One of the major threads running through the readings for this week was a philosophical claim (derived via Heidegger) that poetic language occupies a privileged, exalted role for thinking about how our consciousness connects to our being on earth, and the ways there is something profoundly dis-connecting about modernity, its various technologies and the present ecological crisis. Because poetry is ostensibly not preoccupied with mimetic representation, but rather unfolds a moment (or moments) of consciousness lyrically unfolding itself as it takes in the world, this rather allows the “things” in a poem (birds, bridges, nests, trees) to presence their being, and open a space in the poem towards wonder at their otherness (rather than mere description or classification of them with language). So Jonathan Bate writes, channeling Heidegger: “poetry is the original admission of dwelling because it is a presencing and not a representation, a form of being not of mapping. What Heidegger offers us is a post-phenomenological inflection of high Romantic poetics” (“What are Poets For?”, 262). This has been a cornerstone of much ecocriticism that has oriented itself to the Romantics in a certain way as foundational (and perhaps problematically, some would say, fundamentally, in a fundamentalist sense).
In reading the Heidegger piece on “Building Dwelling Thinking,” I found myself thinking back to words we shared in the seminar last week, in addition to all the productive ways it opens up the Romantic poetry we presently have on the docket. As archaic and irritatingly vatic as Heidegger sometimes sounds (at least to me), his “fourfold” — earth, sky, mortals and gods — is a nice way to frame the creation myths from the different traditions we had read: to read them as essential tales about dwelling with/on the earth, about opening up to the fourfold. The conversation last week briefly invoked Godfrey Reggio’s work ( a still from one of his films is pictured above), as one way to think about the presence/place/validity of indigenous native creation stories for contemporary environmental thought and practice. If “language remains master of man” (Heidegger, 144), and the etymological roots of our words shape our present relationships to space, it behooves us to listen to those non-European languages that took their shape and form on this continent and climate. And, as “Building Dwelling Thinking” — as well as Jonathan Bate’s later glosses on Heidegger– cracked open a critique of modernity that sees a dangerous divorce between techne and the being of things, I thought it would be fun to keep a train of Heidegerrian ideas in mind while experiencing the images and sounds of a section from Reggio’s Koyanisqaatsi cycle.
So, thus, a somewhat crude and abrupt thought experiment: follow the link here to an excerpt from Reggio’s Naqoyqatsi on Youtube (sorry, can’t embed the clip in the posts here). Start watching it from the 3:00 minute mark onwards. Keep in your thoughts the relational sequence Heidegger spells out in “Building Dwelling Thinking” about things–> locations –> (abstract) spaces. Can we think about this moment in the film in terms of the fourfold, dwelling, and presencing?
and what, you might be thinking, does this possibly have to do with Romantic poetry? I feel somewhat justified in sticking Reggio here by the way Bate extends the potential of language to “open an alternative way of being in the world” to include “painting or a performance work” (250). There are other ways we might think of the apocalyptic in Reggio with the apocalyptic in something like Blake’s “London” poem (a fusion of word and image, as Reggio’s work is a fusion of sound and moving images). I think if we stay centered on the problem of “dwelling,” it allows us to focus on both at once, and even bring a charge and immediacy in those older Romantic pieces into the present.
Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature 