Epilogue: A Reflection
1. Ecological theory and criticism.
2. Literary representations of the natural world.
As mentioned in Chapter 6, theorist and eco-critic Tim Morton stresses that all art are important in ecology. He argues that ecology is not just about global warming and green energy, but also about love and loss, despair and compassion, space and time, emotions and other features of culture. He emphasises the needs for coexistence and interconnectedness of all beings, living and non-living (Leitch 2619). He uses poetry as an example of the arts to demonstrate this relationship between man and other beings – trees and space in this case. He theorises that poems are written on paper, which comes form trees. And the way in which a poem looks on paper elicits our emotional response. When we read, our body occupies space and adopts a certain stance. Therefore, the poem organises space and our response at a certain time. Everything is interconnected. The same argument applies to other forms of art – visual and performative. All three are represented in E-Cart. Photos, paintings, ceramics and music do not exit without connections to other beings and materials. The entities in E-Cart are products of my own thoughts enmeshed with those of others in the Living Book, creating literary, visual and vocal response to critical thoughts such as posthumanism, new materialism, deep time and phenomenology.
In literary representation of the natural world, I was drawn to the writings of great writers with diverse styles from different time periods and places. Thoreau (1862) sauntered from Massachusetts in the direction of the setting sun, in company of Indians who dined on marrow of koodoos and reindeers, drank infusions of hemlock-spruce and arbor-vitæ tea, amidst forest music in the summer nights. Everything was wild and free.
Standing Bear (1933) always reassured his visitors not to be afraid of feathered and furry friends as they were born to the same Great Mystery. They were united by a common tongue of brotherhood, a lingua echofranca of ecomimesis and ecodiegesis that Morton, Boes and Marshall theorised, forging connectedness between humans and the natural world, in opposition to Western unitary selfhood and Cartesian dichotomy.
Leslie M. Silko (1986) also believed that the ancestors of her people originally emerged from the earth like non-humans. Their mutual respect enabled them to co-exist on an arid land. Emergence and co-emergence also co-exist, giving currency to Morton’s foreground-background theory and the “bright side–dark side” binary. The Pueblo people already intra-acted rather than interacted with their landscape, treasuring the materials that it provided, long before the flat ontology and new epistemology of the new materialists.
David Abram (1996) acquainted readers to phenomenology. Over the rice paddies in Bali he glazed at the stars and found himself at one with the cosmos. He also made contact with the more-than-human world of ambient lives, sensing their presence and communicated with them through intersubjective experiences.
Rachel Carson made us aware of the past and of the continuing flow of time. Over millions of years, the mangrove periwinkle snails had evolved to adopt to the land, seldom returned to their native sea habitat. This metamorphosis epitomises evolutionary changes that took place in the liminal zone between the land world and the sea world, an area metonymic of a much larger world along the immensely long epochal timeline.
However, Carson’s linear time is not echoed by many indigenous people’s concept of time, which is circular instead. Many of our misunderstandings with our First Nations people could be avoided if we keep such difference in mind.
D. H. Lawrence took us from the marginal worlds back to Tuscany, not far from where the humanist doctrines began. The intertextual juxtaposition of works by Lawrence, Wordsworth, Pessoa and Oswald generated some heated philosophical discussions among readers.
From Tuscany we sailed across the Atlantic to Funk Island to be with Franklin Russell, not far from where Thoreau started his journey westward. Hence readers have come a full circle. On Funk Island, chaos was the order of the day, life was futile. Time became meaningless. The natural world was not always a timid and orderly place.
Reading Natures, then, has introduced me to a treasure trove of keynote eco-criticism and the finest nature writing. Both are vital in the understandings and appreciation of our vulnerable ecology. Together they provide ecologists a voice of praxis which we hope one day will invalidate the Anthropocene. I hope a future version of E-Cart will also afford a small part in this effort. After much uncertainty, Christina Rossetti's wayfarer might have reached the inn near the mountain top, albeit travel-sore and weak. But ecologists must carry on until they reach a "clearer, fresher, and more ethereal" place (Thoreau, Walking).
Works Cited
Finch, Robert and John Elder, editors. The Norton book of Nature Writing, W. W. Norton & Co., 2002, p. 191.
Leitch, Vincent B., editor. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, W. W. Norton & Co., 2018, pp. 2619 - 2631.