Politics of Place - Issue 03

Politics of Place • Green Connections • Issue 03 2

Green Connections

Politics of Place Issue 02: Technology Guest Editors Sarah Daw Sophia David Isabel Galleymore

Contributors Mat Osmond (Falmouth University) Evelyn O’Malley (University of Exeter) Miriam Darlington (University of Plymouth) Mike Rose-Steel (University of Exeter) Camilla Nelson (Schumacher College)

Editors Rory Hill Steven Maiden Simon May Editorial Board Prof Rod Edmond (University of Kent) Prof Nick Groom (University of Exeter) Dr Paul Harrison (Durham University) Prof John McLeod (University of Leeds) Prof Fiona Stafford (University of Oxford) Enquiries Steven Maiden - politicsofplace@exeter.ac.uk Copyright Copyright in editorial matter and this collection as a whole: Politics of Place © 2015 Copyright in individual articles: pp.4-15 © Mat Osmond 2015 pp.16-29 © Evelyn O’Malley 2015 pp.30-37 © Miriam Darlington 2015 pp.38-55 © Mike Rose-Steel 2015 pp.56-77 © Camilla Nelson 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be issued to the public or circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.

Design and Art Direction Liz Mosley (www.lizmosley.net) Photography dreamstime.com istockphoto.com

ISSN 2052-4501 (Print) ISSN 2052-4498 (Online)

www.exeter.ac.uk/politicsofplace

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EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION 2 Politics of Place • Green Connections • Issue 03

In this special issue, the subjects for discussion are fascinatingly diverse: from Jamaican poetry and cartography, to outdoor Shakespeare, the graphic novel, and environmental writing praxis – it is the need and means to form an ecological consciousness that underlies each. All of the papers contained in this issue were originally presented at Green Connections 2014, an interdisciplinary symposium, held at the University of Exeter. The event was created to examine questions of environmental response in arts and humanities disciplines, and the Green Connections team was thrilled to welcome such a wide range of researchers to the event. The wealth of fruitful discussions, and collegiate atmosphere were infectious, and hopefully opened many a door to future interdisciplinary collaborations. The papers given, as well as the creative writing workshop, and a roundtable discussion on the subject of environmental response in the arts, all challenged and expanded accepted ideas around environmental response, interrogating how we respond to the nonhuman world, what determines and governs our responses, and how we can change them. And, most importantly, what the impact of our various responses as humans to the more-than-human world really is.

At a time of environmental crisis, these questions are vital in terms of paving the way for a collective human future. However, engagement with the nonhuman world has always been a central question for the arts. Bonnie Kime Scott describes “Nature” as “an inescapable aspect of being human”, and writers and artists have continued to be obsessed by the possibilities and impossibilities of interaction with their nonhuman environment. The poet Rilke asks these questions when he writes: “whom can we ever turn to/in our need? Not angels, not humans/ and already the knowing animals are aware/ that we are not really at home/in our interpreted world”. Such engagements define us, and the art and literature that we produce, and equally our

world cannot escape the results of them – although perhaps the universe can. A question as complex and wide-ranging in its dimensions and impact requires, we feel, a collaborative response, and Green Connections focused perspectives from across the humanities disciplines on this common goal, in the hope of generating fresh ideas, methodologies and research collaborations to confront what is both a contemporary and an ancient question.

Camilla Nelson and Mike Rose-Steel argue that language is a powerful device for revealing layers of connection and meaning linking the human and nonhuman world. Rose-Steel’s absorbing discussion of Kei Miller’s poetry draws on the themes and metaphors of mapping. The map as a stable, ordering and objective way of understanding the landscape fails to account for its depth, vibrancy and vitality.

Rather, nature is unmappable. The act of writing, however, is an antidote to such singular ways of seeing and regulating systems. It can reveal the layers of meaning and forces at play. Nelson similarly looks towards the power within language. Her ecophenomenological approach recognises language as both environmental incarnation and process.

She argues that shifting and changing language practices bears a positive ecological importance.

These two articles find the act of writing as contingent to environmental response. Mat Osmond, meanwhile, presents us with a case for the “ecofable”. In his fascinating analysis of graphic novels – As the World Burns: 50 simple things you can do to stay in denial by Stephanie McMillan, and Derrick Jensen’s and Nick Hayes’ The Rime of the Modern Mariner – Osmond examines how these stories might inspire people to care for the earth. Osmond illuminates empathy as a vital component within this context; and it is the ecofable’s task to forge a sense of empathy within us for our vanishing species.

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Developing a sense of place is central in the next two pieces of work. It is the experiential sense of being in place that ignites such environmental response.

Evelyn O’Malley’s study of outdoor Shakespeare performances reveals that nature serves a greater function than simply creating an atmosphere or a setting; rather, it become a vital component within the performance, sometimes interrupting it. It is dynamic; its own separate and contingent force. In O’Malley’s exciting analysis, we find that performance in nature can deeply create a sense of place. Lastly, and also developing this sense of place, is a short narrative about an owlet. Miriam Darlington’s stunning reflective prose narrates with insight and beauty the encountering of an owl. What is fascinating about this piece is its attention to the creature’s marvellous sensing, its sight and hearing, and its movement and flight. She creates a dichotomy between the speaker and bird. The speaker is reliant on her binoculars, in contrast to the creature’s spectacular visual ability. Yet her experience in witnessing the owl intensities and she begins to transcend her enclosed anthropocentric perspective and forms a sense of being at one with the owl which, ultimately, forms an ecological conscious. We hope the selection of these articles reflects Green Connections’ own contingency in approaching environmental responses. We suggest it is a broad, complex and varied task. We rely on art and creativity to be able to explore environmental issues from a meaningful and personal perspective, enhance the valuing of nature, or simply to reflect upon our current ecological crisis.

So, what next? As we consider the possibility for an even bigger and better Green Connections in following years, it is impossible not to notice the range of methodologies present in these articles and hope for even greater interdisciplinary engagements in the future. As a field of study, ecocriticism (in which many of these articles might be situated) has often been criticised for a paucity of methodological practices.

Yet in this issue, we are pleased to represent scholarly work from disciplines such as cultural geography, drama and fine art – each finding their own nuanced modes of inquiry. Our question is what could environmental science, environmental psychology and critical pedagogy (to list just a few examples) bring to discussions concerning environmental engagements? Whilst empirical research might provoke new parallels in humanities research, the potential for public engagement with those who live and work in environments, both pastoral and polluted, also proposes rich conversations. With these thoughts of the future in mind, we hope you enjoy and reflect upon these articles that show both achievement and promise in their variety of approaches.

Sarah Daw, Sophia David & Isabel Galleymore (University of Exeter)

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Us and Them: Ecocide, Empathy and the Graphic Ecofable

Mat Osmond

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The reportage artist and storyteller Sue Coe’s 2000 graphic novel Pit’s Letter examines our civilisation from the perspective of a laboratory dog. Coe’s story imagines a team of vivisectionists striving to locate and to eliminate the “empathy gene” once and for all – to root out that awkward lingering capacity for interspecies fellow-feeling that would dare obstruct the onward march of human progress. Like the rest of Coe’s extraordinary and prolific graphic oeuvre, Pit’s Letter expresses an unambiguous moral agenda, reflecting her unwavering commitment to making visible the hidden obscenities within our culture’s treatment of animals. As one of her many print-works puts it: “Go vegan and nobody gets hurt” (Coe 2012).

[Above] Image from Pit’s Letter, the 2000 graphic novel by reportage artist and storyteller Sue Coe, in which industrial civilisation is imagined from the perspective of a laboratory dog. Printed with permission from the author.

Pit’s Letter belongs, then, to a body of animal-rights campaign literature that forms one important cultural background for the emergence of a new genre of storytelling – one that we’ve begun to call the “ecofable”.

For the emergence, in other words, of a newly defined ambition for storytelling: What if we could tell a story that made people care about what’s happening to Earth? And what if our story moved them enough that they’d go and do whatever it took to stop it from happening?

I want to look, here, at two recent graphic novels that typify this now familiar aspiration – Stephanie McMillan’s and Derrick Jensen’s As the World Burns: 50 simple things you can do to stay in denial, and Nick Hayes’ The Rime of the Modern Mariner. And in asking what it is exactly that these stories are trying to do, I want to use them both to explore the related idea of “cultural psychotherapy”, proposed in 2008 by the human ecologist Alastair McIntosh (210).

McIntosh argues that we become capable of collectively destroying our world only by having first become dead to it, and that we become dead to it through the violence we’ve internalised since birth from our ambient culture. His proposal is that the principle challenge for artists, faced with an accelerating collapse of the

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earth’s life systems under the pressure of human civilisation, is to puncture our cultural hubris. Hubris is what McIntosh sees as the ultimate source of the systemic violence behind ecocide, and he suggests that in tackling that, artists may help to “re-kindle the inner life” of our culture (219).

Fostering this process, he argues, hinges on one, essential quality: empathy.

This is an undeniably noble intent – but what would addressing ecological crisis by fostering empathy look like, in practice?

What has that to do with our actual experience of art and storytelling, and what, against a backdrop of global catastrophe that increasingly overshadows our local environmentalisms, might one be hoping to achieve in the attempt? Appropriate questions with which to approach something that we might call “the graphic ecofable”.

1. Us And so we find ourselves, all of us together, poised trembling on the edge of a change so massive that we have no way of gauging it.

The Dark Mountain Manifesto (Kingsnorth and Hinde 9) Chris van Allsburg’s 1990 children’s picture book Just a Dream offers a good place to

start. Opening with the memorable Pogo quote from Walt Kelly’s 1971 Earth Day poster: “We have met the enemy and he is us”, Allsburg shows us a careless American boy who can’t be bothered to do the recycling, and who, upon falling asleep, is whisked away into a series of prophetic nightmares. It’s a green cautionary tale in the pattern of A Christmas Carol, in which the boy wakes, in dream, to the future that will flow from his present mode of living: meeting there a future-earth smothered in humanity’s rubbish, stripped of trees, its oceans emptied of life. And as with Dickens’ Scrooge, our boy wakes from these night terrors filled with a new appreciation for what hasn’t yet been destroyed, and … runs out to do the recycling. A story told to inspire children with a sense of the beauty and the fragility of their world, warning them that actions have consequences, intended or not. Just like that other 1971 vanguard of picture-book eco-fables, Dr Seuss’ The Lorax, Allsburg’s book is telling its young reader: “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better, its not.” (Seuss 1971) All well and good. After all, we might ask what exactly are we supposed to say to today’s children? But forty-three years on from The Lorax, this kind of light green propaganda is coming up against a situation playing out on a very different scale – and finding both

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its language and its strategies insufficient to address it. In fact, of course, this is by no means simply a question for children. Philip Pullman’s observation that there’s nothing a child reader cannot deal with, so long as it’s given to them within an appropriate story, might usefully be extended to all of us staring dumbly at this new word in our lexicon – ecocide.

2. Them Ecocide demands a response.

The Dark Mountain Manifesto (Kingsnorth and Hinde 12) This growing sense of a gulf between problem and strategy is where the 2007 graphic novel As The World Burns: 50 simple things you can do to stay in denial comes in. Occupy cartoonist Stephanie MacMillan teams up with her fellow American, environmental campaigner and author Derrick Jensen, to jeer us out of our fuzzy green complacency. For its intent to be understood, their story needs to be seen alongside Jensen’s better-known nonfiction work. Its plot extrapolates from his maxim that if aliens came and did to our planet what civilisation is currently doing, we’d view that as a situation of all-out war, and respond in like manner.

As the World Burns describes a race of alien robots coming to eat the earth, with the naïve collusion of the corporate state, who see in their arrival only another opportunity for profit. It imagines the earth’s wild creatures, and their few human friends, banding together to repel the invasion before turning, as the story ends, on the establishment that sold them out. Its central characters are two young girls: one with an ardent zeal to save the earth in the familiar terms that Allsburg et al promote: recycling, voluntary abstinence, letter writing, peaceable marching. Her dark-haired friend – Jensen’s mouthpiece in the text – picks these hopeful strategies apart as a string of empty promises that divert attention from the real enemy – the systemic insanity and violence driving the all-consuming engine of civilisation.

Among the primary targets of this story’s derision is just that sense of hope proffered by green tracts such as Allsburg’s. For Jensen, such hope isn’t simply an empty promise.

With relentless – at times ferocious – logic he analyses hope itself as a key element within a dangerous denial mechanism. It is hope, Jensen argues, that allows us to avert our gaze from civilisation’s innately ecocidal trajectory – that of continuous escalation (Jensen 2011). As one of the principle voices behind new radical environmentalist

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movements such as Deep Green Resistance, Jensen asserts that unless it’s brought down by direct – and where necessary, violent – intervention, the juggernaut of civilisation will never be turned around, and that in the absence of such an intervention, all of our greening lifestyle choices have, at best, a short-term feel-good value.

Jensen’s wider polemic, we might easily read this graphic novel as a piece of tonguein-cheek green wish fulfilment. But behind all that trenchant sarcasm lies a call to direct and disruptive action that is seen, by its authors and by a steadily growing number, as the only coherently empathic response to accelerating ecocide.

That this story comes from America isn’t incidental. Jensen understands civilisation to be “a culture of occupation”– a perpetual encroachment on all non-human habitats, and on all indigenous cultures (Jensen 2007 p.186). This perspective owes much to his involvement with the struggles of Native American communities, past and present, to resist just such an implacable process of incursion. In particular, Jensen reads this situation in terms of an Algonquin myth, an idea he takes from the Native American scholar Jack D Forbes: the “wetiko” psychosis (Forbes 1992 p.21). Taken as a lens through which to view the unstoppable spread of Western civilisation, in particular, the wetiko myth presents us a with a sickened culture both infected by, and transmitted as, a virulently contagious form of moral insanity – the wetiko, or cannibal psychosis – wherein consuming other beings’ lives for profit, once begun, becomes an involuntary compulsion shaping our collective behaviour. Without this knowledge of

3. Stories

8. The end of the world as we know it is not the end of world full stop.

Together we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.

The Eight Principles of Uncivilisation (Kingsnorth and Hinde 26) If we find Allsburg’s light green ethics faltering before the scale of unfolding events, we may yet find ourselves recoiling at the implications of this waron-civilisation rhetoric. What practical help might an eco-fable then offer a perplexed reader, faced with our culture’s current direction of travel? At face value, a realistic answer to that question seems to be: almost nothing. Were that the case, we might stop for a moment to consider whether we are in fact asking the right question? Suppose,

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for instance, we were to absolve the ecofable, as it gropes for images through which to fathom ecological crisis, of a responsibility to produce solutions of any kind to the situation that it seeks to explore.

The pressing need to innovate practical adaptations within a rapidly shifting situation is of course an essential factor in our current politics. But might it not be said that this is not, and has never been, either the primary concern or the most valuable function of art and storytelling?

For all his heroic aggression, I think Jensen shows another way forward here, almost by accident. Buried within his 2011 non-fiction work Dreams, a six-hundred-page tirade against the instrumentalist rationality of scientism, is a question that he tosses out as a casual aside: “What stories could we tell that would help us to fight off a wetiko infection?” (481).

It may be unfair to take As the World Burns as Jensen’s own answer to that very good question. But I think this story reveals something important, and not just for the anti-civilisation crew.

It offers a portrait, in high-relief, of a mindset that would couch ecological crisis in terms of an evil-over-there – a process driven by “them” – a them who we can name and point to, and then marshal ourselves against. Amidst the defiance,

there’s a curious shrillness in its fantasy of tearing down the machine – a shrillness that reflects, I think, its misdiagnosis of the infection that it would seek to fight off. The authors’ militant agenda has a compelling, emotive logic, so long as we imagine our own lives to be somehow separable from the problem itself. But in the context of global ecological crisis, I’d suggest that this amounts to a comforting, yet ultimately paralysing mistake – a mistake that the eco-philosopher Timothy Morton, following Hegel, has valuably framed as “beautiful soul syndrome” (Morton 2009 p.13).

Surely we need more from the ecofable than heroics? We need stories that allow us, as Morton puts it, deepen to our own hypocrisy (2010), as we turn towards our lives, and our shared systems of living, to find them on all sides complicit in the very problems that we would address. Stories able to steer us between that soporific platitude, sustainability, and the misanthropic guilt that bedevils much environmental discourse. Most of all, perhaps, we need stories able to speak to the creeping sense of futility that shadows environmentalism – a kind of un-sayable subtext, that usually – when it is spoken aloud – goes something like: “we’re fucked”.

If we were to look for other such roles for the arts within this territory, Paul Kingsnorth’s

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and Dougald Hinde’s 2009 Dark Mountain Manifesto might be a good place to begin.

Here, to my ear, we find an altogether less brittle eco-rhetoric, one that grasps the depth of the problems that activists like Jensen lay out so valuably, but which eschews calls for heroic solutions – violent or otherwise – in favour of offering an unhurried imaginal space within which to turn towards these dilemmas, armed with nothing more than a re-affirmation of those “paths to the unknown world” that storytelling has, of course, always offered us.

One of the ideas mooted within the five year work of the Dark Mountain Project is the writer Akshay Ahuja’s notion of a post-cautionary tale: one that’s shrugged off environmentalism’s understandable tendency to look to the arts as a form of message-dissemination. In contrast to the hectoring tone that often characterises such work, a post-cautionary tale is proposed by Ahuja in “The Literature of Catastrophe” as: one in which you’re no longer scaring people or trying to assuage your own guilt - you’re just trying to live in the world that’s coming and letting your imagination expand into it…whatever your spirit and sense of reality demand…when you give up on warnings (which will go unheeded) and predictions (which

will probably be wrong, and will accomplish very little if correct), you can … start making art again.

All of which brings us to our second take on a contemporary ecofable: the political cartoonist Nick Hayes’ 2011 graphic novel, The Rime of the Modern Mariner. In Hayes’ story, we find Coleridge’s mesmeric Rime used as a dark mirror in which to contemplate the phenomenon of ocean plastic pollution. This exponentially growing problem is now notoriously evident as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where a revolving soup of plastic detritus currently accumulates, recently estimated to be larger than the USA, and reaching from the ocean’s surface to its floor.

In Hayes’ Rime, this gyre pollution becomes a stand-in for the oceanic dead-zone which swallows Coleridge’s mariner – “We were the first that ever burst into that silent sea” – and for the “thousand thousand slimy things” that there assail him (Coleridge 105, 239). Hayes uses the toxic wasteland which confronts his own mariner as a metonym for that all-pervasive but less graspable set of problems we refer to rather vaguely as “the ecological crisis”, of which ocean plastic pollution, for all its mind-numbing scale, forms but one, tangible element. And weaving Coleridge with Melville, Hayes’

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mariner is driven by this encounter into a process of terminal descent, until at his nadir he sees his life reflected for what it currently is, within the eye of the great whale which he’d come there to kill.

What strikes me as valuable about Hayes’ approach to an ecofable isn’t just the way it invites contemplation of an outward problem whilst speaking to the soul-condition that it reflects. Rather, it is what follows this descent to the more fundamental relational wasteland underlying the gyre pollution. The latter part of this book, which shifts into a different visual key to mark a significant change of mode, offers a redemptive reverie in which, I’d suggest, we find Hayes presenting us with a very different answer to Jensen’s provocative question. The figure that pulls Hayes’ traumatised mariner to land and to safety is an affectionate portrayal of the late English naturalist and writer Roger Deakin. The healing grove to which Deakin carries the mariner depicts David Nash’s living ash-grove sculpture. Indeed, Hayes has said that the idea for his retelling of The Rime first came from encountering one of Chris Jordan’s Midway photographs of dead albatross chicks, opened bellies full of plastic, many thousands of miles from the nearest human cities. Clearly one aspect of the redemption being mused on,

here, concerns the arts’ potential to address cultural insanity, and to re-orient us toward the real.

Hayes’ is a story which doesn’t preoccupy itself with what hope is or is not left to redeem the civilisation currently destroying its ecological base – although it ends with a whisper of our eventual departure from the stage. True to the great ballad that inspired it, Hayes’ story imagines the more subtle hope of decolonising that culture of occupation from within, by the simple act of holding out the hand of friendship to our own contingent, radically dependent nature. Certainly this graphic novel doesn’t pretend to offer solutions to our personal entanglement within an accelerating ecocide, other than, with Coleridge, to turn us towards our innate creaturely empathy with all species. And to leave us, at its downbeat conclusion, with the fallibility, complicity, and inevitable self-contradiction that such empathy throws us back onto, as incurably civilised beings. This stumbling, un-heroic turning towards, a move that essentially solves nothing, other than to abandon the violent gesture with which the beautiful soul would disown the evil that it sees – and in seeing, creates – “over there”, might offer us a workable understanding of art, poetry and storytelling as modes of cultural psychotherapy. It might also

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help in forming a response to the rhetorical question with which I began: What exactly are we supposed to say to today’s children?

With this, more forgiving approach to an ecofable’s task, we might find the manifest answers to that question to be neither as thin on the ground, nor for that matter as new, as we’d previously assumed.

WORKS CITED

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Ahuja, Akshay. “The Literature of Catastrophe.” The Dark Mountain Blog.

Web. 20 Aug. 2014 Allsburg, Chris van. Just a Dream, U.S.: Houghton Mifflin, 2011. Print.

Coe, Sue. Pit’s Letter, U.S.: 4 Walls 8 Windows, 2000. Print. ___. Cruel, U.S.: OR Books, 2012. Print.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), Vintage 2004. Print.

Forbes, Jack D. Columbus and Other Cannibals, U.S.: Autonomedia, 1992. Print.

Hayes, Nick. The Rime of the Modern Mariner, London: Jonathon Cape, 2011.

Print.

Kingsnorth, Paul and Dougald Hinde.

Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto. UK: The Dark Mountain Project, 2009. Print.

Jensen, Derrick and Stephanie McMillan.

As The World Burns: 50 Simple Things you can do to Stay in Denial, U.S.: 7 Stories Press, 2007. Print.

Jensen, Derrick. Endgame Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilisation, U.S.: Seven Stories Press, 2007

___. Dreams, U.S.: Seven Stories Press, 2011.

Print.

Jordan, Chris. “Midway.” Chris Jordan Photographic Arts. Web. 14 Aug. 2014.

McIntosh, Alastair. Hell and High Water: Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition, U.K.: Birlinn, 2008. Print.

Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature, Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Print. ___. The Ecological Thought, Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2010. Print.

Seuss. The Lorax. New York,: Random House, 1971. Print.

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Deep and Dynamic Landscapes: Audience Responses at Antony and Cleopatra, Minack, Cornwall, June 2013

by Evelyn O’Malley

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In the fading light of an evening performance, Mecaenas, Agrippa and Enobarbus planned Antony’s marriage to Octavia whilst munching on apples. As they exited down the cliff steps, they flung their half-eaten apples into the sea. One splashed, then bobbed reddish-green in the water close to the rocks. In full view of the audience and while the Soothsayer warned Antony of Caesar’s rise, a seagull plucked the apple from the waves, flew to a rock and munched it quickly - core and all - before flying off again. Neither event acknowledged the other in any particular way but the ‘realness’ of the apple had temporarily traversed the world of the play and the wider world in any case, quietly crunchy in both.

David Abram theorises depth as opposed to width and height in landscape, arguing that “[d]epth is not a determinate relation between inert objects arrayed within a static space, but a dynamic tension between bodies, between beings that beckon and repulse one another across an expanse that can never be precisely mapped” (9899). Abram is trying to get away from two-dimensional ways of thinking about landscape and looking for a way to describe what happens in landscape, how it shifts with the eye of the (sometimes human,

sometimes nonhuman) perceiver. This kind of depth seems obvious at Minack.

The theatre is cut into the sea-cliffs at Porthcurno, where the vast Atlantic meets the Cornish coast. On a clear day, Minack’s expansive horizons stretch uncontained, obscured at other moments by mist, fog and rain, which alter what is perceived from the auditorium. Black tipped gulls make luminous white flecks where sunlight meets the clouds. Cormorants skim the surface, traversing stretches of sea in straight lines, before diving underwater. How deep is the sea? How far is the horizon? Below, above and at eye level, moving of their own accord and moving with the eye of the perceiver, birds and boats fly, float, swim, sail, dive, disappear and re-emerge from the waves that swirl and batter where sea meets stage. As evening unfolds, the luminous colours of beaches, cliffs and subtropical plants fade to shadows, then outlines, then memories. The birds that traversed the seascape in early evening are less and less visible but still there. Occasional wings blink and flicker at the furthest reaches of the electric stage lights, gliding through the shadows. Landscape at Minack is unmappable, dynamic and deep. In this paper, then, I draw from 32 interviews conducted with audience members before

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and after performances of Another Way Theatre Company’s Antony and Cleopatra, which ran from the 3rd – 7th June 2013.1 Writing about Minack in Shakespeare and Amateur Performance, Shakespeare scholar Michael Dobson asks, ‘given its potential for discomfort and Cornwall’s high all-yearround annual rainfall […] Why perform or watch Shakespeare out of doors at all, in a climate like this?’ (187). He concludes that the enduring popularity of Shakespeare outdoors […] probably has less to do with what outdoor performance in such locations does aesthetically for the plays than with what the plays do ideologically for the locations. Like Edwardian pageants, open-air productions of Shakespeare integrate specific places within a nostalgic vision of the nation, its history and its culture. (2011: 187) While Dobson’s arguments around ideology, the elevated position of Shakespeare as ‘high- culture’ and even nationalism colour analyses of Minack (and, indeed, these

points are extensively problematised by Alan Kent in Theatre in Cornwall 2010: 635), I suggest that the audience ethnography I conducted at Minack in summer 2013 revealed more around the temporal appeal of being in a dynamic and deep landscape.

Landscape and wildlife were more commonly cited than Shakespeare as primary reasons for attending the theatre. Being in landscape, as Tim Cresswell suggests, is what turns landscape into place (10). The depth of the landscape to which they responded was evident in the many references to wildlife, weather and scenery recurring and overlapping throughout the interviews.

Wildlife, Weather and Being-in-landscape Like opera-glasses, binoculars at Minack help audiences to see the stage from a distance. Unlike opera glasses, they also assist bird watching. Audience members frequently referenced non-human animal and bird life in the landscape, their comments varying from specific ‘sightings’ or ‘soundings’ of particular species to generic references to birdsong.

Gulls, geese, gannets, basking sharks and dolphins all featured as part of these conversations. Nonhuman animals formed

My methodology is based on research conducted by Penelope Woods at Shakespeare’s Globe between 2010 and 2011 (2012). Following the interviews, I conducted a thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2006) of the interviews. Audience members were interviewed anonymously and have been given alternative names within the ethnography to personalise the writing.

1

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a part of the social discourse around the unusual theatre space, pointing to what ethnographer Hillary Angelo, writing on birdwatchers and ornithologists, has called the ‘phenomenological, affective, dimension of human knowledge of nature’ (352). After watching the performance of Antony and Cleopatra, Clare, a relative local from Perranporth and a regular at Minack, said: It’s actually been one of the warmer nights I’ve ever been at the Minack (laughs) so I’m actually not freezing cold which is really nice and actually I came out from up there I thought it’s not actually all that windy or anything so it’s sort of been a lovely kind of feeling in terms of sort of the physical kind of temperature and environment and everything and we’ve not seen dolphins but we did see the geese going over so yeah, it all added to the atmosphere and everything. (6 June 2013) Along with her physical experience of the weather in the landscape, she recalled a flock of Canada Geese that had flown across the stage in V formation just moments prior to the end of the first half of the performance.

Mike, Joe and Conor, who were at the same

performance and had witnessed the same intrusion, also conversed about their shared experience of the geese. While wildlife had shaped Clare’s expectations of Minack, the actual experience of the geese took Conor by surprise, his cap nearly blocking them out completely.

Mike: Your eye does get taken away by seabirds or whatever and then you look down and you realise you’re here to look at that. [gestures down towards the stage] Joe: Yeah. We had a flock of geese going over and it was like ‘Oh, watch the geese for twenty seconds!’

Conor: Yeah, I saw the geese.

Joe: And it’s like, ‘Oh, we’ll spend twenty seconds with the geese rather than what’s going on’.

Conor: Actually I nearly missed them because of my own peaked cap. And then suddenly I looked up and I thought, ‘Oh!’ [laughter from all] (6 June 2013) Joe went on to explain, however, that it was not boredom with the play or the acting prompting his distraction by the geese, but a

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desire to take in all of the stimuli at Minack that evening. For Joe, the performance was one part of a whole experience. He articulated a way of interacting with environment that did not privilege either the performance or the other stimuli, indicating a kind of heightened alertness and interactive attention to a continuously changing, living and polyvocal landscape as he said: I think you’ve got to… you’ve got to pay a lot of attention to what’s going on down on the stage because wherever you’re sitting you might miss a little bit of the action depending on the angle of where you’re sitting. And, em, yeah, the sound sometimes with the wind and everything… the sound… the sound can be a little bit impaired. So you’ve got to be paying attention to that. And there’s all the stuff going on around which is really interesting. You’ve got, you know, sort of boats going by.

You’ve got things happening.

I sometimes watch the tide coming in and out over there.

During half of a show you can see how much the tide’s come in and out. So it’s kind of like

you’ve got everything going on around you, with the show going on as well. So you’ve got to be really active in your attention if you want to pay attention to all of those things. I mean, maybe I should be just concentrating on the show. But I think there’s other things that I’m interested in in the environment that I want to see as well while I’m here. (6 June 2013) There is a sense, then, that birdlife, weather, landscape, seascape and performance are all a part of Joe’s immediate experience of Shakespeare at Minack.

As well as featuring as part of the immediate experience of landscape, wildlife also formed memories that were communicated as part of audience’s recollections of previous Shakespeares at Minack, triggered by returning to the space. A couple on holidays from Hampshire were returning to Minack having visited years previously: Dan: Well, I think the last time it was… was cold and wet?

Hazel: Yeah. It might have been, yeah, and then the sun came out and everyone took everything off again.

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Dan: I can’t actually remember which performance it was. But, eh, you know, it’s always a great event. And the location…

Hazel: And [suspense pause]… there was a basking shark.

Evelyn: Oh wow!

Dan: Yeah.

Hazel: And it was massive. The performance is still going on and everyone went ‘ah’ when we see this basking shark and… brilliant. I mean, it’s, you know… but no, it was brilliant. Even though it rained for a while nothing stopped. Did it?

Dan: A basking shark going behind the stage. (7 June 2013) Dan and Hazel did not remember which play they had seen, although Dan had previously indicated that they were usually happy to see any Shakespeare. Their memory of the previous performance was partially situated in their embodied experience of weather (evidenced in their recollection of putting on and taking off of wet-weather gear).

The basking shark featured prominently in their memory, suggesting that ‘real’ life, as it had intruded on this occasion, had been

more memorable than the represented life on stage. Rain, play and basking shark all figured in the construction of the memory, highlighting the interconnectedness of wildlife, weather, and performance in a deep, living landscape. Across the examples, the clash arising from multiple sentient beings speaking simultaneously was part of the pleasure of being at the event.

Descriptions of the landscape at Minack, however, repeatedly drew on the language of the theatre – of scenery and backdrops -, suggesting that the environment, the frame around the performance space, was considered a ‘resource’ in the service of the performance. Abram cautions, ‘Even if we venture beyond the walls of our office or metropolis, we often find ourselves merely staring at the scenery’ (2010: 141). Minack was repeatedly referred to as a suitable backdrop for Antony and Cleopatra because of the play’s textual references to seabattles. James, for instance, said, ‘The scenes that stood out the most for me were the battle scenes at sea. The way they did that acting as the boat. That went very well… with the sea as the backdrop’ (6 June 2013).

Una Chaudhuri argues that ‘the ‘nature’ that is landscape’s subject is never free of cultural coding’ (20) and, at Antony and Cleopatra at Minack, landscape was framed anthropocentrically and firmly coded as

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theatre. Although at a theatre event, it is unsurprising that people used the language of the theatre to refer to their environment.

Audience member Adrian articulated the complexity of talking about scenery in the context of outdoor performance at Minack, highlighting some of the overlapping metaphors of the environment and theatre respectively. He said: I was on occasions distracted by the scenery… scenery as in surroundings rather than scenery within the play. I mean it’s very difficult when you come here. You don’t just sit there and look at the play. I mean it’s a 360 degree panoramic experience so you’ve got the play and the surroundings. (6 June 2013 [my emphasis]) There is a distinction he makes between landscape as the built and/ or imagined scenery complementing the play itself (the scenery that was thought of as part of the performance) and the environment surrounding the wider place of performance (thought of as independent to the performance). At Minack, audiences were both separate from the performance and simultaneously co-inhabiting its scenery.

They inhabited the scenery as well as staring at it. Although the language people

used may have been anthropocentrically coded as theatre, the effects it had on people in it respond to the experience of a deep and dynamic landscape.

Might living scenery at Minack, then, challenge the idea that a backdrop is always passive? For Maria at Antony and Cleopatra, the sea was a backdrop but it had its own active and affective agency: It’s just amazing, I mean, being outside and the backdrop of the sea as well. It’s just a wonderful concept. That you could have outside theatre with just this backdrop, you know. It’s just that the sea is a calming influence anyway, I think. It’s just amazing, isn’t it? (5 June 2013) Audience members welcomed the sea for its aesthetic contribution to the performance and imagined some of the fictitious events of Antony and Cleopatra unfolding against this kind of backdrop. Nicola commented, ‘It’s set in Alexandria, by the coast, and we’ve just had the sea with the first battle… the first battle at sea and you’ve got the sea behind us. It’s magic’ (5 June 2013), and Cathy explained ‘At the end when Cleopatra died, I think that’s an image I’ll remember and then the sea behind it and the whole setting’ (5 June 2013). Mike elaborated on

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the confluence between the play’s locales and the sea too: Well, I kind of think it’s funny because when you’re watching it… like in this one I can imagine like certainly the Egyptian thing… certainly being a setting to the Red Sea or something and then in Rome… Well, the scenes tend to lend themselves to having… there’s nothing to say they shouldn’t have an expansive ocean behind them.

And I think it kind of builds in to the whole show. I like it. I can imagine them doing it with a backdrop like that. (6 June 2013) For Adrian, the experience of the thematic content of the play was inseparable from the experience of the landscape and the life within it: Generally, I thought the natural episodes where some engineered aspects of the sea, the tableaux, and some of the movement were particularly strong, particularly given the fact that they didn’t overuse props. I thoughts that worked particularly well. They let the backdrop – the 360 degree or

whatever perspective do the business for them. With the colours too – that worked very well. The birds... (6 June 2013) Similarly, Ellie and Ethan responded imaginatively to the events of the play as presented in the landscape. They conversed: Ellie: Oh yes, the sea, the sea battles.

Ethan: Yes and of course Antony was able to turn to the sea and talk to Neptune face-on as it were.

Ellie: Yes definitely.

Ethan: Because he was standing on the edge of the ocean.

Ellie: Absolutely yes. And Cleopatra with her ships.

Definitely yes you could really imagine that. (5 June 2013) Ethan went on to discuss the physical experience of being at Minack, saying ‘Inevitably the seats are hard so that’s a bit of an endurance test but having said that on one side you couldn’t ask for a better experience’, suggesting that his was not a passive experience of staring at scenery (5 June 2013). For Giles, also, the physical experience of landscape was mixed up with

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his aesthetic experience of the performance.

He explained: It’s terrific that they’re able to do a matinee we’ll come away, you know, sort of refreshed and the weather’s still, you’ve got the wonderful rest of the day ahead of you. Particularly being outside. I think a lot of the scenes towards the coves worked extremely well em in the magnitude of the chaos at the court at the end. I think that was important given the nature of the 360 degree landscape.

That’s memorable. That and the weather. (6 June 2013) Giles continued by elaborating on what it felt like to be physically present in the landscape at Minack and how weather affected his experience of the play: Em, you need some stamina – getting up from below [laughter].

And you need to be prepared, em, you know, in terms of how comfortable you feel and refreshments. Eh the winds and the elements, which are always important. They particularly are of significance when you see a performance of something

in the background during a significant soliloquy, you know.

(6 June 2013) Flo described her experience of Antony and Cleopatra in terms of an imaginative response to the performance in a dynamic landscape too. First, she picked out a particular moment where she felt that the play related to the landscape, saying: I think for me it was when Mark Antony came in and he was wet and his hair was wet so you knew that he was coming off of a battle from the sea. For me that’s when it kind of all came together. (7 June 2013) She went on to explain how the overall experience of the performance in the place affected her, explaining: I think the first word that comes to me is provocative. Because the play em in itself has a lot of provocative sort of moments.

And I think that the, em, surrounding is very provocative because it really makes you come together with nature, um, and you know with the sea and the sun and the seagulls. I mean it’s, I don’t know, there’s just something really provocative

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about nature generally and I think the two together are really beautiful. (7 June 2013) At Minack, then, even when culture framed the environment, turning it into ‘scenery’, the landscape was not considered a passive backdrop; it was experienced as dynamic, deep and full of life. Audience members spoke about wildlife, weather and landscape as contributors to pleasure and enjoyment.

The physical experience of being-in-scenery combined with the themes, imagery and sometimes just the idea of Shakespeare’s play facilitated a temporary experience of being in place. Although Another Way’s Antony and Cleopatra was not designed to draw attention to ecology or to highlight human relationships with the more-thanhuman world, the audience responses to performances at Minack pointed to an experience of landscape that was deep, dynamic and in itself ecological.

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WORKS CITED

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Abram, David. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. New York: Vintage Books, 2010.

Print.

Angelo, Hillary. “Bird in Hand: How Experience Makes Nature.” Theory and Society. 42.4 (2013): 351-368.

Braun, Virgina and Victoria Clarke.

“Using Thematic Analysis in Psychology.”

Qualitative Research in Psychology 3.2 (2006): 77–101.

Cresswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction.

Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Print.

Dobson, Michael. Shakespeare and Amateur Performance. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Print.

Fuchs, Elinor and Una. Chaudhuri, U, eds. Land/Scape/Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Print.

Keller, Mathew C., et al. “A Warm Heart and a Clear Head. The Contingent Effects of Weather on Mood and Cognition.”

Psychological Science 16.9 (2005).

Kershaw, Baz. Theatre Ecology. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Print.

Shakespeare, William. Antony and Cleopatra. Chris Chambers, dir. Minack Theatre, Cornwall. Another Way Theatre Company. First performance: 3 June 2013.

Woods, Penelope. Globe Audiences : Spectatorship and Reconstruction at Shakespeare’s Globe. 2012 PhD Thesis.

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Owl Sense

by Miriam Darlington

32 Politics of Place • Green Connections • Issue 03

I was rolled in my duvet, immersed in a dream, when a weird cry forced my eyes open. It was the sort of cry that wrenches goosebumps up from under your skin. A cry that can only come from one kind of animal.

I left the depths of my pillow and went to the window to listen. The misty field curved over the dawn horizon; it held the form of something, a moving shape floating ghostly on the weak light. I dressed, pulled on Wellingtons, a jumper, grabbed the binoculars and headed through the houses.

Above prickles, ferns and nettles, the sign, its white lettering declaring “Site Acquired for Development”. I wanted to pace out this place, find the inhabitants of this field about-to-be-lost, this rough-edged habitat that housed far more than its new owners could see. I wanted to feel it before it vanished.

Months earlier I had lain recovering from a different sort of loss. I had been waking early, getting up to walk off the misery, to feel the earth’s solidity. My limbs had become used to heaviness, my head filled with a kind of unwelcome fug. Normally I would have traded in the experience with words, but when words fail, you need another kind of transaction. Walk through any lush June growth and it begins to get

to you, from the feet up, with its drenching green, its animal-scents, foxgloves, seeding grasses, its steadying of the breath.

I found bird company in this dawn-lit between-land, filling the hedges with their startle, jizz and twitter, running the gardens through with their diehard ebullience, meshing with the amenity grassland of the human settlement. Here on the other, richer side, beyond picket fences and patios, rages the forgotten garden. With its small wilderness of aphids, beetles, grasses and voles, here is the domain of the owl.

What does an owl sense? Its body is all sinew, air-filled bone and feather. It is lightness and eyesight; eyes that comprise one third of the weight of its whole skull.

My dull, human eyes take up one percent of my head. Most of the time, we are looking inward, or downward, missing everything that is alive and flitting with energy.

The dense light receptors of its fovea mean that a Barn Owl can locate prey at stunning distances, and in near or even complete darkness. The human equivalent would be to see the light of a match over a mile away. But the owl cannot turn its eyes as we do; it must bob and swivel its whole head to capture and focus on the object of its attention. And it would be wrong to assume the owl’s eyes

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are its most powerful feature. We assume that the flat, large-eyed faces somehow resemble our own and that its senses are similar. No, in the Barn Owl, it is the ears that are everything. For an owl, every minute flicker and twitch is amplified in the cochlea and transmitted to the auditory nerve for instant interpretation. Here is an automatic system, one guided almost mechanically by sound. The world must be a discordant, distracting symphony of noise, but the intricate ear flap made of specialized, bristly feathers minimizes interference, prevents air turbulence and allows precision: it locates sound so acutely that the owl can pinpoint prey with chilling accuracy.

my range. A split second view of it and my heart leapt sideways, left me focused, alert.

Appearing and disappearing, it quartered the field, this way and that, delicate, purposeful, catching the light, visible then with a turn of the wings, invisible. A bird that was not bird: a ghost, a piece of mist.

Tyto alba, the Barn Owl.

I walked through the gap, into the field, attuning my own ears to the rustling details of the soundscape. In June, these pathways are all shadows, leaves, roots and earth; the uncanny strata of animal habitations, weasel runs, vole ways. Soil trickles, leaves drip, bird wings flicker. Here are the rusty notes of edgelands; the places we don’t capture, but that certainly capture us with their million senses.

The owl vanished again, but it led my lens to something more solid; the apex of a barn roof, and in the gable end, a stone window that gaped into a quiet grey world. The first fat drops of a Devon downpour sent me scudding inside to shelter. The floor of the muffled interior was scattered with a few white feathers. All around, a prickly feeling rose up, of something alive. A hiss bubbled from somewhere; my ears rang with its rattlesnake presence. Hunched and awkward in a corner, a small, downy face and two dark, watery eyes stared. The shock of it prickled in my hands. An owlet… an owlet had fallen. And higher up was the source of the hissing; a snowdrift of sibling

Above, a yawning of plane-sound, and a view of criss-cross vapour trails in the sky.

Then something flickered on the edge of my vision. A sense of a strangeness, a mothquiet movement of white wings just out of

And then it stooped, taking all my breath with it, and lifted, clutching a dead thing.

I spun my focus wheel and caught its airy form in the lens of my binoculars. The close-up visual framed the bird in parts; the fur-ripping talons, the smooth white breast, the glowing corolla of its face.

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owlets huddled, calling anxiously from their nest ledge.

What would it be like, to have bones filled with air, wings that could spread and float the body out, feet swept beneath belly, talons grasping into seams of nothing? A kind of vertigo gathered in my ankles and spread up my spine until my entire skull felt dizzy with it.

Over the months of my own loss I had thought about the owls. How would they live out the famine season, while the ground froze and the voles died out? While I suffered my interior weather patterns, outdoors, it had been a bad winter for the animals. But somehow, they had taken their chances and made it, these owls. Through the veils of sad news headlines, a subtle, sinewy wildness lived on, beyond the radar of all our clever devices.

I approached as softly as I could. The owlet tottered, its apprehension palpable. I placed my hands around it. The skeletal warmth, the softness were astounding. And so light!

An extravagant body-warmer of ice-white down wrapped its back, head and breast.

The feet struggled then calmed, its featherweight settled in my grip. The stink of rotting mouse, vole blood and ammonia

filled my nose. The scaly feet and claws tangled in my shirt. My hands felt awkward and wrong, clasped around this fierce body, its locked up power, its reptilian wildness. *** In the hospital, I had lain in a cave of unhappiness, the nurses’ routines whizzing dimly around me. People came and went. I didn’t want their condolences: “Perhaps it was for the best.”

“There must have been something wrong, for it to happen.”

Their voices clanged in my ears. In the bed adjacent to mine, Beth, a sixteen year old, had had a termination. She occasionally looked out, raptor-like, refusing eye contact with everybody. Both of us, in our own ways, reminded of our own fragile fertility, and of the stories our bodies create and undo. We hardly spoke, I wanted to wrap her up and tell her it would all be OK, but what did I know?

With one hand grasping the owlet I climbed, my fingers stretching for holds in the stone.

I tripped and dropped back down. I needed two hands. The owlet would fit inside my shirt; it would be safe tucked in there.

Pressed against me the young bird was

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placid, its sweaty warmth bulged through my shirt. I couldn’t be a mother anymore, but I could be the mother of this owlet, of all the owlets there; mother of this barn, mother of the field and its rough meadow. I undid the claws from me, pushed the fallen owlet back with the others, and let go. *** Henry David Thoreau called for a rough, “tawny” kind of grammar, a kind of understanding wrought from the earth, language that sprang from contact with the soil, roots and all. Rough, loamy, real.

Something equal to the earth. Think of the calligraphy earthworms make, with their digested squiggles in the grass. Think of the rust-coloured tussocks, the twittering of finches, the mouse-smell of the sward.

John Clare called it “dropping down” into a different kind of sympathy; rough grassland seen from the seeded, matted thatch; from root-level. And Seamus Heaney, with his bog-inspired, home-rooted, peat-language had a word for its pulse: “omphalos” the Greek word for the centre, the navel. The bottomless centre of things. Heaney repeats the word as if it is the drawing of water from the depths of a well, as if it is the sound of a heartbeat: “omphalos, omphalos, omphalos”.

The thin soil here is peopled with the beat of uncontacted tribes: flowering plants, invertebrates, small mammals. The white owl whose wings cobwebbed with copper and ashes I had just seen, what value was that? An owl that moved so silently that it lifted the hair on the back of my neck.

The owl is weighted with so many stories; when we encounter it we reimagine and redefine it, our folklore annihilating its being. The Barn Owl’s appearance and call signalled doom, foul weather, or imminent death. The unsettling nature of its silent flight and human-like face haunted us with imaginings. So a Barn Owl would be nailed to a barn door to ward off storms and evil. But what is the owlness of owl? It is precarious. As agricultural production intensifies and barn conversions drive it away, it still rests on the edges of our consciousness, but more and more dimly.

Little by little, the Barn Owl is fading from our lives.

But we evolved revering these animals.

We spoke with them, thought with them, coveted their skills, accorded them kinship.

The sepulchral spaces of churches and monastic cloisters abound with owlsymbols. Owls decorate misericords and are set amongst the beasts and foliage of pew ends like mischievous guardians.

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And the consumable owl has been reduced to an item fetishized as a collectible emblem of cuteness, viewed adoringly on YouTube, made into a fashion accessory, printed on cups, clothes and calendars. Owls climb out of biscuit packets, communicate from mobile phone screens; their cuteness subsumed into a kind of love which is not love, but something else.

Where, amongst all this, is the real owl?

We would be wise to pay it some attention.

When I look at the huge lone oak standing in the middle of the field-about-to-be-lost, I long for an owl’s-eye view on the world.

At night I dream of going to perch there, my bones filling with air. *** Through the field and down along the path by the river, something moved against the periphery of my perception. Its shadow prickled my senses as I felt it stray over the grass. No sound came as it swivelled its course and lifted on an invisible ripple.

Something tugged at the core of me.

For over a thousand years our clearings, meadows and grassy summer pastures have made a welcoming thatch of Velvet Grass, Sweet Vernal-grass, Oat-grass, Fescue, Rough Meadow-grass, Yorkshire Fog,

Brome. The rich diversity of species ensures a heart-opening abundance of wildlife, spaces for vole ways, weasel runnels; useful foraging ground for our companion and familiar, the Barn Owl. By accident we made habitat that these long-winged raptors could exploit, but now there is a problem. With increasingly unpredictable weather conditions, conversion of its sheltering roosts and encroaching roads, the Barn Owl is in trouble. *** In the weeks that followed my encounter with the Barn Owls, a kind of listeningsensitivity came upon me. Now when I fall sleep, vertiginous moments take hold.

I tumble from barn beams into darkness, shock myself awake. Light sleeping, and then full-blown insomnia have crept into my nights. In the twilight hours I have become owl-like. *** The roof of the old barn has caved in now, and the adults have flown away. The field will be mashed and one hundred houses built for human families. The rough meadow will be squeezed and neatened into lawns and flowerbeds, the map renamed to

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“Primrose Close” and “Meadow Lane”.

Everything changes. We lose our balance.

But sometimes, like the bubble in a spirit level, we find a new equilibrium. I think I’ll take the developers some owl boxes for their attics and gable ends. I’ll suggest they name their streets differently: “Tyto Terrace”, “Raptor Way”, “Howlet Drive”. If I could speak some tawny grammar into common vocabulary, swoop it into a few thoughts, how would it be? What else, after all is prayer?

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Of Metaphors and Maps: Cartographic thinking and the poetry of Kei Miller1

by Michael Rose-Steel

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It comprehends the earth by categorizing it in circles, triangles, oblongs and dots, unifying writing and image in a world picture at the centre of which lies Babylon

life lived by writing. In many ways, Miller has achieved just what it was that Paxman claimed poetry had lost the ability to do – to engage and challenge a wide range of readers in a way that values and entangles the languages we inhabit.

Description of the “Babylonian Map of the World” (in Jeremy Brotton, A History of the World in Twelve Maps 2-3).

At the heart of CWZ is the insistence that the ways in which we are able to talk create and constrain how we see the world, and what seems possible within it. The words we have access to, and the status we afford them, impact on not only what we see, but how and where we look. This is, of course, a widely noted idea, but by its own terms perpetually needs to be fleshed out anew through original examples and forms.

What Miller has managed is to interlink clashes of culture, discourse and outlook in a way that is involving yet individual, and that remains irreducibly poetic. In the essay that follows I illustrate how maps and their associated metaphors can contribute to our thinking about language, especially the ways in which language can manifest as power, or challenge it. How can Miller’s poems bring our seemingly fixed, natural or objective means of seeing the world under new scrutiny? I argue that the ability of

In 2014, Kei Miller published The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (hereafter CWZ), a collection of poems that had the happy knack of being approachable, musical, intellectually intricate and ethically challenging. It therefore formed the perfect riposte (both positive and negative) to Jeremy Paxman’s much publicised attack on the supposed aridity, elitism and obscurantism of contemporary poetry. 2 Miller’s collection won the 2014 Forward Prize, the competition for which Paxman was a judge, though the poet has also been short-listed for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, and won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for his collection of essay Writing Down the Vision, which charts the political and personal intersections of a

This paper developed from a joint presentation given with Esther van Raamsdonk at the 2014 Green Connections symposium, University of Exeter. I am grateful to both my collaborator and the constructive remarks of an anonymous reader of an earlier draft of this paper.

1

“On the Forward Prize for Poetry” September 2014. The typically punchy article generated more heat (and, perhaps, light) in public debate about poetry than almost any event since Donald Rumsfeld’s “Unknown Unknowns”.

2

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poetry to revivify our directions of thought may be an essential part of challenging the inertia of public discourse – and therefore key in tackling the apparent inevitability or inconceivability of eco-political issues. *** The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion is largely composed of a dialogue of poems between the titular Cartographer, who has been charged with mapping the Island of Jamaica, and the Rastaman, keen to challenge the assumptions and systems behind this apparently neutral task.

Through the moments that pass between the interlocutors, we are presented with the benefits of mapping – its precision and orderliness – but also its contrast to the brightness of local colour, the dark rumblings of history, and the unmappability of people – their infinite relations, unpredictability and “livity” (23). The key point of contrast is in the Cartographer’s resolution to map a way to the mystic city of Zion, about which the question that defines his discipline – Where is it? – makes little sense. Perhaps, at best, one could ask the related question – How do I get there?

Initially, the confrontation seems to be one of cultural asymmetry, as the Cartographer represents the scientifistic, abstract, Western, quantitative discipline of cartography, whose claim to objectivity belies a rapacious urge to count and classify, and the firmly local, historical, provocative Rastaman. The latter is loquacious, hospitable and distrusting, a determinedly human figure, wholly involved in, and protective of, the life the Cartographer would like to classify from above.

Miller has said that the poems play out two sides of his own mind, thinking of his homeland and his relationship to it (Reading given at the Contemporary Cornwall Poetry Festival July 2014). He certainly plays with his somewhat liminal status as poet and academic, and as a Jamaican writer based and published in Britain, and the book portrays some of the complexities and anxieties of this position. Although most might assume that the Rastaman is Miller’s closer avatar,3 he has admitted to more often catching himself thinking like the Cartographer. The creator of stories is, after all, an ordering force, of sorts. Through the characters’ dialogue, Miller can interrogate and interrupt himself, ask questions about what it is that

Aside from a shared cultural background (Miller is not a Rastafarian but is generally sympathetic to the religion’s outlook) there are various hints of self-identification in the collection – the Rastaman’s PhD is from Glasgow University, for example, where Miller taught until recently.

See Claire Armistade’s interview in the Guardian, “Kei Miller: ‘My productivity is linked to what could be called a disability’” 28 Sept 2014.

1

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he does when he writes. It is noticeable that this collection contains more of the dialect of the Island than Miller’s earlier books.

Partly this plays up the contrast between the two protagonists, as their language reveals their origins and interests, but it also seems to signal a degree of confidence in the poet’s identity – an identity that revels in its conflicting directions, its complicated cohesion. As Miller has said elsewhere, his position not only as a partial outsider, but as someone from a country that is “not the centre of the world” means being “blessed with a kind of double vision” (Writing Down the Vision 18); the narrative that, from within, seems inevitable can, from without, reveal the patterns that have shaped it, or the inconsistencies that lend it trouble and charm.

The Cartographer and the Rastaman also speak for two conflicting drives that inhabit a wider arena than the personal: they express the often oppositional urges to order and to remember; to control and to experience; to understand by law and to understand by identity. In particular one can find the attractions and dangers of a systemising worldview (or views). The illusion of neutrality in such an endeavour is a common target in the poems, for instance the pair of short poems numbered “iii” and “iv”:

iii.

The cartographer says

no –

What I do is science. I show the earth as it is, without bias.

I never fall in love. I never get involved with the muddy affairs of land.

Too much passion unsteadies the hand.

I aim to show the full of a place in just a glance.

iv.

The rastaman thinks, draw me a map of what you see then I will draw a map of what you never see and guess me whose map will be bigger than whose?

Guess me whose map will tell the larger truth?

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The problems of the ethics of mapping, and the discipline’s own reluctance to engage with such concerns are well documented.

For example, J. B. Harley in his seminal essay ‘Deconstructing the Map’ and in the later collection of his work in The New Nature of Maps (2001) has complained that even when conferences are held on the subject of ethics in cartography, the discussions tend to remain within the technical and commercial concerns of cartography itself – issues of copyright and competence remain central, while notions of unquestioned assumptions or their consequences (for those mapped) are considered marginal. Harley states that “Cartography seems to be uncritical of its own practices, and both their intentional and unintentional consequences” (198). And this despite the fact that for each map, “design is fraught with potential ethical consequences” (201). Some of these are highlighted in later parts of this discussion. For the moment, the quandary Harley sets will prove fruitful: If we are truly concerned with the social consequences of what happens when we make a map, then we might also decide that cartography is too important to be left entirely to cartographers. (203) This is not to suggest some special criminality or failure amongst cartographers. Rather, it

points to the tendency of systems to be selfpreserving and insular, and of institutions to protect and perpetuate their own form.

Since Harley’s ‘Deconstructing the Map’ first appeared in 1989 (followed by many other articles questioning cartography’s capacity for and assumption of objectivity) there have been a number of responses that have deepened and refined critical thinking about mapping. Harley’s (largely Foucauldian) identification of the ideologies and power structures that come between a map and the world it claims to represent has been extended to a more Derridean question of the very possibility of talking about a mapped world separate from its ‘creation’ in the map. Not only does the ideology of the map-maker disguise the truth of the world, but there is no truth of the world accessible to us by deconstructing the ideologies we can discern in the maps.

Cartography’s “foundational ontology [...] that the world can be objectively known and faithfully mapped using scientific techniques that capture and display spatial information” (Kitchin, Gleeson and Dodge “Unfolding mapping practices” 480) has increasing been eroded by questions of dominant discourses, the mapped subject, and connections between history, technology and purpose in mapping. Many post-modern critiques of cartography are naturally concerned with the development of power structures, especially

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in a (post)colonial discourse, including how maps can “inculcate us into seeing and representing the world in highly selective (and, for the powerful, felicitous) ways.”

(Clayton ‘‘Snapshots of a Moving Target’’ 19).

Kei Miller is an eloquent contributor to these debates, particularly on matters of literature and Jamaican civil rights.4 His facility with key theoretical texts can also been seen in the employment of Sylvia Winter’s work in “xiv” of CWZ: “On How / We Mistook the Map for the Territory” (Ll. 9-10).

Even the ontological stability of maps themselves can be questioned (Kitchin, Gleeson and Dodge 481). Is the idea of ‘the map’ a coherent one, given the myriad methods, traditions and processes of mapping that we are increasingly recognising and applying? Matthew Edney has questioned whether the assumption of ‘the map’ as a single concept in Harley and elsewhere is not damagingly simplifying (“Cartography and its discontents” 11); perhaps the privileging of the graphical image of the map over other forms of visualisation or representation is an expression of the ‘’‘ocular-centric’ character of modernity” and needs to be challenged (Clayton 21). In short, if a map is no longer thought of as a fixed picture of a world (not

even one that it has helped to create, not just represent) it stands itself in constant need of generating and interpretive processes.

“Maps and mappings are emergent processes and performances” (Gerlach 22).

In this line of thinking, Gerlach’s concept of “vernacular” mapping is productive, as a refinement of some of the responses to Harley’s work, such as ‘counter’ or ‘indigenous’ models of mapping, which themselves often run into problems of appropriateness and appropriation, and the “micropolitics of contemporary cartography” (22). Though this is not a suitable space to look into this concept in depth, its core concepts are useful here: “Vernacular mappings are cartographies that in their ethos and practice are more vulnerable and susceptible to change and perturbation; cartographies that perform the unsettling of epistemological and representational certainties while affirming spaces for inhabiting and navigating the world otherwise” (31). By setting under question notions of ontology in favour of ontogenetic cartographies – created by and creative of their settings, technologies, voices and purposes – new possibilities of argument and relation are created. Vocabularies and visualisation technologies can be mingled,

See, in extension of his published essays, his frequent and widely-debated blog posts, addressing colonial inheritance, gay rights, religious politics and émigré perspectives amongst other things: http://underthesaltireflag.com/ 4

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tested, refreshed by insisting that the “work is never complete” (27). If it is possible to continually keep our framing devices in mind, and to be open to other viewpoints and representations without being merely credulous, we will be able to produce and use new kinds of maps. (The ‘possible’ in the previous sentence is a genuine qualifier; a work that welcome many tongues may speak many languages, but may also produce nonsense, on occasion.)

In the remainder of this paper I will discuss some of the most effective elements of Miller’s collection, in particular his use of the vernacular, by which I include not only the quotidian language of The Island, but also local landscapes, shared memories and music. Without pushing the metaphor too hard, Miller’s use of the Cartographer character allows the collection itself to be regarded as a map. First, however, I want to briefly differentiate between some of the guiding lines of thought common to much of the cartography theory mentioned, and the notion of a vernacular that I want to employ. By drawing on Foucault in particular, but also in Gerlach’s case, Deleuze and Guattari, a post-humanist idea of the subject becomes possible, one that brings into view the power relations that shape our world and our view of it. These factors and the geometries thereof are fertile ground for analysis, moving away from notions of

either a fully rational/objective or uniquely individual (Cartesian) representation of the world. Neither binary is sustainable. My own approach here, however, is a line of thinking that places a greater emphasis on notions of responsibility and reflection than most post-humanist models, based on a Wittgensteinian insistence of language ‘in use’, and drawing on work by Cora Diamond and Stanley Cavell, as illustrated below. This choice is partly due to a worry about unintended systematising by both Harley and those who sought to criticise his work (a fear also noted by Clayton (20)).

It also reflects the thought that a degree of expressive agency is necessary in order to non-reductively deal both with Miller’s collection as poetry, and to carry on the kind of debate about language that makes the collection so timely. The approach insists on some notion of will or intention being in play if we are to take an expression as having meaning, and an openness being to altered by it when we claim to have understood it.

New vernaculars can change our language, and in the process change the way we see the world and what we can say about it.

But those vernaculars are not just new information; they require attunement to their production and presentation.

To take one example, it is increasingly difficult to talk about environmental concerns without translating them into an

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economic model of cost benefit – x number of jobs lost or created; x billion pounds of investment needed, x% of GDP sacrificed or gained. News coverage reports on the economics of renewable energy and climate change, with other aspects of these issues reduced to local or human interest stories.

This is clearly helpful for deciding on longterm projects or comparing different events; seeing the world through this lens creates a map that is comprehensible and scalable.

However, if only what can be assigned a monetary value enters into the debate, so that a suitable cost-benefit analysis can be made, this radically simplifies the map of what is happening. If we have no measurement of action or damage done beyond cash equivalence, anything that sits outside this measure, or refuses to define itself this way, fades into anecdote or whimsy. And we (as both individuals and institutions) can be incredibly resistant to acknowledging this simplification. We have a wide-ranging and powerful tool, and tend to prefer the reliable scale of the tool to the less clear world that it measures and stands in for. We prefer – for reasons of efficiency, objectivity and tradition – to retain a privileged view of the world and how it works. And how, if everything that does not conform to this

5

e.g. Philosophical Investigations §334; On Certainty §262, §612.

view is already ruled out, can we come to see things differently, to discover what we have missed out on?

Combating resistance to seeing things differently, especially reflecting back on oneself or one’s institutions, is thus both difficult and essential, and may necessitate not a changing only of the information we hold, but the way that we see – are able to see – what that information tells us. As Eric Bulson claims in Novels, Maps, Modernity, “Maps will only get us lost if we know how to read them” (131); and that is a question of mastering a language, not only facts.

In Philosophy and Animal Life, there is a debate between Cora Diamond, Stanley Cavell and John McDowell about the extent to which seeing the world differently can be equated with having access to certain information – translatable into the making of rational arguments – or whether, at some point, bringing another into seeing the world as I do must become a matter of persuasion.

Although the three philosophers take slightly different positions on this issue, I take persuasion here as used in Wittgenstein’s later work,5 where this might include giving examples, modelling behaviour, or simply saying ‘this is what I do’. These

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activities are something distinct from merely demanding assent or convincing by logic; they appeal to the person to be persuaded on a basis of mutual understanding, or the possibility thereof. It involves asking the other person to take a kind of risk, to allow the possibility of another way of seeing. In Philosophy and Animal Life the chief catalyst for discussing different modes of persuasion is J. M Coetzee’s lecture/novella ‘The Lives of Animals’, which not only places a piece of creative writing into the place normally reserved for academic argument, but also has a protagonist, Elizabeth Costello, who struggles to make clear to those around her (and perhaps herself) the horror she feels at the treatment of animals under modern industrial farming practices.6 She has the same information about animal welfare that anyone else in society might glean, and yet is surrounded by what seems to be a willing blindness by society concerning the misery and death that is inflicted on other living things every day: “in a huge communal effort, we close our hearts” (Coetzee 133). She cannot argue her case by means of theory or statistics; she feels, in McDowell’s phrase, “unhinged” (Philosophy and Animal Life 134) from the world.

Similarly, Cora Diamond reads Coetzee’s novella not as a kind of disguised argument for a particular point of view (as other critics have done) but as a form of persuasion, one that relies on calling to the reader to recognise in Costello a fellow human, to see that we too might be troubled in this way; to take the risk of knowing what it is like to be another person, an animal, a victim (73-74).

By showing examples, or creating believable behaviour that we can understand, even if it remains different to our own, Coetzee changes how we can see the world, even if nothing that was not already open to view has been revealed.

In such ways writing can become a means of fracturing or escaping the kinds of regulating views on the world we tend to embed ourselves in. It is this same consciousness of a break between argument and persuasion, and between worldviews that Kei Miller’s collection exhibits. Mingling characters and symbolism, an attention to history and sound, and the collision of patois, academia, a certain “Caribbean logic” (Writing Down the Vision 16), music, humour and autobiography, Miller opens up several new directions of thinking. “What I do is...”

The complexities of this text and the debate surrounding it deserve more space than I can give it here, but it has been addressed substantially elsewhere. See, for example, Stephen Mulhall’s The Wounded Animal (2008), and Rupert Read’s review of that book in Mind (April 2011).

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says the Cartographer – and likewise the Rastaman reveals himself in his hospitality and his sermonising, his challenges and his unease. The collection invites us to experiment in our outlook, to remember how to remember what has become organised and taken for granted.

secret roads and slaving roads, the dirging roads, marooning roads [...] cow roads and cobbled roads the estate roads and backbush roads

In this context of re-visioning, I will discuss two of the motifs of CWZ: roads, and place names.

These are ‘vernacular’ not only in terms of their everyday language, but also as locally shared landscapes, memories and events.

causeway roads and Chinese roads

***

press-along, soon-be-done,

Roads wear their histories into their landscape. Far from being neutral connectors between places, differentiated on the map only by their colour coding, the routes we chose for crossing a landscape have many purposes and effects. Just as lines drawn on a map are not merely neutral or representative, but in their “unfolding effects and affects [...] are performative” (Gerlach “Lines, contours and legends” 26), roads are more than markers of travel; they have history, agency, and a shaping phenomenology. Miller speaks the character of movement about the Island, including how one might pass along:

the not-an-easy, the mighty-long (“Roads” Ll. 1,2,6,7,12, 16,17)

[...]

[...]

Beyond the type and task of a road, the route may reflect something very other. Poem “xi”, relates how a road was built curved, to please the ego of a plantation owner’s wife,

so that Miss Musgrave on her carriage ride home

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would not have to see a nayga man’s property so much bigger than her husband’s (Ll.11-15)

The race-divide that structured the island’s history is not a surface-level phenomenon; it is pressed deep into the infrastructure, becoming harder to change with every iteration of its processes. “Some kinds of ghostly line . . . can have very real consequences for peoples’ movements” (Irwin et al. ‘The City of Richgate’ p 62, cited in Gerlach 26). The “serpentine” flow of Lady Musgrove’s Road now causes pandemonium on the modern city’s commuter route, as its needless turns restrict and complicate traffic (L.10). This unexpected addendum to the colonial past (interestingly at odds with the Haussmann-ish rationalisation of the landscape one might sooner anticipate) acts as a reminder of the entrenchment that decisions undergo, and institutions facilitate.

The Cartographer notes reluctantly the “thoughtless” (L. 26) lay out of the street,

wishing he could put right the injustices of history with his mapping; straightening and smoothing roads “as if in drawing / he might erase a small bit of history’s disgrace” (L. 35-36).

But for whom, and to whom, would he speak and draw? The map, however superior to reality, cannot improve the traffic, or undo its knotty history. The character of the landscape is as much a factor of its past as its present topography and culture. Miller depicts Jamaica as a place where “every road might buck yu toe”, a statement of roughness that is as proud as it is imperfect (“v” L. 5).

The Island carries its past in its roads and people and language. *** Perhaps no element of language better preserves its history within itself than a name. In some ways a name steps outside of our purely descriptive language and becomes a marker, a word imbued with the solidity of its object.7 Even in transfer to another time or place, something of a name’s original may remain. In “ix. in which the

This is of course a point about our use of names, and their ability to accumulate meaning. It is not a metaphysical claim about ‘how names work’ or an equating of naming with a linguistic ostensive definition, as (arguably) happens in the Augustinian model that Wittgenstein uses to kick-start the Philosophical Investigations. My point is that the application of a name automatically refers to a thing, circumstance or history outside of the word itself in a way that other forms of speech (usually or as emphatically) do not and that this aspect is often consciously used by poets as an intimation (or imitation) of solidity and specificity. See for example the way Wallace Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at Key West” profitably ensnares a philosophical debate about existence, nature and linguistic expression in the quotidian setting of a shorefront. Miller in his collection here is both making use of this naming convention and drawing attention to its operations – and how they can be questioned.

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cartographer travels lengths and breadths” Miller says of Jamaica “this island spreads out as a palimpsest / of maps: for here is Bethlehem; here is Tel Aviv; here / is Gaza; also Edinburgh; Aberdeen […] all of here is Babylon” (Ll. 15-19). Here Babylon, the great wash of terrestrial sin and power, covers the land, the Cartographer’s possible world.8 It is not only the inescapability of the world and its names that Miller notes here, but how deliberate our actions are to maintain this inescapability – transporting names from one world to the next, re-siting the known and well mapped, as though a name could replicate its namesake. Different maps, different histories, overlay each other, the curves and bumps of each affecting the next.

Alongside these transferred memories and famous names, Miller contemplates the ways in which what was once current and meaningful has become forgotten, corrupted, or adapted. A number of the poems in the collection muse over place names – their likely origins and the stories that grow up around them. In ‘Shotover’ a house that once had the grandiose name of Château Vert has acquired a new history, relating itself more intuitively to the local tongue and the recollection of slave-owner violence:

Shotover – so named because our people, little acquainted with French, could make no sense of Château Vert. And talk truth, Mr Backra, dat was too stoosh a name for your house. ‘Green and fresh,’ you said. No – it did just mildew and old; a house which, like yourself, has since returned to the fold of Portland’s earth. But oh Mr Backra, if through the muffle of mud you should hear us traipsing on your ground, one of us asking – how it come about, the name? you will discover that when victims live long enough they get their say in history: Well sah (an old man answers), dem dere backra days, bucky-master had

As well as being, perhaps not co-incidentally, the origin of the earliest known map of the world (see Jeremy Brotton A History of the World in Twelve Maps 2-3).

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was to catch back the runaway slaves, so him would draw for him long musket and buss gunshot over dere, and gunshot over dere, shot dissa fly pashie! pashie! all bout de place. And so comes we get de name.

Place names mutate, build new associations, hide shameful events, signpost the forgetfulness of a society. Throughout Miller’s collection one can trace the scars, both obvious and subtle, of European expansion and slave-trading, but also the grafting on of new meanings and connections. The implications of being able to name the markers of one’s environment are played out; not only is the presence of colonial culture noted, but also the ways that place names carry the spirit of a landscape (“Wait-A-Bit”), the local ironies and stories (“ix”) and, like Shotover, how a name can be a repossession.

There is, of course, a fundamental difference between naming and being named, which this poem treats with Miller’s usual sharpness and humour. A thing named – whether place or person – becomes answerable to those who apply the name. A name – what

gives someone or something a place within the language and culture – can be a form of limitation and exclusion, as much as an empowerment, especially if the name is imprinted in a language not shared by what is named. Those excluded from the language, through economics, education or social division, may become thinned to the surface of that name, or made invisible by its covering. This concern is given voice in the Rastaman’s denunciation of cartography in “xix”, as his rhetoric surges against the cartographer’s embattled certainties:

Map was just a land-guage written gainst I&I who never know fi read it […]

Map was just Babylon’s most vampiric orthography. Better I&I never learn fi overstand what was nutt’n more than de downpressor’s pig latin (Ll. 3-5, 8-10)

The most immediate application of this association between mapping and oppression is naturally the context of the poem’s setting,

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the legacy of colonialism. Elsewhere the Rastaman has worried about how the drawing of maps has “gripped like girdles / to make his people smaller than they were” (“vi” Ll. 7-8). Where the name (or map) stands in for what it represents and replaces it as what can be talked about, it begins a process of exclusion, of railroading the possibilities of discourse. But can writing – specifically here the practice of poetry – become another kind of mapping, one that holds back from the monosemic systematising of the uninvolved glance, the cartographer’s ideal?

We might ask; what would it be like to have a map in many hands? What would it be like to read it?

In this sense, CWZ is itself a map, the poems marking points in a landscape, directing our view towards particular characters, moments or moods.9 One of the reasons why they work so well as a collection is the unity of location, most usually locating us at ground level, on a very human scale.10 But the experience of inhabiting a location is not one of understanding a single meaning or setting; although still mastered by Milller’s inimitable voice, the poems switch locale and viewpoint, come into argument, address the reader differently, and twist linguistic codes to suit their moment of expression.

The poems share a topography, but the guide changes with each step of the journey.

Bulson notes the impact of topographical writing on the reading experience – the reader’s urge to orient themselves against an externally available cityscape. As a particularly modernist technique, the naming of places (rather than their description) generates a space that might be known, or that one might get lost in. Bulson’s account, centred on the modernist novel, pays most attention to the mapping out of action over time that constitutes a novel, and how this map can be realistic, affirmative or disorientating (107-115). Miller’s poems at times reverse the process of structuring the literary space through names, by bringing those names themselves – their histories, stories, secrets – under scrutiny. What does a name mean, and to whom? The land is made more real by delving beyond the street sign or a house name, into the land upon which it has been placed. And this delving can naturally take the form of stories as powerfully as mapping or archaeology; when Miller recounts the history of the place called “Swamp” (35) his sketch conjures more of the flux and cupidity of humanity, of his wide-eyed headshake about the place than cartography could capture. This is one reason to treasure the subjective nature of literature, and Miller’s poetry: the details, images and gaps in a poem become much more than a surface of a map; they respond to a different key. In bringing to bear these different ways

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of reading a map, personal experience can militate against simple classifications and reductionist thinking. The prescribed channels become deltaic as alternative memories and outlooks are allowed to interplay. Bulson speaks of “disorientation” as a desired outcome of writing, similar to Shklovsky’s poetic estrangement, though carried into a more narrative or worldbuilding mode of operation. It can be “a way to resist prescribed ways of imagining the world, it is a technique and an effect that can counteract capitalist abstraction and the forgetfulness of history” (130). This isn’t quite what is happening in Miller’s poems, certainly not to the reader – though the cartographer undergoes something of this kind, as the world refuses to lay itself out for him, like a scrunched-up rug. Miller is not withholding or undermining information, but rather continually adding snapshots, voices and bright moments that tug us in different directions; we can orient ourselves by them, but cannot chart a straight course.

This is less a disorientation than a distraction – both in terms of our continually refocused attention, and in the sense that we lose traction on what had appeared to be secure and at hand for our manipulation. There is always another layer, another word to add to what we encounter.

WORKS CITED

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Brotton, Jerry. A History of the World in Twelve Maps. London: Allan Lane, 2012.

Print.

Bulson, Eric. Novels, Maps, Modernity: The Spatial Imagination, 1850-2000. New York: Routledge, 2007. Print.

Cavell, Stanley, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking and Cary Wolfe, eds. Philosophy & Animal Life. New York: Columbia UP, 2008. Print.

Clayton, Daniel. “’Snapshots of a Moving Target’: Harley/Foucault/Colonialism.”

Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization, 50.1 (2015): 18-23. Muse.

Web. 2 May 2015.

Coetzee, J. M. ‘The Lives of Animals.’

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Princeton, October 15-16, 1997. Web. 12 April 2012.

Edney, Matthew, H. “Cartography and its discontents.” Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization 50.1 (2015): 9-13. Muse. Web. 2 May 2015.

Gerlach, Joe. “Lines, contours and legends: Coordinates for vernacular mapping.”

Progress in Human Geography 38.1 (2014).

22–39. Muse. Web. 26 April 2015.

Harley, J.B. The New Nature of Maps.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2001. Print.

Irwin R, Bickel B, Triggs V, et al. (2009) “The city of Richgate: A/r/tographic cartography as public pedagogy.” International Journal of Art and Design Education 28 (2009): 61–70.

Muse. Web. 3 May 2015.

Kitchin, Rob, Gleeson, Justin, and Dodge, Martin. “Unfolding mapping practices: a new epistemology for cartography” Transactions Institute of British Geographers 38 (2013):.

480–496. Muse. Web. 28 April 2015.

Miller, Kei. Writing Down the Vision: Essays and Prophecies. Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2013.

Print. ___. The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion. Manchester: Carcanet, 2014. Print. ___. Interview by Claire Armitage. ‘Kei Miller: “My productivity is linked to what could be called a disability”’. The Guardian 28 Sept 2014. Web. 08 October 2014.

Mulhall, Stephen. The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy. New Jersey, Princeton UP, 2008. Print.

Paxman, Jeremy. “On the Forward Prize for Poetry” The Financial Times 19 Sept 2013.

Web. 28 November 2014.

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Read, Rupert. “The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy, by Stephen Mulhall. Review.” Mind 478 (2011): 552-557.

JSTOR. Web. 01 May 2015.

Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978. Print. van Raamsdonk, Esther and Rose-Steel, Michael. “’The Roads Constrict like Throats’: Cartography that Creates and Controls.”

Green Connections Interdisciplinary Conference on Arts Practice and the Environment. University of Exeter, Devon, UK. 5 Sep. 2014.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. On Certainty. Trans.

Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe. USA: Harper Touchbooks, 1972. Print. ___. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. Print.

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Human Language-Making as Environmental Praxis

Camilla Nelson

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Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming” (91) In “Towards a Natural History of Reading”, published over ten years ago, John Tallmadge asks: “where are our [literary] methods to match our mountains?” (283). Ten years on, his question still stands. The Winter 2014 special issue of ISLE explicitly calls readers and writers to creatively and critically engage with global warming. Kathleen Moore and Scott Slovic’s “Call to Writers” promotes a range of forms in which writers might respond. What is conspicuous within this call, and throughout the issue, is the relative inattention paid to the environmental impact of compositional method in contrast to the importance attributed to form and subject matter. This blindspot with regards to compositional method is symptomatic of what Christina Haas has identified as a “gap” in our understanding of “the murky, alwaysassumed but never specified relationship between writing as cognitive process and writing as cultural practice, and the relation of both to the material world” (37).

This paper develops upon the work of a growing tradition of writers and thinkers who

understand the emergence of the human, writing and environment as a process of enmeshed mutual influence, in order to emphasise that how we write is as much part of the process of environment formation as what we write. There is a continuing need for the development of environmentallyengaged compositional methods in order to better diversify literary production as a “making of the self and a making of the world” (Bate 282).

In Process: Landscape and Text Catherine Brace and Adeline Johns-Putra set out to examine “the means by which the creative dimension of human existence as a way of experiencing the world takes shape” (29). The particular focus of their book is “the literary creative process, which, though it is a crucial aspect of creativity and the creative impulse, has seemingly remained elusive to writers and critics alike” (30). Brace and Johns-Putra draw on the phrasing of Malcolm Lowry’s Selected Letters to emphasise that “what actually happens in the novelist’s mind when he conceives what he conceives” is “the true drama” of this investigation (208).

However, rather than emphasising the continuity and mutual influence between form and process in the drama of literary creation, this assertion subtly shifts the focus of the investigation from the mutual

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interface of form and process to a particular pole: “the novelist’s mind” (208). Indeed, Brace and Johns-Putra explicitly encourage a “de-coupling” of “the moments of creative endeavour from the forms of what is produced” in an effort to better “delineate the creative process” (29). Whilst this effort is understandable, their atomic approach to analysis re-enacts the split that they appear to be trying to resolve. Writing in Dobrin and Weiser’s investigation into Ecocomposition, two years prior to Talmadge’s call, Marilyn M. Cooper very clearly states that “there are no boundaries between writing and the other interlocked, cycling systems of our world” (xiv). Cooper suggests that one of the primary reasons that we may have trouble coming to terms with this sense of continuity - and what I suggest may trouble Brace and John-Putra’s account - is, what Fritjof Capra has referred to as, “[t]he great shock of twentieth century science […] that systems cannot be understood by analysis” (29) i.e. that the treasured perspective of the objective observer, that is somehow entirely uninvolved with the elements with which they are perceptually engaged in analyzing - a vision that underpins the popular understanding and authority of scientific knowledge production: that we can arrive at a position untainted by human error - is in fact a myth. There can

be no analysis of something with which you have no perceptual interchange because it would quite simply never have existed for you in the first place. But again, this is nothing new. Gregory Bateson, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela and Tim Ingold have all contributed to the growing tradition of thought that champions the mutual influence between the formation of the human and the formation of the world through the process by which we, as humans, emerge in, by, with and through our engagement (voluntary or involuntary) with this world and vice versa. It is not just that we are bound up with the forms and the processes that we are attempting to analyse; it is only by virtue of this being bound up with the world that this analysis is made possible in the first place (Hayles 48). And so we find ourselves (in a Western tradition of thinking) negotiating the tricky divide, or “gap”, between a mechanistic view where “the world is a collection of objects” that “interact with one another” but in which “the relations are secondary”, and a systems view, where “we realise that the objects themselves are networks of relationships, embedded in larger networks” in which “the relationships are primary” (Fritjof 29). It is this perceived gap upon which this paper focusses in order to affirm and uphold Tallmadge’s critical emphasis on the world-changing potential

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of literary praxis. The approach of this paper is not, however, to pursue the linear image of a bridge straddling a divide between two separate entities, but rather to attempt a reweaving or renetworking of these, at times, contradictory and occasionally incompatible concepts. Like Yeats’ falcon, his paper enacts a circling among, through and between these divergent and overlapping conceptions of writing and environment in an effort to hybridise, destabilise and reweave our understanding of their relation. Sarah Whatmore reworks Ansell-Pearson’s words to further support this emergent perspective: “hybridity compels us to acknowledge that not only does “humanity” always already “dwell among badly analysed composites [like “nature” or the non-human] but that “we” ourselves [the human-all-too-human] are badly analysed composites”(7)” (165 [Whatmore’s own insertions]). And so it is that this paper progresses, analysing the process of language formation in relation to the world by way of forming language by, with and from the world, and acknowledging our complicity and implication in this working through and with the fabric of our world. And so it is that, having outlined the impossibility of being other than or outside of that with which we are conceptually and perceptually involved, this paper proceeds to offer a model of involvement, observing

as it does so that this act of modeling is a distancing not to be misconstrued for the fantasy of objectivity or total remove that it aims to contravene.

Figure 1 For reference, and by way of further introduction, Figure 1 outlines the way in which this paper conceives of the relation between human, language and environment.

These terms are considered throughout this paper as “markers” or “place-holders” (Nelson 29). As I have indicated elsewhere, the macro linguistic concept of “human being”, for example, should be “understood as a place-holder, marker or umbrella term, for a collection of micro-concepts […]. These micro-concepts coincide with the microconcepts gathered within other macro-

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concepts” (Nelson 29), such as “environment” and “(human) language” or writing, so that “each of these concepts” can be considered “as a “weave” of ideas or micro-concepts […] rather than as discrete, self-grounding conceptual entities. This understanding echoes the dense weave of perceptual and conceptual interconnection that Timothy Morton has called “the mesh” (2009; 2010)” (Nelson 32). According to this model there are no gaps between concepts, only interweave and overlay. In this paper, each of these concepts – human being, (human) language and environment - has an axiom associated with it. As with all models, this diagram presents a vastly oversimplified abstraction. For ease, “Environment” is presented as a continuous amorphous entity but this model gestures towards an umbrella understanding of “Environment” that is constituted by varying and various more concretely articulated environments.

The same can be said of “(Human) Language” and “Human Being”. This paper presents the thinking that informs each of these three axioms before describing the conclusions that arise from their combination.

Environment Axiom 1: Environment is the sum total of material entities that make up this world and their ongoing, mutually transformative, interaction.

What Noel Castree has argued to be true of our use of “nature” might usefully be considered in relation to our usage of “environment” since both terms continue “to be understood in a multitude of ways, many of them incompatible” (xvii). This paper reweaves the overlap and interrelation of these concepts. The first recorded use of “environment” denoting “nature” or the “conditions in which a person or thing lives” is rendered in Carlyle’s use of the German term Umgebung, in 1827 (Harper, “environment”). The first use of the term in a specialised ecological sense was recorded in 1956. “Environment” (noun) is currently defined as “the surroundings or conditions in which a person, animal, or plant lives or operates” and / or “the setting or conditions in which a particular activity is carried on” (OED, “environment”). An understanding of “the environment” - “the natural world, as a whole or in a particular geographical area, especially as affected by human activity” (OED, “environment”) - arises out of this more general definition. And so we begin to see the splinters that trouble this term: an

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opposition between human activity and the natural world inherent in the term and the conceptual divide between the “conditions in which a person, animal, or plant lives or operates” and the “plant, animal or person” itself (OED, “environment”). If “environment” is contaminated in its very heart with an ideology we are attempting to dispel, how useful is this term? If we are in search of an uncontaminated phrase or one free from unwanted contextual relations the case might plausibly be made to discard it altogether. Timothy Morton has suggested doing exactly this with “nature”. In Ecology Without Nature, Morton is concerned about nature’s implicit opposition to culture. He regards this opposition as dangerous because it suggests that there is another side, an outside, to the term, which, he reminds us, is impossible: […] there is nowhere outside a signifying system from which to pronounce upon it; further […] this is one of the illusions that the signifying system enables and sustains. Virtual reality and the ecological emergency point out the hard truth that we never had this position in the first place. (26-27) If nature’s oppositionally emergent lineage implies another side to or an outside of itself,

environment is just as problematic. Ecology, as a term, is more decentred, more web- or network-based, than nature or environment.

This is not to say that understandings of these terms cannot be and are not increasingly influenced by the rhizomatic infusion of ecology. However, to suggest that any term is “pure” or free from undesirable inference or that a term can be contained in such a way would be to misunderstand how it is that language evolves in the first place. In “Thinking Ecology” Morton reforms nature through writing. Rather than replacing one term with another he attempts to write through the complicated historical and cultural inflections of nature, in an effort to erode and reform it: Nature dissolves when we look directly at it, into assemblages of behaviours, congeries of organs without bodies […] Beyond concept, Nature is, a Nature for which there are no words. But we are already using words to describe this wordless Nature.

(215-216) Morton’s essay goes some way to illustrate the network of relations with which words are always already involved and the multiple and, to return to Castree, sometimes incompatible (xvii) meanings and usages that

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cluster in and around, and come to define the plurality or hybridity of, any given term.

Words are inadequate: they communicate both more and less than what they are being used to communicate. But it is precisely through our use of words that the porous and plastic potential of language, as an agent of change, is revealed. Sarah Whatmore reminds us that the “everyday practices” of language-making “have been argued to be performative rather than cognitive, such that “talk” itself is better understood as action rather than as communication” (6).

But this would be to understand cognition and action as separate processes. In The Tree of Knowledge Maturana and Varela argued that “all cognitive experience involves the knower in a personal way, rooted in his biological structure” (18). As previously acknowledged, the work of Bateson and Ingold support a continuity between performance and cognition: “the art of inquiry, the conduct of thought goes along with, and continually answers to, the fluxes and flows of the materials with which we work. These materials think in us, as we think through them” (6). In other words, as Maturana and Varela have previously stated, doing is a form of knowing and thus “every act of knowing brings forth a world” (26).

The practice or performance of language is transformative: what and how we work with and write through things alters what is said.

Nature’s cultural inflections are not resolved but merely set aside, and the properties of change inherent in language use and formation are obscured, in Morton’s urge to use another term. But we cannot disappear these understandings through compelling argument. They exist, and in order to alter them we must work through and beyond them, to rewrite or reword them. This paper aims to contribute to this rewriting of our understanding of environment.

Since the seventeenth century, environment has designated a ‘state of being environed” or environing, i.e. encircling or being encircled or surrounded by (something) (Harper, “environment”). The verb to environ is derived from the Old French seventeenth-century term environer, meaning “to surround, enclose, encircle” (Harper, “environ”). Environ (“round about”) is composed of the prefix en- “in” and the noun viron, “circle, circuit,” from virer “to turn” (Harper, “environ”). The plural noun, environs, meaning “outskirts”, comes from the 1660’s French term, environs, plural of Old French environ, meaning “compass, circuit”, derived from the adverb environ, “around, round about” (Harper, “environs”).

The current usage of “environment” composts these terms, whilst retaining a sense of circling. However, importantly, that which is encircled remains absent, awaiting

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reference and identification. To return to the image of Yeats’ falcon, “environment” (understood according to these definitions) turns and turns around a present absence at its centre; a centre that defines it always as peripheral. Contemporary western theory has progressively been decentralised and distributed (Latour; Deleuze; Guattari).

Within a theoretical climate that insists with growing urgency that we must regard the other-than-human either as a centre in itself or as a series of networked nodes that destabilize the notion of a centre altogether, the centralised structure of environment is at odds with the overlapping principles of network, system and ecology: the centre cannot hold. Environment overlaps, interweaves and is infused by the currency of these more plural terms, forming afresh from its rich etymological compost. This paper furthers the motion to reform. Rather than considering language as something that happens in environment, this paper considers language as environment, like air or amniotic fluid. Environment is not simply surroundings, or perhaps better, surroundings are not always or only peripheral - that which surrounds us becomes us and vice versa. Environment in this sense has no inside or outside, or is both. Environment is plural and singular: it is both global and local. Assemblages and congeries abound. At this point it is worth

noting the danger, observed by Timothy Clark, that this “term ‘the environment’ has often seemed too vague—for it means, ultimately, ‘everything’ […]” (no page) in an effort to guard against the collapse of the term altogether. This paper advocates for a plural understanding of “environment” in the firm belief that there is a great need to keep trying “to think “everything at once’” (Clark) in an effort to approach an underlying logic, or practice, of how this everythingat-once model might work. Porosity is not incompatible with homeostasis: it is a term that can retain stability whilst in flux. It is this plastic and uneven vision of environment, free from any simple, centralised slavery to an etymological past, full of the potential to fall apart, and still vaguely circling, which infuses this paper.

Human Being Axiom 2: T he ‘specific form of incarnation” (Johnson ix), that is every human being, takes the form it does as a direct result of its relation to environment.

The structure of “human being”, as developed within the remit of this paper, has much in common with a plastic and uneven vision of environment outlined previously. Rather than presenting the human self as a discrete centre, the human is understood as dispersed

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and interwoven with the other-than human in the ongoing articulation of past, present and future selves: There is no “I”, no single, unified executive system that coordinates all of the necessary bodily changes. Instead, there are numerous systems simultaneously “communicating” with one another in a vast dance of ongoing co-ordination and readjustment. (Johnson 59) This gathering of systems under the umbrella term “I” provides another model of the way in which this paper conceives of terms such as environment operating as “markers” or place-holders” that include a series or system of interrelating micro-concepts involved in just such a “dance of ongoing coordination and readjustment” (59). As with the understanding of environment outlined above, it would be wrong to mistake this assertion of a porous, hybrid and responsive articulation of the self for an assertion that who or what “I” am is entirely unrecognisable from one day to the next. As with every organism, or indeed any system, human being is governed by a biological drive towards homeostasis, which, as Damasio helpfully paraphrases, “is convenient shorthand for the ensembles of regulations

and the resulting state of regulated life” (30).

We can sustain movement between and within these multitudes and still remain largely ourselves.

Although Johnson does not use the term posthuman in this book, his understanding of the human as emergent and distributed allies his theory with the posthumanism of Katherine N. Hayles. Hayles’ posthumanism states that “the age of the human is drawing to a close” (283). What this means, Hayles qualifies, is not that humans as a species are approaching annihilation (although this might also be true), but that the age of one specific understanding of the human is drawing to a close: the posthuman does not really mean the end of humanity.

It signals instead the end of a certain conception of the human, a conception that may have been applied, at best, to that fraction of humanity who had the wealth, power and leisure to conceptualise themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice. (Hayles 286) An understanding of “the subject as an autonomous self independent of the

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environment” (290) is, as Francis Fukuyama1 notes, “invalid in the posthuman era and, therefore, needs revision” (20). The conception that takes its place is akin to Johnson’s (as expressed above), except (as in Hayles’ account) there is normally more of an emphasis on humanity’s relationship with machines:

in general – whether plant, machine or otherwise – rather than emphasising human coupling with machine life or addressing accompanying issues regarding artificial intelligence. So what does this distributed understanding of the human with the otherthan-human mean for human cognition in general?

In this account, emergence replaces teleology; reflexive epistemology replaces objectivism; distributed cognition replaces autonomous will; embodiment replaces a body seen as a support system for the mind; and a dynamic partnership between humans and intelligent machines replaces the liberal humanist subject’s manifest destiny to dominate and control nature. Of course, this is not necessarily what the posthuman will mean – only what it can mean.

(Hayles 288)

The chaotic, unpredictable nature of complex dynamics implies that subjectivity is emergent rather than given, distributed rather than located solely in consciousness, emerging from and integrated into a chaotic world rather than occupying a position of mastery and control removed from it. (Hayles 136)

As has previously been stated, this paper understands the human as distributed, or as Robert Pepperell2 terms it, “fuzzy-edged” (20), placing more emphasis on human relation to the other-than human environment

Hayles produces another model by which we can understand the way in which our enmeshedness in the world means that our thinking and doing, our action and / as cognition, emerges with and through the world. As with any single understanding of environment, a centralised conception of the self is unstable but not anarchic. By virtue of the pace at which change occurs in relation to our perception of this change and the

Despite being fearful of what posthumanism might mean in terms of expanding the human capacity to alter our “nature”, and the political ramifications of this, Francis Fukuyama does at least agree on this, that our conception of what it means to be human needs to be readdressed and revised, if not expanded.

1

2

Robert Pepperell’s practical experience as a painter and a draftsman informs his philosophy of consciousness and perception.

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feedback loops that have evolved to govern and enable this exchange, change is both evident and evidently forgettable. It is always, to return to the writing of Timothy Clark, a question of scale, pace and perspective. Both conceptual and actual entities are sustained by virtue of homeostasis or a settled (and regulated, to some degree) set of processes.

This paper maintains that the “I” that I call myself is not only not a “single, unified executive system”, it is constituted by “numerous systems simultaneously “communicating” with one another in a vast dance of ongoing co-ordination and readjustment” (Johnson 59), within the body, between body and brain, but also between body (including brain) and environment.

I am in process: within, without and in between. My periphery is a haze of organism-environment interaction. I am a “fuzzy-edged” entity, a distributed system emerging in relation with other distributed and emergent systems. Things fall apart, are rewoven and continue to exist, by virtue of being altered, through this interweaving, othering process. Judith Butler3 has observed that no individual is “self-grounding” (19).

Dirk Baecker’s earlier writing lends further support to this argument: one can never start anything at all from scratch, neither one’s own life nor a relationship to whatever phenomenon. Systems, regarded as non-self-evident sets of possibilities, are already there; they emerge, they enable and they constrain what is to happen […]. (2001:68) Systems are environments that are inhabited and / or constrained by other environments.

Systems are environments that exist between and among other environments, that effect each other, that vie for priority, that emerge and decay, that are absorbed in part or in entirety into others. No system, either physical or conceptual, is selfgrounding. As D. N. Lee writes, “[l]ike all animals, we exist by virtue of coupling our bodies to the environment through action […] Action in the environment is the root of the ecological self [….] We are what we do” (34). In other words, how we behave (culture / phenotype) affects what we are, or what

In Giving an Account of Oneself (2005) Judith Butler acknowledges the limitations of self-constitution and self-knowledge, arguing for a more dispersed account of the human self and its formation. Given her interest in the distinction between sex and gender and the extent to which gender is environmentally, or culturally, constructed and / or performed (Gender Trouble, 1990) perhaps this development is unsurprising. In Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), Butler recognises the contingency of the human self upon its “external” environment.

Parts of this account complement Hayles” assertion of the foundational importance of human and other-than-human organism and environment interaction in the formation of entity, organism and environment.

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we become (ontology / genetics) or produce, most notably through the incorporation of alterity within the self of the organism, for example, through food consumption or sexual reproduction: human functionality expands because the parameters of the cognitive system it inhabits expands. In this model, it is not a question of leaving the body behind but rather of extending embodied awareness in highly specific, local, and material ways that would be impossible without electronic prosthesis. (Hayles 291) But electronic prosthesis is not the only, nor perhaps the simplest or most obvious, method of expanding human functionality.

Johnson presents a simpler, more general argument for the expansion of human physical and cognitive functioning: “Change your brain, your body or your environment in nontrivial ways, and you will change how you experience your world, what things are meaningful to you, and even who you are” (2). But this too obfuscates the issue since it is not only a question of effecting change in order to alter the environment. We are involved in effecting environment all the time through the constant environmental interchange that we call life. Our lives occur in relation. As writers, our lives occur in

relationship with words, very often written words. Reading and writing, as practices and as industries that both use and produce and large quantities of material (ink, dye, paper, trees, glue, transport lorries, internet connections, computer programmes, hardware, software etc.) that constitutes and generates our environment, must not be forgotten or remain unexamined in our review of how we continue to effect ourselves and our environment by way of language production. I am what was and what will be my environment, linguistically, literally.

Language Axiom 3: L anguage is both a material entity and a process by which material entities interact and transform each other.

And so it is that I, this deceptively simple linguistic signifier, acts as a marker, or a placeholder, for the “gobbly-dumped turkery” of a system that is “moving and changing every part of the time” (Joyce 118: 22-23). And so it is that we come to language and the unsurprising affirmation that human language is no more self-grounding than human being, not only in the Wittgensteinian sense that no human possesses a private language, but beyond this to the blurred edge of the human realm where human and other-than-human interweave. In its

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various ideological and material formations, the human mind - or what it is to be human, according to Johnson’s expanded view – arises through our ongoing coupling with language. Language, as both varying degrees of verbal discourse, and the more general and multi-modal activity of communication, is a fundamental operation of mind. Language, as such, is part of, without being in any way reducible to, being human. Language is always in excess of itself. I mark my name into an apple, the flesh bruises and scars.

This act of marking intends to signify my meaning, the marking of my self in language for other humans to read. However, the bruising of the apple in response to these marks, signify that my self does not signify in a vacuum, it is articulated in relation. Here it is articulated in relation with an apple.

The processing of this apple interacts with my mark-making. The apple’s bruises and scars mean in excess of my intention. The marks that occur in other apples as a result of insect or avian interference, and the parallels set up between the two, are not of my making and yet they affect its meaning by the proximate or paratactical association.

Language does not communicate only (or even) that which it intends to communicate.

By virtue of the fact that language occurs between the human and the other-thanhuman it is always operating in excess of

human intention and / or human control.

Language is “wild inside” (Woods): it has the permanent potential to other itself because it is other than us, even as we inscribe ourselves with and through words. This understanding “contests the status of language as a bearer of uncontaminated meaning” (McCaffery qtd. in Perloff 129). McCaffery’s words bring us back to the affirmation of the impurity of any term or concept (stated earlier in this piece) that, whether micro- or macro-, the contradictions and incompatibilities that exist within our understanding evidences the multiform, ongoing infusion of meanings that is language-making. This paper recognises that language is “hopelessly compromised, contaminated with […] alienness in the very heart” (Hayles 288) and that it is by virtue of this contamination, by virtue of operating in relation, of relating with this “otherness’, that language operates as communication.

An important aspect of this conception of language is an understanding of the materiality inherent on word-making both as product and process. Language has no purity of existence. Words exist by virtue of human or machine marks made on paper, by the tapping of keys on a keyboard, by the utterance of letter forms in relation to teeth, tongue, lips, throat, voicebox, body, lungs. All of these things colour language, make every utterance particular. It is in this way that

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thingness irrupts in language.4 Language is part of the material world that exists beyond the human, and expresses as much of this material, other-than human world as it does of humanity. To borrow Robert Sheppard’s phrasing yet again, language is “the irruption of material historical occasion, of making, validation, and performance of the text, that will unsettle linguistic system, and declare its rooted but excessive presence” (Sheppard qtd. in Cobbing 1998). It is at the juncture of language, where human and other-than human combine in order to communicate, that the relation of human with other-than human is most obviously expressed and revealed. The intent of human languagemaking may be to communicate between humans, but the audience and impact of our language-making practices reach far further than our intentions are able to acknowledge.

Language-making is a process by which human and other-than human environments come together to combine, resist and transform. As suggested in the work of Maturana and Varela, language-making is a practice of organism-environment coupling, decoupling (Brace and JohnsPutra) and recoupling. A material study of how it is that language emerges in relation

to the other-than-human world is crucial to the development of a more joined-up, or systemic understanding of word’s interaction and ongoing infusion with world. The study of the compositional methodologies of language creation is an important and hitherto neglected enterprise in the understanding of our linguistic organisation and inscription of environment. This paper offers the necessary complement to Moore and Slovic’s call. Understanding how human and other-than human environments emerge by virtue of their interaction in languagemaking is key not only to recognising the role language-making plays in human and other-than human environment formation but understanding how this process occurs.

Andy Clark’s neuroscientific findings that support theories of extended mind (how human being extends its environment by way of other-than human entities) provide an occasion for Johnson to evidence the inherently environmental nature of mind: “we tend to offload much of our cognition onto the environments we create [...] we make cognitive artifacts to help us engage in complex actions (Clark 1998) […] Thus, mind emerges” (Johnson 150-151). Johnson claims that “[o]ur ‘minds’ are processes

Robert Sheppard understands the enterprise of Writers Forum as an “irruption of thingness in language” (Sheppard in Cobbing 1998).

The understanding of language expressed in this paper is heavily influenced by the practices and theories of Writers Forum, among other material- and performance-based practices, where word formation is explored in its “thingness” as a substantial, multi-dimensional and multi-sensory engagement with, and expression of, the human body’s interaction with the other-than-human world.

4

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that arise through our ongoing coupling with our environment” (130). Crucial to Johnson’s theory of how human mind emerges in relation to the other-than human environment is the part language plays in this process of organism-environment coupling. According to Johnson, conceptual metaphors develop as a result of “the neural connections between the sensorimotor areas of the brain and other areas that are involved in thinking” (167). Johnson draws upon the findings of cognitive neuroscience to support the suggestion that we use our sensorimotor neural circuitry for abstract reasoning by way of metaphorical mapping.

Our concepts “piggyback”, to use McCrone’s account of the same phenomenon, “on a processing hierarchy designed first and foremost for the business of perception” (158). For example, the activity of grasping, its neural connections and associated sensations, “can be recruited for abstract conceptualization and reasoning” (Johnson 170-171). Abstract concepts emerge from embodied experience: we think, according to Johnson, not just with but through our bodies. How we think about environment depends upon how we use, interact with, or inhabit our other-than human environment.

We understand environment, as percept and

concept, through practice and performance.

How we form language, both materially and conceptually, plays a crucial role in this.

Haas’ work argues for: a link – via bodily interactions – between the material tools and artifacts of text production and the mental processes and representation of writers.

That is, through their physical interactions with the material tools and texts of literacy, writers’ thinking is shaped by culturallymade technologies. (Haas 133) The step that Haas does not explicitly develop but that her work suggests, especially in her acknowledgement of Engels’ work, over half a century earlier,5 is that the evolution of writing practices likewise shape writing technologies and in doing so alters the otherthan human entities and environments that constitute these technologies. Thus, human writing practices alter, affect and inform the evolution of other-than human entities and environments. Language-formation is a crucible of human and other-than human environment formation. And yet we continue to act as if the human is separable from environment, as if the body is separable

“Engels postulated that, in labour, humans interact with nature via material tools. These material tools mediate human encounters with the environment, and, in so doing, transform not only the environment but the humans who use them as well” (Haas 14).

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from mind, and as if language is other than all of these. Our attitudes to writing, and its relationship with and as environment, is troubled by the inconsistencies, internal contradictions, and cognitively dissonant practices that are representative of our state of practical and ideological transition between systems. My proposed response to these inconsistencies, Slovic and Moore’s call and John Tallmadge’s question, is practice reflectively – use practice as a process of reflection and reflect upon your practice of word-making, whether vocal or literal. To echo Mark Johnson’s phrasing, if we want to alter the connections within our brain, our body and environment, if we want to change our world, what things are meaningful to us, and even who we are in relation to the otherthan human, the reflection, revision, and revolution of our writing practices present a significant method of achieving this.

Environment is everywhere both centre and periphery, circling in different directions and eddying in pools. Environment is human, is other-than human, is language. Things fall apart in language to reform. Environment is the point at which human becomes otherthan human and vice versa, in language.

The more radical the change effected in our language practices the more radical the change effected in our relationship with the other-than human world, and in the otherthan human world itself as it exists and is

impacted by our word-making, because it is in language-making that we alter and are infused by the other-than human world in turn. Understanding how it is that language alters and infuses the world (and vice versa) should be fundamental to any environmental literary enterprise.

To review, this paper is informed by three axioms: 1) Environment is the sum total of material entities that make up this world and their ongoing, mutually transformative, interaction.

2) The “specific form of incarnation” (Johnson ix), that is every human being, takes the form it does as a direct result of its relation to environment.

3) Language is both a material entity and a process by which material entities interact and transform each other.

From these three axioms the argument runs, as follows: • I f environment is the sum total of material entities that make up this world and their ongoing, mutually transformative, interaction and language is a material entity and a process by which material entities interact and transform each other then language, both as a material entity and as a process by which material

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entities interact and transform each other, is environment.

radical the shift in language practice the more radical the alteration in environment.

•A nd, if this “specific form of incarnation” [the human individual] takes the form it does as a direct result of its relation to environment then this “specific form of incarnation” [the human individual] takes the form it does as a direct result of its relation to language, both as a material entity and as a process by which material entities interact and transform each other.

In conclusion, human language-making is environmental praxis and language-making methods, as environmental praxis, matter.

•A nd, if this “specific form of incarnation” [the human individual] can, as language, be identified as a material entity then this “specific form of incarnation” [the human individual], similar to language, must also be recognised as environment.

•T herefore we can say that our “specific form of incarnation” affects both language as environment and that language as environment affects the ‘specific form of incarnation” that is, and the processes that constitute, the human individual, and vice versa, because both human language and human being are mutually constitutive of and constituted by, because they are, environment.

• T herefore, effecting change in our language practices effects change across human and other-than human environments; the more

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SUBMISSIONS Politics of Place is a peer-reviewed journal for postgraduates. It publishes exceptional research focusing on the relationship between culture and spatiality in works of literature, engaging particularly with issues of nationhood, community, class, marginality, and the self. The journal places specific emphasis on the complex interactions between physical environments and human activity.

In addition to its academic remit, Politics of Place is founded on the belief that current postgraduate research can make significant contributions to contemporary academic and political debates concerning the relationship between people and place.

Given its intended function as a transitional space for researchers seeking to become professional academics, the journal values original research that presents considerations of hitherto marginalized texts and themes.

Submissions should follow MLA Guidelines and meet the required length of 40006000 words. Submissions must be written in English but the editors welcome submissions that concern texts written in other languages. Where non-English quotes are used, full translations must be included.

Images can be submitted but only with

consent to reproduce from the copyright holder. Politics of Place reserves the right to reject submissions that do not conform to these requirements. Articles should be sent as an attachment to the following address: politicsofplace@ex.ac.uk.

All submissions will be reviewed by editors for their academic quality and relevance to the journal’s core themes. Initial decisions on whether articles will be considered at the next stage of the review process will be communicated to authors at the nearest possible opportunity. Unfortunately, editors are not able to provide individual feedback on the quality of submissions at this stage due to the high volume of work considered.

Those submissions that are sent forward to the next stage will go through a process of anonymous peer review. The final decision on publication will be communicated to authors as soon as possible. Articles selected for publication will follow a conventional process of sub-editing and proofing before appearing online. Work published in Politics of Place will be licensed to the journal and contributors will therefore retain copyright in their work. By submitting an article to be featured in the journal, contributors warrant that the work they submit has not been published previously and that it is their own.

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In addition to articles, Politics of Place will consider creative submissions that engage with the journal’s themes. Also welcome are short commentaries (less than 500 words) on contemporary academic and political debates, which will be published on the Politics of Place website between editions of the journal. These should be sent to politicsofplace@ex.ac.uk.

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