by Lynn Keller
This passage illuminates the intertwining of environmental with aesthetic aims—wanting to appreciate both the needs and the brilliance of the other in what Haraway calls “significant otherness-in-connection”10—while it implicitly acknowledges that the poetry derived from such listening may reveal as much about the humbling limitations of our own senses and sign systems as about other animals.
The notion of becoming the other, “even briefly,” is fraught; the degree to which humans can empathize with or enter into the experience or perspective of other animals has been a crucial debate in critical animal studies. Because all three poets discussed here produce some kind of translation of nonhuman experience or signals into human language, it’s worth laying out these debates more fully and positioning the poets’ work within them. Matthew Calarco’s useful three-part schematization of recent theoretical approaches to human–animal relations, each with its strengths and limitations, can frame this discussion. The first is an identity-based approach whose advocates “seek to establish a relevantly similar moral identity between human beings and animals.” Such thinkers have effectively challenged a simplistic binary between human and animal, but their position has been criticized for its logocentrism and persistent anthropocentrism; quintessentially human traits provide rational grounds for extending (or not extending) moral status to particular nonhuman species. The second is a difference-based approach, represented by Derrida, that involves not the old, humanist dichotomy between animals and humans, but an “exploration of the nonanthropocentric dimensions of post- or antihumanism.” This approach avoids both logocentrism and anthropocentrism, but tends to present Human and Animal as monolithic categories so that “complicated lines of mutual affect and relation” are obscured. Moreover, its reinforcement of difference between human and animal, Calarco argues, plays into the powerful received binary. The third approach, which Calarco believes warrants more development and attention, he labels indistinction: these thinkers are trying to identify “new modes of thought and practice beyond the human/animal distinction” that would “enable alternative modes of living, relating, and being with others of all sorts (human and nonhuman).” Haraway’s work exemplifies this approach that reflects a “desire to inhabit the world from perspectives other than those of the classically human subject and to explore the passions and potentials that are found in such spaces of encounter.”11
The identity-based perspective is well represented by J. M. Coetzee’s character Elizabeth Costello, who asserts “there is no limit to the extent to which we can think ourselves into the being of another. There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination.” A novelist like her creator, this character claims she can think her way “into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life”; she asserts that Ted Hughes does that in some of his animal poems, which she says don’t inhabit another mind but rather another body.12
Her mention of a bat is part of her attempt to refute the difference-based view of Thomas Nagel in his widely known philosophical essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” There, Nagel observes that because our experience as humans provides the basis for our imagination, its range is limited. I can imagine “only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves” but not what it is like for a bat to be a bat, Nagel argues. He reasons that the experience of any species has “a specific subjective character, which it is beyond our ability to conceive.” “If extrapolation from our own case is involved in the idea of what it is like to be a bat, the extrapolation must be incompletable.” However, he acknowledges in a footnote the possibility that the imagination might extend such extrapolation: “It may be easier than I suppose to transcend inter-species barriers with the aid of the imagination. For example, blind people are able to detect objects near them by a form of sonar, using vocal clicks or taps of a cane. Perhaps if one knew what that was like, one could by extension imagine roughly what it was like to possess the much more refined sonar of a bat. The distance between oneself and other persons and other species can fall anywhere on a continuum.”13 In a more recent work than Nagel’s, which urges respect for difference, Kate Soper cautions that it is anthropocentric “to assume that our desires and capacities offer direct access to knowledge of their ‘analogues’ in the worlds and life-styles of other species.” She presents a forceful critique of the current romance with “ ‘transgressive border crossing,’ ” challenging the logic and the political ramifications of the popular “refusal to treat the differences between humans and other animals as anything but matters of degree within an essential ontological continuity.”14 Soper denies that a fluid sense of the divide between the human and the animal necessarily will yield more ecofriendly policies or less tolerance for mistreatment of animals, pointing instead to its possible dystopian consequences.
Yet Haraway, who focuses on the co-constitutive relationships between animals and humans, places far more hope in cultivating awareness of what Calarco calls indistinction. Comments from several of the poets suggest that they, too, are exploring this territory of indistinction, though in ways that avoid anthropocentrism or making the subaltern speak and that maintain a respect for interspecies differences. None of these poets claims really to perceive, or speak, from another species’ point of view à la Costello. For instance, while noting the benefits of listening in a way that expands both “the boundaries of what we allow to be language” and the “realm of ‘linguistic beings,’ ” Gladding expresses the hope that the poems that result from her own listening to the language of bark beetles will be “closer . . . to translation than to imposition, to play than to betrayal,” but she acknowledges “there’s always the danger of making things up.”15 Her stated aim is to skirt that danger and remain in a collaborative relation with the beings she works with. Yet even as Gladding engages in imaginative translation—“trying to stretch beyond my own frame of reference as a human in the world and to think of other beings as linguistic”—she isn’t making truth claims about that thinking; “I’m not making the argument that they are,” she adds.16 She implies that what’s of value is the stretch, the attempt to expand beyond human beings’ usual perceptions, and in so doing possibly to gain some knowledge or wisdom about and from the nonhuman other. We’ll see that the work of the poets under consideration here suggests a faith that what Nagel reminds us are necessarily partial imaginings may nonetheless help us see the world differently.
Importantly, Skinner, Gladding, and a.rawlings approach the nonhumans represented in their poetry as real beings who occupy particular ecological webs and have distinctive habitats, behaviors, and life cycles. In an environmental context, it’s significant that the species these poets write about are not particularly threatened; the poems are not composed to wrench heartstrings in service of any “Save the Whales”–style campaign. Indeed, at least some species of the bark beetles whose material language Gladding translates tend to be seen as the enemy by conservationists, among others: thanks to drought and climate change, native mountain pine beetles are killing off millions of acres of especially lodgepole and Ponderosa pines in the western United States and Canada (and affecting birds, bears, and other species in the process). Producing vast dead forests and thereby reducing carbon sequestration, the beetles are part of a feedback loop that intensifies global warming. But that does not diminish Gladding’s interest in this family of beetles (Scolytinae) or her admiration for the beauty of the engravings their larvae produce in the bark of the trees they inhabit.
The conspicuous differences between a beetle or a beetle larva and an adult female human—or between moths or songbirds and humans—ensure readers’ awareness of the divergences between the species’ experiences of the phenomenal world we all, though with very different sensory equipment, occupy. As I ponder the images of tunneled bark that Gladding includes in her Translations from Bark Beetle, it’s clear to me that she is indeed “making things up.” But this is not necessarily problematic. For as she translat
es the larval tracks into a grammar that relies on a pronoun that does not distinguish between first and second person or singular and plural, in which prepositional phrases are particularly important and verbs are in either “the cyclical or the radiant” tense, her inventions reflect an ethically disciplined imagination of otherness.17 Her “translations” evidently emerge from careful sympathetic attention to the shapes and trajectories of the channels beetle larvae carve, mindful of the creatures’ life cycles, of what is known about their communication systems and their particular ecological needs.
By focusing their curiosity on nonmammalian animals, these three poets reduce the likelihood of their poetry enacting the romanticized and “sentimental glorification of humans’ proximity with animals” that Rosi Braidotti observes is “especially problematic in contemporary culture.”18 Because they do not write about creatures who can easily be made to seem like humans, they avoid the problematic tendency evident in identity-based philosophical discourse to “allocate moral consideration to non-human beings entirely on the basis of their similarity to the human.” Instead, they encourage recognition of these independent beings as having “potential needs, excellences and claims to flourish of their own.”19
Additionally, animals do not function in these poems simply or primarily as figures for exploring the “animal within” the human, although in the sensual fabric of a.rawlings’s Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists human animality does come to the fore. Exploring the animal within humans is potentially an environmentalist project as it attempts an opening of human senses that, in David Abram’s words, “own[s] up to being . . . a creature of earth.”20 Such projects are most curious about the human rather than the other, however, while the works examined here seek greater understanding of nonhuman species. In different degrees and forms these three poets do suggest the possibility of temporarily merging the other’s experience with their own or approximating another’s language with human voicing. While they approach that expansion of perception and expression through focused attention on the other, they also recognize their translation or transmutation of other-than-human expression as, in Skinner’s terms, a performance.
In their exploration of nonlinguistic communication by earth others, then, these poets are engaged in something far less presumptuous and less extreme than the “conceptual meltdown,” the abandonment of ontological discrimination that Soper sees in the trendy dissolution of boundaries.21 The figure Skinner employs of performing karaoke, for instance, captures an amused self-consciousness about the limitations of his own attempts to “translate” bird vocalization. After all, karaoke—Japanese for “empty orchestra”—is a form of entertainment in which the real star is absent and the aspiring amateur singing in his or her place is almost always a poor substitute. Skinner describes his “performance genre” of Birdsong Karaoke as follows: “I play back birdsong at half or quarter speed and read or sing along lyrics composed to fit the bird’s tune. The bird is the composer and I am just trying to sing along with my poor human vocal cords. I often fail, but where there is a match, it’s as though I get to be the bird, for a brief instant, and the audience gets to hear birdsong in human language. If all that comes of the experiment is heightened attention to the specifics of these avian performances, then I am happy.” He adds in the next paragraph: “The text, or language, exists wholly within the world of the human” and goes on to explain the sources for his poem, “Countersong: Rising and Falling,” which re-scripts the duet of two hermit thrushes, in movies he had recently seen or was half-watching while typing, as well as in the topography over which his airplane was flying as he wrote.22 The experiment enacts an openness to varied aspects of the poet’s environment, including but not limited to his repeated listenings to the recorded birdsong. His is a form of translation that aims to expose the wondrous intricacy of bird communication, and to re-code, without presuming to de-code, its content.
Of the three poets treated here, a.rawlings would seem most to participate in the contemporary ethos of species blurring that Soper deplores. As will shortly become clear, I think it one of the remarkable achievements of a.rawlings’s Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists that it manages through varied devices frequently to blur the otherwise obviously divergent embodied experiences of moths and humans. I would argue that producing moments of porosity between species, as she does, need not constitute an eradication of distinctions between those species or an appropriative speaking for the other. To imagine sensorily vivid shared experiences is not to claim unobstructed channels of empathy running between species. It can, however, foster more ready sympathy, compassion, appreciation, and respectful concern on the part of the planet’s now dominant animal.
The work of ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood, which, like Haraway’s, represents Calarco’s indistinction approach, illuminates the poetry under consideration here. Plumwood agrees with Soper and many other environmental thinkers that anthropocentrism is deeply problematic: “To the extent that anthropocentric frameworks prevent us from experiencing the others of nature in their fullness, we not only help to imperil ourselves through loss of sensitivity but also deprive ourselves of the unique kinds of richness and joy the encounter with the more-than-human presences of nature can provide.” But Plumwood distinguishes anthropocentrism, which she contends is as avoidable as ethnocentrism or androcentrism, from an inescapable “epistemic locatedness” (what we saw Nagel exploring); the latter does not preclude empathy or the broadening of ethical concern beyond the self. She proposes that we “need a reconception of the human self in more mutualistic terms as a self-in-relationship with nature, formed not in the drive for mastery and control of the other but in a balance of mutual transformation and negotiation.” Such a reconception seems to her possible. It requires being open to and aware of the potential agency and communicative powers of earth others—potentialities “that are closed off to us in the reductive model that strips intentional qualities from out of nature and hands them back to us as ‘our projections’ ”:
To treat the other as a potentially intentional and communicative being and narrative subject is part of moving from monological modes of encounter (such as those of anthropocentrism) to dialogical modes of encounter. Communicative models of relationships with nature and animals can improve our receptivity and responsiveness, which clearly need much improvement. They seem likely to offer us a better chance of survival in the difficult times ahead than dominant mechanistic models which promote insensitivity to the others’ agency and denial of our dependency on them. This clash of models is critical for our times.23
Sharing Plumwood’s sense of potential agency and intentionality in earth others, a.rawlings, Gladding, and Skinner work to generate just such communicative models. Their interest in the specifics of particular species’ life cycles, sensory capabilities, and ecological needs perhaps suggests a degree of sympathy with those who think in terms of difference, while their attempt to render animal communication in English might be seen as participating in the logocentrism of the identity camp. But most fundamentally they are aligned with the indistinction thinkers like Plumwood, who “aim to have us notice and attend to the fact that what our culture takes to be ‘mere’ animals are capable of entering into modes of relation and ways of life that can never be fully anticipated.”24
Calarco’s phrase “our culture” is a reminder that not all cultures have the reductive perspective on animals evident in the modern West. To complete my framing of the poets’ thinking about their linguistic representations of animal others, I turn to observations the ethnobotanist Robin Wall Kimmerer offers about the cultural perspective of her Potawatomi ancestors. I do so because her insights highlight the key role that language plays in people’s ways of thinking about earth others. Her meditations on one Native American “grammar of animacy” underscore the potential importance of experimental poetics for transforming the relations that English speakers perceive and enact with earth others.
In her essay “Learning the
Grammar of Animacy,” Kimmerer, a member of the Potawatomi tribe (one of the Ojibwe or Anishinaabe peoples of North America), recounts her experiences trying to learn the Potawatomi language—a tremendously difficult challenge because Potawatomi differs so profoundly from English, both in its grammatical structures and in the worldview they convey. Where English is noun-based, Potawatomi is 70 percent verbs. Moreover, in Potawatomi, both nouns and verbs are classified as either “animate” or “inanimate”: “Pronouns, articles, plurals, demonstratives, verbs . . . are all aligned in Potawatomi to provide different ways to speak of the living world and the lifeless one. Different verb forms, different plurals, different everything apply depending on whether what you are speaking of is alive.” Kimmerer recounts being stunned when she learned of the word Puhpowee, meaning “ ‘the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight,’ ” for “the makers of this word understood a world of being, full of unseen energies that animate everything.”25
The difficulties of learning Potawatomi were so great that Kimmerer was on the verge of giving up the struggle, until a revelatory moment when she encountered the verb wiikwegamaa, which means “to be a bay.” She recalls:
In that moment I could smell the water of the bay, watch it rock against the shore and hear it sift onto the sand. A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikegamaa—to be a bay—releases the water from bondage and lets it live. “To be a bay” holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers.