Ontopoetics Part II: Contemporary Examples[1]

with guest contributor Freya Mathews

In her last posting The Meaning of Ontopoetics, Freya Mathews offered a view of ‘reality as presence’ with ‘a capacity and inclination to create and share meaning with us.’ She explained ontopoetics as ‘a way of denoting instances of engagement between self and world’ where ‘meaning emanates not merely from the side of self but from the world’s side as well’. (see also Living Cosmos Panpsychism). In this post she reflects on examples of ontopoetic communication and its potential to transform our lives.

In my last post I offered a brief account of the notion of ontopoetics, setting it, for the sake of philosophical intelligibility, within a metaphysical framework of panpsychism. I characterized ontopoetic phenomena as meaningful configurations of circumstances that constellate locally in response to a particular human act of address or invocation. Such local conjunctions of circumstances match or mirror to some extent the narrative terms of the address or invocation in question. It is the cosmos itself, understood as living presence, that re-constellates itself in this way in response to an act of address.

As I noted in that post, invocation has traditionally been practised in religious and spiritual contexts. Answering manifestations, I suggested, might nevertheless be interpreted ontopoetically rather than as responses of an intended divinity. An ontopoetic approach moreover opens invocation up to wider-than-religious narrative frameworks: when one’s invocations are directed to the cosmos at large one may frame them in mythic, folkloric, totemic, archetypal or other poetic or ceremonial terms.

In this post then, let’s consider some contemporary examples of ontopoetic practices and phenomena. Practices may be collective or private. Collective practices in which I have been personally involved include bioregional ceremonies or festivals devised to celebrate a particular place or landscape or other aspect of earth-life. One such festival, a classic spring paean to regeneration and renewal, used to be held every year in my own inner-city neighbourhood in Naarm or Melbourne here in Australia.[ii] It took place on the banks of our local waterway, the Merri Creek. The purpose of the event was to welcome back to the creek the beautiful little azure-blue bird called Sacred Kingfisher. The Sacred Kingfisher migrates all the way down from south-east Asia to its ancestral nesting grounds in southern Australia, but decades ago it disappeared from the Merri Creek, due to urbanization and industrialization. However, after community-run revegetation projects brought indigenous vegetation back to the Merri, the kingfisher returned.

Thousands of local people used to attend the festival (video here), welcomed by Aboriginal custodians and dancers. Hundreds of performers would participate in the ceremony, including children from schools all around Melbourne. These children would have special parts to play, dressing up as frogs and insects, birds and spirits of the creek. They all learned the Kingfisher Boogie, a little dance that imitated the characteristic call and shake of the Sacred Kingfisher. Each year a different Dreaming story, offered by local Indigenous elders, would provide the theme for the large-scale performance that wove these Dreaming elements into a contemporary narrative of regeneration and belonging. Each year, too, the event tended to become more ceremonial, with the audience being invited to participate in ritual gestures, such as taper-lighting, and ritual processions, so that despite its trappings of telegraph poles and urban horizons, the creekside would become, by nightfall, eerily evocative of an archaic setting, with devotees walking and dancing amongst sacred fires, consorting with the spirits of their homeplace. Invoked in this way, the site would usually respond with dazzlingly synchronized poetics. One year the performance, based on a Dreaming story of Rainbow Woman, culminated in an actual rainbow framing the dancing ground. Another year the ‘audience’ was invited to process along the creek to plant lighted tapers in a mound of sand that represented the home of departed souls. A tree stood beside this sacred mound. A harpist sat beneath this ‘spirit’ tree, playing watery music for the returning souls. When the sand-mound was filled with burning tapers, the spirit tree itself burst into ear-splitting song, as thousands of cicadas chose it and only it, at that moment, for their evening vocals. In such ways each year the poetics of the festival script were enlarged by the poetic contributions of the site, and the resulting ‘performance’ was uncannily potent and numinous.

Large scale ceremonies such as this are not of course the only forms of poetic address to world. Many activities can assume an invocational significance if undertaken with appropriate intent. Pilgrimage, for instance. In China, one of the original and most ancient sites of pilgrimage, mountains have always been the pilgrim’s destination. China’s official religions, Daoism and Buddhism, have situated their temples and monasteries, and imagined their gods and immortals, to fit in with this tradition. Nevertheless, it was arguably the mountains themselves – often personified as gods or goddesses – that were the pilgrim’s prime object of address.[iii] And it was in the landscape lexicon of the mountains – the moods of mist, play of light, sudden unanticipated vistas along winding stone paths, appearances and disappearances of the moon amongst towering pinnacles– that the pilgrim found revelation.

Pilgrimage at Sea to Skellig Rocks. Photo": Peter Reason

As with mountains in China, so with other land forms elsewhere: the act of pilgrimage can awaken a communicative dimension. It can, in other words, ‘sing up’ landscape, as Indigenous people here in Australia put it. I experienced this first hand when I undertook, with two pilgrim companions, a walk to the source of the Merri Creek. The journey to the headwaters took us seven days. Along the way we were showered with unexpected synchronicities, poetic interceptions and revelations. The little creek responded to our ‘singing’ like a true goddess, with poetic gifts and graces in abundance that transformed our modest outing into something larger than we could possibly have envisaged.[iv]

There is an ambiguity in the ontopoetic interpretation of such experiences that… is part of the fabric – the not-fully-determinable weave – of reality itself.

There is an ambiguity in the ontopoetic interpretation of such experiences that I do not wish to disturb because I think it is part of the fabric – the not-fully-determinable weave – of reality itself. Was it indeed the little creek that responded to the ritual intent of our pilgrimage, or was it the cosmos at large responding to us through the landscape lexicon of the creek? I think it was definitely the latter, but at the same time the fact that land forms can be ‘sung’ or psychically activated in this way is also part of their nature. Whether a mountain or a river is in itself alive and potentially responsive to us is thus perhaps not a question that can, within the permeable fabric of a living cosmos, be answered in a binary manner.

Traditional cultures, especially Indigenous ones, have always understood the efficacy of invocation in eliciting poetic responses from the world. This, rather than a wish to manipulate reality by sorcerous means, has probably been the impulse behind much that we in modern civilization regard as “magic”. In modern civilization, magic in its instrumental (sorcerous) sense would appear to have been completely superseded by science, but that should not blind us to the (arguably) reliable efficacy of invocation, nor to the metaphysical implication of this efficacy – that it points to the irreducibly psychophysical nature of reality. To experience for ourselves the intimately apposite poetic responsiveness of place or landscape to our communicative overtures, of creek or river or mountain to our pilgrimage, is to be shifted on our metaphysical moorings. It is to feel graced, even loved, by world, and flooded with a gratitude, a loyalty, that rearranges in us the deepest wellsprings of desire.

This communicativeness that can be called up anywhere, any time, is surely related to the poetic dynamic at the core of reality that Aboriginal people here in Australia call “Dreaming”. Once we have discovered this intimate and responsive core for ourselves, we might begin to feel towards the world the way Aboriginal people feel towards their Dreamings. Psychoanalyst Craig San Roque has poignantly described this feeling:

“‘Dreaming’. You hear them talk about it, this sweet thing. Sometimes they call it ‘The Dreaming’, [v] an approximation for the English language speakers, sometimes in Arrernte they call it 'Altjerre' or in the Western Desert language 'Tjukurrpa', or the Warlpiri, 'Jukurrpa'. What does this really mean, this state of things which brings tears to Paddy Sims’ eyes, seated cross legged before a canvas, singing quietly, painting 'The Milky Way Story'. This thing which women depict and men define in sand-drawings, deft fingers moving upon canvasses stretched on the bare ground, or smudged on a backyard cement slab near the Todd River? Tjukurrpa, land claims, faraway looks, marking this rock and that, casually. Reverence, breaking into song in creek beds, shrugging, walking off. Tjukurrpa, lightly held, with a gravity so exquisite, so solid, so omnipresent. Tjukurrpa, perhaps the most misunderstood, most ignored, most beautiful, most mysterious, most exploited, most obliterated phenomenon in this country.”[vi]

Through communicative encounters with a world that seems so readily to entwine its poetics with ours, apparently simply for the joy of wrapping us and itself in layer upon layer of narrative meaning, we might come to share those faraway looks, that dreamy-eyed love that binds Aboriginal people so indissolubly, so unnegotiably, to “country”, to world. This will be the “background love”, akin to the background radiation in physics, that emanates from our contact with metaphysical source, and within the field of which all our specific day-to-day desires are constellated.

But how transformed our day-to-day desires will be when constellated within this field! All our desires will now be referenced to this background desire for the poetic attention of our world. Our sense of self will be inflected with desire for this attention; our activities will aim to attract the beam of this great significance into every corner of our lives. With the potential for illumination by this transformative light, our instinct for survival will find a new context and the opinions of our fellows will no longer serve as the exclusive yardstick of our personal significance. Gone then will be our anxiety about the image we cut with others, and with it our hankering for the endless accessories and commodities that announce our social status and so drive consumerism in our present culture. Gone too, in this poetic effulgence, will be our susceptibility to the trivial indulgences and tawdry trinkets of such consumerism, the endless repetition and distraction parading as variety. For our aesthetic delectation there will instead be a feast of unique beauties, both miniature and vast, as well as the enthralling poetics of encounter itself, of unfolding intimacies with an array of differently-bodied presences. Our desires will have been realigned, expanded, tuned to new and larger possibilities of self-actualization through poetic engagement with the multi-minded reality of a psycho-active universe. Framed by such a larger poetics of existence, our day-to-day desires, and the day-to-day practices that spring from them, will eventually become aligned with the intrinsic psychodynamics of the cosmos itself.

Pilgrimage at Sea to Skellig Rocks. Photo: Peter Reason

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[i] This post has been adapted from Freya Mathews, “On Desiring Nature,” Indian Journal of Ecocriticism 3, 2010: 1-9

[ii]  See, for instance, Freya Mathews, “Singing Up the City”, PAN Philosophy Activism Nature 1, 2000.

[iii]   See Susan Naquin and Chun-Fang Yu, Pilgrims and Sacred Sites in China, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1992

[iv]  See Freya Mathews, “The Merri Creek: to the Source of the Given” in Reinhabiting Reality: towards a Recovery of Culture, SUNY Press, Albany New York, 2005

[vi]  Craig San Roque, “On Tjukurrpa: Painting Up and Building Thought”, Social Analysis 50, 2, Summer 2006, 148