A TOUCH OF SNOW
Murali Sivaramakrishnan
Ritual disciplines attention and encourages people to develop their powers of discernment and discrimination.Yi-Fu Tuan, Passing Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics, Nature, and Culture. P.51.
Last evening while visiting some friends in Reno, Nevada, we were taken to see their newly acquired land—a lovely expanse of sprawling high country stretching mostly into the California side, for around 40 odd acres. There were many craggy hills, rocks overhanging wild forests, and to top it all a beautiful stream gushing from the high lands cutting right across the land, running down to join the Truckee river. And because it was early December the stream had frozen over in many places and in the several pools and lakes the water lay glistening silver under the exquisite blue of the sky, icy cold to the touch. Many trees stood as sentinels and frightened deer crossed our path at many places dashing from amidst the bushes and then melting off into the shadows that were already creeping up on us as the sun went reluctantly over the mountaintops. We walked in one file--all five of us, mostly meditative, silent, as if held spellbound with awe at the bounteous mountain land. Occasionally our host would say something about the land and share his delight at having managed to take possession of such a great place, and discuss the great plans he had in mind about how to maintain it wild and beautiful. All of us marveled at the pristine wildness and beauty of the land. For some of us it was a miraculous experience walking in the high mountains sharing the silence of the bitter cold and snow—especially for my Chinese friend – visiting scholar and eco critic--and myself. I whispered occasional bits of poetry that floated across my mind. Above all, the experience was indeed poetic. At one point Scott Slovic, Professor of English and Environment at UNR turned to me and said: I am sure this experience of snow has altered your perception a great deal. Earlier, perhaps you had looked upon snow with the simple amazement and wonder of a scholar from the tropics, and snow had basically been a romantic experience, something to be thrilled about. But now, I am sure you will look upon it as a different order of reality—something that calls for a great deal of struggle and resistance! I did not reply immediately, but simply shrugged my shoulders helplessly lost in my own thoughts almost frozen over. The cold was immense and immediate—it crept in through the layers and layers of clothing that I had on me. My hands were cold inside my warm mittens. My earlobes had lost any semblance to being attached at all to a sentient creature. When I tried to run my fingers over the most exposed part of my anatomy—my nose—I could hardly feel it—what was perhaps left there was a mere bundle of cold sense—a blob of icy being! I kept pace along with the others—I knew that I needed to keep moving in order to be warm inside. Once or twice I couldn’t resist stopping to admire a deep precipice or the distant vision of the rosy hued alpine glow of the mountain’s spine. The experience was remarkable and something that passed all powers of verbal expression. And I could not think and verbalise my thoughts. Nevertheless I knew and felt deep within me that the experience of snow in the Alpine mountains or even in the Arctic could not have been quite much different from this one. I said to Scott: Perhaps, the experience of snow is like the experience of age: it is often what you feel inside that matters. Some people feel cold easily; for others even the Arctic or the Antarctic or the Alaskan cold would mean nothing. It is how you internalize the sensations that count. Mountains, the sea and the desert are all what one has within! They are the extensions of our inner being.
We came back into the pleasurable and most welcome warmth of our friends’ fireplace and peeled off our warm clothing one by one. Usha was already perched near the blazing hearth beaming and brimming over in happiness and beside herself in all joy. She had opted to come off half way through the walk finding the cold and snow combined with the altitude of the place much too much for her—she had hitch-hiked her way back earlier. It was altogether an evening of tremendous beauty.
What is cold? What is the touch of snow? Cold and warmth are the touch of the elements that awaken you to your own senses. Do we forget ourselves? Don’t we awaken in the middle of a deep night’s sleep all of a sudden only to realize that the fire had died out and the blistering cold had nudged us awake? We shiver and sit up. We are awake and alert and alive even if our physical body might be tired and drowsy. The same is true of a warm tropical summer night when the aftermath of the sun’s rays refuse to part from the surface of the earth and don’t allow us to seek the comfort of sleep. In the woods, said Emerson, we return to reason and faith. Yes, the touch of snow too awakens in us reason and faith. Reason tells us to pull our heavy woollens a little closer to our bodies in order to retain the body heat within, and faith lets us realize the touch of the elemental being! Robert Frost has written of fire and ice, relating them to an eschatological vision of either being burned up in passion or shriveled in the coldness of hate. Either way, the extremes of heat or cold could lead us to realize the fragility and evanescence of our human’s being. However, there remains another interesting aspect of such an elemental experience that could be traced in a deeper sense of culture and history. Human beings have responded to extreme heat and extreme cold in their own various ways in different places on earth. There is not only individual variance but also cultural and historical differences in confronting extremes of weather. Snow and cold need not always bespeak of a harsh and antagonistic nature over which the artful individual exerts his or her will and brain in an ultimate struggle for existence; neither does the extreme weather of the desert induce such a human-nature contest. It could also be seen as a coming to grips with one’s own nescience a sort of journey into self-hood. The human being clothed adequately to ward off the extreme weather has come to understand the earth a little better: it is not that he/she has overcome the external element! The touch of snow actually bespeaks of the artful space within and without. Perhaps this is the essential meaning of ritual in the east. Ritual disciplines attention and encourages people to develop their powers of discernment and discrimination, writes Yi-Fu Tuan. How true! A sense of Ritual is a sense of space and a sense of time-- a sense of authentic being. Perhaps the origin of ritual can be in a touch of snow or under the extreme heat of the sun in the tropics. Fire and ice are the elemental cornerstones of inner understanding-- antaschamatkara (or inner expansion) as the Sanskrit aestheticians have put it. Ritual is the authentic human experience of inner awareness, and ritual in the broadest sense is the outcome of the elemental touch of the artful universe. One could experience the anguish and trauma of the man struggling to build a fire in Jack London’s story of that name, or one could also wander lost in the Himalayan wilderness in search of the elusive Snow Leopard that Peter Mattheissen writes about. One the one hand it is the struggle to survive and overcome the harshness of the environment, while on the other it is the slow awakening of a clearer understanding of the self. Or is it that the experience of heat and cold are like the experience of one’s age. Some feel it some don’t. Either way a touch of snow tells us a lot—about the self and culture and history.
for the sensitive intellectual, for the nature lover, for the aesthete...
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
RAMBLINGS 2
Learning to Think Like Myself
Murali Sivaramakrishnan
Man withdrew from the picture and turned to look at it –
Paul Shepard, Man in the Landscape. NY: Knopf, 1967, p 124.
The river Truckee is perhaps like a crucial blood vessel in the heart of the small city of Reno. It empties in to the huge lake Tahoe after a long journey. One Saturday afternoon I took a long walk down the riverside—there is a concrete road down town that runs fairly close to the meandering river bed, and it makes one feel close enough to the river. We can feel the rush of waters and we can also feel the roundness of the stones and huge rocks that border the riverbed. The air was crisp and cold, because it was late December and the trees were leafless and silent. The road was practically deserted. Soon I came across a group of young people making themselves merrier for the onset of Christmas no doubt, but obviously in inebriate state, almost delirious and over excited. One of them screamed something at me waving a beer bottle and it was answered by a scream of alarmed river birds—some ducks and geese flapped out of the waters. The angry man screamed back at them shouting: I wasn’t speaking to you guys! Another fellow accosted me and shouted: hey mister, got any dollars? I didn’t answer either of them but kept on as if nothing happened. I passed the guys by and went my way. They tried all the languages they knew on me and I could hear their laughter even after I passed into the trees and closer to the rushing waters. The river appeared to be uncaring and nonchalant. It just flowed. The water birds swam down stream occasionally ducking in and popping out with some writhing thing. My thoughts were full of nature and human nature.
There are these deep ecologists who make a religion of ecology—human beings, they believe have no business to interfere with the cycle of nature. We need to rethink with nature, they believe, for we are, after all, integrally and in no uncertain terms interlinked to nature. Deep ecologists trust in the inherent and intrinsic value of all being—living and non living irrespective of whether they are useful to human life or not. Like the river all life is a flow and the human’s being is not independent from the flow. Of course not too far off are the Preservationists who argue for the continued preservation and cherishing of all nature, fighting for the right of all living and nonliving things, for nature to be maintained in its purity and pristine ness. Not much different are the Conservationists in their thinking—only that they give preference to the human being as the most evolved living thing on the earth. While both the deep ecologists and the preservationists think in a bio-centric or eco-centric manner, the conservationists think in an anthropocentric way, with human beings as the center of all and everything, nevertheless responsible for the continued conservation of the rest of the earth, for their own safety, security and life. Life is so complex when one considers the present with its equally complex postmodern logic and post-industrial market economy and the massive overgrowth of capitalist politics and ideologies. One hears about the end of history, the end of capitalism, even about the inevitable end of all life on this planet not only in eschatological terms but also in rational scientific terms. Nevertheless there are a million voices raised against the blind march of the human being monitoring or apparently, monitored by, a vast medley of scientific and technological outpourings. Where does all this fit in? What is nature and what is human nature? Aren’t human beings an integral part of nature, and if so doesn’t it make all that they do produce as essentially part of their nature and therefore there is nothing unnatural about human actions and human (mis)creations? Even nuclear debris is also a natural outcome of the human interaction in nature! There is nothing that is possibly unnatural in all this! The young fellows drunk and reeling beside the river on a winter evening are attempting to work into their essential human nature in order to find some sort of meaning (or perhaps out of an essential detest, racial or otherwise, of a brown alien like me, comfortably sauntering by their river contemplating nature!) Nothing is out-of-order; everything fits perfectly into the natural scheme! Just like the birds floating in the current down stream, all of us are floating in time and space. Me, a brown Indian from south India, they, young white males from this rich land of possibilities and liberty, and the water birds floating down river in the cold winter waters.
But of course there is apparently some flaw in such reasoning! I grew up in a community that is now so alien to these environs in a tiny village so far away from this great land of America. There was a river not so far from our street. And during monsoons it usually flooded and the brown murky waters swirled all around the banks, frightening and mysterious. My thoughts could never stray beyond the familiar bend in the river. I recall how many a time I sat there wondering what lay beyond it! Our school was beside the river and the temple bells regulated our days and nights. There was nothing special about growing up in a laid back Tamil-Brahmin-street tucked away in a far corner of the big world in far-south India. There were birds and small animals, there were petty thieves and murderers, there were upright scholars and pundits, there were also poetasters and swindlers, there were many marvels and mysteries of growing up like anywhere else. The almost well-stacked library on the far side of the street laid a whole world of learning and knowledge open to those who desired it—in all languages of India including English. Many trees were cut, many houses torn down, streets were tarred and new cars and trucks and busses plunged in and out of our days and nights. Change was as usual in the air and modernity sprouted into our midst like a newly sprung lotus flower to be wondered at from a distance, under the electric light. I knew I was growing up when many things began to disappear, and newer things pored in. I had taken the world too much for granted just like any child would have done. Before my father died he told me to stay back and live comfortably in the small town of Trivandrum, in Kerala. There was no point in wandering, he said, because he had done that too. Didn’t we have everything? But I had already fallen in love with long distances and the lure of strange experiences. I took my family with me wherever I thought life might lead me. My wife and two children have always been quite understanding, I guess. I now begin to understand how much they must have suffered just because of my fancies and dubious dissatisfactions about one place or other. Was I chasing mere phantoms? Where was I to find comfort and happiness? No place appeared to treat me well; no land appeared to accept me in total. Nothing pleased me. I was always moving as if hounded by dissatisfaction. Where did I find roots? Were there any roots at all for the likes of me? Hindu Tamil Brahmins as a community have always been movers—they migrated fairly frequently and seemed so well to adapt to and adopt any alien surroundings—on the whole they had good language abilities and could absorb a plethora of languages. They were flexible. What about me? I had chosen to exile myself and my small family from a community of easy adapters, from a land that could have perhaps yielded me a life of complete happiness and satisfaction. Did I really make any attempt to learn from my nature or the nature of my community life? Why did I always feel at odds with my fellow human beings? Why did I always fancy I had deeper ties with nature—a relationship that went deeper than with other human beings? Why did I start intellectualizing and theorizing? Why did I choose to wander in the mountain jungles of the Western Ghats and later in the lower Himalayas? Did I really find an inner balance and a true harmonious relationship while alone in the deep forests and was listening to the plaintive song of the Blue Rock Thrush, or idly sitting beside the village stream where the common Iora sang? Did I fancy that I had struck a wonderful companionship with those great poets of the western world whom I read and by-hearted in English right from my school days? Or even those masterpieces of western modernist period, which apparently seemed to reach out to me intimately—were they really communicating with me? Did I establish a contact with nature and the human nature while I myself painted and wrote poetry? Or theorized in the many lecture halls across India and sometimes in other places abroad recoursing to the postmodernist and postcolonial jargons and discourses!
I had moved from one big city to another bigger city, seeking newer contexts for intellectual development and material pleasures. I had recently, a few years back, moved my family albeit with great reluctance on their part to the small town of Pondicherry on the south east coast of India by the great Bay of Bengal. And here I am in Reno Nevada, a visiting scholar in the UNR under a Fulbright. Now when I read and discuss bioregionalism and ecofeminism, here in the small western city in the United States of America, do I really hear the sounds of my far away childhood, the familiar smell and heat and dust of those eighteen streets, do I see the colors and forms of my little village, do I receive the bounteous wisdom of my bioregion that I left with pure disdain and contempt, several years ago? There is a river that runs through it, connecting two muddy banks, disappearing beyond that mysterious bend. The mystery of things, as the philosopher said, is the true truth of things. And it is perhaps still in here or out there waiting for me. I do not think this is mere nostalgia for the past, for a childhood paradise that is forfeited forever in a romantic past in an equally remote village country. To explore memory, writes Mitchell Thomashow, you have to be a good archeologist, knowing where and how to dig. The purpose of revisiting the special places of childhood is to gain awareness of the connections we make with earth, awakening and holdingthose memories in our consciousness of the present. Not to nostalgically pine for a lost, innocent childhood, but to recover the qualities of wonder, the open mindedness regarding nature, the ability to look at what lies right in front of us. The purpose of witnessing the transformation of those places is to appreciate the magnitude of environmental change, to understand and feel the impact of the changes. (Ecological Identity: Becoming a Reflective Environmentalist. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT press 1995,9-10). The ecological wisdom that my native land liberally and unashamedly provided me is within me still (or without!)—I need to sit still and quieten my self and meditate in order for it to rise up to the surface. I have been a coward and a prospector, searching for gold in far away lands. But then it has made me the richer, and wiser. Had I stayed by the river in my native village for this long I would have never heard the ripples in the deep because of my loud empty chanting of the Rig Veda. Had I stayed on in my own bioregion I would have been conceited with the wealth of my own land and its wisdom, so much so that I would never have recognized it for what it is or even perceived it. The great murmuring of the vedic rishi reaches me here by the Truchee, where the waters of my own village river merge softly and curl into one another. I murmur to myself—gangaicha yamunaichaiva godavari saraswati…The resounding calls of the river terns and gulls swell into the clanging of the temple bells—and once again I am running down the warm stone steps eager to reach my own river. The secret is still hiding beyond the mysterious bend. The benign goddess is still the presiding deity of the forests and rivers. The eternal feminine with one arm raised in perpetual, benevolent grace, and the other in an ever assurance of everything beyond all good and evil! The rising notes of the temple sounds bring me closer to the essential being of all nature and human’s being. I recall the words of Paul Shepard: Man withdrew from the picture and turned to look at it! Yes, human beings have withdrawn from the world of their essential selves and now turn to look at the beauty and mystery of natural forms seeking to go back! Some get drunk while others seek other psychedelic drugs for a biochemical transformation. All are in search of that essential harmony-- that being within and without. I also remember the words of Sri Aurobindo: all problems of existence are problems of harmony. The mysterious veil covering all and everything is slowly beginning to lift.
The river glideth at its own sweet will! A soft evening darkness descends. Overhead there is a cackling of geese. The air has become colder, and I decide to turn back. When I come to the place where the youngsters were lurking I find it empty. Instead, on a lone bench there is an old man and a little girl all swaddled in woolens. I look into their eyes. There is so much calm: there is so much peace in both pair of eyes. Perhaps they are bioregionalists, quite unknowing what they know! The old man might have passed on his wisdom –not gained in school, but from lived experience—silently to his grand daughter. Of course, who knows, someday soon enough she is going to be deschooled in some college or university. There is the Spirit of Sierra free bus for me to catch, back to the University. I am learning to think like myself.
Murali Sivaramakrishnan
Man withdrew from the picture and turned to look at it –
Paul Shepard, Man in the Landscape. NY: Knopf, 1967, p 124.
The river Truckee is perhaps like a crucial blood vessel in the heart of the small city of Reno. It empties in to the huge lake Tahoe after a long journey. One Saturday afternoon I took a long walk down the riverside—there is a concrete road down town that runs fairly close to the meandering river bed, and it makes one feel close enough to the river. We can feel the rush of waters and we can also feel the roundness of the stones and huge rocks that border the riverbed. The air was crisp and cold, because it was late December and the trees were leafless and silent. The road was practically deserted. Soon I came across a group of young people making themselves merrier for the onset of Christmas no doubt, but obviously in inebriate state, almost delirious and over excited. One of them screamed something at me waving a beer bottle and it was answered by a scream of alarmed river birds—some ducks and geese flapped out of the waters. The angry man screamed back at them shouting: I wasn’t speaking to you guys! Another fellow accosted me and shouted: hey mister, got any dollars? I didn’t answer either of them but kept on as if nothing happened. I passed the guys by and went my way. They tried all the languages they knew on me and I could hear their laughter even after I passed into the trees and closer to the rushing waters. The river appeared to be uncaring and nonchalant. It just flowed. The water birds swam down stream occasionally ducking in and popping out with some writhing thing. My thoughts were full of nature and human nature.
There are these deep ecologists who make a religion of ecology—human beings, they believe have no business to interfere with the cycle of nature. We need to rethink with nature, they believe, for we are, after all, integrally and in no uncertain terms interlinked to nature. Deep ecologists trust in the inherent and intrinsic value of all being—living and non living irrespective of whether they are useful to human life or not. Like the river all life is a flow and the human’s being is not independent from the flow. Of course not too far off are the Preservationists who argue for the continued preservation and cherishing of all nature, fighting for the right of all living and nonliving things, for nature to be maintained in its purity and pristine ness. Not much different are the Conservationists in their thinking—only that they give preference to the human being as the most evolved living thing on the earth. While both the deep ecologists and the preservationists think in a bio-centric or eco-centric manner, the conservationists think in an anthropocentric way, with human beings as the center of all and everything, nevertheless responsible for the continued conservation of the rest of the earth, for their own safety, security and life. Life is so complex when one considers the present with its equally complex postmodern logic and post-industrial market economy and the massive overgrowth of capitalist politics and ideologies. One hears about the end of history, the end of capitalism, even about the inevitable end of all life on this planet not only in eschatological terms but also in rational scientific terms. Nevertheless there are a million voices raised against the blind march of the human being monitoring or apparently, monitored by, a vast medley of scientific and technological outpourings. Where does all this fit in? What is nature and what is human nature? Aren’t human beings an integral part of nature, and if so doesn’t it make all that they do produce as essentially part of their nature and therefore there is nothing unnatural about human actions and human (mis)creations? Even nuclear debris is also a natural outcome of the human interaction in nature! There is nothing that is possibly unnatural in all this! The young fellows drunk and reeling beside the river on a winter evening are attempting to work into their essential human nature in order to find some sort of meaning (or perhaps out of an essential detest, racial or otherwise, of a brown alien like me, comfortably sauntering by their river contemplating nature!) Nothing is out-of-order; everything fits perfectly into the natural scheme! Just like the birds floating in the current down stream, all of us are floating in time and space. Me, a brown Indian from south India, they, young white males from this rich land of possibilities and liberty, and the water birds floating down river in the cold winter waters.
But of course there is apparently some flaw in such reasoning! I grew up in a community that is now so alien to these environs in a tiny village so far away from this great land of America. There was a river not so far from our street. And during monsoons it usually flooded and the brown murky waters swirled all around the banks, frightening and mysterious. My thoughts could never stray beyond the familiar bend in the river. I recall how many a time I sat there wondering what lay beyond it! Our school was beside the river and the temple bells regulated our days and nights. There was nothing special about growing up in a laid back Tamil-Brahmin-street tucked away in a far corner of the big world in far-south India. There were birds and small animals, there were petty thieves and murderers, there were upright scholars and pundits, there were also poetasters and swindlers, there were many marvels and mysteries of growing up like anywhere else. The almost well-stacked library on the far side of the street laid a whole world of learning and knowledge open to those who desired it—in all languages of India including English. Many trees were cut, many houses torn down, streets were tarred and new cars and trucks and busses plunged in and out of our days and nights. Change was as usual in the air and modernity sprouted into our midst like a newly sprung lotus flower to be wondered at from a distance, under the electric light. I knew I was growing up when many things began to disappear, and newer things pored in. I had taken the world too much for granted just like any child would have done. Before my father died he told me to stay back and live comfortably in the small town of Trivandrum, in Kerala. There was no point in wandering, he said, because he had done that too. Didn’t we have everything? But I had already fallen in love with long distances and the lure of strange experiences. I took my family with me wherever I thought life might lead me. My wife and two children have always been quite understanding, I guess. I now begin to understand how much they must have suffered just because of my fancies and dubious dissatisfactions about one place or other. Was I chasing mere phantoms? Where was I to find comfort and happiness? No place appeared to treat me well; no land appeared to accept me in total. Nothing pleased me. I was always moving as if hounded by dissatisfaction. Where did I find roots? Were there any roots at all for the likes of me? Hindu Tamil Brahmins as a community have always been movers—they migrated fairly frequently and seemed so well to adapt to and adopt any alien surroundings—on the whole they had good language abilities and could absorb a plethora of languages. They were flexible. What about me? I had chosen to exile myself and my small family from a community of easy adapters, from a land that could have perhaps yielded me a life of complete happiness and satisfaction. Did I really make any attempt to learn from my nature or the nature of my community life? Why did I always feel at odds with my fellow human beings? Why did I always fancy I had deeper ties with nature—a relationship that went deeper than with other human beings? Why did I start intellectualizing and theorizing? Why did I choose to wander in the mountain jungles of the Western Ghats and later in the lower Himalayas? Did I really find an inner balance and a true harmonious relationship while alone in the deep forests and was listening to the plaintive song of the Blue Rock Thrush, or idly sitting beside the village stream where the common Iora sang? Did I fancy that I had struck a wonderful companionship with those great poets of the western world whom I read and by-hearted in English right from my school days? Or even those masterpieces of western modernist period, which apparently seemed to reach out to me intimately—were they really communicating with me? Did I establish a contact with nature and the human nature while I myself painted and wrote poetry? Or theorized in the many lecture halls across India and sometimes in other places abroad recoursing to the postmodernist and postcolonial jargons and discourses!
I had moved from one big city to another bigger city, seeking newer contexts for intellectual development and material pleasures. I had recently, a few years back, moved my family albeit with great reluctance on their part to the small town of Pondicherry on the south east coast of India by the great Bay of Bengal. And here I am in Reno Nevada, a visiting scholar in the UNR under a Fulbright. Now when I read and discuss bioregionalism and ecofeminism, here in the small western city in the United States of America, do I really hear the sounds of my far away childhood, the familiar smell and heat and dust of those eighteen streets, do I see the colors and forms of my little village, do I receive the bounteous wisdom of my bioregion that I left with pure disdain and contempt, several years ago? There is a river that runs through it, connecting two muddy banks, disappearing beyond that mysterious bend. The mystery of things, as the philosopher said, is the true truth of things. And it is perhaps still in here or out there waiting for me. I do not think this is mere nostalgia for the past, for a childhood paradise that is forfeited forever in a romantic past in an equally remote village country. To explore memory, writes Mitchell Thomashow, you have to be a good archeologist, knowing where and how to dig. The purpose of revisiting the special places of childhood is to gain awareness of the connections we make with earth, awakening and holdingthose memories in our consciousness of the present. Not to nostalgically pine for a lost, innocent childhood, but to recover the qualities of wonder, the open mindedness regarding nature, the ability to look at what lies right in front of us. The purpose of witnessing the transformation of those places is to appreciate the magnitude of environmental change, to understand and feel the impact of the changes. (Ecological Identity: Becoming a Reflective Environmentalist. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT press 1995,9-10). The ecological wisdom that my native land liberally and unashamedly provided me is within me still (or without!)—I need to sit still and quieten my self and meditate in order for it to rise up to the surface. I have been a coward and a prospector, searching for gold in far away lands. But then it has made me the richer, and wiser. Had I stayed by the river in my native village for this long I would have never heard the ripples in the deep because of my loud empty chanting of the Rig Veda. Had I stayed on in my own bioregion I would have been conceited with the wealth of my own land and its wisdom, so much so that I would never have recognized it for what it is or even perceived it. The great murmuring of the vedic rishi reaches me here by the Truchee, where the waters of my own village river merge softly and curl into one another. I murmur to myself—gangaicha yamunaichaiva godavari saraswati…The resounding calls of the river terns and gulls swell into the clanging of the temple bells—and once again I am running down the warm stone steps eager to reach my own river. The secret is still hiding beyond the mysterious bend. The benign goddess is still the presiding deity of the forests and rivers. The eternal feminine with one arm raised in perpetual, benevolent grace, and the other in an ever assurance of everything beyond all good and evil! The rising notes of the temple sounds bring me closer to the essential being of all nature and human’s being. I recall the words of Paul Shepard: Man withdrew from the picture and turned to look at it! Yes, human beings have withdrawn from the world of their essential selves and now turn to look at the beauty and mystery of natural forms seeking to go back! Some get drunk while others seek other psychedelic drugs for a biochemical transformation. All are in search of that essential harmony-- that being within and without. I also remember the words of Sri Aurobindo: all problems of existence are problems of harmony. The mysterious veil covering all and everything is slowly beginning to lift.
The river glideth at its own sweet will! A soft evening darkness descends. Overhead there is a cackling of geese. The air has become colder, and I decide to turn back. When I come to the place where the youngsters were lurking I find it empty. Instead, on a lone bench there is an old man and a little girl all swaddled in woolens. I look into their eyes. There is so much calm: there is so much peace in both pair of eyes. Perhaps they are bioregionalists, quite unknowing what they know! The old man might have passed on his wisdom –not gained in school, but from lived experience—silently to his grand daughter. Of course, who knows, someday soon enough she is going to be deschooled in some college or university. There is the Spirit of Sierra free bus for me to catch, back to the University. I am learning to think like myself.
RAMBLINGS
Dr S Murali Essay 1
MEANING, VALUE AND RESPONSIBILITY:
Contextualising Environmental Aesthetics
Some Theoretical Issues
My presentation intends to problematise some of the key issues related to Environmental Aesthetics. The study of literature and literary studies have undergone many significant changes over the last century, and the focus of attention has shifted many times from the text through the author to the reader. History and ideology have been challenged within the corpus of literary production and their means and methodologies most minutely examined and critiqued. Strategies of reading and reception have been reexamined from the points of view of gender, class, ideology, race and nation. Wave after wave of theory and counter theory have subverted earlier readings and their strategies. It would not do now to hold naively on to the idea that the acts of reading and meaning production are such simple procedures. And yet, as I would attempt to present, these successive theorisings have left the text bare and tattered as the denuded earth in the march of blind science and its handmaid, technology. Value and responsibility have been laid aside conveniently. The literary has been trimmed down to the insignificant play of text and desire and pleasure. However, in my argument I shall endeavour to show how the text spills on to the globe and how environmental issues have served to re-contextuslise the text in renewed light—what I call environmental aesthetics.
Many years ago when the dispute over the Silent Valley in Kerala was rampant and the great debate over the whole philosophy of Nature Conservation was in its incipient stages, a senior friend of mine who later was to become a naturalist of considerable renown, turned abruptly to me and opined: “you are more of an aesthete than a naturalist!” His dismissive tone was on account of the significance that I advocated for the idea of beauty and value in nature. Nature conservation, I had then argued, began with the love and devotion to nature and the natural. However, the late seventies in Kerala, were quite unsuitable times for the aesthete and idealist! And by then, the Sastra Sahitya Parishad-- the advocates for peoples’ science movement-- who radicalized the idea of science and technology, and who were development-oriented and forward-looking, had taken over the entire struggle and popularized the idea of conservation and preservation. Ecology had become a household term and the idea of conservation of biodiversity was indisputably foregrounded as an integrated part of the agenda of development studies. Equating development with the progressive adaptation of science and technology was always held to be logical and unquestionable.
Of course, the arguments for and against conservation have not yet subsided. Even now there are many who believe that the entire idea of nature conservation is only suited for the developed countries, while the poor and needy in our part of the world can not afford such a measure! Economically such proceedings are not quite feasible at all. Ecology we need to remember was a comparatively recent science and it has been necessitated by the inadvertent march of human civilization! Because we overexploit our natural resources and remorselessly indulge in species annihilation, lethally poison our rivers and seas over and above damming and polluting them, smoke out holes in our atmosphere, and engage in a hundred different ways of self-destruction, we need to sit up and take stock before things go out of our hands. If only we had listened to our poets and artists! If only we had heeded our now over-interpreted spiritual texts and good old religious seers! It is not as if everything about the past and those days of yore is to seen as conservation-oriented. But then there had been one too many voices of dissent and disapproval raised against the mad march of development in the past. And the point is that they had perhaps resorted to the heart rather than the head. And that is where it all leads us to.
The argument that my scientist-friend disapproved of was that nature conservation was largely a matter of the heart than the head. I had cited the green poets and pointed out that the ultimate historical foundations of nature preservation are aesthetic (which I much later came to realize was the basis of the environmental ethics as formulated by the deep ecologists). We start by loving nature and the natural, and begin to care for what we love and cherish. The deep blue sky, the wide expanse of the green earth, the songs and flutter of the birds and butterflies, the gamboling animals—all these begin to crystallize in our hearts a deep fondness of indistinguishable delight, a sense of nature. This crystallization is not without its cultural and historical contexts. Nevertheless it is what binds us the great wide world. The hard data of the like that today a significant portion of the 15000 plant species and 75000 animal species found in India are threatened by the pressure of human activity on land and forests, and so many hectares of forest land are ransacked per the hour in the rain forests of the world, are only supplementary and they add to our agony. The fragility and the resilience of earth is first borne into our hearts through the wonder and amazement that our hearts accord. Perhaps this is the experience of the intangible behind the tangible that the spiritual masters have spoken of. This would bring us to the brink of metaphysics and religion. Perhaps, this is the right place to begin.
Religious thought, the world over, dovetails with that of the nature lover, because religion in its beginnings and ends has a bearing on nature. Almost all religions, sociologists would agree, have their roots in the worship of nature. The adoration of trees, birds and animals, the worship of sacred groves, and the attribution of sacredness to all life forms are true to the spirit of ancient religions. It may be that the reasons for their being so sacred might be slightly different from the ecological angle that we are seeking for, but however, in spirit, they come quite close to that. Of course, we are saddled with the virtues and hindrances of hindsight and therefore can see in history the reverence attributed to all life forms in the sacred texts of almost all religions. The finer aspects of differences may be a matter of significance only for the scholar: while most “pagan” religions identified the immutable with the divine, the Hebraic, especially the Christian religion, maintained the natural superiority of the human being over all other life forms, and insisted on his (His?) superior ability to break the immutability of natural laws. As many perspective scholars have noted it might be this underlying patriarchal power that laid the foundations for classical science and its strains are still visible despite the claims to universality and understanding of contemporary science. However, pre-scientific societies cherished a celebratory attitude to nature.
In the march of Western history of ideas, the Enlightenment is often looked upon as the age of reason. Whatever else this might have entailed, the most significant aspect is that this age gave rise to a belief in scientism—a dangerous attitude indeed—a deep faith in the order of scientific thinking. Human emotion, feeling, and the entire “irrational” sphere of mankind were delegated a secondary insignificant position in the understanding of life. The intellect superceded the heart and analytical thought sought precedence over the intuitive. Values came to be reinterpreted, religion was relegated to superstition, and science got itself the supreme role as the interpreter of truth. In our own times even to speak of one’s beliefs is to rake up the ghost of pre-renaissance nescience! How could one speak of being moved by nature and the natural forms? Poetry and imagination are things of the past. These are days of rationality and intelligence. Religion breeds only superstition and nonsense; it works as opium! This is not to demean rationality and intelligence per se but only to challenge their claims to being the only valid means of approaching the truth. While this being so, truth, in the logic of the postmodern, is multi-dimensional and multifaceted. Let us reorient ourselves to this fact that is not a fact! If fiction differentiates itself by not being fact let us create the faction of the present! In the search for alter/native truths we need to heed and understand the other logic that may not resemble the logic we are used to. If the post-enlightenment logic declaims the validity of religion and metaphysics, then we need to reorient ourselves with regard to these two as well.
To believe Theodore Adorno, it is barbaric to write poetry after Auswitz. And to believe Michael Foucault and Edward Said, it is impossible to think of any social situation without relating it to the politics of power and oppression. And of course after the great movements in Feminist thinking it is virtually impossible to understand any situation without relating it to the ideas of gender and politics. Likewise race, class, ideology—these concepts have all altered our ways of understanding the present. In such a situation how could we relegate the idea of nature? What we understand by nature most certainly has a bearing on what we make of ourselves. And our understanding needs necessarily be holistic and not discriminative. The efforts of environmental historians and environmental geographers have enabled us to understand the profound implications of the natural environment and our ways of responding to it.
Thus in our understanding of the world we live in we need to reorient ourselves with regard to the values and our ways of response. It is my strong contention that aesthetics belongs to the order of values of which ecological value too forms a significant part. In fact the value which we attribute to the environment cannot be seen distinct from our general aesthetico-ethical frame of reference. The value which we attribute to the environment is holistic and complete and not peripheral or derivative. Aesthetic value cannot be and should not be dismissed as subjective (in a Cartesian sense) when considering the value of environment and issues pertaining to conservation and preservation. The ecological activism that globally politicized these issues has come to be known as the Green Movement. There is a green politics and even a green speak! And over the last fifteen years a whole aesthetics of the green has also emerged under the name of ecological criticism or eco criticism. In the great welter of socio-political theorizing that had held sway over the last half of the twentieth century the concerns of the human individual and nature were virtually submerged. After the death of the author the individual artist/poet ceased to have any space to speak afterwards, and after the closure of the text history ceased to exist at all. If one were to take the pains of going over the warp and woof of socio-political theorizing carefully, one can perceive the struggles of the author and the text in the light of meaning production. When we reinstate class, race and gender along with the voice of nature we regain the fuller meaning of human’s being. When Thoreau wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately…” and when Aldo Leopold spoke of the land ethic, they were giving voice to an aesthetics of commitment and engagement.
DeepEcologyWhat came to be called Deep Ecology stemmed primarily from the work of the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess. According to Naess, “the aim of supporters of the deep ecology movement is not a slight reform of our present society, but a substantial reorientation of our whole civilization.” Hence it is an ecosophy. It concentrates on the human relationship with the natural world and supplies a substantial reorientation to a world run astray. Let me provide the major points of this ecosophy as it is developed by the practitioners of deep ecology:
A rejection of anthropocentrism. All life on earth has an intrinsic value irrespective of the human angle.
Richness and biodiversity are valuable in themselves and humans have no right to reduce this diversity.
An identification with all life
Caring for the other life forms is part of individual self realization.
A critique of instrumental rationality (emphasis should be not on quantity and efficiency but quality)
Personal development of a total world view. Individual thinking and action are of utmost significance and later the collective and the social.
As can be seen the concept of deep ecology is akin to the spiritual. What is aimed at is life enhancing qualitative values very much similar to spiritual enlightenment or artistic fulfillment. After all, life becomes meaningful only when we start to live fully and selflessly.
In our present day to day life of hard reality at every point we are habituated to turn to the physical sciences for concurrence and approval for only they can account convincingly for our corporeal existence. Similarly, in spite of their theoretical differences the so-called social sciences get their sanction only because they meekly follow the methodology of the non human mathematical sciences. And yet many perceptive minds have pointed out time and again that our thinking and perception have been determined by the technological environment rather than the natural. There is apparently little of nature that is left in us. Technology has taken over. This has become an automatic universe for us. Our constructions of our environment and our lives have become so removed from the organic unity of the poetic and the spiritual and so how could we sense and see the elemental harmony that is so apparent to the poet when he writes:
My beloved is the mountains
The solitary wooded valleys,
Strange islands…silent music
(St John of the Cross)
or
iyam prithvi sarvesam bhutanam madhu, asyai prithvyai sarvani bhutani madhu
this earth is like honey for all creatures and all the creatures are like honey for this earth, Brhadarnyaka V brahmana1.
Environmental Aesthetics
It is however in imaginative writing and narratives the world over that a deep felt affinity to nature can be discovered. Some are overtly evident while some remain submerged under the rubble of dominant cultural narratives ill disposed to nature. In what has come to be called Green Aesthetics or Eco aesthetics, efforts are being made by scholars in various disciplines to study the interrelationship of nature, human life and creativity. Of course, Eco Aesthetics is not too far from the ecosophy of deep ecology.
In the woods, said Ralph Waldo Emerson, we return to reason and faith. Despite the fact that this statement is loaded with nineteenth century American transcendentalist overtones, one could still see in it the essence of an environmental aesthetic. Ching-yuang, an early follower of Zen reflects on his understanding of nature as follows:
Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it’s just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters. (quoted in Lawrence Coupe, The Green Studies Reader, London and New York: Routledge, 2000, p. 1)
It is an experience of perceptual transformation that the Zen master undergoes. The difference is between the guileless innocence of the Child and the achieved innocence of a yogi. The very first level of perception—seeing mountains as mountains-- preceded all logic, ratiocination and language, while the second bracketed the world of nature as the other that is just a creation of the human unconscious (recall the Lacanian aphorism “the unconscious is structured like language”) where in the signifiers and the signifieds overlap to create a parallel reality or the reality as we understand it. The third stage is beyond all experience and transcends logic, reason, and language, having “got its very substance.” This is where eco aesthetics or green studies steps in, in the wake of theories and counter theories in the academia of twentieth century. It is post-deconstruction. As one green critic has claimed: these are days when the critic has turned from red to green! Green studies attempts to reinstate the real world of men and women and nature and human history. Kate Soper, hits the nail on its head directly when she pronounces dramatically: “In short, it is not language which has a hole in its ozone layer; and the real thing continues to be polluted and degraded even as we refine our deconstructive insights at the level of the signifier.” (The Green Studies Reader, p. 3). Green studies thus aims not merely to speak about nature but also to speak for nature. This is just where literature and the environment meet and the text spills over on to the globe, when we learn to see mountains as mountains and waters as waters once again. So much depends upon our sensibilities, the self-realisation of the human being and the humanization of nature. Aldo Leopard one of the pioneers of this kind of thinking has spoken about the land ethic that called for a biocentric vision. The point we have to remember is that the genuine environmentalist cherishes the values of love and affection that makes him/her a human being. The path of the Mahavira and the Buddha is not too far to seek. Or to put it in the words of the German poet Holderlin: “…poetically man dwells…”
The Implications of Environmental aesthetics
In the post deconstructive academic world of today many sensitive critics are turning to green. It is in the US universities that green studies picked up in the beginning and later British universities followed suit. Prof Scott Slovic of the University of Nevada at Reno has attempted to formulate certain key issues that the environmentally conscious literary critics are concerned with. Ecocriticism, for him “means either the study of nature writing by way of any scholarly approach or, conversely, the scrutiny of ecological implications and human nature relationships in any literary text, even texts that seem at first glance oblivious of the non human world.” This leaning towards an environmental aesthetic is an indication in the present day world of the growing consciousness of the importance and fragility of the non human space. Eco aesthetics has thus a wide range of significance and possibility.
The major aspects of green studies:
environment and ecology—basic awareness of nature
writing about nature and nature writing—poetry, fictional/non fictional narratives
rereading history—Romanticism etc, Women and nature-- ecofeminism
reclaiming the past—tracing roots of environmental writing and awareness
Especially in non-anglo-American situation—traces of environmental culture
religion and society and nature
environmental philosophy
environmental history
landscape studies
landscape and memory—mythical and spiritual connections to non-human world
Aesthetics as it began was that branch of philosophy which dealt exclusively with sensory experience. Now after the wealth of theoretical movements and counter movements aesthetics has come to signify wider implications not only in terms of the text but also in the manner and methodology of its reception and the production of meaning.
Class, race, gender, ideology --are all significant factors that contribute to the production of meaning And as we have seen, the idea of nature is equally, if not more significant. It not only contributes to meaning, but also constitutes the meaningful. Eco aesthetics belongs not only to that order of the study of nature and the non human world, but also implicates the human in the non human. It is holistic and inclusive not exclusive and fragmentary. It bespeaks of meaning, value, and responsibility. However, it should not be reduced merely to being just another technical aspect of the theoretical framework, just as another policy or strategy of reading like deconstruction. It brings with it more than a sign of the times—it bears responsibility. Let us examine these concepts one by one.
1. Meaning
Eco aesthetics looks upon the act of literary and artistic production as a meaningful activity. Wave upon wave of linguistic and semantic theories have almost deprived the work of art of any worthwhile meaning. Meaning has become a guessing game. If with the New Critics it was the fallacy of Intention that came to be challenged, the structuralists and the poststructuralists ripped off the meaningful world from the space of the linguistic sign altogether. There was ultimately nothing but the play of signifiers and signifieds while the referent was altogether bracketed off. Literary and art activity was but a meaningless engagement of the intellect – a rhetoric of signs. Eco aesthetics reinstates meaning at the heart of the aesthetic activity. The aesthetic revolves round the idea of values.
2. Value
“Literature and the other arts,” writes Scott Slovic, “are ideal media for exploring and communicating systems of values—ethical frameworks—within specific communities and between one culture and another. This is not a particularly novel idea, but it flies in the face of postmodern critical theory, which is frequently noted for its indeterminacy, its devolution to textual (and meta-textual) problematics, and its indifference to real social problems. Many literary scholars in recent years have forgotten the traditional social function of the arts….” (A Companion to Environmental Philosophy, Ed Dale Jamieson. Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2001,p. 254). Literature and the arts have a social dimension—a history and an ideology—a need to be committed to the here and now. Values are not peripheral and incidental—they are holistic and born out of a recognition of the responsibility of the writer the artist as well as the critic and the reader. The most significant of all values no doubt would be that which links the human and the non human worlds. Nature is the most valuable of all values and a transvaluation of all our value systems is the essential need of the hour.
3. Responsibility
There is more than ever an increasing need to recognize the social responsibility of literature and the arts. The aesthetic act is not something that takes place in emptiness. It is here and now, and the artist/writer needs to recognize the responsibility that she bears to the world at large. This need not reduce literature to the simplistic and the didactic. The text actually spills over on to the globe and the web of life implicates us in it. This is where eco aesthetics reaches into the sphere of ecosophy, as outlined earlier. The ideas of meaning, value and responsibility, actually is the recognition of the creative act as one that is sanctioned by the ethical – and it up holds the text as holistic, complete and harmonious with the rest of creation. In the end it is nature that triumphs.
All this might sound so remote and alien to those literary minded writers and critics trained in the traditional or modernist academia. The long-time-too-familiar debate of the two cultures has now finally ceased to be. After all we have only one earth and a global recognition has dawned on us that our life itself is too brief and rounded with a sleep… The literature class room should once again be informed by science, this time more sure footed and alert, recalling at every step the too scientistic fate of the New Critic of the Anglo American schools. For the text is not too confined in its form and meaning. It spills over on to the globe. As Terry Gifford has put it succinctly: Literary criticism should also be informed by science and apply that learning with what appears to be the best rigour of clarification available at the time. (Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry. Manchester: Manchester Univ Press, 1995; p. 141) And, he continues: When an engaged commitment is made to either work, or place , or inner energies in relationships, a responsibility for nature can, in turn, make a recognition of connectedness. (ibid) In the final analysis the plea for environmental aesthetics is this recognition of interconnectedness and totality.
I shall close this with a poem of mine:
The Golden Oriole
I had not known so much happiness
Until that rainy afternoon
When the first oriole fluted
From across the mango trees
A clear delightful call
Filled with the brightness of sunshine
Slowly fading in the afternoon light.
No night and day after that
Could take away
The golden oriole’s fruity call
It hung like a rhyme
Over the mango trees.
And it still does. The rains have come and gone.
I cannot say the same thing about happiness.
References
A Companion to Environmental Philosophy, Ed Dale Jamieson. Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2001
Beneath the Surface: Critical Essays in the Philosophy of Deep Ecology. Ed Eric Katz, Andrew Light, and David Rothenberg. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2000
Gifford, Terry. Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry.Manchester: Manchester Univ Press, 1995
Lawrence Coupe.The Green Studies Reader, London and New York: Routledge, 2000
MEANING, VALUE AND RESPONSIBILITY:
Contextualising Environmental Aesthetics
Some Theoretical Issues
My presentation intends to problematise some of the key issues related to Environmental Aesthetics. The study of literature and literary studies have undergone many significant changes over the last century, and the focus of attention has shifted many times from the text through the author to the reader. History and ideology have been challenged within the corpus of literary production and their means and methodologies most minutely examined and critiqued. Strategies of reading and reception have been reexamined from the points of view of gender, class, ideology, race and nation. Wave after wave of theory and counter theory have subverted earlier readings and their strategies. It would not do now to hold naively on to the idea that the acts of reading and meaning production are such simple procedures. And yet, as I would attempt to present, these successive theorisings have left the text bare and tattered as the denuded earth in the march of blind science and its handmaid, technology. Value and responsibility have been laid aside conveniently. The literary has been trimmed down to the insignificant play of text and desire and pleasure. However, in my argument I shall endeavour to show how the text spills on to the globe and how environmental issues have served to re-contextuslise the text in renewed light—what I call environmental aesthetics.
Many years ago when the dispute over the Silent Valley in Kerala was rampant and the great debate over the whole philosophy of Nature Conservation was in its incipient stages, a senior friend of mine who later was to become a naturalist of considerable renown, turned abruptly to me and opined: “you are more of an aesthete than a naturalist!” His dismissive tone was on account of the significance that I advocated for the idea of beauty and value in nature. Nature conservation, I had then argued, began with the love and devotion to nature and the natural. However, the late seventies in Kerala, were quite unsuitable times for the aesthete and idealist! And by then, the Sastra Sahitya Parishad-- the advocates for peoples’ science movement-- who radicalized the idea of science and technology, and who were development-oriented and forward-looking, had taken over the entire struggle and popularized the idea of conservation and preservation. Ecology had become a household term and the idea of conservation of biodiversity was indisputably foregrounded as an integrated part of the agenda of development studies. Equating development with the progressive adaptation of science and technology was always held to be logical and unquestionable.
Of course, the arguments for and against conservation have not yet subsided. Even now there are many who believe that the entire idea of nature conservation is only suited for the developed countries, while the poor and needy in our part of the world can not afford such a measure! Economically such proceedings are not quite feasible at all. Ecology we need to remember was a comparatively recent science and it has been necessitated by the inadvertent march of human civilization! Because we overexploit our natural resources and remorselessly indulge in species annihilation, lethally poison our rivers and seas over and above damming and polluting them, smoke out holes in our atmosphere, and engage in a hundred different ways of self-destruction, we need to sit up and take stock before things go out of our hands. If only we had listened to our poets and artists! If only we had heeded our now over-interpreted spiritual texts and good old religious seers! It is not as if everything about the past and those days of yore is to seen as conservation-oriented. But then there had been one too many voices of dissent and disapproval raised against the mad march of development in the past. And the point is that they had perhaps resorted to the heart rather than the head. And that is where it all leads us to.
The argument that my scientist-friend disapproved of was that nature conservation was largely a matter of the heart than the head. I had cited the green poets and pointed out that the ultimate historical foundations of nature preservation are aesthetic (which I much later came to realize was the basis of the environmental ethics as formulated by the deep ecologists). We start by loving nature and the natural, and begin to care for what we love and cherish. The deep blue sky, the wide expanse of the green earth, the songs and flutter of the birds and butterflies, the gamboling animals—all these begin to crystallize in our hearts a deep fondness of indistinguishable delight, a sense of nature. This crystallization is not without its cultural and historical contexts. Nevertheless it is what binds us the great wide world. The hard data of the like that today a significant portion of the 15000 plant species and 75000 animal species found in India are threatened by the pressure of human activity on land and forests, and so many hectares of forest land are ransacked per the hour in the rain forests of the world, are only supplementary and they add to our agony. The fragility and the resilience of earth is first borne into our hearts through the wonder and amazement that our hearts accord. Perhaps this is the experience of the intangible behind the tangible that the spiritual masters have spoken of. This would bring us to the brink of metaphysics and religion. Perhaps, this is the right place to begin.
Religious thought, the world over, dovetails with that of the nature lover, because religion in its beginnings and ends has a bearing on nature. Almost all religions, sociologists would agree, have their roots in the worship of nature. The adoration of trees, birds and animals, the worship of sacred groves, and the attribution of sacredness to all life forms are true to the spirit of ancient religions. It may be that the reasons for their being so sacred might be slightly different from the ecological angle that we are seeking for, but however, in spirit, they come quite close to that. Of course, we are saddled with the virtues and hindrances of hindsight and therefore can see in history the reverence attributed to all life forms in the sacred texts of almost all religions. The finer aspects of differences may be a matter of significance only for the scholar: while most “pagan” religions identified the immutable with the divine, the Hebraic, especially the Christian religion, maintained the natural superiority of the human being over all other life forms, and insisted on his (His?) superior ability to break the immutability of natural laws. As many perspective scholars have noted it might be this underlying patriarchal power that laid the foundations for classical science and its strains are still visible despite the claims to universality and understanding of contemporary science. However, pre-scientific societies cherished a celebratory attitude to nature.
In the march of Western history of ideas, the Enlightenment is often looked upon as the age of reason. Whatever else this might have entailed, the most significant aspect is that this age gave rise to a belief in scientism—a dangerous attitude indeed—a deep faith in the order of scientific thinking. Human emotion, feeling, and the entire “irrational” sphere of mankind were delegated a secondary insignificant position in the understanding of life. The intellect superceded the heart and analytical thought sought precedence over the intuitive. Values came to be reinterpreted, religion was relegated to superstition, and science got itself the supreme role as the interpreter of truth. In our own times even to speak of one’s beliefs is to rake up the ghost of pre-renaissance nescience! How could one speak of being moved by nature and the natural forms? Poetry and imagination are things of the past. These are days of rationality and intelligence. Religion breeds only superstition and nonsense; it works as opium! This is not to demean rationality and intelligence per se but only to challenge their claims to being the only valid means of approaching the truth. While this being so, truth, in the logic of the postmodern, is multi-dimensional and multifaceted. Let us reorient ourselves to this fact that is not a fact! If fiction differentiates itself by not being fact let us create the faction of the present! In the search for alter/native truths we need to heed and understand the other logic that may not resemble the logic we are used to. If the post-enlightenment logic declaims the validity of religion and metaphysics, then we need to reorient ourselves with regard to these two as well.
To believe Theodore Adorno, it is barbaric to write poetry after Auswitz. And to believe Michael Foucault and Edward Said, it is impossible to think of any social situation without relating it to the politics of power and oppression. And of course after the great movements in Feminist thinking it is virtually impossible to understand any situation without relating it to the ideas of gender and politics. Likewise race, class, ideology—these concepts have all altered our ways of understanding the present. In such a situation how could we relegate the idea of nature? What we understand by nature most certainly has a bearing on what we make of ourselves. And our understanding needs necessarily be holistic and not discriminative. The efforts of environmental historians and environmental geographers have enabled us to understand the profound implications of the natural environment and our ways of responding to it.
Thus in our understanding of the world we live in we need to reorient ourselves with regard to the values and our ways of response. It is my strong contention that aesthetics belongs to the order of values of which ecological value too forms a significant part. In fact the value which we attribute to the environment cannot be seen distinct from our general aesthetico-ethical frame of reference. The value which we attribute to the environment is holistic and complete and not peripheral or derivative. Aesthetic value cannot be and should not be dismissed as subjective (in a Cartesian sense) when considering the value of environment and issues pertaining to conservation and preservation. The ecological activism that globally politicized these issues has come to be known as the Green Movement. There is a green politics and even a green speak! And over the last fifteen years a whole aesthetics of the green has also emerged under the name of ecological criticism or eco criticism. In the great welter of socio-political theorizing that had held sway over the last half of the twentieth century the concerns of the human individual and nature were virtually submerged. After the death of the author the individual artist/poet ceased to have any space to speak afterwards, and after the closure of the text history ceased to exist at all. If one were to take the pains of going over the warp and woof of socio-political theorizing carefully, one can perceive the struggles of the author and the text in the light of meaning production. When we reinstate class, race and gender along with the voice of nature we regain the fuller meaning of human’s being. When Thoreau wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately…” and when Aldo Leopold spoke of the land ethic, they were giving voice to an aesthetics of commitment and engagement.
DeepEcologyWhat came to be called Deep Ecology stemmed primarily from the work of the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess. According to Naess, “the aim of supporters of the deep ecology movement is not a slight reform of our present society, but a substantial reorientation of our whole civilization.” Hence it is an ecosophy. It concentrates on the human relationship with the natural world and supplies a substantial reorientation to a world run astray. Let me provide the major points of this ecosophy as it is developed by the practitioners of deep ecology:
A rejection of anthropocentrism. All life on earth has an intrinsic value irrespective of the human angle.
Richness and biodiversity are valuable in themselves and humans have no right to reduce this diversity.
An identification with all life
Caring for the other life forms is part of individual self realization.
A critique of instrumental rationality (emphasis should be not on quantity and efficiency but quality)
Personal development of a total world view. Individual thinking and action are of utmost significance and later the collective and the social.
As can be seen the concept of deep ecology is akin to the spiritual. What is aimed at is life enhancing qualitative values very much similar to spiritual enlightenment or artistic fulfillment. After all, life becomes meaningful only when we start to live fully and selflessly.
In our present day to day life of hard reality at every point we are habituated to turn to the physical sciences for concurrence and approval for only they can account convincingly for our corporeal existence. Similarly, in spite of their theoretical differences the so-called social sciences get their sanction only because they meekly follow the methodology of the non human mathematical sciences. And yet many perceptive minds have pointed out time and again that our thinking and perception have been determined by the technological environment rather than the natural. There is apparently little of nature that is left in us. Technology has taken over. This has become an automatic universe for us. Our constructions of our environment and our lives have become so removed from the organic unity of the poetic and the spiritual and so how could we sense and see the elemental harmony that is so apparent to the poet when he writes:
My beloved is the mountains
The solitary wooded valleys,
Strange islands…silent music
(St John of the Cross)
or
iyam prithvi sarvesam bhutanam madhu, asyai prithvyai sarvani bhutani madhu
this earth is like honey for all creatures and all the creatures are like honey for this earth, Brhadarnyaka V brahmana1.
Environmental Aesthetics
It is however in imaginative writing and narratives the world over that a deep felt affinity to nature can be discovered. Some are overtly evident while some remain submerged under the rubble of dominant cultural narratives ill disposed to nature. In what has come to be called Green Aesthetics or Eco aesthetics, efforts are being made by scholars in various disciplines to study the interrelationship of nature, human life and creativity. Of course, Eco Aesthetics is not too far from the ecosophy of deep ecology.
In the woods, said Ralph Waldo Emerson, we return to reason and faith. Despite the fact that this statement is loaded with nineteenth century American transcendentalist overtones, one could still see in it the essence of an environmental aesthetic. Ching-yuang, an early follower of Zen reflects on his understanding of nature as follows:
Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it’s just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters. (quoted in Lawrence Coupe, The Green Studies Reader, London and New York: Routledge, 2000, p. 1)
It is an experience of perceptual transformation that the Zen master undergoes. The difference is between the guileless innocence of the Child and the achieved innocence of a yogi. The very first level of perception—seeing mountains as mountains-- preceded all logic, ratiocination and language, while the second bracketed the world of nature as the other that is just a creation of the human unconscious (recall the Lacanian aphorism “the unconscious is structured like language”) where in the signifiers and the signifieds overlap to create a parallel reality or the reality as we understand it. The third stage is beyond all experience and transcends logic, reason, and language, having “got its very substance.” This is where eco aesthetics or green studies steps in, in the wake of theories and counter theories in the academia of twentieth century. It is post-deconstruction. As one green critic has claimed: these are days when the critic has turned from red to green! Green studies attempts to reinstate the real world of men and women and nature and human history. Kate Soper, hits the nail on its head directly when she pronounces dramatically: “In short, it is not language which has a hole in its ozone layer; and the real thing continues to be polluted and degraded even as we refine our deconstructive insights at the level of the signifier.” (The Green Studies Reader, p. 3). Green studies thus aims not merely to speak about nature but also to speak for nature. This is just where literature and the environment meet and the text spills over on to the globe, when we learn to see mountains as mountains and waters as waters once again. So much depends upon our sensibilities, the self-realisation of the human being and the humanization of nature. Aldo Leopard one of the pioneers of this kind of thinking has spoken about the land ethic that called for a biocentric vision. The point we have to remember is that the genuine environmentalist cherishes the values of love and affection that makes him/her a human being. The path of the Mahavira and the Buddha is not too far to seek. Or to put it in the words of the German poet Holderlin: “…poetically man dwells…”
The Implications of Environmental aesthetics
In the post deconstructive academic world of today many sensitive critics are turning to green. It is in the US universities that green studies picked up in the beginning and later British universities followed suit. Prof Scott Slovic of the University of Nevada at Reno has attempted to formulate certain key issues that the environmentally conscious literary critics are concerned with. Ecocriticism, for him “means either the study of nature writing by way of any scholarly approach or, conversely, the scrutiny of ecological implications and human nature relationships in any literary text, even texts that seem at first glance oblivious of the non human world.” This leaning towards an environmental aesthetic is an indication in the present day world of the growing consciousness of the importance and fragility of the non human space. Eco aesthetics has thus a wide range of significance and possibility.
The major aspects of green studies:
environment and ecology—basic awareness of nature
writing about nature and nature writing—poetry, fictional/non fictional narratives
rereading history—Romanticism etc, Women and nature-- ecofeminism
reclaiming the past—tracing roots of environmental writing and awareness
Especially in non-anglo-American situation—traces of environmental culture
religion and society and nature
environmental philosophy
environmental history
landscape studies
landscape and memory—mythical and spiritual connections to non-human world
Aesthetics as it began was that branch of philosophy which dealt exclusively with sensory experience. Now after the wealth of theoretical movements and counter movements aesthetics has come to signify wider implications not only in terms of the text but also in the manner and methodology of its reception and the production of meaning.
Class, race, gender, ideology --are all significant factors that contribute to the production of meaning And as we have seen, the idea of nature is equally, if not more significant. It not only contributes to meaning, but also constitutes the meaningful. Eco aesthetics belongs not only to that order of the study of nature and the non human world, but also implicates the human in the non human. It is holistic and inclusive not exclusive and fragmentary. It bespeaks of meaning, value, and responsibility. However, it should not be reduced merely to being just another technical aspect of the theoretical framework, just as another policy or strategy of reading like deconstruction. It brings with it more than a sign of the times—it bears responsibility. Let us examine these concepts one by one.
1. Meaning
Eco aesthetics looks upon the act of literary and artistic production as a meaningful activity. Wave upon wave of linguistic and semantic theories have almost deprived the work of art of any worthwhile meaning. Meaning has become a guessing game. If with the New Critics it was the fallacy of Intention that came to be challenged, the structuralists and the poststructuralists ripped off the meaningful world from the space of the linguistic sign altogether. There was ultimately nothing but the play of signifiers and signifieds while the referent was altogether bracketed off. Literary and art activity was but a meaningless engagement of the intellect – a rhetoric of signs. Eco aesthetics reinstates meaning at the heart of the aesthetic activity. The aesthetic revolves round the idea of values.
2. Value
“Literature and the other arts,” writes Scott Slovic, “are ideal media for exploring and communicating systems of values—ethical frameworks—within specific communities and between one culture and another. This is not a particularly novel idea, but it flies in the face of postmodern critical theory, which is frequently noted for its indeterminacy, its devolution to textual (and meta-textual) problematics, and its indifference to real social problems. Many literary scholars in recent years have forgotten the traditional social function of the arts….” (A Companion to Environmental Philosophy, Ed Dale Jamieson. Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2001,p. 254). Literature and the arts have a social dimension—a history and an ideology—a need to be committed to the here and now. Values are not peripheral and incidental—they are holistic and born out of a recognition of the responsibility of the writer the artist as well as the critic and the reader. The most significant of all values no doubt would be that which links the human and the non human worlds. Nature is the most valuable of all values and a transvaluation of all our value systems is the essential need of the hour.
3. Responsibility
There is more than ever an increasing need to recognize the social responsibility of literature and the arts. The aesthetic act is not something that takes place in emptiness. It is here and now, and the artist/writer needs to recognize the responsibility that she bears to the world at large. This need not reduce literature to the simplistic and the didactic. The text actually spills over on to the globe and the web of life implicates us in it. This is where eco aesthetics reaches into the sphere of ecosophy, as outlined earlier. The ideas of meaning, value and responsibility, actually is the recognition of the creative act as one that is sanctioned by the ethical – and it up holds the text as holistic, complete and harmonious with the rest of creation. In the end it is nature that triumphs.
All this might sound so remote and alien to those literary minded writers and critics trained in the traditional or modernist academia. The long-time-too-familiar debate of the two cultures has now finally ceased to be. After all we have only one earth and a global recognition has dawned on us that our life itself is too brief and rounded with a sleep… The literature class room should once again be informed by science, this time more sure footed and alert, recalling at every step the too scientistic fate of the New Critic of the Anglo American schools. For the text is not too confined in its form and meaning. It spills over on to the globe. As Terry Gifford has put it succinctly: Literary criticism should also be informed by science and apply that learning with what appears to be the best rigour of clarification available at the time. (Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry. Manchester: Manchester Univ Press, 1995; p. 141) And, he continues: When an engaged commitment is made to either work, or place , or inner energies in relationships, a responsibility for nature can, in turn, make a recognition of connectedness. (ibid) In the final analysis the plea for environmental aesthetics is this recognition of interconnectedness and totality.
I shall close this with a poem of mine:
The Golden Oriole
I had not known so much happiness
Until that rainy afternoon
When the first oriole fluted
From across the mango trees
A clear delightful call
Filled with the brightness of sunshine
Slowly fading in the afternoon light.
No night and day after that
Could take away
The golden oriole’s fruity call
It hung like a rhyme
Over the mango trees.
And it still does. The rains have come and gone.
I cannot say the same thing about happiness.
References
A Companion to Environmental Philosophy, Ed Dale Jamieson. Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2001
Beneath the Surface: Critical Essays in the Philosophy of Deep Ecology. Ed Eric Katz, Andrew Light, and David Rothenberg. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2000
Gifford, Terry. Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry.Manchester: Manchester Univ Press, 1995
Lawrence Coupe.The Green Studies Reader, London and New York: Routledge, 2000
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)