I've been thinking about reading today, because I was asked to provide a sort of mission statement for my other blog on ecocritical interpretations of poetry. I thought you might like to see it here.
Aside from other kinds of ecological reading, like exploring the nature imagery in a poem, or looking for how a writer talks about pollution, there's looking at artistic form as ecological. As in “environmental art”—art that makes you aware of space. More on this in later posts.
But there's a still further way of engaging with ecological reading, and that's my theory that reading itself is an ecological act. And this is what I lay out below.
I feel quite good today, like this critique thing might even work, you know? More on this soon I hope: but basically, you don't have to jump outside the Universe or pull yourselves up by your own hair. It's all possible, because reality is full of holes (4000 of them in Blackburn, Lancashire alone, I hear).
So here goes. Let me know if it works.
The ecological thought—mission statement
Think of a Rorschach blot: as well as looking like a cloud or a person, it is just a meaningless stain. Aside from content and form, texts are blobs of others' enjoyment, literally—they are made of ink—and less literally, but still fantasy is a part of reality. Therefore reading is fundamentally coexistence with others. To read a poem is a political act, a nonviolent one. At the very least, there is an appreciation, with no particular reason, of another's enjoyment. I would argue that (at least closely analytical) reading goes beyond mere toleration, towards a more difficult, disturbing, and potentially traumatic encounter with enjoyment—which is always “of the other,” even when it's your own.
Reading a text is a profoundly ecological act, because ecology, at bottom, is coexistence (with others, of course), which implies interdependence. What I call the ecological thought is the thinking of this coexistence and interdependence to the fullest possible extent of which we are capable. If we are going to make it through the next few decades, we will have explored deeply the implications of coexistence.
Some of these implications are highly disturbing to “environmentalist” ideology: that we are not living in a “world”; that there is no Nature; that holism is untenable; that personhood is a form of artificial intelligence; that ecology is queer down to the genomic level, and so on. These highly counterintuitive conclusions are forced on us by the ecological thought itself, which is thinking coexistence, coexistence as thinking.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is about reading as coexistence beyond mere toleration. On many levels, it presents ecological coexistence as a theme. At its most profound, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner forces us to coexist with coexistence itself, with the meaningless distortion of the real. It is a poem whose reading helps us to think the ecological thought. My blog is a contribution to this project. I am finishing a book called The Ecological Thought in which I explore these issues in a different way.