Reconstruction 7.2 (2007)
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Gestures toward Cross-Species Reciprocal Relations in Contemporary Poetics / Mary Newell
Abstract: In this essay, I explore some embodied bases of ethical attitudes toward human/ animal exchanges in the texts of three contemporary authors: Mary Oliver, Heller Levinson, and Adrienne Rich. Since other species share with humans varieties of agency, sentience, and purposive activity, I suggest that reciprocity is a fundamental aim in cross-species relations. Phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty depicts the correlation between embodied actions and attitudes, for example, between the hand movement of grasping and an appropriative attitude toward the natural world. His concept of reciprocity, grounded in the experience of one hand touching another, provides a reference for encounters that function reflexively, offering a re-acquaintance with the self as well as with the ecosystem. I augment this approach by discussing the attunement enfolded in our neural pathways as they develop during early environmental interactions. On the whole, these correspondences are layered over with verbal structures, conceptual knowledge divorced from feeling and sensation, and accommodations to life in a culturally and technologically mediated society. The direct and imaginal encounters described by the three authors indicate how relations with non-human nature can reinvigorate our underlying environmental attunement. In moments when we experience a correspondence with the world around us that exceeds our customary categories, we are available for exploring reciprocal relations.
<1> To the extent that we attribute agency, sentience, and purposive activity to non-human nature, our relation cannot be limited to a model of stewardship in which humans manage natural materials. Such a model implies hierarchical control and keeps humans at a privileged center that many contemporary theorists claim is no longer tenable. More promising are models that include reciprocity, such as Donna Haraway's model of "conversation." In response to the multiple, complex, and unpredictable agency of the natural world, Haraway (1992) labels nature a "material-semiotic actor," an agent both substantial and signifying, with whom "we must learn to converse." [1] Haraway differentiates this approach from one in which nature could be treated merely as a resource available for human appropriation. "Situated knowledges require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent, not a screen or ground or resource... Accounts of a 'real' world do not, then, depend on a logic of 'discovery,' but on a power-charged social relation of 'conversation.'" [2] A conversational model has the built-in expectation of reciprocity, in the sense of listening and responding. I suggest that reciprocity is a fundamental aim in an ethical response toward the natural world. Rather than applying principles to nature, one would begin by engaging and interacting.
<2> As I discuss elsewhere, a conversational model can be extended to include non-verbal, kinesthetic exchanges as well. [3] Nevertheless, it is challenging to imagine reciprocal exchanges with heterogeneous conversational partners. Haraway complicates the conversation model with her reminder that, although our relations with the ecosystem should "be imagined as genuinely social and actively relational ... the partners remain utterly unhomogenous" (Simians 3). [4] She suggests that acknowledging the complexities of our connections with the natural world might help us to "refigure the kind of persons we might be. These persons can no longer be, if they ever were, master subjects, nor alienated subjects, but - just possibly - multiply heterogeneous, inhomogeneous, accountable and connected human agents" (Haraway, Simians 3). I am interested in pursuing the linkage between being "connected" and feeling "accountable" in the context of heterogeneous relations.
<3> While it has become a cliché to affirm that we are all connected, awareness of our ecological interconnectedness is often latent. Physicist Fritjof Capra's definition for the ecosystem as a "community of organisms and their physical environment interacting as an ecological unit" emphasizes the social aspect of organisms, an aspect often overlooked in discussions of non-human nature (31). In ecological network models, humans occupy a different place than in the Cartesian worldview. Although they may remain at the top of the food chain, they are, like other animate life, interdependent. To acknowledge the ecosystem as the source of our sustenance implies a recursive network in which the effects of our actions in the environment will cycle back to affect us, directly or indirectly. In a recursive structure, models of hierarchy yield to models of relationality.
<4> An ethical response of reciprocity with other life forms assumes a degree of sentience. The experience of an active and sentient natural world is a common, if sometimes disregarded, occurrence for those living or traveling in suburban or exurban habitats. However, it competes with what are, for some, longstanding habits of regarding nature as object of human vision or purposes. If we begin to attend to it more frequently, the experience of being observed by wildlife might initiate a shift toward a reciprocal model. As writer Gary Snyder notes,
The world is watching: One cannot walk through a meadow or forest without a ripple of report spreading out from one's passage. The thrush darts back, the jay squalls, a beetle scuttles under the grasses, and the signal is passed along. Every creature knows when a hawk is cruising or a human strolling. The information passed through the system is intelligence. (Practice of the Wild 19, italics mine)
Snyder suggests that wildlife is not only sentient, but shares information through a system of communication. In other words, their intelligence is networked, a network of which, in principle, we are also a part. Certainly, in Snyder's example, we are included as objects in the field of observation. To the extent that we experience the reciprocity of perceiving and being perceived, the implicit reflexivity could be an incitement toward feeling accountable to other life forms.
<5> In this essay, I explore some embodied bases of ethical attitudes toward human/ animal exchanges in the texts of three contemporary authors: Mary Oliver, Heller Levinson, and Adrienne Rich. One of phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty's foundational statements concerns the recovery of the "lived body" as opposed to the body as object. This direction parallels my focus on embodied approaches, defining "embodied" as a condition in which body, mind, and emotion are not divided dichotomously, but interact within a living organism. Consequently, I am interested in an ethical approach that can be enacted, not merely espoused. Merleau-Ponty speaks of engagement, relation, and reciprocity. He depicts the correlation between embodied actions and attitudes, for example, between the hand movement of grasping and an appropriative attitude toward the natural world. His concept of reciprocity, grounded in the experience of one hand touching another, provides a reference for encounters that function reflexively, offering a re-acquaintance with the self as well as with the ecosystem. I suggest that an ethic based on reciprocity is also two-directional: it demands that one be ethical toward oneself as well as toward the others. Sometimes, one's only available ethical stance might be to refuse to participate in unjust conditions.
<6> Humans as well as other species have a degree of attunement to the natural environment that is hormonal and neurological. For example, our pineal glands are attuned to diurnal times. During early experiences in the environment, infants learn the parameters both of their bodies and of the surrounding space. These parameters are enfolded into brain maps that provide orientation for movement and sensation throughout life. Our capacity to function in any environment depends upon these relational maps, which allow us to correlate our dimensions and movement capabilities with the attributes of external spaces. On the whole, these correspondences are layered over with verbal structures, conceptual knowledge, and accommodations to life in a culturally and technologically mediated society. For instance, clock time replaces diurnal time in much of our cultured life. Merleau-Ponty describes a trajectory toward direct or less mediated experience that bypasses some of our cultural conditioning. This trajectory, I suggest, is also the trajectory toward a reclaimed awareness of the underlying attunement. Heightened experiences in natural environments may revive our contact with these deep structures and generate a feeling of deep correspondence.
<7> Mary Oliver's primary ground rule for interacting with other living beings is an attitude of non-appropriation or non-disruption of embedded orders of life forms, based on the conviction that they have significance independently of human purposes. [5] Merleau-Ponty claims that such a non-possessive attitude is a requirement for intimate contact.
The effective, present, ultimate and primary being[s]...offer themselves therefore only to someone who wishes not to have them but to see them, not to hold them as with forceps, or to immobilize them as under the objective of a microscope, but to let them be and to witness to their continued being - to someone who therefore limits himself to giving them the hollow, the free space they ask for in return, the resonance they require, who follows their own movement... (Merleau-Ponty, Visible 101-02)
Merleau-Ponty exemplifies appropriation in the scientific context of using animals as specimens. Appropriation can also be economic, personal, as in collecting, or conceptual, in the cases where nature is thought of merely as a source of inspiration, without regard to its sustainability. Merleau-Ponty relates such attitudes to physical actions of holding. Similarly, biologist Francisco Varela and colleagues use the term "grasping." [6] Grasping could be considered the embodied basis of possessiveness and acquisitiveness. In contrast, one who would enter a relation with other species "limits himself" to experiencing them within their meaningful context.
<8> Oliver's poem "Pipefish" (1990) delineates the persona's commitment to non-appropriation [7]. She describes reaching under water in the shallows and looking for interesting specimens, an act of human acquisitiveness that she then redirects toward respect for life on all scales.
I waded, I reached
My hands
In that most human
Of gestures - to find,To see,
To hold ...("Pipefish" 1-11)
Calling the series, "to find,/ To see,/ To hold" "the most human/ Of gestures" indicates the bodily correlates of possessive attitudes toward the natural world. In subsequent lines, the human tendency to grasp and acquire is expressed as "your hands passing over the world,/ gathering and closing" (47-48). A common and probably unconscious hand movement of closure can also be the foreclosure of possibilities for what the hand takes. The pipefish, which "wasn't much," nevertheless "glittered and struggled" to escape from her "hold" (15-16). The persona's message, in the face of this acquisitive impulse, is to acknowledge that "the diminutive// pipefish / wants to go on living" (41-43). To "go on living" can be considered a common denominator among living beings.
<9> The poem earns its risky stance of speaking for other creatures by portraying a situation in which an ethical value emerges in an embodied context. A respect for all life forms weighs in as significant, not through analysis, but through immediate, literally 'hands-on' experience. She has felt the fish's struggle to survive with her fingers - which can sense as well as grasp - and responded with a choice to give the creatures "the free space they ask for," in Merleau-Ponty's words (Visible 102). The effort to respond to another life allows a commitment to a non-acquisitive credo: "I opened my hand - like a promise // And let it go" (32-33, 36). The opening of the hands functions metonymically to affirm a commitment to be a concerned participant rather than an acquisitive appropriator [8].
<10> In describing the way that we can be "open ... to other bodies," Merleau-Ponty begins with a handshake, which he claims "is reversible; I can feel myself touched as well and at the same time as touching" (Visible 142). Each hand could take either an active or passive part. Merleau-Ponty suggests that such reciprocity is possible between different organisms as well. This reversibility, or reciprocity, confounds a subject / object delineation. Silvia Stoller explains that a relation can be asymmetrical and still reciprocal (177). Her interpretation extends the phenomenological approach to the arena of animal/ human interactions.
<11> To depict the immediacy of animal-human encounters in words is challenging, partly because the exchanges are primarily kinesthetic and sensory. Different parts of the brain process these modalities than process language and concepts, although the parts are highly interconnected [9]. A related challenge is that the experience may take one beyond the boundaries of one's usual subjectivity. In a style similar to magical realism, Oliver sometimes employs everyday language to depict scenes with intersubjective or ecstatic elements. Using rhythm and repetition, she evokes common kinesthetic and sensory experiences in a context where they exceed everyday interpretations. One example is the poem "Last Night the Rain Spoke to Me" (2002), [10] in which the awareness of self and perceptual field are equally active, resulting in a reciprocity of perception that relates hand to hand, and person to tree and stars, through the field of vision. In expressing perception as a reciprocal activity, Oliver's poem reflects both phenomenology and ecological psychology. J.J. Gibson, the founder of ecological psychology, claims that "[t]o perceive the world is to coperceive oneself. [...] The supposedly separate realms of the subjective and the objective are actually only poles of attention" (116). Oliver begins this poem simply, as she frequently does, and gradually builds to a sense of reciprocal observing. "Last Night..." begins with the rain expressing its joy "to come falling" and "to be happy again/ in a new way" (7-8). This almost simplistic opening is potentially irritating in its apparent anthropomorphic projections of feelings into the rain. Yet it can also describe a translation of an event in which she felt in touch with natural processes. The joy results from her translation of the rain. For Oliver, as Janet McNew puts it, "everything has consciousness and even language of some sort" (66) [11]. As discussed by Merleau-Ponty, the expressiveness of the natural world indicates its inherent meaningfulness (Visible 155). Phenomenological writer David Abram asserts that "[t]o describe the animate life of particular things is simply the most precise and parsimonious way to articulate the things as we spontaneously experience them, prior to our conceptualizations and definitions" (56).
<12> Gradually, the poem's linear sequencing of time gives way to an expanded present moment:
Then it was over. The sky cleared.
I was standing
Under a tree.
The tree was a tree
With happy leaves,
And I was myself.("Last Night..." 10-15)
This section of the poem reflects a phenomenological construct of difference through differentiation rather than opposition. As McNew expresses it, "Oliver's visionary goal, then, involves constructing a subjectivity that does not depend on separation from a world of objects. Instead, she respectfully confers subjecthood on nature, thereby modeling a kind of identity that does not depend on opposition for definition" (69). Even drenched in the same rain, the tree and the persona retain their particularities. They have permeable boundaries but distinct identities. Intersubjectivity is not homogenization. In fact, relation requires the separateness of differentiation. The final stanza depicts an image of interconnectedness between these varied entities:
My right hand
Was holding my left hand
Which was holding the tree
Which was filled with stars(20-23)
The poem concludes with a mention of a state of wonder which, ecophenomenological philosopher Ted Toadvine suggests, is a suitable response to recognizing that in confronting the natural world, we are confronting a phenomenon of an immensity beyond our conceptual grasp (143). This recognition displaces our consciousness beyond an ego-centered perspective in which the world consists of objects available for our grasping, literally or cognitively. Such an experience resonates inwardly as well. The underlying, buried attunement, based as I mentioned on neurological mappings and glandular emissions, receives a note of confirmation in such moments.
<13> In the poem, these separate particles, each "themselves," join in a moment of interconnectedness, like harmony in music that leaves the separate voices intact, yet influenced by their close association. The feeling of inclusion begins with a touch of hand on hand, a proprioceptive connection to self which forms the root of Merleau-Ponty's construct of reciprocity, and of hand on tree, a kinesthetic awareness of self and environmental context. [12] Oliver's simple language, in which rhythm and repetition are important, calls up bodily impressions rather than mental associations, suggesting the physicality of the linkage and grounding the mystical elements.
<14> Drew Leder, a medical doctor and philosopher, extends Merleau-Ponty's ideas to a preconscious layer of organic sentience that he calls "recessive." He affirms that we relate to the world on this level as well as on the intentional one, which he labels "ecstatic":
The body is in ceaseless relation to the world. ... There is a two-sided linkage, flesh and blood, ecstatic and recessive, each dimension of engagement mirroring the other. I gaze up at the stars ... at the same time I know that the carbon molecules from which my body is made were forged in the furnace of dying stars. I am thus doubly connected to even the far reaches of the universe. We form one organic/ perceptual circuit (160).
We cannot touch the stars, but we can touch the tree in which the stars appear to rest. This prospect provides a suggestive visual analogy of connectedness. Below the visible realm, scientists claim that humans share much of the same DNA with other species. These underlying layers of commonality may contribute not only to establishing the sense of relation, but also to the emotional satisfaction that often ensues in such moments of contact.
<15> In contrast to such instances of intersubjective resonance are instances when the natural world is not responsive to Oliver's personas' longing for connection, leaving a residue of yearning or longing. These experiences of dissonance indicate limits to human participation in the natural world, in Oliver's experience. Toadvine claims that the foundation of an ethical response to the natural world begins "only when we are faced with the impossibility of reducing it to the homogeneous, the continuous, the predictable, the perceivable, the thematizable" (140). Toadvine has reservations about "the anthropomorphic and even romantic overtones of a return to holistic oneness with nature conceived as an organized and productive telic system" (142). Although Merleau-Ponty often speaks of a "kinship" of the body with things, he also refers to a "blind spot" (Visible 300) which cannot be experienced. Toadvine claims that there are ephemeral aspects of nature that remain a "pocket of resistance" to attempts at comprehensive theorizing (150). He suggests grounding ethics on "an attentiveness to the resistance of what cannot be thought or perceived, to the opacity of a wild being that circumscribes our concepts and percepts. It is at the margins of our experience, in the desirous response of our flesh" to this not fully knowable presence, "that we are confronted with a wildness with which we can never come face to face" (150). Following Toadvine, the aim of reciprocity needs to be tempered by acknowledging our limited capacities of understanding wild animals.
<16> Oliver's portrayal of an encounter with an owl in "The Best I Could Do" (2004) [13]. combines a recognition of this opacity along with a persistent yearning for transparency. In the reported incident, the owl stayed near, and "stared into my face, though not my eyes." One might come face to face tangentially, the poem indicates, but not fully eye to eye.
I would have given
a great deal
to have invoked some connection,
eye to eye,
to know what he thought of me
here in the world - his world -
his gauzy and furzy acres,
sour, weedy, lush,
mortal.
The shape of this poem artfully recreates an owl's face, with space for eyes just where the line says "eye to eye." This image substitutes for a more total encounter that can only be completed imaginally. The eyes are significant features that allow the animal to hunt as well as to see and be seen. In this interpretation, Oliver uses the wordless spaces where the eyes would be to depict the unrepresentable residue of the encounter.
<17> Owls are frequently associated with mortality in Oliver's opus, where they spend a lot of time preying. In that context, the period following "mortal" signifies the period of someone's life story. It is "his world," the owl's. Oliver can never complete its description, because it will only admit limited connection. Oliver honors this fact by refraining from embellishing the moment and leaving space to represent what has been withheld. At the same time, she does not construct a boundary around the wild as a separate category. As Oliver says elsewhere, "The world where the owl is endlessly hungry and endlessly on the hunt is the world in which I live too. There is only one world" (Owls 16). The "too" establishes a paratactic relationship that allows a respect for the differences between co-inhabitants. Oliver's poems provide an ongoing investigation of how to honor both the possibilities and limitations in human exchanges with other life forms.
<18> As evident in Oliver's owl encounter, birds do not necessarily desire kinship with humans. This fact recurs in a very differently styled poem, Heller Levinson's '"Mongolian Eagle's Ascent" (2005), which could be termed a study in appropriation from the point of view of the appropriated. Instead of describing a human engaged in or desirous of contact with the other living beings, as Oliver does, Levinson makes an imaginal leap into the awareness of a raptor, a Mongolian eagle. He creates an eagle persona capable of carrying four pages of syntactically rich poetry. As a side issue, Levinson accomplishes a rare achievement in portraying a first person speaker who describes her own demise. The poem models a radical act of refusal to comply with the consequences of this appropriation. The eagle refuses to participate in the non-reciprocal organization of her future arranged by the humans' "hegemony."
<19> The following passage in an excerpt from a National Geographic article that Levinson uses as an introduction to the poem.
In Mongolia, a group of Kazakhs hunt with golden eagles, a tradition more than a thousand years old. Females are employed because they are believed to be more aggressive.... Once trapped, taming her is difficult. Her ankles are bound in leather straps and tied to a wooden block on a rawhide line. Each time she tries to fly away, she flips upside down. She'll stay struggling with this tightrope for up to two days. When she's exhausted, she's tame, and the falconer can teach her to return, bloody knuckled from the hunt. (Millard, Candice qtd. in Levinson 36). [14]
For the bird to function as hunter for its host, it must be captured and broken in. Then, it will be hooded to focus its vision. As Millard explains, while wild eagles will hunt small prey for their own food, captive birds can be trained to capture wolves and lynx, whose furs are valuable to the hunters. In this endeavor, the eagles can be injured. [15] Levinson's poem is written from the point of view of an eagle who refuses to cooperate with this traditional assault on its freedom, preferring death to captivity.
<20> When free, the bird had a fully elaborated, embodied engagement with her environment, as indicated in the poem's first stanza:
To soar by cutting -
My talon tips pouring thousands of pounds
Of pressure per square inch - hares, mice, snake -
This manicured death quash lifts
Permits my aerial dives & dips partnered
By ancient scrolls unribboning encrypted simoom davenings
The flipping cornerstones of the igneous mute
-- contra-horizon decibels
lute clouds
strum precipitations("Mongolian Eagle's Ascent" 1-10)
This attunement is shattered by the conditions of life in captivity. The stanza shows the eagle's joy in her expansive range of free flight. It describes her capacity to fly and hunt, and also to bring into form the "igneous mute," a basic energetic capacity not yet congealed into formal expression. While she was free, the bird's attunement to her environment is attested by her ease in soaring by "rallying thermals," finding the warm-air currents and gliding on them. Levinson describes the bird's ascent as "feathered incarnadine inception." Her "inception" is a self-willed beginning, the fleshy color of "incarnadine" shading toward red that codes her sanguine hunting life. The golden eagle becomes sanguine in flight, and ruddy, blood-stained, after her hunt. To her small prey, she delivered "manicured death," a quick assault.
<21> Now she is "raveled in the thorn comfort station:" she needs to keep hunting to eat, but the pleasure of being interconnected with a mobile natural world in which she had a "privileged lookout" over vast expanses of terrain has been circumscribed. Now, each hunt would be a painful reminder of her captivity. She will be hooded and controlled, the hood interfering with her "vision feasting" and the human's entrainment curtailing her "tipping/ hilarities to the Altay mountains alive with oneiric celebrity." The term "oneiric," while usually referring to the dream world, I take to refer to a condition of interconnectedness when self and context are not two, but swirl together.
<22> Not only does the bird tune to her environment, the power of her flight is such that she raises her surroundings to a new level of connectedness in which
Distal kingdoms of divisibility shatter
In original emergence
Words rousing at the world's ignition
Loading the wings with significance
-- molt perpecuities("Mongolian Eagle's Ascent" 53-57)
In response to the eagle's bold expression of her capabilities, the world ignites into language; new significance emerges as if written on the air by her passing wingtips.
<23> With her capture, the ecosystem that organizes partly around the food chain gives way to a manipulative reorganization that services humans at the expense of animals. Now, she is "netted through the spear of her hunger" into the humans' hunting plans, "tethered to their delectables-table." For her, "The underbelly of sustenance is erasement." A corollary of attunement may be that one does not feel like oneself in the absence of the interplay with a corresponding environment. In my observation, Raptors in cages often become morose. In the poem, the eagle's very self-definition as a soaring careening swooping bird is quenched. Now instead of eating to be nourished, she will be the middleman, her own purposes entrained. Her vital sense of herself as a wild, free creature "shoaled in magisterial buoyancy," is compromised. With her ankles tethered, she falls and rises like "a tin solider at a shooting arcade." From dynamic, self-initiated, large movement patterns, she is constrained to a mechanical up and down designed to wear down her resistance. From a bird with 'winged alacrity,' she has been reduced to a target - the target of human strategies. The humans can rely on her 'culpable biology': she will tire.
<24> Her protest consists in an absolute refusal to be a tamed servant of others' purposes. Instead, in self-cognizance, she initiates a "resistance so profound" that it will be her final act. The bird's self-direction in action is described as a kind of inscription, recalling David Abram's discussion of the expressiveness of the natural world: [16]
And with hot verbs calligraphying my wing
I scrum the playing cards of Falconiform ancestry
rostering strength to scrumble hurls of negation
a resistance so profound
that
in that moment I bolt upright
that they will count as energy Spent
my flapping will mount so severe
I will lunge into a nano-second of flightdelivering to them
a carcasswhile for myself
I reservea scrupulously articulated
soar
("Mongolian Eagle's Ascent" 62-76)
She withdraws her fate from the hands of her captors and writes herself a script in which she can experience, at least for a moment, her full capacity. In enacting her refusal, she interrupts not only her own captivity, but the historical tradition that forefronts the purposes of humans over that of wild animals. She becomes a culture hero for the free soaring birds, an analogy to Prometheus suggested by the poem's fire images. Although self-annihilating, she still triumphs in the realm of quality, by executing "a scrupulously articulated/soar."
<25> Certainly, I am not suggesting self-annihilation as an ethical response. As a symbolic, rather than historical, rendering, the poem presents a gesture of refusal by wild life to be tamed and circumscribed within human systems. As such, it serves as a reminder that anthropocentric approaches fail to take into account the feelings of appropriated "others." These feelings are entwined with the environments in which they developed their capacities and learned to thrive, or at least, survive.
<26> The poem also resonates back toward its domesticated human readers. If we are concerned about the environmental conditions of other embodied beings, then, from a standpoint of reciprocity, we might be equally concerned with our own opportunities for connection and attunement. Merleau-Ponty claims that, as a result of direct experience of the body and the world intertwined, we shall also rediscover ourselves as "the subject of perception" (Visible 206). The embodied person engaged in the world is there to be rediscovered, as much as are other living beings. I would claim that one is not only the subject, but also the recipient of the impression of contact with its multiple reverberations, to the extent that one is sensitive to them. The resonances of the poem point toward a sense of attunement with the environment that many may have relegated to deep storage. That environment is vast and varied compared to its domesticated residues. Emblematically, the eagle revises the past. Could humans, in a parallel way, revise our history of conceptual separation from our environmental roots?
<27> The eagle's soaring reenacts a sense of attunement developed through activity in the environment. She had developed through experience the correspondences that were available through her structural and functional capacities in relation to the constraints of the environment. Let me extrapolate from Levinson's eagle back to our own species and our first-person experience. As I noted earlier in this essay, our early experience in the environment leaves indelible traces in our nervous system which serve as guidance for our subsequent movement, sensory, and conceptual activities. In experiments involving distorted sensory experience, the participants become upset and confused. In contrast, I suggest, experiences of reciprocity reconfirm the neurological mappings we developed to make sense of the world. The reported moments of heightened awareness in natural settings reflect this resonance. Levinson's broad-winged bird could gesture, then, toward the recuperation of a past connectedness that is still inside us which might be recovered, not as form, but as an "igneous" reservoir of neural potentiality. From re-enlivening the enfolded geography, rekindling the junctures where we are not sharply delineated from the environment, new ecological expressions might emerge.
<28> While Levinson's eagle who soars the steppes of Mongolia presents a broad scale of natural inhabitation, Adrienne Rich's essay "Woman and Bird" reminds us that wild life passes through human habitations as well. Like Levinson, Rich's encounter includes an interest in language, in her case focused on human speech. Her encounter with a Great Blue Heron occurs in her own backyard. Rich acknowledges that the bird could have its own intentions; it is distinct and yet also connected to her through the ecosystem they share. She describes their encounter as a moment when their "trajectories crossed":
The Great Blue Heron is not a symbol. Wandered inadvertently or purposefully inland, maybe drought-driven, to a backyard habitat, it is a bird, Ardea herodias, whose form, dimensions, and habits have been described by ornithologists, yet whose intangible ways of being and knowing remain beyond my - or anyone's - reach. ... The tall, foot-poised creature had a life, a place of its own in the manifold, fragile system that is this coastline; a place of its own in the universe. Its place and mine, I believe, are equal and interdependent (What 7).
By recognizing the bird's niche in the ecosystem, its particular way of inhabiting their partially shared space, she defines a node in a local ecological network. By acknowledging the bird's distinctness as well as its relation to her, she also identifies an intersection point where their experiences can be partially shared. The passage continues:
Neither of us - woman or bird - is a symbol, despite efforts to make us that. But I needed to acknowledge the heron with speech, and by confirming its name. To it I brought the kind of thing my kind of creature does (What 7).
Rich does not want to reduce the bird to a symbol of some abstract meaning. She neither evaluates the bird relative to her own needs nor projects her feelings toward the bird. Instead, her attitude expresses an engaged impartiality. At the same time, she sees her act of confirming the bird's (scientist-assigned) name as an act of acknowledgment both of the bird and of herself as a language-user. Her action of naming brings the precision of a scientific discipline, but not in a way that separates science from creativity or feeling. It is also an act of connection, as Rich indicates by describing it as a movement: "to it [the bird] I brought the kind of thing my kind of creature does." Rich writes that the impulse of naming is linked to "plotting connections between and marking distinctions among, the elements presented to our senses," and could supersede the artificial cultural divisions between poetry, politics, and science (Arts 6). From such a perspective of appreciation without appropriation, a relation can begin that is replete with open-ended potential. As Rich expresses it, when two trajectories cross like this, "so begins the suggestion of multiple, many-layered, rather than singular meanings, wherever we look, in the ordinary world" (What 6). This musing points toward an attitude that could support relations across species, or other, boundaries.
<29> The heron has been classified, named, and studied by ornithologists, which brings it into a human knowledge system. At the same time, the scientific approach has not delved into the bird's "intangible ways of being and knowing," (Rich, What 7) which might remain, in accord with eco-phenomenologist Ted Toadvine's thesis, beyond human knowledge systems. To acknowledge that the meaning inherent in living form exceeds the explanatory models of science is to lead away from hierarchical models of control toward models of exchange, dialogue, and conversation.
<30> Rich negotiates a difficult balance between acknowledging the bird from her situated perspective and still allowing the bird a "place of its own" (What 7). She does not want to simply appropriate the heron as a symbol, bringing it entirely into her world. At the same time, to explore its multiply layered significance to her, she approaches the heron from her own located position as a human language user. When Rich looks for the bird's name in a guidebook to Pacific Coast ecology, she states, "I wanted to be sure I could name what I had seen; to stay with what I had seen. ... The color plate of the Great Blue Heron confirmed my naming" (What 4). The paradox contained with this passage is one inherent in embodied process. She wants to stay true to the experience, "to stay with what I had seen." At the same time, to fully comprehend the bird, she feels the need to identify it botanically so she can also "name what [she] had seen" (What 4). This urge takes her from the direct visual impression to text. At best, she is moving not from the sensory to the mental but in the direction of a full complement of embodiment, relating her visual perception to cognitive processes, conceptualizing the experience within one of her culture's knowledge systems. Then, on looking at bird's names, the network of associations that has connected her with the heron expands.
<31> In reading lists of bird names, Rich feels connected to the humans who had named the birds and recognizes an intersection point between botany and poetics. "Human eyes gazed at each of all these forms of life and saw resemblance in difference--the core of metaphor, that which lies close to the core of poetry itse1f..." (Rich, What 6). Rich proceeds to speculate about the process of human meaning construction. As her circle of associations widens out from the encounter with the heron, there remains a sense that she stays, not with the bird itself, but with its reverberations of meaning for her as a language user who is also preoccupied, at that moment, with contemplating the significance of the approaching turn of the century. From this point, after accumulating a rich complement of detail, Rich generalizes about how our culture has segregated different human ways of apprehending "the order and disorder of the world," what I refer to generally as the dynamic ecological processes. Although poetry, science, and politics might produce "electrical exchanges" if "triangulated," instead "over centuries, they have become separated--poetry from politics, poetic naming from scientific naming, an ostensibly "neutral" science from political questions, "rational" science from lyrical poetry..." (What 6). In insisting on viewing the world from a situated perspective that resists these divisions, Rich affirms a reciprocal ethical commitment toward those whose trajectories intersect ours.
<32> Parallel to the cultural divisions Rich enumerates are the internal divisions between conceptual processes and other components of embodiment such as feeling and sensation. I have suggested that a reconnection of these divided parts would further our capacity for exchanges with other species. In accord with Toadvine's perception, it seems appropriate to approach another with the acknowledgement that our perceptions are limited by our cognitive capacities. An additional layer of limitation, though, derives from our habits of interpretation. In moments when we experience a correspondence with the world around us that exceeds our customary categories, we are available for exploring reciprocal relations.
<33> Poetry, as well as direct encounter, can engender a more fully embodied response. The poet Jorie Graham comments on poetry's resistance to conceptual appropriation:
Listening to the poem, I could feel my irritable reaching after fact, my desire for resolution, graspable meaning, ownership. I wanted to narrow it. ... It resisted. It compelled me to let go. The frontal, grasping motion frustrated, my intuition was forced awake. I felt myself having to "listen" with other parts of my sensibility, felt my mind being forced back down into the soil of my senses. And I saw that it was the resistance of the poem--its occlusion, or difficulty - that was healing me, forcing me to privilege my heart, my intuition - parts of my sensibility infrequently called upon in my everyday experience in the marketplace of things and ideas. I found myself feeling, as the poem ended, that some crucial muscle that might have otherwise atrophied from lack of use had been exercised.
Interestingly, Graham settles on the same word, "grasping" that Varela and colleagues use in describing the human tendency toward appropriation. Graham emphasizes poetry's call toward a fully embodied response, not just a "frontal" or conceptual one. I include her passage not to argue that poetry always exceeds prose in its capacity to elicit embodied engagement. What interests me is her affirmation that such a response exercises faculties that are in danger of atrophy, and that these faculties also offer a more expansive response than one of "grasping" or conceptual appropriation. In approaching either a direct encounter or its description in language, a willingness to be surprised and refreshed by a wider spectrum of impressions could help reawaken our contextual sensitivity. From such a more fully embodied response, one would be more able to engage in a meaningful exchange with another.
<34> While the concrete and imagined encounters described by these writers will not, of themselves, solve our ecological dilemmas, they suggest entry points for reconsidering the intertwined places of multiple life forms. To conceptualize intersections where exchange and "conversation" can occur without collapsing differences between individuals and species is a step in the direction of reciprocal relations.
Works Cited
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Pantheon Books, 1996.
Capra, Fritjof. The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems. New York: Anchor, 1997.
Graham, Jorie. "Introduction to Best American Poetry 1990 ." 20 January 2007. <http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16612>.
Haraway, Donna J. "A Game of Cat's Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies." Configurations 2.1 (1994) 59- 71.
---. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. New York: Routledge, 1991.
---. "The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerated Politics for Inappropriate/d Others." Cultural Studies . Eds. Lawrence Grossberg et. al. New York: Routledge, 1992. 295-337.
Leder, Drew. The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Levinson, Heller. "Mongolian Eagle's Ascent." ToxiCity: Poems of the Coconut Vulva. Berthoud, CO: Howling Dog Press, 2005, 36-29.
McNew, Janet. "Mary Oliver and the Tradition of Romantic Nature Poetry." Contemporary Literature 30:1 (Spring 1989): 59 - 77.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Phenomenology of Perception. 10th ed. Trans. Colin Smith. New York: Routledge, 1996. (Originally published in 1978).
---. The Visible and the Invisible. 4th ed. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997. (Originally published in 1969).
Millard, Candice S. "Hunting with Eagles." National Geographic 196.3 (September 1999): 90-104. Academic Search Premier. 3 November 2006. <www.web.ebscohost.com.>.
Newell, Mary. "Embodied Mutuality: Reconnecting to Environment and Self in Terry Tempest Williams's An Unspoken Hunger." Surveying the Literary Landscapes of Terry Tempest Williams: New Critical Essays . Eds. Katherine Chandler and Melissa Goldthwaite. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2003. 27-46.
Oliver, Mary. House of Light. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990.
---. Owls and Other Fantasies. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003.
---. What Do We Know? Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002.
---. Why I Wake Early. Cambridge, MA: Beacon Press, 2004.
Rich, Adrienne. Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991.
---. What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.
Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990.
Stoller, Silvia. "Reflections on Feminist Merleau-Ponty Skepticism." Hypatia 15.1 (2000), 175-182.
Toadvine, Ted. "The Primacy of Desire and its Ecological Consequences." Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself . Eds. Charles S. Brown and Ted Toadvine. 139-155.
Varela, Francisco, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.
Notes
[1] "The Promises of Monsters," 298. As Haraway points out, "Feminist embodiment, then, is not about fixed location in a reified body, female or otherwise, but about nodes in fields, inflections in orientations, and responsibility for difference in material-semiotic fields of meaning" (Simians 195). "Material-semiotic" refers to the conjoining of material bodies with modes of knowledge and interpretation. To bring together bodies and meaning, to ground knowledge in embodiment is, as Donna Haraway says, to support "the hope for livable worlds" ("Game" 60). [^]
[2] Haraway, Simians 198. [^]
[3] See Newell, "Embodied Mutuality" for a discussion of kinesthetic conversations. [^]
[4] This is the quote in full: "Historically specific human relations with 'nature' must somehow - linguistically, ethically, scientifically, politically, technologically, and epistemologically - be imagined as genuinely social and actively relational; and yet the partners remain utterly unhomogenous" (Simians 3). In addition to humans and other organisms, Haraway includes technological constructions as actors to include in relational paradigms. She and N. Katherine Hayles both try to investigate how situated positions can function within technologically-inflected contexts. Although this direction is beyond the scope of my project, I think it is important to acknowledge that technology is part of our environment. [^]
[5] Appropriation, in this usage, is based on a subject/object dichotomy in which I, as a human individual, have some degree of importance, whereas entities in the natural world are merely resources for my needs and desires. Appropriation is based on an anthropocentric view that only humans matter, and on an egocentric acquisitiveness. Such attitudes have been discussed by ecofeminists such as Val Plumwood, Patrick Murphy and Carolyn Merchant. Cf. Carolyn Merchant, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture . New York: Routledge, 2003 andThe Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. 1980. San Francisco: Harper, 1990; Patrick D. Murphy, "Ground, Pivot, Motion: Ecofeminist Theory, Dialogics, and Literary Practice." Hypatia 6.1 (Spring 1991): 146-162 and Literature, Nature, Other: Ecofeminist Critiques. Albany: SUNY Press, 1995; Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1993 and "Nature, Self, and Gender: Feminism, environmental philosophy, and the critique of rationalism." Hypatia 6.1 (Spring 1991): 3-28. [^]
[6] Varela, Thompson and Rosch locate the root of many social inequalities in this basic, ego-centered tendency. "Grasping can be expressed not only individually as fixation on ego-self but also collectively. ... If our task in the years ahead... is to build and dwell in a planetary world, then we must learn to uproot and release the grasping tendency, especially in its collective manifestations" (254). The authors' proposal connects a basic embodied tendency with large-scale events as well as immediate ones, and demonstrates how ethics involves not only policy making, but also everyday practices. [^]
[7] "Pipefish" is published in the volume, House of Light, 1990. [^]
[8] Oliver's commitment toward non-appropriation corresponds with many strains of ecological and ethical thought. It has been shown that the disruption of habitat or food source for even minor species can have far-reaching effects because of their interconnectedness with other species. [^]
[9] For more information on the cerebral structure and functioning, see Kandel, Eric R., James H. Schwartz, and Thomas M. Jessell. Principles of Neural Science. McGraw-Hill/Appleton & Lange; 4th edition (January 5, 2000). [^]
[10] Last Night the Rain ..." is published in Oliver's 2002 volume, What Do We Know. [^]
[11] McNew, citing the studies of Carol Christ and Nancy Chodorow, attributes to Oliver the capacity of "less rigid boundaries" because of gender. Statistically females have more innervation in the corpus callosum, which would facilitate left/right brains shifts. It is time to revisit these studies to see if similar patterns are found or if the differences turn out to be conditioned by early enculturation. In any case, no one has established that styles of relating in human groups would carry over into human/nature encounters. [^]
[12] Merleau-Ponty develops the construct of reversibility in The Visible and the Invisible from his former discussion of role reversal in the hands alternately touching each other. [^]
[13] "The Best I Could Do" is published in Why I Wake Early (2004) . [^]
[14] The original article is listed in the Works Cited under author Candice Millard. [^]
[15] Millard, Candice 98. [^]
[16] Cf. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous. Abram offers a current reading of a phenomenological approach to ecocriticism. He emphasizes the expressiveness of the natural world. From this perspective, human language is not a discrete phenomenon, but a node on an expressive continuum. [^]
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