Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language

Introduction: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language

INTRODUCTION The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language sS “Zheee?” “Cheee! Chee!” “Shdeee . . . shdeeeeeee.” My thirteen­month­old­son Rowan reaches out from my back to a towering hemlock and attempts to echo my latest denotation, “tree.” I am huffing up the basalt­riddled trail along Multnomah Creek to the top of Larch Mountain, pointing to the flora that I recognize and reciting the common names of wildflowers, ferns, and trees to the boy on my shoul­ ders. His sudden, small utterances into this ancient grove above Oregon’s Columbia Gorge startle me. He can walk but not yet talk, at least not in recognizable English. These sounds, however, are clearly meant to refer, like my “tree” with which they rhyme, to the hemlock whose moss­blanketed bark Rowan pats with his little hand. I am startled to realize that he is sud­ denly engaged in the old human habit of weaving word to world. I am also struck by his actual sounds, aural relatives of “tree” but simultaneously for­ eign—repetition with a difference. The effect of Rowan’s utterances on my perception is curious; as a result of his small strange noises, I experience lan­ guage as raw sound instead of hearing his vocalizations as merely underde­ veloped, inaccurate versions of the “correct” word he will eventually master. His sounds, that is, take on aural heft and are, in my ears, as palpable as the hemlocks around us and basalt beneath us. Rowan nudges language back to its wild origins in my ears. This rematerializing of language, one variety of defamiliarization, is of 1 2 s introduction course what many poets deliberately attempt: “Poetry creates something of the conditions of hearing (not just listening to) a foreign language—we hear it as language, not music or noise; yet we cannot immediately process its meaning. Another way of saying this is that the poetic function—what Tsur calls ‘the poetic mode of speech perception’—rematerializes language, returns it from ‘speech’ back to ‘sound’; or rather, the poetic mode synthe­ sizes the speech mode of perception and the nonspeech mode of percep­ tion” (Bernstein 18). This description of poetry runs counter to the mimetic assumptions behind most nature writing, in which the text is meant to func­ tion as a mirror held up to nature. Mimesis demands that the author be as faithful as possible to the real world “out there,” beyond the page, which accounts for the dominance of realism as the literary mode of choice for most nature writers. The poets discussed in this book also relate to nature as a powerful source of meaning, although none of them uses language mimeti­ cally. Each of them, in his or her own distinct way, employs instead what I term “sensuous poesis,” the process of rematerializing language specifically as a response to nonhuman nature. Their poems undo simple oppositions between humans and nature; sensuous poesis operates from the assump­ tion that humans (and their tools, including language) are both distinct and inseparable from the rest of nature. Rather than attempt to erase the artifice of their own poems (to make them seem more natural and supposedly, then, closer to nature), the poets in this book unapologetically embrace artifice— not for its own sake, but as a way to relate meaningfully to the natural world. Indeed for them, artifice is natural. If the mission of environmentalism is to help us gain a meaningful rela­ tionship with the nonhuman world and to encourage more ecologically ori­ ented behavior, then how does language fit in? Is nature on the other side of language, or can language, despite its mediating function between the human and nonhuman, weave us to nature? Though it is the aim of literary theory to address just such questions about language, much first­wave eco­ criticism (ecological literary criticism), roughly the first ten to fifteen years of its existence as a recognized scholarly field, responded contentiously to other literary theories, especially poststructuralism. This is hardly surprising, since any new school of criticism typically defines itself in opposition to estab­ lished practices. Nonetheless, there are substantive reasons why ecocritics, concerned by the human destruction of the nonhuman world, have resisted an anthropocentric focus on textuality, part of what David Ehrenfeld calls the “arrogance of humanism” in his book by that title. They see their work The Language of Nature...