March 24, 2015 - 07:32
Amala is re-situating us in the student lounge, in the basement of English House
I. coursekeeping
* Abby on laptops out during class inside—less eye contact/engagement/more comfort?
* on Thursday, I had you pair up to re-write your opening paragraphs,
re-starting with your keywords (Ariel's plague/interdisciplinarity got a good work-out)
not everyone got to report--> Teresa & Rosa? others?
II. for today, I asked you to read two essays by Gary Snyder, "Unnatural Writing"
and "Language Goes Two Ways"; and then Paula Gunn Allen description's of
"Three Approaches to Interpreting a Keres Indian Tale."
note that we're moving up "levels of abstraction" in our discussion of eco-linguistics:
we started last week with words, I had hoped to look @ grammatical structures today (we'll go back to those,
once I get the articles scanned), and we are now attending both to the shape of sentences and of stories.
For Thursday, we're going to go even more "abstract," and consider the difference that genre makes.
Please read Joseph Meeker's 1972 essay, "The Comic Mode"
(one of the very earliest contributions to environmental criticism in the humanities),
and Steve Mentz's much more contemporary piece on "Shakespeare, Ecological Crisis, and the Resources of Genre."
Each one is about 20 pp. long.
Ariel: you are on for selecting where we meet, and letting us know by the night before;
instructions on this process in the "group links," left-hand side of the course home page;
Amala--you will watch our interactions today, write up a report of our class dynamics,
with a particular focus on the role the environment plays...
So: have any of you ever met either Snyder or Allen before?
Gary Snyder is German/Scots-Irish/English descent,
85-years old, a Pulitzer-prize winning poet, a Buddhist,
"the Poet Laureate of Deep Ecology,"
one of the grand old men of the environmental movement/studies
Paula Gunn Allen died 7 years ago, was 10 years younger than Snyder,
of mixed European-American and Native American descent,
identified with the Laguna Pueblo culture in which she'd grown up,
@ the forefront of Native American Studies and feminism....
So let's see what they have to teach one another--and us!
Divide class in 1/2, to "be" one or the other,
then count off to find a new talking partner...
and (pretending to be Snyder or Allen),
tell "the other" what your key ideas are:
Snyder: What is "unnatural writing"?
What does it mean to say that language goes "two ways"?
Then reverse: what are Allen's challenges to
the "unspoken assumptions and orientations of 'our' culture?
What is "open" or "unified field" perception?
What does it mean to say that "it's hard to see the forest if you are a tree"?
(What's the forest and what's the tree, in this metaphoric statement?)
Each says they are challenging conventional assumptions
about reading, writing, speaking language;
do they challenge one another's presumptions?
Where do they diverge/disagree?
What points of agreement/shared assumptions/vocabulary underlie both essays?
III. Return to large group: what do we think/
what use can we make of these ideas...?
Do Snyder and Allen give us new ways to think about the relationship
between experience and language, about writing and reading??
IV. Try this out with our own writing.
Example: "tajiboye--when I visited your site on Tuesday morning,
I was surprised to see that it was circled by flags."
Re-written as wild this would read.....?? As "unified field perception"?
I printed off each of your postings on "re-reading your images."
Look at your own. Select one sentence--I'd suggest the first, but it could be any one.
Re-write it in "wild" language, then in "unified field perception."
Select a sentence by someone else, and ditto.
Maddie's "Humancentric Visual": For me, when anything is as landscaped as Bryn Mawr is, the only thing that benefits from it are humans. We pick the trees and the flowers which grow on campus, where they go and how big they are. We create pathways so our feet won't get muddy. We like to have grass, but no weeds in it. What made me giggle the most was, although not on this occassion because it had just snowed, but facilities actually plows the athetic field. I think we become so consumed in things being easy for us that when we have to walk through the valley of death, we complain. This is funny to me because the dips and the flows of the landscape, although we can control them to a certain extent, we would never be able to "fill in" the valley of death because the water naturally flows in it, the more we put in, the more the water will flow out. One thing for me is I hate walking through brush, but maybe that's because I have become to used to walking on pavement and not having needels go into my pants or branches hitting me in the face. I think this is ironic, because for millions and billions of years, this is exactly the way the whole world worked and most animals and plants would probably prefer it this way. Having protection from the weather elements (but we have warm buildings to hide it) and from predators.
Celeste's "Revisiting Visualization of Campus" : The visualization that I posted on January 30 was that of the rugby pitch at sundown. Egocentric was one of the words that I previously chose, and I think it’s worth addressing in relation to the image I provided. Honestly, when taking into consideration nature and humanity, in my mind I tend to convert the word egocentric to human-centric. That having been said, I can’t help but acknowledge how very human centric my visualization of the campus actually is. Sure, I chose a secluded place to serve as my scape, but I also have to take into consideration the human-centric elements of this isolated space. When I took the picture, for example, I wanted to capture as much of the space as I could in a single image (trees, the peaceful sky, etc), but I ultimately made sure to foreground the human-made field. I suppose I didn’t immediately realize that in my pursuit of more genuine interactions with nature, I still wanted the protection of human-centricity.
Teresa's "Visualization of BMC": The visualization of the campus I put up on January 30 was a picture I took over the summer of 2013 of Bryn Mawr’s athletic fields. The words: experience, interrelationship, home, green, comfort, and biotic comes to mind when I look at the image. The reason I took the picture of the athletic fields was because I felt a sense of belonging after my journey and experience to the center of the labyrinth. I felt like I had a sense of what I wanted to do and where I wanted to be in the next 4 years of my education career. I knew Bryn Mawr was going to be my 2ndhome because I found comfort where I was. One thing I liked about Bryn Mawr on my first visit was how green it was. I had never seen grass so green before in my life. It was as if the entire campus was alive, like it was a giant biotic factor. My image shows the interrelationship between all the keywords mentioned above. I guess I never really noticed the egocentric aspect of the image until asked to analyze it in terms of the keywords we chose as a class. I looked at it in relation to my goals on campus and how I see myself in it, rather than looking at it in relation to why I chose to take a picture of that specific area.
Joni's "Visualization": This is the image I posted as a visualization of my site sit at the beginning of the semester. It was kind of embarassing to me then, both because it is a selfy and because I'm posing with a cigarette. I used it anyway, beacuase midnight was approaching and I couldn't think of another idea of how to represent the space I chose visually. I don't think it uploaded correctly then, so this might be the first time people are seeing this. Honestly, looking at different words that people chose and looking back at this photo, I don't see much that I didn't before. It's still embarassing that I am at the front of a picture that I used to represent a space outdoors. Looking at the word life, as Amala wrote about it last week, makes this photo a little less embarassing for me.... All three definitions use the basic idea of life as being living, but the Merriam-Webster definition and the etymology she provides are interesting to me. I like looking at this picture while thinking about the idea of life as specifically "the ability to grow [and] change" and the roots of the word in German as "to remain, peresevere, continue; stick, adhere." In my selfy I am alive with the tree I like so much, growing, changing, and perservering. I took the photo early in first semester, and looking at it reminds me that I have grown and changed and perservered as a student at this school. I have grown, changed, perservered, the tree has grown, changed, perservered, and my relationship to it has too, through my site sits.
Amala's "Comfort in Knowing": If seven months ago someone were to have shown me this map of Bryn Mawr's campus, the thought of finding comfort in it would have never crossed my mind. For some reason, more than the maps that are around campus (with little sketches of each building), I find comfort in this bird's eye view map more. It might be because as a kid I used to spend time looking at my entire town through Google Earth, and then figuring out exactly which building was where in relation to the next (from the map), or it might just be my ability to zoom in and out and see it as clearly as I choose to.
I find comfort in knowing exactly which building is which, and how long it actually takes me to get from one to another. I find comfort in knowing how the path is set and where the hills are. I find comfort in knowing which route will cause me to encounter more people and which route will allow me a more solitary walk. I find comfort in being able to look at this map and recall all those things from my experiences.
Caleb's "Back to Topographies": It's only really now that I've noticed the stark color difference: what's in red is largely residential, white is public/semi-public, and the green shows forested areas. In these colors, I'm thinking about my site* as a retreat (thanks to tajiboye). Unless we take a wide view, there is little around it that isn't overtaken by development. My site is not blocked off by any means. While existing in a greater context of fellow green shapes mostly outside of the greater Philly area, I still can't see that the site is much of a retreat from the city's hum. Red—houses, roads, trains, parking lots—seeps through. Even the Montgomery/Delaware County lines nearly cleave the site in two. I retreat temporarily of my own obligatory academic hum in my visits. But my retreat may not be physically (nor spatially) far removed enough from those hums to really effectively do what retreating originally meant: to make a strategic blow—to disorient, to turn the tables, to upend—by withdrawl. It is encapsulated in the red and the streets and the institutional buildings that box it in. It's neither an island nor a secluded patch of land. The topographic map, through color categorization, holds onto the notion that the little band of trees is indeed a retreat from the red, from the outside world. But there is constant interaction between its edges and its own position in the greater ecosystem. Looks pretty green all around in this one. Deceiving? Where am I retreating to? How far can I get away?
* : I'm beginning to use "my site" rather than "the site", because now that I'm feeling at home in my site, I think I'm also beginning to change the way I think about lingual possession: just because it's "mine" or I feel attached to it does not have to mean I am its sole proprieter. It is home in the way that my house also belongs to other beings that live in it. We share that home, and in sharing ownership also belong to one another.
Marian's "Not 'interconected'": Looking back on my first post about my site sit, it was interesting to remember that the image I put up for my site was a map of campus, with Batten House circled. I didn't think about this at the time, but I think the fact that I put up such a large scale, "practical" image instead of a picture of my surroundings from the site echoes sort of my mentality going into the site sits. I had chosen the Batten jungle because I had gazed over it many times from the back porch, but had only once before been actually down in it (at night, nonetheless, so I saw hardly anything). All I knew of the jungle was from above, from a distance, and by making it my site sit, I would have to go down into it and explore its depths. One word that keeps resonating in my mind as I think about both this map image of my site and my experiences during my site sits, is the word "interconnected." Not because I feel interconnected (and thus ecological) at my site, but because I don't. In the map image, it is clear that Batten is out on the edges of the campus (you can't even see the woods on the map!), socially, as a house, Batten often feels very separate from the rest of campus, and even moreso, being down in the woods I feel very separate from the rest of campus and Bryn Mawr life, and even separate from Batten House itself, because I'm down in the jungle looking back up at Batten from a totally different angle than I had looked at it pre-site sits. I also have times when I'm wandering down to my site, where I feel out of place, not because I don't enjoy the jungle or don't want to be there, but because I feel like an intruder on a sacred space that is not mine to monopolize for my own enjoyment, pushing my way through branches and inevitably stepping on some plants as I walk. So my question is then, if I don't feel "interconnected" with the rest of the world at my site sit, does that mean my site sits are not "ecological," since we talked so much about ecological being interconnectedness? Is it bad that I don't feel "interconnected" during my site sits?
Abby:
Ariel:
Liz:
Nkechi:
Rosa:
Tosin:
What do you re-see on this third round of looking @ and re-describing your image?
V. Gary Snyder's own poems may not be the best
example of the wildness he celebrates
(deeply infused w/ Buddhist sensibility: a disciplined balance);
in fact, the best example is probably not a poem @ all, but
something more like a primal scream-->
direct, emotional, unmediated expression
(Whitman, maybe? or Ginsberg's "Howl"?)
here's something small that nibbles @ this:
e.e. cummings, "since feeling is first"
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
----
Anne's Reading Notes
Snyder's "Unnatural Writing" first reviews older forms of "nature writing":
* "harmonious, middlebrow, Euro-centric"
* natural history ("naively realistic," anthropocentric, good-hearted)
* "off to the side," yet profoundly present in history, philosophy, literature
* background to defining human role in the world
* classical myths (wild systems that small human populations lived near)
critical literary establishment (Nemerov) dismisses the "abyss" outside the "garden" of civilization;
dangerous language of "sustainable development" (not compatible w/ biodiversity, steady state...)
consciousness, mind, imagination and language are fundamentally wild:
art is (not) imposing order on chaos, but discovering measured order in it
"art of the wild": see nature as process, continually actualizing
autonomy, integrity of non-human part of the world
"depth ecology": insatiable appetite, irrational, moldy, cruel, parasitic
nocturnal, anerobic, cannibalistic, microscopic, digestive, fermentative
the decay side: blood, polution, putrefaction
shame, grief, embarrassment, fear
narratives are a trace we leave on the world
wildness confers freedom: the ability to live in the real
physical daily world @ each moment, totally and completely
Points for a "new nature poetics":
* be nature literate
* be grounded in a place
* use Coyote/Bear/find further totems
* fear not science
* go further w/ science (be aware of problematic/contingent aspects of so-called objectivity)
* study mind, language as wild systems/habitat
* be crafty and get the work done
"Language Goes Two Ways":
popular description as that by which human beings bring order to the
chaos of the world: imposes a net of categories on an untidy universe;
but the world (ike our minds) remains unpredictable:
we can't guess our next thought...patterns are mysterious/unpredictable
languages, like the world, are naturally evolved wild systems, self-organized
it "goes two ways": gives us a window in the world, and shapes how we see it
"The menu is not the meal"--but we can see w/ language, play w/ its possibilities
creativity: seeing afresh what's already there, overlooked connections, etc:
a world away from usual education into "good language usage"
Ordinary Good Writing = well-weeded garden;
Really Good Writing = more diverse, unpredictable, broader, deeper =
Thoreau's "tawny grammar": mother-wit, "savage, howling," yet powerfully ordered
turn around familiar view of language: not "civilized," but "wild"
cf. seeing wren, forgetting self, feeling "wren," joining larger moment...
playful writing: roaming, dreaming...
"Discipline and freedom are not opposed to each other.
We are made free by training...disciplined by choice...
a friend of 'necessity'....Just a person playing in the field of the world."
Cf. Paula Gunn Allen's "tribal-feminism or feminist-tribalism" reading:
Often what appears to be a misinterpretation caused
by racial differences is a distortion based on sexual politics."
"The cultural bias of the translator will inevitably shape his or her perception
of the materials...in short, it's hard to see the forest when you're a tree."
What's the forest? What's the tree?
"Language embodies the unspoken assumptions and orientations of the culture it belongs to..."
Three Interpretations of the Yellow Woman Story
(as translated by Allen's mother's great-uncle)
A KERES INTERPRETATION:
a narrative version of a ceremony related to the planting of corn,
transfering focus of power, with assumptions...of balance and harmony...
sense of rightness, or propriety...fundamental principle of proper order...
ritual agency in conflict-phobic culture
A MODERN FEMINIST INTERPRETATION:
use of passive female figure as pawn in male bid for power...
useful in instructing women in their obligation in revolutionary struggle
(assumes that conflict is basic to human experience and that
women are essentially powerless)
AN INDIAN-FEMINIST INTERPRETATION:
Political Implications of this Narrative Structure-->
* tribal habit of mind toward equilibrium of all factors
* even distribution of value among all elements in a field
* no single element foregrounded...no heroes, no villains
* no chorus, no "setting"...no minor characters...
* foreground slips along from one focal point to another until
all the pertinent elements in the ritual conversation have had their say...
* focus of the action shifts...there is no "point of view"....
"Perceptual modes...are more resemblant of open-field perception
than of foreground-background perceptions....
Traditional peoples perceive their world in a unified-field fashion
that is far from the single-focus perception that generally characterizes
Western masculinist monotheistic modes of perception."
How do you/we decide what's foreground/what's background?
Is it even possible for us to look this way,
using unified- or open-field perception?
(remember discussion of ambiguous figures?)
"Women's traditional occupations...more often circular than linear,
more synchronistic than chronological, and more dependent upon
harmonious relationships of all elements within a field of perception..."
"The patchwork quilt is the best material example...
of the plot and process of a traditional tribal narrative...."
"to be and to create background...is of ultimate importance..."
Go and be backgrounds!(?)