The poetics of a sentient world

In our co-operative inquiries engaging with Rivers from a panpsychic perspective, as well as telling stories from the encounters with the world as sentient, many wrote poems or fragments of poetry to express their experience.

Our relationship with the sentient world is necessarily ‘poetic’. Indeed, we see the world as a ‘poetic ecology’. In the words of Andreas Weber

It is poetic because it regards freedom and expression as necessary dimensions of the existential reality of organisms. [It is] an ecology because all life builds on relations and unfolds through mutual transformations… Poetic ecology restores the human to its rightful place within nature – without sacrificing the otherness, the strangeness and the nobility of other beings.[1]

For Andreas, poetry is an expression that ‘conceives the world verbally or artistically, but not through explanation’.[2, 3]

Freya Mathews sees poetics not only as a way of speaking about the world, but also a communicative engagement with the world, a practice Mathews calls ‘ontopoetics’:

We invoke the world in certain terms, and the world responds – if it does indeed so grace us – by arranging itself to match those terms. The terms in question will be unavoidably poetic, in the sense of metaphorical, since the only 'language' available to the world is a language of things. That is to say, while the world cannot literally speak to us in either words or gestures nor discourse on abstract topics, it can arrange concrete particulars in meaningful configurations in the same way that poetry and dreams use imagery to create and convey meaning.[4]

Wellow Brook, Somerset UK

In the practice of co-operative inquiry, presentational knowing is one dimension of the extended epistemology, ‘the first clothing or articulation of experiential knowing’, and as such is prior to propositional knowing. As Gregory Bateson’s warned, we must be wary of over-reliance on conscious and rational knowing, which, he argued ‘is necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life’ since it inhibits the unconscious and recursive processes upon which all creative art and science depend: [5, see also 6]. As poet Robert Bringhurst writes, poetry is both what we hear from the world and how we express ourselves to the world:

Poetry is what I start to hear when I concede the world's ability to manage and to understand itself. It is the language of the world: something humans overhear if they are willing to pay attention, and something that the world will teach us to speak, if we allow the world to do so. It is the wén of dào: a music that we learn to see, to feel, to hear, to smell, and then to think, and then to answer [7]

Video: ripples in Wellow Brook, Somerset

Given these viewpoints, it is not surprising that our human co-researchers found forms of aesthetic expression of particular importance in inquiries into the human place in a sentient world, and reached out to poetic expression as they attempted to do justice to their encounter with Rivers. In a later post we will reflect on drawing and other visual responses (here and here).

Tim, a river conservation scientist with responsibility for the condition of a chalk stream in the south of England, was far more familiar with his stream than most other participants, although from a strictly scientific perspective. In the early cycles of inquiry he struggled to move to a relationship with Stream as a sentient being. This is harder than I thought, he wrote, wondering if poetic expression – quite unfamiliar to him – might draw him closer.

Will the Candover Brook help me to see beyond myself?
This is harder than I thought.

David wrote several poems and haiku in relation to Rivers around his home in Gloucestershire, including within the flow…, a poem given to him as he sat drowsily on the river bank:

within the flow there is a story
running jumping swirling water

Ezekiel, walking by a heavily polluted river near an industrial city, tells his inquiry group he feels ‘the fullness of it, the heartbreak and the confusion and the loneliness and the decimation and the hopelessness… the irredeemable emptiness and yet the life in the midst of all that… I don't think I could have written anything other than some sort of poetic expression’.

No words as I ramble down. 
No words as I search for life. 
No words as I scan for something
Other than terrible beauty. 

Dave responded  to Ezekiel on behalf of the inquiry group, ‘It's uncomfortable reading. But it's an uncomfortable experience that you are handling. It's as much horror as it is about grief, it seemed to me. I respect your courage to let it into your heart, into your belly as you did’. He wondered if Ezekiel had been influenced by Wendell Berry’s poem To know the dark: To fully know the dark, we must not take a light with us.

Over several years, again and again, Sabine has had dreams, night dreams, day dreams, of herself as a river woman. “When the land becomes dry and deep dry cracks furrow the earth, I creep out of my cave, my head becomes longer and longer, my arms and legs become longer and longer and turn into river arms, my trunk turns into a broad river, and I inundate the dry land as a river, until everything becomes humid, until the dry cracks disappear, until the earth has sucked itself full of water, and until plants grow again on the previously dry land. As soon as the earth is fertile again, I, the river woman, become smaller and smaller and creep back into my cave again.” Sabine expresses this in a series of poems.

I hear the water
flow slowly
deep beneath the earth

Tamzin spent her inquiry time alongside the Evje fjord in Norway. She tells us that the process ‘has opened me to ways of seeing and being that had felt missing before, and which I am excited to bring to my work on and with creative writing. Her sequence of poems, some of which are addressed directly to Evje, evoke Rainer Maria Rilke’s direct mystical access to reality.

Dear wide bay -
what do you become
if I open to you?

Tamzin’s contribution also shows that poetry is not necessarily verse. Her contribution includes a ‘prose poem’, which reminds us that so many of the human inquiry members written contribution held poetic qualities even though not labelled as poetry.

The point is not to write excellent poetry so much as to draw on the poetic as a way of knowing. We want to encourage people to slip into the poetic mode without being daunted by the need to live up to some standard of ‘good poetry’, because poetics is a way of knowing that avoids analysis and explanation, but reflects experience in metaphor and imagery. In Robert Bringhurst’s words, it is knowing ‘freed from the agenda of possession and control – knowing in the sense of stepping in tune with being, hearing and echoing the music and heartbeat of being’.[8]

1.         Weber, A., The Biology of Wonder: Aliveness, feeling and the metamorphosis of science. 2016, Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, p.3.

2.         Weber, A., Matter and Desire: An erotic ecology. 2017, White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, p.88.

3.         Weber, A., Biopoetics. 2016: Springer.

4.         Mathews, F., Panpsychism, in Interreligious Philosophical Dialogues: Volume 1 G. Oppy and N. Trakakis, Editors. 2017, Routledge. pp. 45-71.

5.         Bateson, G., Steps to an Ecology of Mind. 1972, San Francisco: Chandler, p. 146.

6.         Reason, P., Wilderness experience in education for ecology, in The Handbook of Experiential Learning and Management Education, M. Reynolds and R. Vince, Editors. 2007, Oxford University Press: Oxford. p. 187-201.

7.         Bringhurst, R., The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind and Ecology. 2008, Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 145.

8.         Bringhurst, R., Everywhere Being in Dancing, Knowing is Known. Chicago Review, 1993. 39(3/4): p. 138-147.