Arcadiana

A Blog about Literature, Culture and the Environment

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  • The Writings of Trees: Ogham, Phytographia, and Calligraphy

    Introduction

    If a plant could speak, what would it say? From the Ents in Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings to current scientific research on plant communication and signaling, explorations and imaginations of communications from plants abound. The concept of a language of plants and plant writing has been addressed by philosophers, botanists, writers, poets and many others, fostering a rich discussion on what a language of plants may look like. 

                Adjacent to the idea of a language of plants is that of a language based upon plants. Ogham[1], or the Celtic Tree Alphabet, is an early Mediaeval alphabet whose letters can be ascribed to trees and plants: the names of letters include  “dair” (oak), “beithe” (birch), “coll” (hazel) and “sail” (willow) (McManus, 1991). Although Ogham has fallen out of everyday use and is principally used nowadays for artwork, a contemporary place and role for it may perhaps still be found. As a unique venue to encounter plants and their forms, appreciation of Ogham and its incorporation in our life may help bring us closer to acknowledging and recognizing the ways of beings of plants, and enhancing nature-connectedness. Here, I will explore how Ogham may be a distinctive setting where our language, and that of plants, can encounter and intertwine. 

    Ogham, the Celtic Tree Alphabet

    Ogham is a distinct alphabet that represents the sounds of the Irish language and is estimated to have been used from the fourth to the tenth century AD (Carney, 1975). It is most commonly found in the form of inscriptions on stones in counties across Ireland, with a concentration in the south-west counties of Kerry, Cork, and Waterford. However, it can also be found across England and Scotland. These inscriptions are often in the genitive case, denoting possession (e.g. stone of, burial place of), and are carved along the natural edge of the stone, to be read from the bottom up along a stem line (McManus, 1991). 

                There are numerous theories on the origins of Ogham, with its definitive provenance still unknown. The Ogham Tract, a manuscript written near the end of the fourteenth century, suggests that Ogham was invented in Ireland by Ogma, “a man very learned in language and poetry” (Graves & Limerick, 1876). It may also have been created by pre-Christian druids as a secret manual gesture alphabet, or was based upon secondary cryptic runes or derived from tally numerals (McManus, 1991). 

                The letters of Ogham are composed of one to five lines along a “stemline”, with the letters called “faeda” (trees). The consonants are called “taobomna”, while the diphthongs are “forfeada”, or extra trees. The continuous stem, or stemline, along which the Ogham letters are ranged is called the drum, or ridge, with each short stroke perpendicular to it called a “flesc” (twig). Notably, the names of at least some of the letters refer to real trees and plants, such as oak, birch, hazel, willow, and alder, with the shape of trees playing an important role in Ogham. Commenting on its distinctive nomenclature, Charles Vallancey’s observations on Ogham note that the form may have been adapted to the name, rather than the name to the form: he writes “from the Book of Oghams, translated and published in my Vindication, it appears that the first Ogham characters were intended to represent trees” (Graves & Limerick, 1876). 

    It is worth highlighting that while manuscript sources such as Auraicept na n-Éces ‘The Scholars’ Primer’ and In Lebor Ogaim ‘The Ogam Tract’ have keys indicating that all the letters are named after trees, more recent work by Damian McManus has shown that while some of the letters are named after trees, others have been misinterpreted or replaced artificially as the original meanings were lost. Nonetheless, some of the original tree letter names include the birch for B or “beithe” and the willow tree for S or “sail” (McManus, 1991). 

    Ogham and Phytographia 

    To see how our language and that of plants may meet in Ogham, we can turn to Patricia Vieira’s concept of  “phytographia” – namely, how the vegetal world is embedded in human cultural productions. Here, Ogham presents a clear case of the vegetal becoming deeply embedded in one of human beings’ most fundamental activities: writing. 

                First, how can we understand and interpret the language of plants? Vieira proposes using the notion of inscription: we all inscribe ourselves in our environment and in the existence of those who surround us. This notion of inscription can be understood in terms of Spinoza’s conatus essendi, or “the wish of all things to persevere in existence, a yearning that leaves traces in and through other entities” (Vieira, 2015, p. 39). For plants, their inscriptions take the form of their physical configurations, such as the shapes and length of their branches, the texture of their bark, and the contours of their leaves. Vegetal inscription takes place in human lives at very basic levels, Vieira writes, such as through the food we eat and the air we breathe. However, she focuses upon a narrower dimension of vegetal inscription- specifically, how the vegetal world is embedded in human cultural productions – phytographia . This rests upon the assumption that “a continuum extends from plant to human forms of inscription, which necessarily interact and get entangled” (Vieira, 2015, p.39). Although Vieira focuses on literature for her phytographia, Ogham presents an interesting case of traces being left in not just our literature, but in our letters and alphabet themselves- phytographia as a concept can help us to decipher this encounter.

    With the letters and structure of Ogham resembling the shape of the tree and its branches, the physically inscribed language of plants not only encounters but is heavily intertwined and entangled with our written word – we express ourselves through the form of plants and their physical inscription, almost as if we attempt to view our language through theirs. The letters take a tree-like shape and are formed like the forking branches of a tree, mimicking the ways in which they physically inscribe themselves in the world. Each character sprouts from the central line, like leaves from a stem, and we read Ogham in a vertical manner from the bottom to the top, mimicking the growth and flow of trees, from the roots to the crown. 

    Ogham presents a particular instance of the language of plants meeting ours. However, concerns have been raised as to whether we might erase the vegetal language in our attempt to interpret or co-opt it.  In “To Hear Plants Speak”, Michael Marder raises this worry of vegetal languages disappearing under the “shroud of meanings” that we throw over it when we use plants as symbols (Marder, 2017). In using them as symbols for our own frameworks, we may inadvertently turn them into mere tokens. By using the physical inscriptions of plants as letters in Ogham to form our own language,, are we obscuring their own language?

                To respond to this concern, I turn to Chinese calligraphy and its appreciation, drawing upon the work of Shi Xiongbo, to show how this encounter may not necessarily entail the suppression of the vegetal language. Instead, Ogham may aid in highlighting and drawing attention to the language of plants in beneficial ways.

    Lessons from Chinese Calligraphy 

    Chinese calligraphy, or shufa in Mandarin, is best translated as “the art of writing” and was established as an art in China during the first four centuries of the first millennium (Shi, 2023). It has developed into the characteristic cultural symbol for China that many recognize it as, and is appreciated as a fine art alongside painting and poetry (Zhang et al., 2008). 

                The beauty of Chinese calligraphy is seen to stem from the order and the pattern of the forms and brushstrokes. It does not seek to replicate images from the real world, but “rather expresses them kinesthetically” (Shi, 2023). As an example, metaphorical expressions like “a dot should be like a stone falling from a high peak…a vertical line should be like a withered vine, ten thousand years old” are often employed (Shi, 2023) – for calligraphy, this does not entail the dot should literally be a falling stone, but should embody a momentum akin to one. Shi writes on two aesthetic terms associated with Chinese calligraphy: xing, or form/configuration; and shi, the force or potential. Successful works of calligraphy present both characteristics: however, only with shi can a calligraphic form be a living form (Shi, 2023). 

    Attending to the multiple brushstrokes that compose a Chinese character then constitutes the other important element of Chinese calligraphy. To achieve shi in a character requires “an effect of tension that animates the various elements in the configuration of the written character” (Shi, 2023). Suzanne Langer’s concept of “living form” has also been used to characterize Chinese calligraphy. According to Langer, living form suggests “a dynamic form of vital processes such as growth and motion” (Langer, 1957). This is particularly relevant as a work of calligraphy constitutes an organic form, and not just a sequence of characters (Shi, 2023).

                To appreciate calligraphy, Shi suggests that the physical presence of the characters – and not the textual content- is the primary object of appreciation (although the two are inextricably intertwined) (Shi, 2023). Indeed, Simon Leys raises the question as to what extent one needs to be able to read Chinese in order to fully enjoy Chinese calligraphy, answering the question by way of another: “To what extent is it necessary to be able to read music in order to enjoy a musical performance” (Leys, 2011)? Appreciating Chinese calligraphy, Shi describes, involves “tracing the brush” and identifying the brushwork and its spiritual qualities (Shi, 2023; Gulik, 1958). Or, as Leys elaborates, “follow[ing] and reconstruct[ing] in his mind the successive movements of the calligrapher’s brush” (Leys, 2011). 

                For Ogham, as an alphabet bearing traces of the physical inscription and forms of trees, the letters seem to embody Langer’s living form, expressing the living process of flourishing and growth found in nature. With the physical shape they embody, characteristics like germination and motion are captured in the letters. Interesting to note is that this has parallels with the Chinese character for tree (木), which also resembles a tree with roots and branches (with two “tree” characters coming together to form the character for forest ( 林)).

    Chinese calligraphy can help us to respond to Marder’s worry of vegetal languages disappearing under the cloak of our own meanings.. By drawing upon methods of appreciation of calligraphy, which endeavor to separately appreciate the art from the textual content it carries, Ogham may also be acknowledged and appreciated for more than the meanings that we attribute to it from our own language. By focusing on its form and shape, we can highlight the way traces of vegetal inscription lie within Ogham. 

    The method of appreciation for Chinese calligraphy can also be a source of inspiration for Ogham. Just as we retrace the brushwork of the artist in calligraphy, we can trace in our minds the form of the letters, and its origin -namely, the tree or plant in question. We can envision the growth of branches and the trunk, and how they spread out into the sky, forming the distinctive silhouette of a tree. “Retracing the brush” for Ogham might look like reflecting on the growth and processes of trees, how they convert elements like water and air into their own bodily material and inscriptions, and what their physical form might say. By appreciating Ogham in this manner, and by viewing it as a space where traces of vegetal inscriptions can be found, we are encouraged to pay attention to the physical inscriptions of plants and to listen to their language. 

    Building Upon Ogham: Steps Forward

    As previously mentioned, Ogham is no longer in everyday use. However, it has not been forgotten, cropping up in places like the Ogham in 3D project, which seeks to digitize the four hundred remaining Ogham stones that exist (“Ogham in 3D”, 2014). Increasing awareness of Ogham, along with other forms of tree-based alphabets such as types of runes, may have numerous benefits- notably, the offering of a novel form of interaction with nature and the language of plants.

    Popularizing Ogham, and novel variations of it, can serve to introduce to the public both the names of trees and their way of being in an enjoyable and accessible way, especially for children. Moreover, examining and drawing upon the rich knowledge and history behind Chinese calligraphy can also provide ideas for Ogham’s future direction. As described above, Chinese calligraphic works seek to embody an energy, a tension, and convey images kinesthetically- it becomes a living form. Artwork involving Ogham and other tree-based alphabets may also follow a similar route, seeking to embody the organic processes and growth that lead to the physical inscriptions of trees that we observe. Such mediums and projects can encourage us to explore and listen to the language of the vegetal, and to ponder their inscriptions in our lives. 

    References

    Carney, James. “The invention of the Ogom cipher.” Ériu 26 (1975): 53-65.

    Translation based on Robert H. van Gulik, Chinese Pictorial Art as Viewed by the Connoisseur (Rome: Serie Orientale Roma, 1958)

    Graves, Charles, and C. Limerick. “The ogham alphabet.” Hermathena 2, no. 4 (1876): 443-472.

    Holten, Katie. “Katie Holten.” Katie Holten. 2013. https://www.katieholten.com/new-york-city-tree-alphabet.

    Langer, Susanne K. 1895-1985. 1957. Problems of Art: Ten Philosophical Lectures. New York, Scribner.

    Leys, Simon. The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays. New York Review of Books, 2013.

    Marder, Michael . 2017. “To Hear Plants Speak.” In The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature, edited by Patricia Vieira, Monica Gagliano, and John Charles Ryan. U of Minnesota Press .

    McManus, Damian. A guide to ogam. 1991. Maynooth Monographs 4.

    “Ogham in 3D.” 2014. Dias.ie. 2014. https://ogham.celt.dias.ie/menu.php?lang=en&menuitem=80.

    Shi, Xiongbo. “An Aesthetics of Chinese Calligraphy.” Philosophy Compass (2023): e12912.

    “The Talking Forest Tree Runes.” 2023. Talkingforestrunes.com. 2023. https://www.talkingforestrunes.com/.

    Vieira, Patrícia. “Phytographia: literature as plant writing.” Environmental Philosophy 12, no. 2 (2015): 205-220.

    Zhang, Jie, et al. “Chinese calligraphy and tourism: From cultural heritage to landscape symbol and media of the tourism industry.” Current Issues in Tourism 11.6 (2008): 529-548

    [1] Although the alphabet is frequently referred to as “Ogham”, Ogham refers to the characters, whilst the script as a whole is named Beithluisnin. 

  • Blossoming Hope in Eco-dystopian times: Deniz Gezgin’s Eyes Wings Flowers Tails

    by Merve Günday

    Deniz Gezgin’s1 poetic novel Eyes Wings Flowers Tails (2023)2 welcomes its readers to a magical realist universe where weird and fantastic characters become the everyday victims of environmental degradation. Though plunged into the darkness of the exploitation of nature, its “[w]orld is more sudden than we fancy it/…crazier and more of it than we think/ incorrigibly plural” (MacNeice 24).

    The novel is set in a dystopian space where ecological balance is shattered and an inexplicable sense of fear looms around. In this setting, winters witness trees with budding branches, new seasons are lived every day, and winds continuously change their direction; everything is in the constant threat of rising water. What is more threatening, plants start to fly, seeds become lighter than ever, birds’ wings get shorter, seas turn into smoke holes while mine workers get poisoned, and following the death of trees even weeds and insects disappear. Moreover, the number of artificial species increases, and natural human-animal-insect subjects are replaced with talking puppets, toy animals, and artificial bees.

    Amidst the chaos of this shattered ecology reverberating with a dystopian sense of fear and anxiety, surprisingly “[a]ll the living beings are on the move, everything is in constant transposition” (Gezgin 13). I suggest that this movement implies in a way that there are still some glitters of hope blossoming despite all the death, sickness, or distress caused by the Anthropocene. 

    Only what Gezgin calls the Randoms (Gelişigüzeller) can cross the boundaries of rationality by slipping into the constant flow of waters and passing through closed roads. Unlike the Anthropos, notoriously intoxicated with the dream of gaining mastery over the nonhuman, the Randoms are not poisoned by this greed. They are not compelled by the linearity of time and they sense time only through light, similar to the way plants do. In the absence of linearity, “the corridors of the wind, water mouths, and gaps” become their homes (Gezgin 14)3. Gezgin doesn’t give a clear depiction of what she means by the Randoms. They address, I would argue, whatever resists the codes of binarism or mathematical formulation.                 

    Inspired by the Randoms, Luçe and Kara, two peripheral characters whose paths cross at the beginning of the novel, resist in this dystopian world.

    Echoing the spirit of the Randoms for regeneration, Luçe, the son of a mine worker named Siti, emerges from the magma of a volcano: sleeping in a cradle made of black ashes, he holds on to life. Similarly to Luçe, Kara is also depicted as a victim of ecological devastation: he is found in the middle of a burnt forest surrounded by ashes. Put in a mental institution together with other marginalized children, Kara is not allowed to get in touch with the outside world. However, unlike the others, he does not bend to the will of those who attempt to silence and tame him but rather confronts what lies beyond the cold walls of the institution. 

    In the midst of the unsettling Gezgin’s scenery where life and death and natural and artificial are difficult to distinguish, it is shown that the world is surrounded by infinite possibilities of liberation. To put it in the words of the narrator,

    “[a]lthough there were no flowers anymore, bees would see petals in the globules and find the nectar in this way…Aren’t globules opened on their own?…Nothing gets lost without leaving a trace…While the Randoms walk around all these traces, they are neither in the past nor in the future. Tails stars bones, lights waters volcanoes, everything is in a constant motion” (Gezgin 39)4.

    Despite the loss of bees and their replacement with artificial ones, there are still some natural bees that can find “eucalyptuses, downy oaks, and cedars in grains” (Gezgin 43)5. Motivated by the constant move of the Randoms, as mentioned earlier, Kara finds in the heavy rain that turns everything into mud an opportunity to create a new narrative: following the deep arcs opened by waters, he finds a road, but he does not falter. Rather, in a state of drowsiness, he finds a breach opened by the constant drops of water and follows Bohemian waxwings into the darkness. 

    Then, at the end of the tunnel, he meets wooden-legged Çilaba and the rock goat Patina who collect seeds from the few spaces remaining still uninvaded by the Anthropos and plant them in sandbags for their preservation. He also meets a puppet named Avel, who comforts Çilaba and Patina away from the harsh reality of the world by singing and playing. With his help, Kara discovers the world of poetry: “Poetry was a seed of transposition and growth sprouting infinite possibilities” (Gezgin 68)6.

    Having encountered such magical characters, Kara reaches the volcano presented at the very beginning of the novel and meets Luçe there. The novel ends with this encounter, implying the beginning of a new phase for both of them: they jump into the volcano crater hand-in-hand and as they pass through, they die into life. 

    In conclusion, despite all the exploitative practices of the Anthropos that erase nature’s blissful melodies, nature is always pregnant with multiple possibilities connecting everything like a rhizome and resisting immobility. As the author puts it in the last lines of the novel: “Wouldn’t the world turn upside down if the living always gathered on the same slope of the same hill?” (Gezgin 95). That’s what the Randoms represent in the novel. Given that the Randoms always find a way to freedom from the tyranny of ecological degradation, I argue that Eyes Wings Flowers Tails make our hopes blossom amidst the darkness of the Anthropocene. What is more important, the human-nonhuman hierarchy is overturned in the novel, as what unlocks the chains of stillness for Kara and Luçe is in fact the nonhuman.

    About the author

    Merve Günday completed her PhD in English Literature at Middle East Technical University (2022) with a thesis entitled “Alternative Subject Positions and Subject-Object Relations in Keats’s Poetry.”

    References

    • Gezgin, Deniz. Eyes Wings Flowers Tails (Gözler Kanatlar Çiçekler Kuyruklar). İstanbul: Can Publishing, 2023.  
    • MacNeice, Louis. “Snow” in Peter McDonald (ed), CollectedPoems: p. 24. London: Faber and Faber, 2007.   

    Footnotes

    1. Gezgin is a graduate of Protohistory and Asia Minor Archeology Departments at Ege University. She made her first entrance into literature with her novel Ahraz, followed by YerKuşAğı and Eyes Wings Flowers Tails.   ↩︎
    2. Gezgin’s novel hasn’t been translated into English yet. The translated sections of the work from Turkish to English belong to me. ↩︎
    3. “Gelişigüzellerin konağı rüzgâr koridorları, su ağızları ve boşluklar” (Gezgin 14).
      ↩︎
    4. “Orada artık hiç çiçek olmadığı halde arılar yuvalarda taç yapraklar görür, nektarları böyle bulurdu…Yuvarlar açılmıyor mu kendiliğinden? …Hiçbir şey iz bırakmadan sönüp gitmiyor…Gelişigüzeller bütün bu izlerin üstünde gezinirken ne geçmişte ne gelecekte. Kuyruklar yıldızlar kemikler, ışıklar sular volkanlar her şey kendi boşluğunda sonsuz hareketli” (Gezgin 39).  
      ↩︎
    5. “(…)zerrelerde okaliptüsleri, tüylü meşeleri ve sedirleri” (Gezgin 43). ↩︎
    6.  “Bir yer değiştirme ve büyüme kozasıydı şiir, sesle örülmüş deriyi soyunurken sonsuzca hareketin uç vermesi” (Gezgin 68). ↩︎

  • Rivers as Emblems of Hope and Resilience: Drowning and Resurfacing in the Ganga

    by Saloni Shokeen

    I still remember the extreme experience of drowning in the Ganga. A few years back, I went up the river with the intention of acquainting myself with rafting. As we got on our rafts, the river appeared to be calm and serene, except for a few rapids that shook the raft with great intensity. We were now moving closer to the end of our route and I was brimming with a sense of achievement and thrill.

    This was our last and most difficult rapid to cross. The waves hit our raft with unimaginable force, which made me lose all control. Within the next few seconds, I was one with the river, and the waves were carrying me from one end to the other. My fate was completely up to the river water now, since I could not anticipate where the waves would eventually take me. Although I was wearing a life jacket, I could have hit large rocks in the river while I was flowing like a leaf on its surface. It was becoming more and more difficult to not let the water suffocate me, I was struggling to keep my face above the surface. During these brief minutes of resistance, I witnessed the evening sun right in the middle of the valleys that surrounded the Ganga. With its low light, the sun was about to disappear into nothingness, and so was I. 

    All I could think of was getting just one more chance to live, and how I would lead a different life from hereon. The life that I had experienced so far flashed before my eyes, and I was filled with remorse for the precious moments wasted. I was not able to accept that this could possibly be the end of my life and this led my body to revolt more strongly. Exhausted, I almost surrendered to the nothingness that lay beneath the river, until a hand pulled me back up on the raft. Gasping for breath, rubbing my eyes in disbelief, I sat in deep quietude watching the river. 

    Over the years, people asked me what changed in my life after this accident, but it is impossible to translate such experiences into words. However, some changes did indeed happen, and they were majorly internal; I became more reflective, hopeful and humble. Moreover, I became grateful for each day of life and I formed a special connection with the Ganga. Instead of getting forever scared by its waters, they started representing immense hope, the place where a new and more conscious life began for me. 

    Meditating upon this incident, I wonder:” What is it about rivers that makes us calm and reflective?”. Standing on the banks of a river, an individual witnesses the unstoppable flow moving. An inevitable parallel that comes to our minds is that of the trajectory of life itself: similar to rivers, human life has to constantly overcome obstacles. The river, like life’s flow, does not stop, irrespective of the magnitude of challenges. In order to reach their destination, streams never stop. The breeze that swiftly moves above the water surface only symbolizes temporary disturbances. The patterns created by the wind are mirages. The human eyes see them appear and disappear every second. Whatever enters into the river surrenders itself to its waters and here it finds the place to express freely. The river water, as it symbolizes fluidity and transitionality, provides a special place for hope in our times. 

    The metaphor of transitoriness associated with rivers goes back to the rhetoric current of Ancient Greek philosophy of the 6th century BC. The following lines from Heraclitus’ works are the most famous today:

    A man cannot step into the same river twice, because it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.

    The two main ideas in Heraclitus’s philosophy are the doctrine of flux and the unity of opposites.  It is difficult to locate the complete body of work where Heraclitus said this sentence, or point to what he exactly meant by those words. Nonetheless, this line greatly influenced thinkers that succeeded Heraclitus, and most of all Plato and Aristotle. Although Heraclitus is considered as a pessimistic philosopher, in my opinion the river could be an emblem of choices and alternatives: by emphasizing the natural flow of the river, Heraclitus describes the succession of momentary situations. If nothing is permanent, the possibility of positive change will always persist. After a steam leaves the river, a new one enters and fills the heart with hope. 

    One could argue that Heraclitus is mourning the instant gone forever and that will never return. That is to say, we can never turn time backwards just as a stream cannot reverse its route. But in the context of human life, it also signifies that opportunities continually arise in our present world. The river, similar to life, unendingly rejuvenates and revitalizes itself. Rather than being remorseful about what is lost forever (if anything really is), can we imagine a scenario where re-entering into the river flow is better than before? In other words, perhaps a new moment was worth the wait and the hope? Especially in a planet that is increasingly threatened by anthropogenic activities, can rivers become embodiments of respite? 

    Across the globe, rivers hold distinct cultural and social value. By virtue of belonging to particular geographies for centuries, rivers greatly influence the language and knowledge systems. Rivers have intricate relationships with human beings, especially those who live in close proximity to them. This is a difficult thing to trace and map out. W.H Herendeen’s essay The Rhetoric of Rivers, analyzes history of river representations in literature and philosophy. Herendeen’s argument is that rivers are the central repository of wisdom for mankind. Rivers evoke a feeling of reflectiveness that leads to meditating upon life. This is intimately tied, Heredeen states, with the geographical and social existence of a river. It embodies the voice(s) of a specific region and informs its people’s identity. A prime example of this is the significance of the Ganga river in Hinduism. The first words that come to one’s mind when the name Ganga is mentioned are purity and liveliness. Apart from the religious associations, the river has an ecologically rich life that we cant see from the surface. Over the years, the Ganga has been represented across Indian literature and films. In the national award winning movie Massan (2015), the Ganga becomes the epitome of hope, depicted through the metaphor of confluence. Ironically, the title Massan, literally translates into “crematorium”, yet the story ends on a hopeful note for the two main characters of the movie Devi and Deepak. 

    Deepak, an engineer in the making, works with his family as they cremate bodies on the banks of the Ganga. In the Hindu tradition, the Ganga is considered to be the ultimate pious place for the rebirth of human life. When cremated on the banks of the Ganga, a soul never ‘dies’. The river waters symbolizes immortality and rejuvenation of the soul. One day, without any prior warning, Deepak receives his girlfriend’s body, which he must cremate. In the same period of time Devi loses her beloved boyfriend, while also being shamed for having an intimate relationship with him outside of marriage. Her entourage, even her father, begins to question her ‘purity’, and the movie portrays the hardships she encounters facing a patriarchal society. The Ganga is a constant part of both their lives. Despite the tragic screenplay, Massan ends on an optimistic note where the audience is left full of hopefulness. In the final scene, Devi and Deepak’s stories come naturally together as two streams flowing in the same direction: they accidentally meet on a boat, as if the river were bringing them together. 

    They will never swim in the same river again, yet the tragic past they have already lived through has come to an end. Nothing could take away their hope, because life’s flow never stops. It might just change its course temporarily. Heraclitus’ lines encapsulate the transitoriness central to human life and have strong echoes in this situation: Deepak, after cremating his past, has to eventually overcome his grief, and so does Devi, for if they had lost all hope they could not meet each other. Massan’s ending, along with Heraclitus’ thinking, could offer us a generative method to think about rivers. 

    Hope is perhaps the rarest emotion to find in our times. Everyday, our anxiety escalates after reading shocking news about climate change and increasing instances of violence worldwide. This pessimism does not let us appreciate the beauty of the present moment, and makes us feel hopeless and lost.

    I would leave you with these questions: is it still possible to feel a glimmer of hope for our future? Moreover, is it possible to gather the courage to welcome change, and believe it doesn’t have to always be negative? Despite the unfortunate scenery, can we really afford to miss the present beauty that surrounds us? 

    About the author: 

    I am Saloni Shokeen, instructor and PhD scholar at SUNY Binghamton. Here at Binghamton I have so far undertaken specialization courses in environmental literature. This is in fact my primary area of research, as I am interested in how different forms of storytelling can enlighten our minds on the subject of climate change. Within the broad field of environment, I am curious about water bodies, and especially in how rivers prefigure literary narratives: along with being a significant resource to any civilization, rivers shape our cultural and personal horizon in various ways. Belonging to specific regional geographies, rivers represent multiple voices at once, enriching our knowledge. While this is one of my major interests, through my research I also look at interspecies, planetary and animal studies. My goal is to find generative and sustainable methods of research that expand our understanding of nature.

    References

    • Herendeen, W. H. “The Rhetoric of Rivers: The River and the Pursuit of Knowledge.” Studies in Philology, vol. 78, no. 2, 1981, pp. 107–27. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4174068. Accessed 10 April 2024.
    • Kirk, G. S. “Natural Change in Heraclitus.” Mind, vol. 60, no. 237, 1951, pp. 35–42. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2251397. Accessed 10 April 2024.
    • Stern, David G. “HERACLITUS’ AND WITTGENSTEIN’S RIVER IMAGES: STEPPING TWICE INTO THE SAME RIVER.” The Monist, vol. 74, no. 4, 1991, pp. 579–604. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27903264. Accessed 10 April 2024.
    • Colvin, Matthew. “Heraclitean Flux and Unity of Opposites in Plato’s ‘Theaetetus’ and ‘Cratylus.’” The Classical Quarterly, vol. 57, no. 2, 2007, pp. 759–69. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27564109. Accessed 10 April 2024.

  • Tossing their heads in sprightly dance

    by Franziska Maria Bergholtz

    resolve these behavioral cancers before
    they become more     sexually suggestive
    using the method is simple
    a potent message throughout the body

    being “hit in the head” with a bad idea
    fear, dominance, confusion, or pain
    there are over a hundred emotes that let you
    express yourself and swallow

    women (mostly) can show off their hair
    pain could also be triggering this

    (especially of old people)
    a great deal of tension in the neck
    eye staring, and tossing

    you can also produce a like effect
    an opposition reflex or even a displaced behavior
    take a drink of water, lean forward,
    energetic and in good health
    a broadcast signal to anyone

    there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach
    but that might just be part of the problem

    there are over a dozen unique dances
    you can perform; toss the head back and shake it
    your airway opens and your throat can close off

    these dances can only be obtained
    by purchasing them for real money.

    Working notes on Franziska’s poem:

    When I decided on that stanza of Wordsworth’s poem, I was curious to find out how the head-tossing nowadays would differ from the peaceful, elegant dancing that’s depicted in the poem. I simply searched online for the stanza, and later on for parts of the stanza, because in its entirety it only drew up more articles on Wordsworth. It was very surprising to see that the algorithm didn’t relate those words to dancing at all. Rather, I got a whole lot of websites on the topic of horse riding, also some advice on reading female body language while on a date and an article about the best way to swallow pills. The only website referring to dancing at all gave advice on how to purchase dance moves in a video game – what a brilliant contrast do the sprightly daffodils. I really enjoyed how the algorithm focused so much more on the bodily aspects of that dancing and tossing – incidentally showing in how many ways our bodies are political. Be it in terms of sexism, capitalism or the treatment of animals – which closes the circle to ecopoetics, I suppose.

  • in sprightly dance

    by Lara Wenisch

    Working Notes on Lara’s poem:

    When I set out on the project to unframe Wordsworth, I was hesitant to say the least. To me, it felt challenging to an extent that I doubted I could create a piece that could relate blatantly unemotional material to the vision of the picturesque from Wordsworth’s poem. It wasn’t until I found myself sitting in the midst of a cut-up speaker manual and advertisement for a local tourist
    hotspot that I dared to break from a tradition in which I felt perfectly comfortable. But the break was inevitable. The words I chose, relating predominantly to the sense of sound and movement, began conforming to an idea of “sprightly dance”, infringed by technical requirements and still
    upholding the notion of being in one’s senses. Looking back on it now, my poem reflects much more the process of its creation than the relation to the original text. But in the end, I found something to say, even if the words weren’t my own.

  • You are a sky full of stars

    by Demet Uygun

    You are a sky full of stars,
    A floating voyage,
    Infinite beauty that never leaves scars,
    Cause you light up the path through the dark.
    Like the Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky,
    Continuous as the stars that shine,
    You light up the world from afar.

    Working Notes on Demet’s poem:

    I chose the line “continuous as the stars that shine” because it reminded me of Coldplay’s song “A
    Sky Full of Stars.” Then, I looked at the names of the stars, especially the brightest star, which is
    Sirius. I gathered the lines of the song, the poem, and a basic definition I found on Wikipedia about
    Sirius.

  • Beside the lake, beneath the trees 

    by Charmaine Küllenberg 

    The wind rises 

    Like a wave upon the sea 

    Where the weeds are growing free  

    There deep, deep in the forest night  

    Some are born to sweet delight  

    _

    There we wander, there we weep 

    As the crows fall asleep 

    Hear the forest talking, insects and birds  

    An idiot prayer of empty words 

    With no alarms and no surprises 

    _

    I looked up to the sky above 

    To you, who was dearly loved 

    Working notes on Charmaine’s poem:

    For the Wordsworth rewriting poem, I chose the line “Beside the lake, beneath the trees” because I
    had the idea of describing a new scene based on it. So when I was collecting lines, I picked the ones
    that I thought would fit the scene I had in mind. I had a lot of fun working on the poem, but it was
    also quite challenging. What made it difficult for me was that I found lines that rhymed at the end
    (the first pair I found was ‘night’, ‘delight’) and decided that I wanted the whole poem to rhyme. I
    found most lines from songs I’ve been listening to at the time and other things I’ve read. The line
    “Some are born to sweet delight” is taken from William Blake’s ‘Auguries of Innocence’ because I
    just like that poem and wanted to use a line for this. Personally, the poem invokes a feeling of
    solitude and melancholy, but also calmness. The first two stanzas build a sort of frame as I put the
    rhyming lines at the beginning of the first stanza and the end of the second one (‘rises’, ‘surprises’).
    I’m not quite sure why I wanted to frame it like that; it just felt right to me.

  • Application for state-funded jocund company support during higher educational training under the Federal Training Assistance Act

    by Noah Brelage

    1. Extract from Personal Details:

    “I wandered lonely as a cloud 

    In vacant or in pensive mood, 

    Which is the bliss of solitude”

    2.1 Declaration of the person receiving the daffodils:

    I am aware that 

    I am obliged under § 60 of 

    Fluttering and dancing in the breeze 

    to immediately report any changes 

    Beside the lake, beneath the trees, 

    without being asked to do so 

    and to submit the documents required for the final determination of dances with the daffodils. 

    2.1 Appendix: Required supporting documents & other evidence

    ● stars that shine 

    ● sparkling waves in glee 

    ● sprightly dance 

    ● heart with pleasure 

    more documents may be requested upon further processing of the application

    3. Overview of personal information

    A duly enrolled as a student at 

    the university of a host, of golden daffodils, 

    A poet

    Working Notes on Noah’s poem:  

    I tried to find a document that is as far away as possible from a romanticised presentation of  nature, so I decided to use an application form for state funded financial support during study. I  myself have already oftentimes had the pleasure of reading these documents written in byzantine  wording far removed from the real world. Ironically, I felt some similarities in the needlessly  strange choice of wording in both the application form and the Wordsworth poem. Additionally, I  can not imagine something more distant from any concept of nature than an overly-arbitrary,  human-made, bureaucratic financial system. Juxtaposing these two became a fun challenge. The italicised parts of text are the parts I took from the Wordsworth poem. I wanted to make a  clear distinction between the texts to present the stitching-together of the original texts. The rest of  the structure of the text is, obviously, based on the application form I had used.

  • Unframing Wordsworth’s Daffodils. A practical and theoretical poetry class

    Even outside of environmental literature circles, William Wordsworth’s poem ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, also commonly known as ‘Daffodils’, is widely recognised as ‘one of England’s most famous and most quintessentially Romantic poems’ (British Library). In 2007, local tourism officials of the Lake District even released a pop video and hip hop version to celebrate its bicentennial legacy – and to advertise Wordsworth’s beloved home to a younger audience. In environmental discourse, Wordsworth’s status as an “ecopoet” whose sensitivity to emotions, elements, and place turns poems into “imaginary parks in which we may breathe an air that is not toxic and accommodate ourselves to a mode of dwelling that is not alienated” (Bate 64) has been particularly secured by Jonathan Bate. Other critics, however, are more skeptical of what they see as an erasure of material, economical, and political conditions in favour of an idealised pristine natural idyll (cf. Hess, McGann, Levinson). Though acknowledging the Romantics’ attentiveness to the non-human, later strands of ecocriticism and ecopoetics have further pushed against traditions of nature poetry that reduce nature to a pastoral scene we admire from afar. Moving beyond this, ecopoetics, as Evelyn Reilly writes, includes the “rejection of compensatory notions of nature as retreat and of our role as consumers of consoling description” and engages “the recuperation of cultural, industrial, and political erasures; the dismantling of dichotomies of self/other, nature/ culture, indigenous/alien and central/peripheral” (257). 

    The creative writing & artistic research seminar “Beyond Nature Poetry: Ecopoetics” that I currently teach at Düsseldorf University aims to foster critical engagements with so-called nature poetry precisely along these lines of investigation. Open to BA and MA students in the English department, it seeks to explore the capacities of ecopoetics to disclose, reflect on, and reimagine the power dynamics between humans, language, and what we refer to as “nature”. In this context, we discussed how the poetic I in Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” encounters the natural world and how we as readers encounter it in turn. The students were quick to point out that the first iconic line “I wandered lonely as a cloud” suggests a bird’s-eye perspective that places the speaker outside the landscape. The description of the “crowd” of daffodils that come into view “all at once”, like in a picture, adds to the picturesque spell of the poem that frames nature as a spectacle the disconnected spectator observes from distance. Driven by an exclusive focus on the visual – “saw I”; “I saw”; “I gazed and gazed” – this distance continues throughout all four stanzas. As students noted, the poem thus appears to be more about us seeing the poet seeing the daffodils rather than the daffodils themselves. Although the content of the poem seems to suggest an emotional connection with the daffodils as “company” for the lonely poet, the way it is presented, framed by the narrator and an omnipresent lyrical eye, simultaneously continues to separate the disembodied speaker’s mind from the natural, socio-political, and physical environment they are engaging – or, rather, failing to engage with. 

    Scott Hess, who reads Wordsworth’s poem in relation to the conventions of Romantic-period landscape aesthetics, suggests that it demonstrates the persistence of the picturesque as a mode of structuring perception and framing landscape. Focusing quite literally on “that peculiar kind of beauty, which is agreeable in a picture” (Gilpin xii), the emergence of the picturesque as an aesthetic ideal propelled a new way of looking at nature as if it were a landscape painting. From the 18th century onwards, the Lake District in particular became popular with new picturesque tourists who used the Claude glass, a portable convex tinted mirror, to impose a perceptual frame around the landscape whilst – not only metaphorically, but physically – turning their back to it. Enacting a similar framing technique through its point of view and emphasis on the visual, Wordsworth’s poem arguably implies separations between viewer and landscape, subject and object, mind and body – separations that are unhelpful when we are searching for reparative ways of ecological interconnectedness. Anthropomorphised only, it seems, to make the poetic I feel less lonely, the daffodils that are “tossing their heads in sprightly dance” are exclusively bent towards the human, suggesting a non-reciprocal and anthropocentric relationship between human and nature. The final stanza adds to this reading, as the daffodil scene is now completely interiorised and becomes an imaginative resource for the narrator’s pleasure and sense of individual self. In that sense, the poem’s activation of picturesque framing can thus be read as reinforcing a persistent perception of nature as a projection surface and separate stylised idyllic retreat for anthropocentric purposes.

    With this in mind, we set out to re- or unframe Wordsworth’s daffodil poem. Since my seminar embraces ecopoetics as a “creative-critical edge” (Skinner 1) that combines theoretical and practical modes of investigation, our critical discussion was paired with a creative writing task. Inspired by a combination of conceptual/procedural poetry techniques, Charles Bernstein’s language experiments and this playful Daffodil variation I found online, I asked the students to pick a line from the Wordsworth poem that spoke to them in some way. They were then supposed to find material (leaflets, newspaper articles, dictionary entries, other poems…) that somehow related to that line and to finally make a new poem composed of phrases from the new sources, juxtaposed with lines from the original if desired.

    The results are surprising and wonderful in many ways. Students’ materials included songs, references to Blake, bureaucratic forms, research on dance, manuals, and advertisements that begin to move Wordsworth’s poem into the chaos of our contemporary present. Unraveling a detached bird’s-eye view on nature, the new poems became expressions of embedded narrators whose reading experience, context, and environment shape and in-form their writing. In that sense, many of the new poems no longer describe but start to embody a more connected, interdependent sense of being in the world and having to deal with its material, physical, and economic conditions: Wordsworth meets the struggles of applying for student funding; “dancing daffodils” are complicated by the bodily strains of professional athletes and commercialised resource extraction. Often questioning nature as an idyllic retreat separated from the human realm, the poems disclose various contact points between humans and their multifaceted environments. Juxtaposing different registers and sources, they open themselves up to new relations between textual and extratextual ecologies and reflect on the various uses of language as it connects us to “the fragile and finite territory our species named, claimed, exploited, sentimentalized, and aggrandized as ‘our world.’” (Retallack para 30) We do not need to wander out into nature, we are in the midst of it, part of it, and it is not always pretty but includes “fear, dominance, confusion, or pain”. Amidst this confusion, we can find poetry and “experience art” that is not separated from but fully embedded in everyday life and thereby directly interacting with its social, political, and historical layers.

    The writing and reading procedures/process of these poems invite closer attention to these layers and how they are curated by language, searching for an ecopoetics of disruption, imagination, and critical consciousness that can make us aware and perhaps push the limits of our view. Resembling branches that grow out of Wordsworth’s original poem, as one the student described it, all of the new, unframed poems emphasize process and offer new perspectives on and beyond Wordsworth’s “Daffodils”. My intention with this task has not been to disparage his poem, but rather to show it is not the end of the story and encourage us to investigate, shift, and lift the frames that structure our perception. One voice, one poem, one frame is simply not enough to register the fullness, multiplicity, and complexity of this ancient earth we humans inhabit only briefly.

    References

    Bate, Jonathan. The Song of the Earth. Picador, 2001.

    British Library. “William Wordsworth’s ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’. https://www.britishlibrary.cn/ en/works/i-wandered-lonely-as-a-cloud/ 

    Gilpin, William. An Essay on Prints. A. Strahan, 1802. 

    Hess, Scott. “John Clare, William Wordsworth, and the (Un)framing of Nature”. John Clare Society  Journal, Iss. 27, 2008. pp. 27-44. 

    Levinson, Marjorie. Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems. Cambridge University Press, 1986. 

    McGann, Jerome. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. University of Chicago Press, 1983. 

    Reilly, Evelyn. “Eco-Noise and the Flux of Lux”. Eco Language Reader, edited by Brenda, Iijima, Portable P at Yo-Yo Labs/Nightboat, 2010, pp. 255–74. 

    Retallack, Joan. ‘What Is Experimental Poetry and Why Do We Need It’. Jacket Magazine, 2007,  jacketmagazine.com/32/p-retallack.shtml. 

    Skinner, Jonathan. ecopoetics 01. Periplum, 2001.  

    Soth, Amelia. ‘The Claude Glass Revolutionized the Way People Saw Landscapes.’ JSTOR Daily, 2021.

    Wordsworth, William. “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” PoetryFoundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45521/i-wandered-lonely-as-a-cloud. 

  • Queer relation and the landscape: animals, the neutral, and significant otherness

    Queer relation and the landscape: animals, the neutral, and significant otherness

    In this writerly contemplation of queer relation with animals and landscapes, Clare Patterson draws connections between sheep trapped in snow drifts, Clarice Lispector’s cockroach, Leslie Feinberg’s crow, and various “significant othernesses” that shape our lives and queer literature.

    🏵

    At my grandmother’s house, I slept in a small back bedroom, with one window that looked out onto the fell behind. In the winter, I would wake up to a changed landscape of white fields, the absolute white rendering the sheep the murky pale yellow of teeth. Sometimes my uncle or grandad had to dig out sheep that had been buried under snowdrifts – huddled together in flocks and protected by their thick wool, they could survive for multiple days buried completely. 

    This image stuck in my mind as a child – the flock of sheep crowded together in some deep, blue hole, wool coats pressed together for warmth, hot breath clouding the air. In my head, it was like an image I’d seen in a children’s book, one in which mice, squirrels, and other small animals lived in trees hollowed out into human houses. In the winter they dug tunnels between them to travel to each other’s homes, lit them with Victorian gas lamps and candles. In reality, the sheep probably huddled and shivered, terrified, until human hands came along and dragged them out. 

    Many of the children’s books I read involved these anthropomorphised animals, cute little animal societies whose denizens wore non-specific “old fashioned” clothing and lived in cosy cottages with roaring log fires. There was an ecological bent to these stories, which made children engage with the natural world and the changing of the seasons, but also a deeply anthropocentric one, making animals agents of storytelling relatable, empathy-worthy creatures through human narratives. 

    I held both ideas in tandem in my mind – saw mice as both the subjects of sweet children’s stories, who lived nearly-human lives in churches or hedgerows, but also as creatures that needed to be caught in traps when they came into the house. They were the reason why farms have barn cats, why cats were domesticated in the first place. When my mum grew up on the farm it was filled with cats, both feral ones in the barn and tame and semi-tame ones in the house. Some were only seen in glimpses carrying mice in their jaws, some let my mum dress them up in doll clothes and slept in her toy cot. By the time I was there they had far fewer cats on the farm, only feral ones we hardly saw, but my mum always had pet ones at home who, despite their pampered indoor lives, retained their own instincts and strangenesses. 

    The cats would often bring dead birds into the house. They would also bring them in alive, sending them flapping around the living room in a wild panic. My mum found the birds frightening, but I was one of those children who loved animals, so catching and rereleasing them was always my job. I would do this by first backing them into a high corner of the room, and would then gently close my hands around them, the weight of them between my palms like a smooth stone. If I could, I would grasp them with their head poking out between my thumbs, hoping this would prevent them from being frightened, but sometimes they cowered in my hands in a little ball. 

    There was always a soft thrill in holding them for a moment – the tickle of their wings against my palms as they panicked, the release of tension as they realised they were trapped and froze completely still. I carried all kinds of birds this way – wrens, sparrows, blue tits, robins, even a woodpecker. Once, just before I let the bird go, he pecked me sharply on the hand, drew blood. In my child’s mind I was deeply offended that a creature I had rescued could be so ungrateful. Another time, the bird flew out of my hands before circling back to me once more, as if to say thank you. My cats once brought in a half-dead bird – I don’t remember what kind, but his chest was white, and a blossom of bright red blood had flowered there. I took him and carried him gently to our front garden, shut the cats in the house, and placed him on a large, cool leaf. I knew he was still living because his red chest moved up and down heavily, as if with effort. I checked back on him hourly or so, hoping he might recover but knowing deep down that he wouldn’t. As it was getting dark, my mum stepped out to look at him, and came back to tell me she was very sorry, but he was dead. I was furious at my cats and their claws and teeth, even though I understood they couldn’t help their nature. 

    Their nature – an idea we apply to animals, an idea of what separates us from animals. Something inherent to them that they have no control over, no consciousness of. Animals are unmoral, thinking only in terms of instincts, prey drives, motivations that live only within the body. There is no love in nature, only maternal instinct and hunger. Clarice Lispector, in her novel The Passion According to G.H., calls this unmorality “the neutral” – life that doesn’t think about law or morality, life that doesn’t think, life as life itself only. 

    In the novel, a middle-class Brazilian sculptress known only as G.H., the initials embossed on her luggage, crushes a cockroach with a cupboard door and, looking upon its dying, oozing body, experiences something between a psychic break, a transcendence of physical form, and a return to this animal, “neutral” state of being. In G.H.’s loss of self, Lispector describes a “link of mutual ferocity” connecting all life, all things human and nonhuman. This phrase containsg both comradely connection and uncontrollable violence. It is a phrase that makes me think of the food chain diagrams we filled in in biology class, drawing big, red arrows connecting soil to an earthworm to a robin to a hawk then looping the hawk and its postmortem decay back around to the soil to represent transference of energy. Animals eat each other forever – they know no better; they know nothing else. 

    Lispector’s protagonist begins this text as a specifically gendered subject – she is a “pretty replica,” someone who men read as “a woman of generosity and grace, and one who isn’t a bother, and one who doesn’t eat away at a man.” Her class position and her role as an artist gives her some freedom – she is seen to inhabit a social role “between man and woman”, able to move with conviviality across both male and female spaces, but within this is still limited to a extent by her gender – her sculptures “would be good if they weren’t so amateurish”. Her fear of “being a bother” exemplifies how her welcome in these spaces, her treatment as an equal, are conditional to the extent that they exist at all. This idea of (not) “eating away” at a man is notable when, at the climax of the novel, G.H. feels compelled to consume the innards of the dead cockroach, giving herself over to the “mutual ferocity” of nonhuman life. She begins from the female urge to fold herself up, to repress desire. Indeed,  Andrea Long Chu has described femaleness as “any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another”. The “neutral” she eventually embraces, this unmoral form of life, no longer makes room for the desires of another, and in fact barely contains the “desires” of the self, beyond the need to eat, to sleep, to procreate. The novel ends with an unselfconscious, in the most literal sense, consummation of the pure desire-driven actions of animal instinct. G. H.’s loss of self, her surrender to the neutral, is not only an act of un-humanisation but an act of ungendering. 

    🏵

    In winter evening half-consciousness, I watch something on the news about glaciers receding. Later, in an episode of a David Attenborough documentary, an arctic fox is shown crossing the open tundra, all white under a blue-purple winter night. These documentaries often wring so much pathos out of animals lives, projecting human emotions that are as unknowable to them as their minds are to us – assuming they experience love like we do, grief like we do, envy like we do. Here, though, we seem to be seeing a creature only as it is – for a moment it is just the fox, beautiful and white, crossing the tundra alone. I would quite like to be a creature of snow, I think absentmindedly, something with thick wool or fur and hardened paws. Generating my own warmth and sleeping in an ice hole in cold, blue safety. 

    I would like to have the relationship to my body that an animal has, I think – difficult to gender by sight, just living with little thought of it. Of course, many creatures have sex characteristics that can be easily read by humans, but not all. For those that can’t, most people don’t try too hard to read them. People sometimes seem irritated when I inadvertently misgender their dogs, as if it is something that should be immediately obvious. In Leslie Feinberg’s novel, Stone Butch Blues, the protagonist Jess Goldberg has a similar feeling about animals. Jess is a young adult still comprehending her gender identity, and doing so within a nuclear family that punishes her for the gender transgressions of wearing jeans or having short hair. Upset by her family’s conditional love and their attempts to feminise her, Jess finds some solace in nature:

    ‘I hurried out to the pond to catch polywogs in a jar. I leaned on my elbow and looked up close at the little frogs that climbed up on the sun-baked rocks.

    “Caw, caw!” A huge black crow circled above me in the air and landed on a rock nearby. We looked at each other in silence.

    “Crow, are you a boy or a girl?”

    “Caw, caw!”

    I laughed and rolled over on my back. The sky was crayon blue. I pretended I was lying on the white cotton clouds. The earth was damp against my back. The sun was hot, the breeze was cool. I felt happy. Nature held me close and seemed to find no fault with me.’

    The unintelligible response (for Jess) to an unintelligible question (for the crow) shows our ability to look at animals and their ability to look back – but also the vast gulf of communication between us, and our desire to make and project meaning onto that unknowability. Animals do not have gender, at least not as far as we know, and at least not in the way we do. In our mutual unknowing is an acceptance of the limits of our understanding. Donna Haraway calls this “relating in significant otherness”, the act of living with something we cannot know. Writing about her relationship with her dogs, she compares it to the love the worshipper has for God – the act of loving something too big or strange or far away to know its nature, the act of loving something that can only be understood by what it is not, and by knowing what one cannot understand. 

    “Nature” is often used in appeals to conservatism, especially around queerness – queer relationships aren’t “natural,” transition isn’t “natural,” in nature we only see reproductive sex and so only reproductive sex is “natural”. I could make appeals here to scientific evidence to the contrary – that many animals engage in same-sex relationships, that male seahorses carry pregnancies. I could cite numerous examples of reproduction in flora and fauna that are different and alien to ours – but that isn’t really the point I’m making. My appeal is more to a meeting with something unknowable without finding fault – to queer relation as a meeting with the limits of our understanding of another creature, or another being, without the desire to mould it into our own shape. Queerness opens up the idea that not everyone’s desires are the same, and in that are endless possibilities. Nature has never seemed to find any fault with me.