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The Ecological Comedy the Case for an Existential Literary Ecology

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The Ecological Comedy the Case for an Existential Literary Ecology The Ecological Comedy The Case for an Existential Literary Ecology For everything that happens can become a story and fine discourse, and it may well be that we are caught up in a story. Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers (Joseph to Potiphar's wife, p. 952) Contents Narrativity .............................................................................................................................................. 2 Robinson Jeffers and the Poetry of Place ........................................................................................ 3 Poetry and the Moral Sense of Place ............................................................................................. 16 The Poetry of Earth ............................................................................................................................ 22 Notes for A Poetics of Earth ............................................................................................................. 32 Song of the Earth ............................................................................................................................... 41 In the World of Waldo Williams ........................................................................................................ 46 Samuel Palmer: Mysterious Moonlit Dreams ................................................................................. 64 Marc Chagall: Art as a State of Soul ............................................................................................... 65 Ecopoetics, disclosing the Hidden God in Nature ......................................................................... 67 Finding Meaning Through Metaphor ............................................................................................... 74 Ecological Restoration as a Restorying .......................................................................................... 80 The Springs of Action - Making Facts Existentially Meaningful .................................................. 99 Tolkien and the Ethics of Enchantment ........................................................................................ 113 Natural Anarchy ................................................................................................................................ 127 The imagination is truly the enemy of bigotry and dogma ......................................................... 135 The Light Within ................................................................................................................................ 146 For lovers of William Blake – because he kept the divine vision in time of trouble. .............. 159 The Unveiling of a Gravestone to William Blake ......................................................................... 166 Dante and Marx ................................................................................................................................ 169 Contextualizing Marx's Criticism of Commercial Society ................................................... 172 Fire and Ice: where would Dante place all of us who are borrowing against this Earth…? .. 191 Dante’s Sweet Symphony of Paradise.......................................................................................... 216 Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo ............................................................................................ 231 Sic Transit Gloria Civilization .......................................................................................................... 243 Ruins .................................................................................................................................................. 246 Sigurd F. Olson and the Singing Wilderness ............................................................................... 250 Narrativity Human beings are story making animals. Before homo faber came homo symbolicus. Ecological restoration is a restorying. Transitioning to a new world is always a matter of being between stories. We may call these worldviews, standpoints or paradigms, articulating norms and values. We are moving from one view, the materialist, mechanistic and reductionist understanding of the world as some objective datum to a view which sees the world as creative, participatory, animate, and interconnected. In between stories, however, our lives express a certain schizophrenia. We lurch between contrary positions, recognising the right thing to do whilst continuing with practices that, deep down, we know to be wrong. We have bifurcated identities, split from the world, from others and, ultimately, from our own whole natures. Estranged from the Earth, we struggle to see the world that enfolds and sustains us as a sacred community, carrying on with practices that we know to be harmful and exploitative. The problem is that, socially and structurally, we are locked within those destructive patterns of behaviour. We need a new story, one that integrates the material and spiritual dimensions our lives within new patterns of behaviour. This story will not just enlighten and inform but inspire, enthuse, and enliven, motivating people to change their behaviours and reorient their practices for the new Age of Ecology based upon union between the human and earth communities. Robinson Jeffers and the Poetry of Place The environmental crisis we face is an existential crisis that requires much more than institutional reform and technological solutions. We need to recover something of the spirit of old Pan, rekindle the wild within and without as the Eros between our sensing bodies and the sensuous, living, animate world that enfolds and sustains us. Robinson Jeffers’ poetry of place captures this ethos well, pointing to the close identification, the intimacy, with a landscape that a respectful, reverential familiarity can engender. Biologist E.O. Wilson has argued for biophilia as a condition of our survival. Robinson Jeffers expresses this as a ‘falling in love outward’, something which draws us to the ‘divine beauty of the universe’. In this respect, sensuous experience is a mystical experience. In The Tower Beyond Tragedy, Jeffers has the character of Orestes explain how his experience in the forests’ natural landscape has changed him, giving him a oneness with a place: I entered the life of the brown forest And the great life of the ancient peaks, the patience of stone, I felt the changes in the veins In the throat of the mountain, a grain in many centuries, we have our own time, not yours; and I was the stream Draining the mountain wood; and I the stag drinking; and I was the stars, Boiling with light, wandering alone, each one the lord of his own summit; and I was the darkness Outside the stars, I included them, they were a part of me. I was mankind also, a moving lichen On the cheek of the round stone. I have fallen in love outward. Jeffers is not advocating some de-industrialised Arcadia, but incorporates machines into his landscape. ‘Great-enough both accepts and subdues; the great frame takes all creatures,’ he writes in Phenomena. His oneness may well be described as mystical, but in a genuinely spiritual rather than obscurantist sense. His words express ‘the feeling — I will say the certainty — that the universe is one being, a single organism, one great life that includes all life and all things; and is so beautiful that it must be loved and reverenced.’ The view is mystical and real, since who we are, our very nervous systems, coevolves with the sensuous world. This yields a vision of being that is attuned to place. In The Answer’, Jeffers spells out the holistic view of life: "A severed hand Is an ugly thing and man dissevered from the earth and stars and his history... for contemplation or in fact... Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions, or drown in despair when his days darken." Jeffers’ holism is a response to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s plea to be the poet ‘who re- attaches things to nature and the Whole,—re-attaching even artificial things, and violations of nature, to nature, by a deeper insight.’ Jeffers’ writing is permeated by a holistic understanding of the world. When asked to express his ‘religious attitudes,’ Jeffers commented: ‘I believe that the universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, influencing each other, therefore parts of one organic whole. (This is physics, I believe, as well as religion.)’ Jeffers’ poem The Double Axe presents a certain philosophical attitude, what could be called Inhumanism, ‘a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence. It seems time that our race began to think as an adult does, rather than like an egocentric baby or insane person. This manner of thought and feeling is neither misanthropic nor pessimist, though two or three people have said so and may again. It involves no falsehoods, and is a means of maintaining sanity in slippery times; it has objective truth and human value. It offers a reasonable detachment as rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy. It neutralizes fanaticism and wild hopes; but it provides magnificence for the religious instinct, and satisfies our need to admire greatness and rejoice in
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