors. Writing Nature in Contemporary
Poetics. How can we write about nature when all perspectives are mediated by language and self?
from Panel paper Australian Poetry Festival 2001
In this paper I briefly suggest one possible way of avoiding Cartesian and other dichotomies which distance us from nature and allow the session’s title to be asked in the first place. I then investigate what an ecological poetry might look/sound like.
Language a curse or a blessing?
It seems reasonable to suppose (as Noam Chomsky, Stephen Pinker and many others have) that language is an evolutionary adaptation to the social and natural environment. And further, that representational systems such as visual perception and symbolic systems like language provide access to a ‘real world’ because of evolution and adaptation considerations. If it we could not access (mostly) reliable information about the external world survival would be unlikely.
We are interpretative, self-reflexive and cultural so that attitudes and notions of nature are always mediated, that is, to some extent nature is constructed.[1] But there is a world out there, one we skilful practitioners are situated in, engage with, manipulate, destroy and enjoy. Mark Turner, a literary scholar steeped in cognitive science, asserts that cognitive capacities for attributing meaning have evolved and are ‘directly susceptible to pressures of fitness. For example, it seems to be a very fit part of brain activity to: attribute a vertical up-down gradient to the environment; distinguish between the interior and the exterior of one's body, with the skin as boundary; partition the world into objects and actions; understand certain objects as agents; and attribute purposes to agents.’ He states, ‘Inabilities to attribute meaning in these ways would count as fundamental deficits in the organism: someone lacking them would die. It is hard even to imagine that someone lacking them could count as a human being.’ [2]
All is interpretation, from the simplest act of visual perception to hearing a poem. From a pragmatist perspective, Richard Rorty argues that the distinction appearance and reality is between getting things right and wrong. He does accept that there is a real world out there which we have fallible access to and quotes Wittgenstein, ‘The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not - the world does not speak. Only we do.’[3] But when we speak, we speak as embodied beings emotionally and metaphorically, that is to say poetically.[4] Antonio Damasio cheekily suggests that ‘the cool strategy advocated by Kant, among others, has far more to do with the way patients with prefrontal damage go about deciding than with how normals usually operate.’[5]
Tim Ingold, an English anthropologist taking a phenomenological approach, suggests perceptual systems are attuned to different aspects of the environment, not different realities. He writes, ‘Far from dressing up a plain reality with layers of metaphor, or representing it, map-like, in the imagination, songs, stories, and designs [and I’d add poetry of course] serve to conduct the attention of performers into the world, deeper and deeper, as one proceeds from outward appearance to an ever more intense poetic involvement.’[6] This notion rubs against the deep-rooted view of a divided world from Platonic, Judeo-Christian and Cartesian traditions.[7] This conflict deepens the gulf between literary and cultural theorists, quick to argue that nature is not ‘natural’ since it is enmeshed in human behaviour and history and ‘green’ theorists who suppose nature to be unproblematic, simply a given reality.[8] In Landscape & Memory, Simon Schama shows how entangled natural and cultural categories are. He argues, ‘Landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock. So goes the argument of this book.’[9]
Elsewhere Ingold writes, ‘The world is not a given world, it comes into being as we act in it, and in which we come into being as, acting in it, we also perceive it. It is not a given world of nature, nor is it a constructed world of culture, it is rather what I wish to call an environment.’ [10] Nature is too complex a word, overloaded with transcendent meanings perceived as something beyond scientific inquiry, a deeper level of reality. Material nature is suffused with metaphysical nature. I prefer to talk of natural environments, of which built environments are a subset, which consist of ecological processes, fauna, flora and habitat.[11]
Australian nature poetry
Charles Darwin read Barron Field’s First Fruits of Australian Poetry (1819) (the first poetry book published in Australia)before writing anccount of the Australian bush in The Voyage of the Beagle (1845), ‘[T]he foliage is scanty, and of a peculiar pale green tint, without any gloss. Hence the woods appear bright and shadowless: this, although a loss of comfort for the traveller under the scorching rays of summer, is of importance to the farmer, as it allows grass to grow where it otherwise would not.’[12] This is interesting, well written and more poetic than the poems of his grandfather Erasmus Darwin who made the great leap forward by dismantling the Great Chain of Being and seeing evolution as historical, contingent and fluid i.e. an ecological process.[13]
Charles Harpur may be considered to be the first Australian poet who took the new land seriously but typically, in ‘Midsummer Noon in the Australian Forest’, he writes in generic terms, ‘All the birds and insects keep / Where the coolest shadows sleep . . .’ Henry Kendall wanted to be known as a Native Australian Poet, he wrote to a friend, ‘I was born in the forests and the mountains were my sponsors. Hence, I am saturated with a peculiar spirit of Australian scenery.’[14] Kendall describes a journey on the Clarence from Grafton in a prose superior to his poetry in terms of ‘nature writing’. The last two lines of his poem ‘Bellbirds’ use the conceit that memory of nature would sustain him in the city (a theme Wordsworth and Banjo Paterson also worked, though only Wordsworth spurned the city).[15] Charming to slumber the pain of my losses /With glimpses of creeks and a vision of mosses. Judith Wright criticises Kendall for his conservative old world ways of describing Australia.
I find Australian poetry, up to and including mid-career Slessor inadequate to the experience of Australian natural environments. For example, Christopher Brennan’s poems could be describing any part of the world. This is partly due to the inadequacy of available poetic models. The pastoral is a powerful genre having lasted in one form or another since Theocritus in urban literary circles but it is limiting. John Barrel has shown how ideologically conservative this sense of lost authenticity, of a lost Eden is.[16] Raymond Williams points out in The Country and the City (1973) that ‘rural’ is a middle-class fiction; working the land is hard and repetitive work not bucolic. Judith Wright costs the pastoral, ‘Well, there are luxuries still,/ including pastoral silence, miles of slope and hill,/ the cautious politeness of bankers.’[17]
Literature informs our notion of and experience of natural environments. James Thomson’s The Seasons, is a poem (with some rich descriptive passages) that affected how nature was viewed in Europe – by 1800 the book was in its 200th edition (while Lyrical Ballads had sold about 200 copies). At the same time ‘a realistic pastoral’, The Farmer's Boy written by Robert Bloomfield, a farm labourer, had sold 26,000 copies, the vast majority to city dwellers who enjoyed its fresh ‘real’ descriptions of rural life (as did Wordsworth & Clare). Susan M. Schultz writes of mainstream poetry inheriting the pastoral approach, ‘Poems in this mode, which Charles Altieri has called "scenic," owe their genesis to Romanticism, and often feature a solitary artist looking out at a pastoral landscape and discovering himself in it. This poetry knows what it says before it says it . . .’[18]
Landscape is a limiting idea closely associated. Landscape was beginning to be established in England in 1640s as a separate branch of painting; ideas of nature mixed with ideas of landscape, gardening, painting, poetry and travel. It is a distancing concept, e.g. perspective and privileges art over nature. In late June 1788, Arthur Phillip wrote, ‘There are few things more pleasing than the contemplation of order and useful arrangement.’ He contrasted this with a normative account of wilderness, ‘The wild appearance of land entirely untouched by cultivation, the close and perplexing growing of trees, interrupted now and then by barren spots, bare rocks, or spaces overgrown with weeds, flowers, flowering shrubs or underwood, scattered and intermingled in the most promiscuous manner, are the first objects that present themselves.’[19]
Richard Flanagan complained recently on ABC Radio’s Arts Today, ’The idea of landscape is Terra nullius it is about removing people and essentially removing ourselves; - about finding the vista, the long view rather than understanding how we exist within the land and the land within us - and that’s the art towards which I would hope we would be striving now.’[20] Brian Elliott argues that Australian Colonial poetry was obsessed with landscape, ‘At first the urge is merely topographical, to answer the question what does the place look like? The next is detailed and ecological: how does life arrange itself there?’[21] The transition Elliot talks of is hardly straightforward. In the 1998 Boyer Lecture, ‘The Making of Australian Consciousness’, David Malouf quotes Judith Wright, ‘She points out that ‘except for the wattle . . . there is very little mention of trees, flowers and birds by name or by recognisable description in Australian verse during the nineteenth and early twentieth century.’ This is not because they were not there in the landscape, to be seen and appreciated, but because there was as yet no place for them in the world of verse. The associations had not yet been found that would allow them entry there. Currawong and banksia carried no charge of emotion like 'nightingale' or 'rose'.’[22]
Does poetry need such associations? No. An ecological poetry works the particular environment of the particular poem – and needs new locally rooted associations, if any. Gary Snyder begins ‘What You Should Know to be a Poet’ - ‘all you can about animals as persons / the names of trees and flowers and weeds / names of stars, and the movements of the planets / and the moon. . . .’[23] Paul Carter quotes an old source on indigenous naming, ‘For each variety of gum-tree and wattle tree, etc., they had a name, but they had no equivalent for the expression ‘a tree’.’[24] Landscape also needs naming as Judith Wright notes in Rockface, ‘In the days of the hunters with spears, this rock had a name.’[25] Elsewhere she warns that naming can control and label, ‘Flakes that drop at the flight of a bird / and have no name, / I’ll set a word upon a word / to be your home.’ (from ‘Nameless Flower’ in The Two Fires.)
Detailed naming requires identification, which suggests knowledge, experience and awareness of the environment. Though poetry cannot follow a scientific methodology, or stick to facts and measurements, it can use them. An ecology requires precise nomenclature, identification, classification. Mark O’Connor has a point when he argues that now more is known of the details of ecological processes, the poet must write the details.[26]
Writing Ecology
The word ecology slews across a science developed in 1920s,[27] the study of ecosystems and green politics to a view that everything is interconnected which has ethical dimensions. Les Murray has suggested, ‘[E]cological consciousness . . . is a new form of a very ancient sense of the interrelatedness of all things.’[28] Ashton Nichols notes, ‘My point is not that Romantic writers were good scientists, or that their literary images always derived from accurate information. Sensitive plants, poison trees, and ‘new species’, however, indicate a pervasive paradigm shift, away from a ‘nature’ that was static and unchanging toward a ‘nature’ characterised by dynamic links between all living things.’[29] From his reading of ‘Tintern Abbey’, Jonathan Bate asserts (mistakenly I believe) that Wordsworth was an early believer in ‘what in our time the ecologist James Lovelock has called the Gaia hypothesis, the idea that the whole earth is a single, vast, living, breathing ecosystem.’[30] I think Murray is right and links up with notions of Gaia but it does not go far enough. There are the ethical, political and aesthetic consequences. Lawrence Buell, a leading eco-critical theorist, argues, ‘the potency of the environmental text consisted not just in the reader’s transaction with it but also in reanimating and redirecting the reader’s transactions with nature.’[31]
Deep ecology most clearly recognises this (and has been accused of fascist ideology) though this sense of interconnection is opposed by our increasing disconnection both from nature and other people. You and I are the last generation where anyone lives as human beings have from the beginning, as hunter-gatherers. Now that we don’t kill our own meat or collect our own berries, we need a rich ethical and aesthetic attitude to the natural environment (including the built environment). A paradigm shift is needed. Consumerism, social and economic values and institutions must change in line with ecological sustainability.
Prose has best served nature writing these last two centuries. Thoreau’s Walden is a subtly complex work full of poetry but not poems. There are twenty odd poems in Walden, (four by Thoreau) - some are jingles, many rhyme but all are forgettable.[32] His books were catalysts for a new genre of nature writing and influenced John Muir who alerted a public to increasing alienation from nature and emphasised both our current environmental crisis and the aesthetics of ‘nature’. Eric Rolls admits that his feelings for poetry have been most fulfilled by his prose works, such as A Million Wild Acres.[33] Aldo Leopold wrote about farming and life out in the west introduced the concept of land ethic. In his most explicit statement, he wrote, ‘In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.’ He was influenced by Walden and became as influential as Rachel Carson whose account of environmental pollution and destruction Silent Spring (1962) shocked many Americans.[34] Such texts change our alignment to the environment.
Does poetry have to turn completely from thoughts of education, a defence of poetry since Horace’s epistle to Piso (known as Ars Poetica) and very influential in the 18thC? We can no longer accept that poetry should be, let alone is most powerful when, mixing the useful (particularly moral) with the pleasurable, but surely this is not proscribed. [35] After all, the best ecological poets are political (Virgil, John Clare, Gary Snyder) and sometimes use ‘facts’.
We need to see both the trees and the forest (and the mirrors); poetry is an art form that effortlessly works at any scale and can surely help situate us in our environments, particularly experientially. That is, as Arnold Berleant suggests, ‘Perceiving environment from within, as it were, looking not at it, but in it, nature becomes something quite different; it is transformed into a realm in which we live as participants not observers.’[36] Marjorie Perloff notes, ‘No one today is going to write Georgics, pastorals, and eclogues that are reminiscent of the eighteenth-century for the simple reason that ours is a totally different word demanding quite different forms and modes.[37] I don’t think the world is significantly different, rather, the available poetic modes have not been suitable for an ecologically informed poetry. The question remains for another paper what poetic forms might fulfill this task.
[1] ‘We are obliged, as members of our species to interpret what confronts us.’
Mark Turner, Reading Minds, The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science, Princeton UP, 1991, p19.
[2] Mark Turner, ‘Design for a Theory of Meaning’, (1992) in W. Overton and D. Palermo, editors, The Nature and Ontogenesis of Meaning, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994, pages 91-107.
[3] Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p5.
[4] Evidence comes from, Raymond Gibbs Jr., The Poetics of Mind, Cambridge UP, 1994; Mark Johnson The Body in the Mind: The Bodily basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason, Uni of Chicago Press, 1987; and George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, Basic Books, 1999; among others.
[5] Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1994,p172.
[6] Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays in livelehood, dwelling and skill, Routledge, 2000, p56
[7] The notion that such world views assist in domination of nature is balanced by Luc Ferry’s talk of (as reasonable), ‘The hypothesis of a secret complicity between humanism, which is necessarily anthropecentric, and the exploitation of nature . . . ‘Luc Ferry, The New Ecological Order, (1992), U of Chicago Press, 1995, p47.
[8] See for example, Kate Soper, ‘Nature/nature’, in Future Natural, Ed George Robertson et al., pp. 22-34. Routledge, 1996.
[9] Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, A.A. Knopf, 1995, p61. He begins by examining the rhetoric John Muir used to describe America as ‘a democratic terrestrial paradise.’ and Thoreau’s notion that ‘wilderness’ is what we carry with us. ‘The wilderness, after all, does not locate itself, does not name itself.’ (p7). And ends with a journal entry by Thoreau, ‘It is vain to dream of a wilderness distant from ourselves. There is none such.’ (p578).
[10] Tim Ingold Ed., Key Debates in Anthropology, Routledge, 1996, p117.
[11] Though any terminology is problematic. Luc Ferry quotes Antoine Waechter from a 1990 French text, ‘The word ‘nature’ is expurgated from all discourse as if it were indecent, or at the very least childish, to evoke what it designates. The word environment, apparently more credible has won out . . .The choice is significant. Etymologically, the word ‘environment’ designates that which surrounds, and in this context, more precisely, what surrounds the human species.. This anthropocentrist vision conforms to the spirit of our civilisation of conquest, whose only reference point is man and whose every action tends towards total mastery of the earth.’ Quoted in Luc Ferry, The New Ecological Order, (1992), U of Chicago Press, 1995, p 74.
[12] Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle, quoted by Brian Elliott, The Landscape of Australian Poetry, Cheshire, 1967, p19.
[13] Erasmus Darwin anticipated his grandson's theory of evolution in The Botanic Garden (1789, 1791), Zoonomia; or the Laws of Organic Life (1793), Phytologia (1800), and The Temple of Nature (1803). His poetry influenced Shelley and impressed Coleridge. Prior to this the world was created and stuck for ever as Linnaeus, put it in Systema Naturae (1735), 'Nullae species novae', no new species in a perfect world.
[14] Quoted by Rob Ritchie, Seeing the Rainforests in 19th C Australia, Rainforest Publications, 1989, p85.
[15] But Kendall does question the destruction in his poem ‘The Sydney International Exhibition’ - Where are the woods that, ninety summers back, / Stood hoar with ages by the water-track? / Where are the valleys of the flashing wing, / The dim green margins, and the glimmering spring?
[16] J. Barrell, Poetry, Language, Politics (Manchester University Press, 1988.
[17] from ‘To My Brothers’ in For A Pastoral Family ,(1985), REF> Unfortunately, this year her family lost their land to the banks.
[18] She continues, ‘and the formula can, in fact, be taught - as it is in most MFA (Master of Fine Arts) programs. Bernstein's "apoetics," on the other hand, looks for what cannot be formalized, taught, handed down as tradition. Hence the emphasis on reading rather than writing, since the teaching of writing cannot be divorced from traditions of it. of writing cannot be divorced from. Susan M. Schultz, ‘Poetics at Buffalo’, JACKET # 1, http://www.jacket.zip.com.au/jacket01/schultzbuffalo.html
[19] Arthur Phillip, The Voyage to Botany Bay, Facsimile Edition, Hutchinson, 1988, p122.
[20] ‘Arts Today’ Radio National, 6.3.2001 Michael Cathcart in discussion with Tim Bonyhardy and Richard Flanagan.
[21] Brian Elliott, The Landscape of Australian Poetry, Cheshire, 1967, p4.
[22] David Malouf, ‘The Making of Australian Consciousness’ The Boyer Lectures, 1998. Lecture Two: A Complex Fate’, Broadcast on Sunday, November 22, at 5pm on ABC Radio National. http://www.abc.net.au/rn/boyers/98boyer2.htm. DL December 2000.
[23] Gary Snyder, Regarding Wave (1967) New Directions, 1970.
[24] R. Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria and Other Parts of Australia and Tasmania, John Currey, O'Neil, 1972 (orig. pub. 1876), vol 2, p.413. quoted by Paul Carter, ‘The Anxiety of Clearings -for John Wolseley's Patagonia to Tasmania’ May 1996, The Australian Centre, Melbourne.
[25] from ‘The Shadow of Fire: Ghazals’, in in A Human Pattern: Selected Poems, Imprint (1990) 1996, p234-5.
[26] ABC Radio, Encounter, ‘Land and the Spiritual’, 3 September 1997. For a brief discussion of this claim see my essay ‘On Being Called a Nature Poet to ones Face’, Scarp, June 1998.
[27] A.G. Tansley, in the 1930s, proposed the concept of an ecosystem as treating communities of living things functionally. He thought of them as ‘running machines’.
[28] Les Murray, ‘Eric Rolls and the Golden Disobedience’, The Quality of Sprawl, Duffy & Snellgrove, 1999, p199.
[29] Ashton Nichols, ‘The Anxiety of Species: Toward a Romantic Natural History’, The Wordsworth Circle 28:3, 1997, p130-36, at http://www.dickinson.edu/~nicholsa/Romnat/anxiety.htm
[30] Jonathan Bate, The Song Of The Earth, Picador, 2000, p146.
[31] Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture, Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1995, p97.
[32] Wittgenstein too had a conventional idea of poetry but a radical notion of prose. ‘I believe I summed up my attitude to philosophy in saying: One should really only do philosophy as poetry. From this it seems to me it must be clear to what extent my thought belongs to the present, to the future, or to the past. For with this I have also revealed myself to be someone who can't quite do what he wishes he could do.’ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, Ed. G.H. von Wright, trans. Peter Winch, University of Chicago Press, 1980, p24.
[33] Reported by Robert Gray and Geoffrey Lehmann eds. Australian Poetry in the Twentieth Century, Heinemann, 1991.
[34] Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1949), OUP, 1968, p204.
[35] Robert Bly writes ‘Some of his [Thoreau’s] greatest poetry lies secretly glowing in his prose, as Thoreau himself implied when he remarked that he had two notebooks, one for facts and one for poetry and he often had difficulty in deciding where a certain passage belonged.’ Robert Bly, preface to The Winged Life: The Poetic Life of Henry David Thoreau, Sierra Club Books, 1987.
[36] Arnold Berleant, Aesthetics of the Environment, Temple UP, 1992, p376.
[37] Marjorie Perloff, ‘Response to Kinzie, No 4’, Salmagundi 67 Summer 1985, p148.