A critique of how the field of ecopoetics holds imagination.
Craig Chalquist
Chalquist.com
2022
If you were to look up “gnosis,” you would find many definitions, some conflicting, as I have learned from teaching both Gnosticism and Hermeticism at the graduate level. For our purposes, “gnosis” means experiential insight into an aspect of the world felt to be divine. Gnosis is therefore different from whatever intellectual knowledge it encompasses. It is revelatory but not mystical, involving a deepening of relationship with the sacred rather than obliteration of the ego. It tends to arise outside of religion or, if within one, does not stay there long. Many a Gnostic dreamer wove imaginative stories to counter the oppressive authoritarianism of Genesis, only to move entirely beyond it.
Hermeticism and its evolutions (including Gnosticism, Renaissance natural magic, the Islamic Science of Lights, Romantic philosophy, Goethean phenomenology, Jungian psychology, terrapsychology) have relied on imagination as a tool of gnosis. The question we will tend here is: Where does ecopoetics take its place in this tradition of deep knowing?
Literary criticism has to do with how literature is studied, analyzed, and interpreted. As a discipline it derives from Aristotle’s Poetics, the first book of literary theory. It offers now-familiar poetry classifications like epic, lyric, and dramatic, the third of which breaks down into comedy (which shows us the social imperfections of ordinary people), tragedy (depicting the downfall of the formerly noble), and tragicomedy. All these arts and genres imitate life.
In 1978, William Rueckert coined “ecocriticism” in his essay “Literature and Ecology: An Expertment in Ecocriticism” (Gladwin 2017), where he defined it as the application of ecology to the study of literature (Oppermann 1999). Arising around the heyday of post-structural studies, ecocriticism, also known as ecopoetics, questions the value of wordplay disconnected from the worsening condition of the natural world. Poetics (as literary theory), linguistics, semiotics, rhetoric, communication studies, philosophy of language, narratology, the environmental humanities, and hermeneutics are all associated with the project of ecopoetics (Mickey 2022).
Based initially in literary ecology, ecocriticism evolved in two waves—the first mainly Romantic and early American nature writing, the second much more diverse, multivocal, and multicultural—into an ongoing inquiry into the relationship between literature and our relations with the environment. Key events include the 1992 founding of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) at the Western Literary Association, the journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment a year later, and the 1996 publication of The Ecocriticism Reader edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Herold Fromm (Gladwin 2017).
This multidisciplinary approach to Earth-centered literary studies is not merely an intellectual exercise, but ethically concerned about the accelerating worldwide ecological crisis. “Ecopoetics thus contributes to the dissident project of resistance to dominant cultural modes of thinking” (Mambrol 2021). “What must an ecopoem be to do justice to its name?” asks John Shoptaw. “My answer is twofold: an ecopoem needs to be environmental and it needs to be environmentalist” (2016). As we will see, this admirable commitment to bringing attention to environmental woes can backfire.
Ecopoetic theorists often mention “imagination” briefly, as in, “How can our imaginations begin to engage with the implications of a profoundly changed relationship between human and non-human nature?” (Lindström and Garrard, 2014). For the most part, ecopoets are busy using imagination rather than talking about it. However, Lawrence Buell, a founder of ecocriticism, edited The Environmental Imagination:
If, as environmental philosophers contend, western metaphysics and ethics need revision before we can address today’s environmental problems, then environmental crisis involves a crisis of the imagination the amelioration of which depends on finding better ways of imagining nature and humanity’s relation to it” (1996, 2).
To do this we should search the works of nature reflection within the world’s biggest technological power to find both the pathologies and the alternatives.
Fesmire considers deliberation of any kind inherently imaginative, drawing by necessity on various cognitive structures like metaphors, models, images and narratives. He defines a more specific focus:
…Ecological imagination is treated herein as relational imagination shaped by key metaphors used in (although not necessarily originating in) the ecologies. Our deliberations enlist imagination of an ecological sort when these metaphors (some of recent origin and some millennia old) shape what John Dewey calls our “dramatic rehearsals” (184-85).
Ecological imagination also builds relational perceptiveness needed for appreciating ecological interdependencies, cultivates empathy for those affected by our choices, probes for technical and communal solutions, shows sensitivity to cultural traditions, and enlists aesthetic responses to natural and cultural landscapes (203).
In Ecocriticism in the Modernist Imagination, Sultzbach analyzes works by E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and W. H. Auden to show how they represent nature’s animate agency (2016). Estok calls for a broadening of the ecocritical imagination beyond a false opposition between scientific and nonscientific narrative (2010). Glotfelty, Armbuster, and Lunch assembled essays to reimagine our relations with bioregions (2012). Ryan writes about “botanical imagination,” or how plants are represented in contemporary English, American, and Australian poetry (2018). Echoing Goethe, he argues that poetic imagination is as essential as scientific rationality to understanding the life of plants. Rigby observes that Romantic ecopoetics sustains a vital capacity for reflective self-critique (2021).
Not everyone agrees on what ecological imagination should concentrate on, or how. For example, Janet Newman explores the poems of Dinah Hawken and finds them depicting nature as more resilient than victimized (unlike most contemporary ecopoetry) and more a partner in metaphor with human consciousness:
Polemic ecopoetry tends to rely on literal descriptions and rhetorical assertion because its primary aim is to raise awareness of environmental concerns. Instead, Hawken’s work often aligns with a critical school of thought that suggests there is a larger catchment of ecopoetry that includes those poems more akin to a Romantic engagement with nature, specifically the notion that nature has a positive effect on consciousness. Such poetry uses the language of figure and imagination (Newman 2015, ii).
In these and other ecocritical examinations of imagination, the emphasis is mainly on using it as a tool to enlarge the human sense of a profuse, living world. Not exclusively human. Ecopoets do describe the natural world as a source of meaning (Knickerbocker 2012, 2) and make use of “sensuous poesis” (17-18), shaping aural and visual effects to parallel the language of nature so that we might have a clearer sense of what it needs from us. We might recall here the Ecological Circle of Howard Clinebell, coiner of “ecotherapy,” who insisted that we give back to the natural world at least as much as we receive from it (1996). Nevertheless, ecocritical theory tends toward an Emersonian and Apollonian utility of the imaginal as a resource for the enrichment of humanity and of the more-than-human.
In the past, I would have applauded all this. Then something strange happened to me just before a public presentation.
For a number of years I have presented and written on how motifs from folklore, and especially myth, tend to resurface in dreams, complexes, news stories, and contemporary events. This reflects my background in Jungian depth psychology and my interest in storytelling. We tend to get caught in storied replays unless we become conscious of them when they first appear. If we fail to, then Moloch the hungry sacrifice god reappears as a bronze bull sculpture on Wall Street, the figure of the Golem returns to life as AI out of control, and the fiery Underworld river Phlegethon ignites with every watery oil spill that catches fire.
One of my favorite tales for showing how human and environmental justice coincide is that of mythic Baucis and Philemon, an elderly couple who welcomed two strangers to dinner after everyone else in their village turned away the travelers. The strangers revealed themselves as Jupiter and Hermes and warned the couple to flee, for a flood was about to end all life there. After the flood, the formerly poor couple take their places as priests of a shining new temple to the gods. The ruined village, now cleansed, has become a sanctuary.
I was preparing to retell this tale when the following dream popped up the night before the event:
I am preparing to go on stage to present something on myth and justice when an elderly couple approaches me. To my shock I see Baucis and Philemon walking up. “We don’t like how you tell our story,” Philemon tells me as Baucis nods, “and we’d prefer that you stop doing it.”
Deciding on a rather literal-minded last-minute change for the presentation, I took the story out. Afterward, I spent time reflecting on what the dream was trying to tell me.
When C. G. Jung began his famous “confrontation with the unconscious,” a series of deep imaginal descents into himself throughout a three-year period starting in 1913, he was approached by the images of Elijah and the biblical figure of Salome. As they conversed, he speculated that Elijah, who appeared later as Philemon, represented Logos in the psyche and Salome Eros—whereupon Elijah/Philemon corrected him: We are real and not images (1989, 182).
From this and many other startling encounters with the imaginal, Jung concludes that such figures possess an autonomy eerie to the conscious mind that must reckon with them. For much of what we take to be “our” thoughts and imaginings are no more ours, says Jung’s Philemon, than birds flying through the air could be (183).
This was a pickle. To live more justly and sustainably on this planet, we surely needed an overhaul of imagination. This capacity is not just an evolutionary add-on for entertainment, but a “primary process” (Freud 1989, 43) that founds all other other cognitive and affective capabilities. This dire need was beyond dispute. At the same time, these pesky imaginal figures demanded respect for their integrity and autonomy.
I was reminded by this upsetting dream of another that visited when I had begun to study dreams in my late twenties and felt frustrated that they did not speak clearly:
I stand beside a pool with an East Asian man I do not know. He is lecturing me: “You Americans think the whole world should speak your language! But when you visit our realm, you must learn to converse in our tongue.” He hands me a document, the title of which is DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. Then he turns into a giant turtle.
I woke feeling slapped. From then on, I devoted myself to learning as best I could the symbolic language of the unconscious. (I also traveled more.)
It would be many years before I came across that turtle again. In Chinese mythology, Ao was present when the world was created by Nuwa and her consort Fuxi. Later, when the sacred pillar mountain Bouzhou was destroyed by a monster (the original mountaintop miner?) and the sky turned black and fell down (e.g., Beijing or San Francisco on a smoggy day), Nuwa used one of Ao’s legs to repair the sacred pillar and put back the sky. Some say he is still around, numbered as one of the Four Auspicious Beasts. According to tradition, the hexagrams of the ancient I Ching oracle started out as markings on the backs of tortoise shells.
It is as though the dream turtle said: You must respect the autonomy of the imaginal instead of dragging us into the dayworld; but yes, we do possess potent tools for putting the sky back where it belongs. How to understand this?
A third dream continued the conversation while reminding me that I had not fully learned the lesson:
I am visiting C. G. Jung in the foyer of his house, where he will give me and a few others a quick tour. [I have never been there and do not know if it even has a foyer.] Z, one of my former students, is arguing with Jung about the need to use psychology to make change in the world. Just as I prepare to ask Jung about the possibility of a socially engaged deep ecopsychology, Jung reads my mind and states mischievously, “I don’t care a shepherd’s pie about social change.” It’s relationships that matter, he insists, not trying to change people.
Now, it’s no secret that Jung did not favor combining depth psychology with activism, or that he dissuaded analysts from doing so. But the dream does not underline what I already know: namely, his rather hyper-individualistic approach to transformation. Nor is he indifferent to the need for change; his entire opus shows that. The point “Jung” insists on is that overt attempts to make adults live differently tend to fail. Who likes being preached at or told what to do? Mainly those who never grew up emotionally and idealize leaders as parent figures. The food Jung mentions is a sly dig at a recent attempt to lose weight (a remnant of my hero complex) by giving up a dish I like to eat. The former student often argued in the day world that one must push, harangue, polemicize, and just plain bully people into being ecologically responsible.
I recently accepted a position with the potential to extend my academic outreach. Unfortunately, most of my alchemical fire has flowed into artistic and other creative projects. I’ve amazed myself by how well I sketch. I’m writing speculative fiction. As though to comment on this, I have repeatedly dreamed of losing my phone/wallet or my car (a Prius) and, after searching for them, finding wallets with SF writer ID cards in them. A fourth and recent dream:
I have been kidnapped by unknown assailants who deprive me of my phone. When I ask for it back, they give me what looks like a Star Trek communicator bearing several plastic toothpicks like those found on a Swiss army knife…
…of the kind I carried as a boy. Those damned picks somehow always get lost.
What to make of all this?
My use of imagination and myth for ecological education, similar in motive and aim to that of ecopoetics, has been called into question by imaginal figures and synchronicities. I am faced both personally and professionally—at the start of my second Saturn Return no less—with having to rethink my relationship with the uses of imagination. Mine alone? I do not know. Perhaps going farther into this can shed light on what I see as a limitation of ecopoetic and ecocritical approaches to imagination.
The problem seems to be that of mining the unconscious for imaginal ore. When I cross the line from storytelling as inspiration for the soul into the territory of suggesting courses of action, the unconscious pushes back with cases of imaginal dyspepsia. But when I tell a tale with deep ecological consequences and let it hang out there, very often people approach afterward to share how the telling prompted them to take concrete action on behalf of nature, place, or planet. It reminds me of old folktales in which being kind to an animal allows it to bring the magic, but yoking it for work kills it. Imagination as golden goose.
Can enchantivism bring light to this conundrum?
Several years ago, I began to wonder in earnest about activist burnout.
I’ve not been much of an activist, although I have supported activists in a variety of ways, one of which was helping San Diegan street artists get grants. A former partner who was an activist wondered why I did not attend protests very often; for her, life was a series of injustices to be corrected mainly through activism. But that activist style felt shaming and superegoic to me, as did the shoulds, musts, and oughts that infused so many justifiable calls to action. In all this I saw much risk and frustration but little joy.
I wondered how non-activists could step up. What was there to do for people not called to the heroic activist path? Or for activists too burned out to go on protesting? Some of my students and colleagues had carried on activism for years, only to succumb to frustration, depression, or physical breakdown. What might serve their healing?
I have inveighed against the overuse of the Hero’s Journey (Campbell 2008, 41) schema not only in Hollywood, where screenwriters have converted it into an oversimplified template, but as a symptom of an American hero complex. Having come from two families (adoptive and birth) full of half-destroyed and emotionally repressed male heroes, many of them survivors of brutal military service, before going on to counsel combat veterans, I have been struck by the darkness of the hero’s shadow. The rest of the world feels it every day as fading American military, political, and financial might continues to dominate local and regional interests.
What might non-heroes do to participate in earthly regeneration? What motivated me to live more lightly on the planet?
Inspiration. I don’t like to be pushed, but I can be pulled.
“Enchantivism” is a pull through storytelling:
Enchantivism describes the many ways we make lasting change by telling reenchanting stories about our relations with ourselves, each other, or our ailing but still-beautiful planet; sharing our reflections and inviting others’ on the relevance of these stories; and then letting the stories impel creative and thoughtful responses to how things are. The stories can be narratives, displays of imagery, humor, even dance and ritual (Chalquist, 2021).
Enchantivism appeals directly to inspiration, and by doing so exerts a fascinating pull rather than a parental push; an invitation instead of a demand. No heroics are required. In fact, enchantivism for some makes a good post-heroic journey of reenchantment with ourselves, each other, and our homeworld. As a thought attributed to Saint Exupery puts it: Don’t teach people how to build boats; instead, fill them for a longing for the sea. Or as organic farmers say: Tend the soil, and the plants will take care of themselves.
How does enchantivism work? Although Seamus Heaney believes that no lyric ever stopped a tank (Knickerbocker 2012, 17), a group of Ukrainian citizens was recently spotted doing just that, blocking an entire Russian column while singing the Ukrainian national anthem (Times Now Digital, 2022). Furthermore, a poem stopped a logging operation (Suskin 2015), an Apsáalooke/Crow artist playfully destroyed “noble savage” museum stereotypes about American Indians (Monani and Seymour 2020), and science fiction writer David Brin stated that doomsday fiction may have helped prevent nuclear war (Brin 2021, 10). As is well known in the Star Trek community, Nichelle Nichols, who played Niota Uhura, was talked into staying on the bridge of the Enterprise by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who knew the future—even a fictional one—needed Black faces in prominent positions.
I was pleasantly startled to hear Dr. Sam Mickey say in a CIIS lecture that King spoke of having a dream, not a nightmare (2022). I’ve made a similar point when teaching enchantivism: that King did not say “we are a bunch of victims,” clear as he was on the tremendous and continuing injustices done to Black people, but that he had been to the mountaintop and seen. King was direct and forceful about racism, greed, White complacency, and war-mongering, and he encased these terrors in inspiring possibilities for action. A collection of his speeches is rightly called A Testament of Hope (2003).
Of course, King’s “Dream” speech has been coopted by the privileged powers that be into the warped message of: Just try hard individually and you can live the American dream. James Hillman would likely say that this shows a basic problem with hope itself: it takes us away from where we are (Jenson 2005). King’s form of hope did not do that. It was enchantivist in how it revealed its grim roots while keeping to the possibility of a better future. Lose sight of either and we are left with either an abyss of helpless hopelessness or an idealism unmoored from on-the-ground realities. Women in Salvadoran refugee camps during that nation’s civil war showed the way by creating for each camp a Committee of Joy (Wallis 1995, 231).
In its commitment to poetry as environmentalism, ecopoetics often feels heroic, with Nature in need of saving. The heroic impulse is not necessarily negative. One might argue that we need more heroism today than ever. But the problem remains of how to respect the integrity of the imaginal in all its magical autonomy.
A local artist and psychologist recently presented some of her work at an online event. Her technique was superb and her concern about ecocrisis sincere. But as I watched image after image of absent birds, bright green pools of toxic runoff, and parents telling children about what used to fly in the skies, I felt uninspired to do anything about it. Moreover, here was yet another psychologist belatedly waking up to the deep state of catastrophe on every side and responding with what Jung in his essay “Psychology and Literature” called psychological art and which he compared unfavorably to visionary art: the first is merely personal, the second an expression of some “primordial” impulse emanating from collective consciousness (1971, 89-90).
In dealing with the psychological mode of creation, we need never ask ourselves what the material consists of or what it means. But this question forces itself upon us when we turn to the visionary mode. We are astonished, confused, bewildered… The public for the most part repudiates this kind of literature, unless it is crudely sensational, and even the literary critic finds it embarrassing (91).
When Picasso started painting Guernica, he had taken on the project as a politicized commission and felt little enthusiasm for it. The bombing of that town by Nazis and Italian Fascists galvanized him. We might feel tempted to classify Guernica as psychological art. However, when asked to interpret the painting, he refused. The trigger may have been psychological, as was the outrage Steinbeck felt before writing The Grapes of Wrath, which many consider his greatest novel; but the visionary dimension of Picasso’s painting grew evident in time. It was as though the ruined town and its dead had reached out to him for a response deeper than that of the conscious mind. Tolkien wrote parts of The Lord of the Rings in the trenches of World War I, but forever after he argued against turning the War of the Ring into allegory. The tale and its characters emerged from a deeper realm.
Laura Mitchell argues that imagination transcends the human. Similar to Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “flesh” (1968, 248-51), the “eco-imaginal” is a relational interface we share with the natural order: a commonality and reciprocity of experiencing (2004).
The eco-imaginal is thus the interface we share with Nature that makes possible nature-human communication—a communication not defined exclusively in terms of the human but experienced at the more biological and elemental level at which all life shares the same consciousness…neither ecological nor imaginal but both (2004).
Everything talks. We are in the conversation, if not its center.
Including on the imaginal plane. Imagination from here is not an exclusively human tool for use in environmentalism, for example. The imaginal is not only autonomous, but intimately interwoven with the world of nature. When we engage with nature artistically, the deeper the conversation, the more visionary the result and the greater its capacity to inspire.
Here it might be argued that any imaginative work with nature is eco-imaginal and thereby linked to the world’s experiential “flesh” as presence. This sounds somewhat like the argument that even heavy, world-devouring industry is an expression of nature. The argument leaves out the distinction between healthy and symptomatic expressions via human consciousness. Chopping down a forest for profit betrays an alienated urge to reconnect with the natural world; making art to save the trees brings in a heroic human agenda. The alternative would be to go deeper, as the most evocative ecopoetry does, to allow the eco-imaginal to speak as clearly as it can through human hands and hearts.
We ride this spectrum in our work with terrapsychology: the study of how the things of the world—natural, human-made—get into the psyche and live there, and how so much of what we take as personal inner experience accurately reflects events in the world (Chalquist 2020, 8-11). We read doings in the world symbolically, as when mountain peaks encourage peak experiences, clean rivers clarify human communications, and failing power grid monopolies black out our life at home. Whereas “symbol” means to join together, “diabolic” means to tear apart. A literal-mindedness unaware of the “book of nature” reaching far back into Christian and other traditions risks denigrating the world as passive and speechless. Instead, we can allow its symbolic speech to reenchant us back into mutual ecological imaginings.
For an example of this, consider “Lichen,” a poem by ecopoet Janet Newman:
Once you see it
it is everywhere
like a ghost, gravity
tugging a cloud,
something from nothing,
nothing from air
They say it means
you have good air.
They don’t mean
a good ear
but clear
like a high note
sung on that hill
and carried across the gully
to here when the wind is right
or there is no wind at all.
It grows to the top
of the concrete power pole,
yellow paw prints climbing up.
From the wooden crossbars
aquamarine whiskers
Test the air.
From there you can see
over the plain to Kapiti,
Tuteremoana rising
From the sea (2015, 66).
Tuteremoana, the highest point of Kapiti Island, is named after a Maori ancestor, chief, and chanter of songs. Lowly lichen, “something from nothing” but growing everywhere, tests the air while lifting the vision to an ancient, rocky past joined to the watery horizon. Those with a good ear can hear lichen speak of many meaningful things. Instead of presenting a disguised sermon or demand, the poem invites us to perceive lichen differently, through a lens of reenchantment. The lichen, not an activist agenda, takes the lead.
For both ecopoetics and enchantivism, this responsiveness moves the mind toward respecting the autonomy of the imaginal. Still, have we answered the objection of creatives like allegory-disliking Tolkien, who resisted every attempt to drag the secondary world of imagination into the primary world of lived being? Have we met Philemon and Baucis on their own imaginal ground?
Here is where my experience may diverge from that of others earnest about assembling an Earth-honoring society. When I try to get my storytellings to fulfil primary-world goals, the stories lose their charm. If I persist, imaginal characters show up in dreams and synchronicities to stage their own protest. I am trying to learn to present what I envision—what speaks to me—as creatively as I can, and then step back from the outcome.
I will continue to write stories about “Terrania,” a word that drifted in one evening for the just, delightful, and Earth-honoring civilization I would like to be a member of (Chalquist 2021a). I hope Terrania awaits us down the road. I believe we can build it from the ground up. But it’s for other people to persuade, cajole, and manage the details.
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