In the Mind’s Eye: Essays across the Animate World (review)

As she recalls the vertiginous experience of balancing on a metal walkway while staring raptly at Paleolithic cave paintings in France, Elizabeth Dodd describes how the guides would “rein us in with words,” calling out, “‘Attention,’ or in the Briticism, ‘Mind now. Mind your head’” (138). These phrases could be epigraphs for Dodd’s In the Mind’s Eye: Essays across the Animate World, since the sixteen essays in this intriguing collection portray the dizzying experience of immersing oneself in a landscape. How can we see the animate world? Why is creativity so powerfully interwoven into the process of seeing, past and present? Do we realize our good fortune in having the capacity to use a “mind as a gallery or palace of fine arts” (21)? The “mind’s eye” is truly the book’s subject, and Dodd explores it by pondering travels to the places that draw her most. These are primarily sites west of the Mississippi, but Ohio and France also feature strongly in Dodd’s quest for “ecological intimacy,” a relationship with a site that embraces its “complexity, worth teasing apart, or trying to, to see whatever cause and pattern can be found” (266).

Each essay unravels the layers of individual human reaction that infuse and radiate from particular sites or encounters. “In Situ,” for example, begins with an audience member challenging Dodd at a reading; he claims that ancient petroglyphs are not art. Dodd shifts focus to describe hiking to view Fremont rock paintings in Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and considers Ellen Dissanayake’s scholarly theory of art that emerged in prehistoric times from a human need to make one’s world special. Perhaps, Dodd muses, Fremont artists painted on the towering canyon walls less as a way of “‘making’ [the canyon] special” than of “‘marking’ the perception that [the canyon] is, indeed, special” (158). How similar were that ancient rock painter’s impulses to her desire to tell readers that both canyon and paintings are special? She manipulated her computer as the painter wielded pigments, both honoring what they saw by creating records to extend their observations into the future. Is a rock painting art? Avoiding simplistic answers, Dodd explores richer questions about why the animate world moves human beings so deeply and moves some with equal force to create lasting records of their observations.

“I feel I’m a conduit: the world’s impressions somehow translated into what we call expression,” Dodd explains, as she considers her “urge to tell, to describe, to share …” (243). Were we all to experience the world’s impressions in situ, the impact of our travel would hasten their already rapid degradation. Surely for the sake of our overcrowded planet, more of us must rely on especially gifted conduits to go, see, and tell. Dodd, like Terry Tempest Williams, is such a conduit, and her writings help us understand and practice ecological intimacy by reading a book. Read globally, travel locally? Artists like Dodd help us say “yes” to that suggestion and further embrace literature as a vital part of environmentalism.