Hear my ideas go pop, bam, fizz, siz z z z le...

I've been toying with the idea of composing a creative thesis for a couple weeks, and by toying I mean that I've batted the notion of doing and not doing one back and forth in my mind without any real, solid consideration of what a creative thesis might constitute should I undertake one. Until today. As I mentioned in my last post, I've begun sifting through ecocritical writings, principally those in Cheryll Glotfelty and Harlod Fromm's Ecocrtitcal Reader, with the hope of expanding my understanding of what ecocriticism looks like and how I might apply it to my thesis work on Romantic poetry. This morning I began reading William Ruekert's piece in the anthology, Literature and Ecology. Given the title its little wonder I settled on this piece to read- literature and ecology are after all exactly the two fields I am interested in bridging with my thesis. But Ruekerts's essay offered me more than the critical frame work I expected from its title; it offered me what I think might be a door into a creative approach to exploring Romanticism and the environment.

Poetry, Ruekert suggests, "is stored energy, a formal turbulence, a living thing, a swirl in a flow," (108).


A swirl in a flow.


Poetry, he tells me,
is part of the energy that sustains all life.

It feeds community and creativity.
These its greatest recipients.
Ruekert explains, "poems are a verbal equivalent of fossil fuel
(stored energy),
but
they are a renewable source of energy,
coming as they do, from those ever generative
twin matrices, language and imagination," (108).
Language provides a container
for the imaginative energy that it expresses;
it is
the imagination then, not language, that is
the potent fuel of creative energy.

Through reading, the exchange of energy
from poet,
through poem,
to reader
the energy is translated from entropy
(the dissipation or loss of potential)
to sustain the community that depends on a constant flow
of creative energy. It is through the movement
of energy through poetry to the human community,
Ruekert romantically suggests, the higher ideals of literature
might
be
accomplished (111).



Building on these ideas,
I find the following passage from the essay particularly inspiring:




"Green plants...
are among the most creative organisms on earth.
They are nature's poets....
Poems are the green plants among us;
if poets are suns (the vibrant sources
of imaginative creativity), then poems are
green plants among us
for they clearly arrest energy
on its path to entropy and in so doing, not only
raise matter from lower to higher order,
but help to create a self-perpetuating and evolving
system. That is they help
create creativity and community,
and when their energy is released and flows
out into others, to again raise matter from lower
to higher order (to use the most common description of what
culture is)..." (111--- parenthetical insert mine).

Ruekert goes on to explain that following from this line of thought, teaching becomes a vital means of intesifying and perpetuating the process of creative transfer from poetry to human minds, by as he says "providing an the environment in which the stored energy can be released to carry on its work of creation and community," (111). I love the notion of poetry a ball of sustainable imaginative and creative energy with the potential to animate the creative minds of human communities. I love the notion of a poem, like a mouthful of of the richest fruit or a spark from the vaporous finger of a electrified cloud, energizing people to action. And while I do not think that this is how Romanitic poets conceived of the effect of poetry, this is I believe (honestly I believe) the potential power of their poetry on the creative minds its recipients. A great example is I think the fair assertion that romantic nature writing fueled the creative, and active work of later environmentalist writers in at least in America.

But how does this apply to my project? I think I would like to draw from this ecological metaphor to compose creative responses to the renewable creative fuel of the romantic poetry I will investigate. My responses could take many forms. As I am often a writer deeply influenced by the convulsions and densely layered activity of my place in history my writing shifts shapes and resists neat categorization. I might therefore produce poetic prose, free-from poetry, and maybe even include snatches of my own nature writing and reflections from journals and from blogs. All of which though would spring up in response to the poetic meditations of the writers at the center of my project. Sort of like a tangible representation of the creative potency and continuing relevance of the poetry to my own struggle to reconcile the relationship between myself/humanity and nature, which is now just as alluring, estranged, and symbolically important to the way we see ourselves and our place in the world.

Call this is an idea under construction. Call this a serious attempt to enlist my ideas in the construction of something new, something maybe not perfect or tidy but something important I think...at least to me.

Environmental Texts-Environmental Imagination

This morning Debbie provided us with a list of criteria for environmental texts from Lawrence Buell's The Environmental Imagination. According to Buell, environmental texts are characterized by the following traits...

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.
2. The human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest.
3. Human accountability to the environment is part of the text's ethical orientation.
4. Some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a constant or a given is at least implicit in the text.

As Debbie suggests Romantic imaginative texts with their rich environmental imagery may not qualify as environmental writing as Buell defines it. The question at hand is whether or the work of Keats, Shelley, Coleridge and all those Romantic's bewitched of nature constitutes environmental writing. Confronted with the question my first response is a mixture of confusion and unsettled uncertainty. In my conception of Romanticism the environment figures prominently, if not as a vital element to the writer's world vision. But, if we are to take Buell's criteria into consideration it becomes I think difficult to say if Romantic writing is also environmental writing.

That the Romantics express a reverence for the natural world is undeniable. However, I am not entirely confident that the environment in Romantic writing does not operate as resource for the use of poetic and artistic expression; an introspective realm, if you will, rich with metaphor and symbolism that poets tapped and used for human interests. Considering Buell's second point, "the human interest is not understood to be the only interest," and the abundant use of the natural as a metaphor for elements of the human experience it may not be unreasonable to suggest that the Romantics used the environment to advance human interests. To be more clear, I begin to wonder if the natural is more a poetic tool rather than a legitimate interest. For example, Keats Ode to Nightingale takes as its subject the poet, using nature or rather the desire to merge completely and irrevocably with a pure natural state to express the frustration that comes with the impermanence of the imaginative experience. When I say "imaginative experience" what I mean is the process of the romantic imagination that enables the poet to transcend himself and commune with the natural. While the nightingale figures prominently in the poem as an idealized object of the poet's desire; it representative of a state of being Keats both celebrates and longs for, the ode is I think an ode to the poet rather than to the natural. (Insert textual analysis) It it is the poet's desire, the poet's persistent humanity, the poet's lament of the transient ecstasy of imagination that is the subject of the ode. Therefore, the poem presents an interesting, and I don't think unique example, of the use of the environment to express the human. It is easy, given that the natural world is as in this poem often so exalted to believe that Romantic poetry advocates the notion that the human interest is not the only interest. But, how often the environment is represented as a mirror for humanity, a contemplative space in which man sojourns for a time to contemplate himself, his species, and the civilization lingering at the forest's edge. It is not therefore, representative of another legitimate interest, but a resource for poetic contemplation and expression.....

I broke off on the above thought about a week ago with the intention of picking up where I began. Since then however I tipped my toes in the world of ecocritism, searching for a better sense of how others have spoken about the relationship between nature and literature. Today I find myself reading my own thoughts with a new perspective I can only thank Fredrik Turner for. Turner points out in Cultivating the American Garden the very problem of trying to write about nature and culture (or lit as a cultural artifact) as separate entities (as I attempt to do above). My thoughts about romantic poetry and its exploitation of the environment to express human interests hinge on the assumption that man (and his products) and nature are mutually exclusive. Man is the exploitative other to the nature (which I suppose I think of as an untampered with, vulnerable green space).

Now, in his article Turner rightly points out something about ecological discussions that I fail to do in my above thoughts, and that is clearly define nature and culture- but I think more importantly nature. Discussions about the relationship between man and nature often hinge on the (often unaddressed) assumption that the two are mutually exclusive entities. Turner points out, a weakness of such discussions is the failure to explicit consider how nature is being defined, and to consider that man and nature are actually inseparable. What is nature after all? And for that matter what is man, if not nature?

More than a few of us might attempt to define nature as the ecosystem outside, out there. It is the trees and plants, bears, wolves, and the insects in the grass at night (or some other variation on these ideas) isn't it? And yet nature is often also bound up in the notion of wilderness, or wild, unrestrained life. I think it's fair to reiterate an apt point Turner makes when he notes that for many of us there is a clear distinction between the wild nature of uninhabited forests and mountains and the fabricated or manipulated nature of a suburban garden or green house flowers. The absence of human influence is essential to a pure definition of nature. As Turner points out nature is often always "out there" in the green spaces that (and I think this is vital) remain outside the bounds of human interference and habitation. But, and I don't mean to come off like a parrot here, Turner suggest that nature and culture are not in fact exclusive- that in fact humanity, its social matrix, habitations, and interferences are in fact nature. If we are to assert that human culture is not nature after all, if it something separate from nature, then let's face it we are suggesting an alternative source for our existence, behaviors, and cultural artifacts that as far as I know has only been (popularly) described as well God- or a God force. More importantly, as I boldly step out onto some highly political ice here, we would be denying the stacks of evidence (widely accepted evidence I might add) that we are fundamentally animals, and culture as we understand it is evolved. I suppose what Turner is getting at (and what I am beginning to accept myself) is the notion of "natural" social matrices like bee or ant colonies are not any more natural (as in not artificial) than the human colonies we call civilization. Where things start to get messy is when we try to separate the technologies of culture (say agriculture, genetically engineering flowers, crops, or industry) and what we perceived to be that natural touch stone from which these technologies sprung and now encroach upon. I am not saying that I think it is natural to deforest hundreds of acres of land in the name of cattle grazing and ultimately beef production. But in as much as these sort of activities sprung from human evolution (and by that I mean our development overtime into the highly social, creative, if not also destructive, species we are now) they are fundamentally natural. Unfortunate. Depressing. Hopefully abandoned or heavily revised. Yes. Yes. Yes. But I have a hard time after reading Turner's article so easily differentiating these activities and realities from nature. If not nature then what? And if we think of pure nature as that which remains largely untouched- the organisms, communities, and cultures that are not human- then it must be pointed out that even these do not really exist. Are the neatly enclosed spaces of the national parks nature? Are the vistas prepared for strategic viewing (and photographing) of various landscapes in these parks natural? And what I think is most interesting and perhaps applicable to my thoughts about Romantic poetry, is it even possible for us to see nature except through ideological/cultural filters that impose meaning upon them? Did I state that clearly? What I'm asking is when we see the Grand Canyon or stumble upon a yet untred upon spot in a forest somewhere does not just the way we see and apply meaning to these spaces interfere with them? Aren't we always interfering with the natural, putting it in neat symbolic boxes and affixing meanings to its colors, shapes, and sounds that then have significance not only for us as a species but nature, in as much as how it is viewed influences how it is treated in this ever human-dominated world?

Now, all that I have said here I must admit is extremely uncomfortable for me. I don't know how to make sense of these ideas and my own ecological convictions. On some level Turner's ideas deeply resonate with this until now unvocalized sense that I could never really access nature. It seemed to me strange and uncomfortable that the only way to access nature for one unexperienced in hiking solo in the wilderness is to follow a map, or drive to a state park, or rent a cabin in the woods somewhere. Take a hike I went on with my sister last summer for example. Even as we climbed higher into the mountains we passed troops of fellow hikers, all destined for the same scenic vista. At the top of the track (and the fact that we were following a well trodden track says something I think) there were scores of sunny-cheeked hikers taking the view in while enjoying a lunch or snapping pictures of friends in front of the wide green landscape. While at the time I too delighted in the sense that I had done something deeply beautiful and worthwhile- I'd left the city to climb up onto a high cliff and look out in wonder at the landscape- I look back now in awe of how fundamentally artificial that experience really was. Time and time again I am confronted by that feeling of some how being tricked into seeing nature, when in fact I'm see a designed form of nature. Where is NATURE? I feel always like its beyond me. Like it's this distant other I think about when I shop for organic, sustainable foods at the Coop or take out the recycling. I think about nature sometimes the same way I think about children starving in the Sudan. It is this precious entity I remember while I contemplate what to eat or buy or want or deny myself with a sense of guilt and responsibility. But it is always distant from me. So while some of what I said above sounds almost blasphemous even to me, I have to admit that even as I feel this desperate desire to care for Nature, to remember, and consider the consequences my actions have on it I feel still, always estranged from and unsure about what it really is. It is sad to say I would not recognize the face of my mother if I saw it. Not for all the picturesque simulations we've cut her up in to. I would not know her to see her in whole, and sometimes I think it is no longer possible to see her that way. Now of course as I say this, the mother I am referring to is the primal earth that reared my species up over millions of years like an oyster suffering a very dark, very peculiar pearl. I think she is gone. But I love, even as I lament, her thousand broken pieces.

I have not arrive at a complete understanding of how to define nature, but what I think interests me most is the sheer difficulty and tension inherent in trying to do so. While Turner's thoughts at first threatened to over throw my ideas about romantic poetry and nature it they could instead support my ideas. I'm wondering if the struggle to understand nature, and man's connection or perceived alienation from it that is the very draw of poets to nature, particularly in the 19th century, when modern civilization began to rear its coal-blackened head up from the landscapes of history. And on that note, I will elicit a sigh and say....more on that later.



In book-ending my thoughts with images of nature on one hand and culture in the form of urbanization on the other I am visually representing the place my thoughts churn, ceaselessly. I am some what unsure of how to interpret either image. Are they so totally separate as I have often thought? Is one more or less nature? More or less man? I'm caught between ideas at the moment, in the void between what I understand as nature (the green other) and culture (the city, home). It's a tense, creative, and fertile place to be.