Richard Kerridge wrote:
Where does this leave poetry, and other nature-writing? I
guess - following the recent exchanges on
`openness' - an ecologically-aware poetry would be one
which was not only prepared to see the natural world
in more ecocentric terms, but was willing to mix the
pastoral and industrial discourses.
Thanks, Richard, for your cogent summary of where nature is with us
in Britain and how it got us there, as one might say. I particularly
respond to your last para, having been interested in writing about
plantations which are precisely units of industrial production as
well as tree-reserves in a more eco sense. It's harder to apply that
to broiler-houses, though. I think you're right also about the
durable nature of pastoral(though the British landscape/rural
communities aspect is surely now an area of total contention and it
can only be a benighted minority who take it for granted). Pastoral
endures as an object of desire, and that, to me, is the most
interesting aspect to it. I know we revisionist moderns would
like to siphon off the nostalgia in favour of
some more strenuous, authentic set of pressure-relations, but
nostalgia may still be the emotion which initiates, the primary
provocation. And it may have its uses, as a questioner OF the
reach of the problematic, rather than another problematic question.
But why take out the nostalgia from nature anymore than you would
take the erotic out of sex? They both have liabilities, but they are
the desiring forms we have.
That's why an ecological awareness of the dynamics of the human
within/across nature is fine,but it doesn't of itself give us a
poetics of nature, though may give us some clues. In this area, if we
start with ourselves we won't end up with ourselves. So this is and
isn't personalist. Nor does nature become some abstract other,
given that human beings remain in desiring relation to it. I respect
John's uses of abjection as an insight into the fallout of desire,
but I hold to a "purity of horizon" too as a sort of prime mover.
It's precisely that which nature doesn't guarantee, provides for but
out a scarcity of not rendering it a swirl of necessary
association or a swerve into the tangible swirls of decreation.
Peter
Peter Larkin
Philosophy & Literature Librarian
University of Warwick Library
Coventry CV4 7AL UK
Tel: 01203 528151 Fax: 01203 524211
Email: [log in to unmask]
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