Looking back at my first web paper, the account of my Thoreauvian walk around Bryn Mawr, I wrote the piece in a pastoral from. Specifically, I wrote the essay as a non-fictional, 1st person account of specifically what I saw and what I was thinking at the time of the walk. Although the style I wrote in accurately retells what had happened, I could have easily changed the style so as to be not as dependent on reality as it had been. Instead of writing in the genre I did, I could have used the experiences of the walk to serve as the inspiration for a fictional story set in a science fiction setting just as Le Guin had done in her story. Doing so would allow me to use my imagination to create new visuals for the reader to experience, similar to what I had experienced on my Thoreauvian walk.

            Original

Ahh who ever thought sitting down could be so restless trying to avoid the rain covered seat. I feel like a biirdy on a perch trying to mimic my fellow birdies in the area. When in fact they are actually silent. Is this not a chipper day? The dark clouds overcast, the bone chilling cold blowing through my jacket. This is quite a lovely day for me! I breath in through my noise and as the cold air enters my lungs it causes me to cough and clear my throat. I like the feeling of my toes vibrating everytime I wiggle them as the sharpe jolts of pain shoot around my foot.  I cannot be happier as I hear the acorns dropping all around me and wonder if one will make its way down onto my head. Kerplunk! Oh wait, that landed next to me. I enjoy giving up my comfort to sit on the top of the bench instead of letting my butt get drenched. I enjoyed trying a more comedic approach to nature because us as humans always seem so uncomfortable when we go outside our comfort zone and cannot get comfortable. So I thought I would play on that uncomfotableness and make it humerous since we all experience it.

I have been here since I was young, and short. The world I have been living in is a small and limited land. I grow up higher and higher just to see the surrounding with all its elements stay (almost) the same. Characteristics of shapes, colors, positions, etc. make no difference: they have all been there for too long and become too familiar that there is no reason for them to have a name. We are always in sight with each other I never miss or forget. However un-diverse and familiar this world is to me, it is still mysterious. Questions obsess me whether anything lies underneath the surface of water over there, whether I and all the tall plants that look exactly like me are of the same kind and so on. I long for an answer. I long for a better understanding of this world. The inability to move is a hardship. Whether it rains or shines, cold or hot, I am standing here observing and confusing myself. There are strangers who come to my world, stay for a while then leave me, even more puzzled, behind. There are fast-moving animals that keep running around and on my body, as if showing off their superior ability and teasing my helpless self. Giant as I am to many other beings, I feel incompetent to the world.

To examine the genre of my written Thoreuvian Walk is difficult. I don't know whether I can quite name it in a specific genre. It is not a tragedy, it's not a comedy. Is a reflection a genre? I think my "walk" is still quite like a pastoral, but it does explore partially the idea of the hidden and the parts of the earth that are difficult to navigate. So maybe it's slightly Gary Snyder-esque? That's what I will call it now, a pastoral with hints of Gary Snyder. So now to write it into a different genre. Not sure what to call it? Not exactly a tragedy, but sort of leaning toward it.

Original:

Rain. Much colder, getting colder. I came to campus to swim, but the open swim is closed (that's what I'm told, in those words!) so that volley ball players can use all the locker rooms. (Thanks a bunch, Claire and Zoe!) So, to the labyrinth, with the intention of going deeper. Slower, deeper. Stepping into deep dreaming space, circling towards union. Greet the beech tree first: the "three ladies" are hugely bigger than I remember them: my photographs, which I've been looking at all week, have no reference for scale, and make them look small, graceful, like normal size tree trunks. In fact they are huge and graceful. The trunk of this tree is enormous, much thicker than one would expect from the overall profile of the tree. In my paper I compared these three trunks to my grandmother, my mother, and me. Does their surprising size tell me something about us, our deceptive, unobvious size and power? I sneak a wilderness pee under the shelter of the tree's hanging branches. No one around, no one watching, but I feel illicit, get away with it.

Going deeper already, I sense/imagine down into the earth, the curve of the hill, picturing/feeling grass over earth over rock.

I found it interesting how Wideman used space, time and distance as measures of success at the beginning of the book. It seems like he really reflects on his desire to separate himself not only from his neighborhood and his relationship with brother but also from his own identity. He doesn’t seem to be proud of it, but simply acknowledge the complexity, and perhaps reason as to why his relationship with his brother is so broken.

The quote that strikes me the most is on page 27 when he said, "One measure of my success was the distance I'd put between us. Coming home was a kind of bragging...It's sure fucked up around here ain't it? But look at me, I got away." I think that this quote really exemplifies the belief that success and his home stand in direct opposition, that he must leave one in order to embrace the other, even though later on the book he complicates this idea. Although I understand that there must be a refashioning of the self in order to fit into alien spaces, I don’t think that it is absolutely necessary to choose one or the other. It seems to me that the distance and the silence can in fact point not just to the fact that him and his brother are different because of his “choice to be successful” but also to the fact that the awkwardness exists because of their history and blood, because that awkwardness and guilt would not manifest itself through silence if they were not intrinsically tied. 

I began this post by looking up a list of genres on Wikipedia. What I was specifically looking for was one that encompassed science, but still told a story. I have a friend who is interested in the emerging field of narrative medicine, and I had hoped that I would be able to find something along the same lines pertaining to ecology. The general idea behind narrative medicine is that you treat a person as a whole, and not just a cluster of symptoms. You allow people to contextualize their ailments in terms of the schema of their lives as opposed to the often cold and impersonal jargon that is so common in medical fields. See also: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/education/edlife/03narrative.html.

This made me wonder, could we solve more of our current ecological problems by taking this sort of approach to the environment. This is very closely related to what Berry and other authors we’ve read this semester have said; Recontextualize how we think about “nature” (a slippery term in itself.) This would not automatically solve any of the problems that we have created for ourselves, but just thinking in terms of different stories would give us the necessary insight to work on these problems.

I had the goal of rewriting this post: /exchange/“traditional”-ecology-field-guide-flowers in a more narrative way. Right now it seems very straight forward and scientific, so I think I need to make it more inviting for the reader.

From yesterday's NYTimes: Who's in Charge Inside Your head?
"Buddhists note that our skin doesn’t separate us from the environment, but joins us, just as biologists know that “we” are manipulated by...the rest of life....Where does the rest of the world end, and each of us begin? Let’s leave the last words to a modern icon of organic, oceanic wisdom: SpongeBob SquarePants....'Absorbent and ...and porous is he'...are we, too."