The ecological thought consists in intimacy with the strange stranger. We can’t ever predict exactly who or what strange strangers are, whether they are a “who” or a “what.” If we can, then we are still clinging to a reified concept of Nature, whether it’s the old school version or some new and improved version. When the Mariner looks at the water snakes, he is not, as he says, “Alone, alone, all all alone” (4.232). He is coexisting with other beings that “liv[e] on”: “And a thousand thousand slimy things / Liv’d on; and so did I” (4.239–240). Darwin argues that human sympathy derives from the basic social instincts of other sentient beings.95 He provides many examples of nonhumans acting with seeming sympathy. What the Mariner learns is how true sympathy comes from social feeling—the awareness of coexistence.
The ecological thought needs to develop an ethical attitude we might call “coexistentialism.”96 The Mariner hails the albatross, then the sailors “hulloo” it like a hunting dog, then the Mariner shoots it like prey. There is a descent in this progression. If we regard the albatross, the churning sea “like a witch’s oils” (2.129), the frightful, viral face (“as white as leprosy”; 3.192) of “Life-in-Death” (3.193), and the water snakes (4.273–281) as four modes of the same encounter, we witness the Mariner ignoring the ethical entanglement with the other, then restarting it (or letting it restart) from an unimaginably nightmarish ground. The disturbing, inert passivity of life forms is the zero level of this encounter. This “feminine” inertia is the ground of coexistentialism.97 What we encounter in the face of the female Life-in-Death isn’t some utterly hostile violence but a sickened hunger and vulnerability, whose very presence condemns us: “‘The game is done! I’ve won, I’ve won!’ / Quoth she, and whistles thrice”—her strange vocalization is uncanny, inhuman (3.197–198). “Life-in-Death” is a pretty good description of a virus. Coleridge confronts us with the disturbingly non-thin, nonrigid boundary between life and nonlife.
Interconnection implies separateness and difference. There would be no mesh if there were no strange strangers.98 The mesh isn’t a background against which the strange stranger appears. It is the entanglement of all strangers. Consider some poetry concerning strangers. At his most visionary, William Wordsworth loses his vision. The epiphanies in his masterwork, The Prelude, involve blanking out. Just like our experience of identity in the mesh, these “spots of time” are often “less than” what the reader is expecting. Wordsworth’s loss of bearings is common in traumatic experiences. When you’re in a car crash, time seems to slow down, even stop; everything seems unreal. In such moments, Wordsworth experiences himself as the strange stranger. Then there are the people Wordsworth meets. Like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, these arrivals are unexpected. The encounter with the strange stranger breaks the cycle of sameness.
Wordsworth’s particular genius is in seeing the environment incarnated in a unique person. The environment includes human history. Wordsworth is one of the greatest war poets, partly because the disturbing subtlety of his war references creeps up on us, like a figure emerging from a distance. “Old Man Travelling; Animal Tranquillity and Decay, a Sketch” suggestively links the human and “animal” realms. The poem resembles an excerpt from a picaresque novel. Perhaps the ecological thought is picaresque—wandering from place to place, open to random encounters.
The little hedge-row birds,
That peck along the road, regard him not.
He travels on, and in his face, his step,
His gait, is one expression; every limb,
His look and bending figure, all bespeak
A man who does not move with pain, but moves
With thought—He is insensibly subdued
To settled quiet: he is one by whom
All effort seems forgotten, one to whom
Long patience has such mild composure given,
That patience now doth seem a thing, of which
He hath no need. He is by nature led
To peace so perfect, that the young behold
With envy, what the old man hardly feels.
—I asked him whither he was bound, and what
The object of his journey; he replied
“Sir! I am going many miles to take
A last leave of my son, a mariner,
Who from a sea-fight has been brought to Falmouth,
And there is dying in an hospital.”99
The way the line “The little hedgerow birds” hangs in space—incomplete, accidental—wonderfully suggests the contemplative quiet that settles over this poem. We’re looking at the old man from the point of view of someone who sees the birds not “regarding” (line 2)—they remain unconcerned that a human is passing. This image of unseeing is far more prosaic than Milton’s imagery and more haunting. The narrator is in wonder about the birds as much as about the old man.
The birds “peck along the road” (2)—“peck along” suggests tiny movements, something halfway between tiptoeing and nibbling, and something to do with thinking, which the old man’s gait also conveys. “Peck along” evokes “chew over.” We can’t resist the slightly creepy conclusion that there is almost no one there.100 What is remarkable about the old man is how unremarkable he is. He isn’t even remarkable to himself—“He is insensibly subdued / To settled quiet” (7–8). “Subdued” suggests being beaten down, the posture of a loser, but not an extraordinary loss, at least not at this point in the poem. The old man has given up. He is unaware of how he appears in the eyes of the other, in the envious “young” (14). The poem shows us how the strange stranger can be strange in his ordinariness, surprising in his mildness and passivity. The poem is pregnant with thought, and finally with grief, for the old man is going to visit his dying son. This isn’t the only Wordsworth poem in which grief emerges from a sustained engagement with an environment.
The big picture in the poem is that war is environmental—it seeps into everything, even into the sight of an old man treading down a country lane. Wordsworth is one of the most powerful antiwar poets of all time, precisely because he writes about war in a sidelong way. Rather than presenting full frontal violence, he shows how war is everywhere: we see it on the television in our living room, we read it in the paper lying on the driveway, we feel it in the quiet tread of the old man. War is displacement in multiple dimensions: the son who dies before the father, the people sent to a foreign land, the way a “Nature poem” becomes a war poem. Isn’t this why ecological art must learn from the art of wartime? In a global environmental emergency, there is no safe place. Ordinary things like birds pecking along a road become pregnant with larger significance.
War is also about the unexpected encounter. “Strange Meeting” is Wilfred Owen’s poem about a British soldier meeting a German one in a weird space between life and death. In Wordsworth’s poem, something apparently simple, inevitable, and obvious becomes strange, intimate, and painful. The ecological thought demands that we encounter the strange stranger on many levels and on many scales: from the bacteria in our gut to birds slick with oil to displaced victims of a hurricane. At the same time that we awaken to the ecological catastrophe that has already occurred, we’re waking up to the fact that there was no Nature, no ground beneath our ontological feet. This is war, from the viewpoint of the weak and the indigent. This is realizing that we’re always already responsible for the other.101
The old man in Wordsworth’s poem emerges as if from a background of which he is part, a background of unconscious coexistence (the birds “regard him not”; 2). It’s like the moment in the film Contact where Jodi Foster’s character Dr. Arroway meets the alien—the environment shimmers and the figure of a man emerges in a “strange distortion.”102 When the environment becomes intimate—as it is in our age of ecological panic—it no longer remains an environment. The seemingly smooth transition of the poem as it flows down the page, in Wordsworth’s beautifully open blank verse, belies the torsion and distortion of those final words about the dying son. In the same way, the e
cological thought creeps over us to deliver a message of unbearable intimacy.
THE POETICS OF ANYWHERE
The strange stranger affects ideas of place and space. The essence of the local isn’t familiarity but the uncanny, the strangely familiar and familiarly strange. The experience of the local is the profound experience of strangeness. Any poem by John Clare, an actual peasant, will satisfy your curiosity. Mull over the first line of “Autumn Birds”: “The wild duck startles like a sudden thought.”103 The mind and the world it perceives are there, all at once, but not as a nice, integrated, “fitting” whole. Who is startling whom? Think of the baby mice in “Mouse’s Nest,” disturbingly alive in their extended phenotype of glistening pools:When out an old mouse bolted in the wheat
With all her young ones hanging at her teats
She looked so odd and so grotesque to me.
(5–7)
The absolute “thereness” of the location stops you dead, at the same time as it leaves you high and dry: “The water o’er the pebbles scarce could run / And broad old sexpools glittered in the sun” (13–14).104 The Edenic local, by contrast, is a cheap imitation, the product of a society that displaces itself, that produces not just space junk but also junkspace. “Junkspace” is architect Rem Koolhaas’ term for how space itself becomes part of the junk of a throwaway culture.105
Levinas evokes the “thereness of location” hauntingly when he refers to environments as “the element”: “One is steeped in it.”106 Yet although Levinas says, “The element separates us from the infinite,” it might be the platform for coexistentialism.107 Levinas appears to concur when he describes “naked” existence as “not entirely absorbed in [the] form [of things].... They are always in some respect like those industrial cities where everything is adapted to a goal of production, but which, full of smoke, full of wastes and sadness, exist also for themselves. For a thing nudity is the surplus of its being over its finality.”108 In modern junkspace, there is more infinity. As Andrei Tarkovsky understands in his intimate panning shots over pools full of detritus, waste and pollution are the face of the infinite (for Tarkovsky himself, the face of God). Levinas is profoundly ecological when he asserts, “A thing exists in the midst of its wastes.”109 Junkspace reveals this fact in a naked way.
We must therefore examine a different form of the strange stranger—the environment. Strange strangers are all around us, so let’s consider this “all around” quality. Environments are made up of strange strangers. The phenotype produced by the genetic genotype includes the environment, like a beaver’s dam or a mouse’s nest.110 Environments coevolve with organisms. 111 The world looks the way it looks because of life forms. The environment doesn’t “exist” apart from them. The philosopher Georges Bataille had a suggestive phrase for “animal” existence: it’s like “water in water.”112 The last parts of The Origin of Species show that climate, environment, and place are not strong determinants of living beings. Contrary to the beliefs of German Romantic thinkers such as Humboldt and Herder, there is no special “environment” separate from living organisms that somehow conditions their qualities. This belief in a special environment is a symptom of nationalism, and it’s time to drop it. The ecological thought cannot abide national boundaries. This is another good thing about “Tibetans in space”: nomads would never have developed ideas like Humboldt’s and Herder’s.
Sigmund Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” is essential for thinking the ecological thought. The uncanny exists because we’re always somewhere. Repetition, with its play of familiarity and difference, is thus possible. Freud’s examples of being lost in a forest or a city, and of repeatedly returning to the same spot, emerge because of the existence of environments such as forests and cities:[A] recurrence of the same situations, things, and events ... awaken[s] an uncanny feeling, which recalls that sense of helplessness sometimes experienced in dreams. Once, as I was walking through the deserted streets of a provincial town in Italy which was strange to me, on a hot summer afternoon, I found myself in a quarter the character of which could not long remain in doubt. Nothing but painted women were to be seen at the windows of the small houses, and I hastened to leave the narrow street at the next turning. But after having wandered about for a while ... I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my presence was now beginning to excite attention. I hurried away once more, but only to arrive yet a third time by devious paths in the same place. Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad enough to abandon my exploratory walk and get straight back to the piazza.... Other situations having in common with my adventure an involuntary return to the same situation ... also result in the same feeling of helplessness and of something uncanny. As, for instance, when one is lost in a forest in high altitudes, caught ... by the mountain mist, and when every endeavor to find the marked or familiar path ends again and again in a return to one and the same spot, recognizable by some particular landmark.113
Here is shot through with there. Our sense of place includes a sense of difference. When we think the qualities (or lack thereof) of uncanny place, we arrive at a strangely familiar location—anywhere. Modern capitalism has turned America into a country of anywheres (Anytowns, U.S.A.). Neither nowhere nor everywhere, anywhere is a zero degree of place, hardly a location at all. Consider Freud’s suggestive phrase, “that sense of helplessness sometimes experienced in dreams.” Cities and forests are like dreams because they are autonomous: they have their own laws, their own movement. Strange strangers inhabit them. Even on a very superficial level, we can tell someone lives in the streets that are desolate for now, the forest that seems empty for now.
Isn’t there something creepy about how the desolate streets, the empty forests, seem to become entities in themselves? It’s like what Wordsworth describes in the “boat stealing” episode of The Prelude. As the boy Wordsworth paddles away from a mountain peak, parallax seems to make it loom larger, as if it were following him:my Boat
Went heaving through the water, like a Swan;
When from behind that craggy Steep, till then
The bound of the horizon, a huge Cliff,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Upreared its head. I struck, and struck again,
And, growing still in stature, the huge Cliff
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
With measured motion, like a living thing,
Strode after me.
(1.403–412)
Isn’t this the essence of ecological awareness? There is something sinister about discovering the mesh. It’s as if there is something else—someone else, even—but the more we look, the less sure we are. It’s uncanny: there is something there, and there isn’t. Any form of ecological language that has a tin ear for this weirdness isn’t worth the candle.
Why now? The uncanny stirs because total interconnectedness enables it. Industry means repetition, automation, and the creation of junkspace. Repetition and automation apply to the creation of spaces, not just the manufacture of objects. Think of a grid pattern of streets: functional, efficient, and easy to produce. A grid involves repetition in at least two dimensions—three if you include repeating tower blocks. You will inevitably encounter repetition in the modern city. You will inevitably experience the uncanny. The uncanny is a function of repetition, because it brings to light our compulsion to repeat, a feature of our psyche. This is why doppelgängers are uncanny and why the strange stranger in general is uncanny—both remind us of us. And people live in those streets—other people. Modern life multiplies these uncanny experiences.114 The uncanny applies to evolution at large, because it appears to reenact its past actions.115 The double walls of certain cells are evidence of some ancient coexistence.116
Since our psyche is always disturbing—it takes so long to contruct one, and there are so many rules for its construction—it is disquieting to see an image of our psyche in the external world, in the form of repeating pattern
s. It’s our own artificiality, projected onto the outside world. The repetition involves an uneasy sense of emptiness: visualize the paintings of the surrealist Giorgio De Chirico—empty streets contain some unseen oppressive force, open doorways wait for us to enter them—or not—and streets not taken looking just like the streets we took. One of his titles says it all: Mystery and Melancholy of a Street. The “of” applies to the street itself. It’s as if the streets and doorways are gazing at us. Modern life multiplies these experiences. The lyrics by Robert Smith (of The Cure) about being lost in a forest, looking for a girl, are disturbingly ecological: “The girl was never there, it’s always the same / Running towards nothin’, again and again and again and again” (23–24).117 They convey the sense of environmental creepiness, of the environment as creepy, which overwhelms those now useless weather conversations.
The more ecological awareness we have, the more we experience the uncanny. Any environmentalism that edits this out is incomplete. If there is an inevitable experiential dimension of ecology, there is an inevitable psychological dimension. This psychological dimension includes weird phenomena that warp our psychic space. There is no smooth, flat, immediate ecological experience. It’s all curved. Not acknowledging this aspect of ecological awareness is inaccurate and unrealistic at least, perhaps even dangerous. If we don’t take the uncanny into account, we will just be trying to squeeze into a mold we don’t really fit. This could have serious political consequences. Consider the idea of the “authoritarian personality,” the too-normal person who seems to have purged herself or himself of negativity, perhaps of any trace of inner life—but at what cost?118 Corporate culture selects for authoritarian personalities all the way down the chain of command. For the authoritarian personality, all psychic space appears smooth, spick and span. An ecological variant could easily arise.
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