I do not know if I became closer to the ecological thought. I don't sense that Morton's intent is that we all feel freaked out by the existence of everything and unable to function with the facade of normalcy ever again. Or maybe it is. He did say "The ecological thought is about warmth and strangeness, infinity and proximity, tantalizing 'thereness' and head-popping, wordless openness" (12). I guess my symptoms paralleled the description to an extent (I did feel quite feverish), but I could never do anything in that state--it is very arresting, like being paralyzed in a capsule of perception that is both tight and binding and boundless. Unless it just takes some getting used to, and then in it (or of it) you can move. I don't know, but it is difficult feeling like an extra-terrestrial on your own planet. Or maybe that is the idea, that it is not your own planet to call home as nothing in the universe belongs to anyone or thing else, so you should hold the equal amount of reverence to the earth as if you were its guest. I don't know. I feel a little dizzy again.
Friday, October 15, 2010
S.O.S. Save Our Stomachs
Last class I experienced something quite bizarre. The deeper we got into unraveling our impressions of thoughts and language (the higher and higher the consequent pile of yarn), the more we spoke of language and its potential obstruction to the ecological thought using language, the more absurd the scene became. I began to find everything happening in the room uncontrollably more and more silly, and words themselves began to disassemble into their essential form of mere patterned sounds; my tongue suddenly felt like a strange autonomous organism in my mouth. The recognition of the absurd in both the abstract and the concrete, us sitting there on orange mental chairs with the seriousness of children, babbling away in a building about this idea Nature, trying to figure out how to enmesh with the mesh, erase the software installed in our brains by human culture, these sad creatures feeling left out of all the rest of the universe--the room began to spin, I felt the disorientation Morton spoke of, was dislocated, floating. I left class, quite literally, with motion sickness. I sat on the ground in the quad and clenched the grass to let the nausea pass and in slight irrational fear gravity could have a glitch and I may fly off the surface of this weird spinning orb of water and dirt into space.
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This is an excellent post, and a worthy attempt at dislocating, I think. Yes, the crux is indeed "getting used to" it, all the time!
ReplyDeleteI like this idea: "...it is not your own planet to call home as nothing in the universe belongs to anyone or thing else, so you should hold the equal amount of reverence to the earth as if you were its guest." I think this is really astute, and very much in line with Morton's line of thought.
This is one point at which I'm not sure if I agree with Tim: the idea that we should get used to feeling alien all the time. A sense of place is very important to an ecological existence.
ReplyDeleteI suspect the disorientation actually comes from a wealth of symbol-manipulation and a scarcity of doing things. If there is one thing I've learned in permaculture & ecological design (sometimes to my horror), it's that it doesn't matter what people say. At all. People's behavior is very interesting, but it has no relationship to what people say, or what questions they can answer about what they're doing. Zero! Anyone who tries to study people by listening to them is self-deluded. The first thing they should do is ask the question, "Can people report to you correctly on their behavior?", to which the answer is "No."
I don't feel alien when I'm eating from a garden, or when I'm inhabiting a house that's built with passive solar design so that it heats up when the weather cools down and vice versa with no electricity at all, or when I use a composting toilet that fertilizes the garden. I think Tim's ecological thought could work very well, but it can't stop at thought or it's meaningless. You have to have some ecological aesthetic in which those thoughts can grow logarhythmically. The only way to have that is to create it, and you can't do that all on your own, but you do have to set the example so that others can learn it.