Knots like Stars : The ABC of Ecological Imagination in our Americas [1 ed.] 9781443898362, 9781443894593

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Knots like Stars

Knots like Stars: The ABC of Ecological Imagination in our Americas By

Roberto Forns-Broggi Translation by Dr. Karen Rauch

Knots like Stars: The ABC of Ecological Imagination in our Americas By Roberto Forns-Broggi Translation by Dr. Karen Rauch This book first published 2016 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2016 by Roberto Forns-Broggi All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-9459-1 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9459-3

To our beloved seeds.

Nudos Nudos que nadan En misteriosos océanos De nada Nudos que son sombras De infinitos nudos Celestes Divinos nudos nacidos Entre dos manos Unidas Nudos que no dicen nada Y nudos que todo lo dicen

Jorge Eduardo Eielson Knots Swimming knots In mysterious seas Of nothing Knots that are shadows Of infinite celestial Knots Divine knots born Between two hands United Knots that say nothing And knots that say everything

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix Translator’s Acknowledgements.................................................................. x Introduction ................................................................................................ 1 Acclimatization........................................................................................... 9 Alienation ................................................................................................. 11 The Amazon ............................................................................................. 14 Biocenocis ................................................................................................ 31 Buen Vivir ................................................................................................ 32 Celebration ............................................................................................... 35 Commitment .............................................................................................. 41 Composition of Place ............................................................................... 46 Compost.................................................................................................... 48 Co(s)mic Connection................................................................................ 53 Cosmopolitan Communication ................................................................. 67 Cultural Heritage of the Potato ................................................................. 78 Cycles ....................................................................................................... 80 Dreams...................................................................................................... 83 Eco-Art ..................................................................................................... 88 Ecocinema ................................................................................................ 94 Ecocriticism ............................................................................................ 112 Ecofeminism ........................................................................................... 124 Ecological Consciousness....................................................................... 141 Ecospirituality......................................................................................... 162 End of the Road ...................................................................................... 166 Environmental Justice............................................................................. 174 Environmental Knowledge ...................................................................... 179 Errant Polyphony.................................................................................... 185 Harmony ................................................................................................. 189 Interval.................................................................................................... 197 Metamorphoses....................................................................................... 205 Minor Body ............................................................................................ 224 Poetic Matter(s) ...................................................................................... 234 Projects ................................................................................................... 243

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Contents

Questions ................................................................................................ 245 Reconsiderations..................................................................................... 251 Seeds....................................................................................................... 254 Slow Reading ......................................................................................... 261 Slow Violence ........................................................................................ 263 Tenderness .............................................................................................. 266 Things ..................................................................................................... 270 Time of the Seed ..................................................................................... 277 Tinkuy for the Digital Age ..................................................................... 290 Utopia ..................................................................................................... 292 Waste Pickers ......................................................................................... 295 Wetlands ................................................................................................. 299 Will to Live ............................................................................................ 308 Writing Like the Sea ............................................................................... 309 Sources .................................................................................................... 324

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The process of writing this version of Knots began with my sabbatical in the spring of 2011. From there Karen Rauch started the arduous labour of translation. Her generosity and intelligence not only helped me to rethink and adjust the details of the English version, but also to add the most recent developments of my research. I am deeply grateful for her tremendous effort to translate such diverse materials—particularly poetry, which is so difficult to translate. I am tremendously grateful for all the support I have received from MSU Denver’s School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Department of Modern Languages, and Office of International Studies in supporting my participation in conferences and seminars related to environmental humanities in the US and abroad. There is a long list of mentors and fellows from the first years of ASLE to my friends today: thanks to Renato Sandoval, my editor of Nudos, Steven White, the first to use Nudos in a classroom, Melissa Tuckey, Tiffany Higgins, Jorge Marcone, Scott Slovic, José Manuel Marrero, Tania Meneses, Melvin Ledgard, Enrique Yepes, Iñaki Prádanos, and Montserrat López Mujica. I am immensely grateful for all the generous and valuable feedback I received in this long process: David Mejía, for the great mountains of his childhood and his eternal friendship; Javier Torre, for his crucial feedback on the first drafts and his constantly cheerful company; Juan Carlos Galeano, for his verve and his apt word advice; Jorge Gibbons, for his unconditional readership; John Nizalowski, for endless talks on origins and bridges coming from our beloved lands; and also Gustavo Fierros, for his brilliant suggestions. I am very thankful as well for my family in Lima, especially my mother, who never complained about the hundreds of books that occupied the space I am sure she did not have to spare. Thanks to Santi, Joanna, and Bea, for all the support that they have given me and continue to give me across great distances. A particular thanks to my daughters: to Laia, for the passion for writing we share; and to Fiona, for her passion for being curious and her sense of wonder. Finally, I want to thank my wife, Melissa, with all my heart for helping me to find, with faith, the cockpit I needed for writing.

TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In her poem “Traducir,” Ida Vitale opens with a stanza that perfectly encapsulates my feelings about this translation project: Alguien al centro de la noche llega en un orden de palabras ajenas, las reviste de nueva piel y con amor las duerme en nueva lengua.

In so many ways, this project has been a labor of love/amor. It has allowed me to work with the author, my friend Roberto Forns Broggi— and a more generous person is not to be found on this, his beloved Earth— and to know his wife and his lively, intelligent daughters. I shared some of this project with my students, and for me, teaching has always been about love . . . love for literature and for Spanish, and sharing that love with my classes. I want to thank the students in my Introduction to Spanish/English Translation course, who threw themselves into the task of offering their own translations of some of the poems included in Knots. In particular, I appreciate the work that Kelly Fitzpatrick did on the chapter entitled “Time of the Seed.” Through this project, I also had the life-changing experience of participating in a National Endowment for the Humanities Institute in 2013: “The Centrality of Translation to the Humanities: New Interdisciplinary Scholarship,” led by Elizabeth Lowe and Christopher Higgins. I met many wonderful scholars in Illinois that summer; several of them continue to inspire me with their friendship and their wisdom, especially Sandra Kingery, Mohammed Albakry, Hans Gabriel, Joseph McAlhany, and Pablo Peschiera. Of course, I must thank my friends: Dawn, Craig, and Tim. I don’t know what I did to deserve not one, but three, amazingly supportive friends like this dynamic trio. My parents, too, have stood by me through it all, as they always do. And yes, Dad, I am finally finished typing that book.

INTRODUCTION

Writing affords new angles of perception and above all helps me to organize my mania for seeking connections—for finding the positive in everything because life is precisely that: nurturing yourself, fighting, enjoying, facing pain, feeling, evolving. So, why write a book about the ecological imagination? Writing is like fluttering around the meaning of life. I choose the word “fluttering” because I do not know the best way to write if I begin to think that a bird’s flight continues to be the very incarnation of freedom in movement. While writing this abecedarium, I have gained a wealth of perspectives through which to rehearse multiple destinies, to try out different angles and scales, and to poke around in other worlds. The art that intrigues me demands a passion for learning, which in turn demands a dismantling of all that we learned so that our capacity for response may be as vital and inclusive as possible. That is why I seek out new forms, new horizons. And in this search, the ecological perspective is my way of broadening the limits of what is human. But, please, do not think that this means that I am an “anti-humanist” or a “post-humanist.” I am only establishing a point of departure that does not leave behind what we have all internalized as separate from ourselves: nature. I write this book because I believe that nature is not merely a resource, or a scene for our escape from urban noise, or the strange or inferior Other to our own subjectivity. We know very little about birds, for instance, no matter how much we may wish to possess wings. In other words, I write against the current, in order to know more about the environment, which ultimately is us. Why ignore the advantages that the insect’s perspective gives us? I would like to flutter and hover like insects, at the very least because they incite me to pay attention to details, a skill which had seemed to me impossible to perfect until I began to become aware of what ants, bees, lobsters, spiders, worms, and the interminable and infinitely numerous list of tiny agents—all interconnected with life—are capable. How not to think about a poem or a short film about flight if I do not possess the bird’s or the insect’s capacity for movement and beauty? I conceive of art not as an object of study, but as a program for life. And I do not conceive of life as a matter only for humans. That is another

Introduction

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reason why I have written this ABC book: to unshackle the mind from domesticating formats. I nurture my imagination with examples that deserve to be emulated so that my writing will have foundation and depth. I am not only referring to a critical stance, but also to a daily practice that does not refuse to face the incommensurate and unrepresentable global ecological crisis. I do not want to act like the majority of mortals as if the crisis had no lasting consequences for daily life, either at an individual or a collective level. I want this book to serve as an invitation to a reading of cultural artifacts such as poems, films, videos, narratives, and other creative forms. It is obvious, though, throughout the reading of my ABC book that I have a predilection for poetry. I am not going to attempt to list here all of the master poets and the poets I count among my friends that have shaped me as an active reader. Suffice it to state, though, that nothing else has taught me the pleasure of connecting and of trying on other identities like poetry has. I know that the reading of any poem has to be provisional, dependent on the particular context, and that this reading is nurtured by the intellect but also by the intuitive writing that I pursue in this ABC book. I beg the reader to pardon me if I do not give too many clues or “instructive” interpretations regarding the poems that I include herein. At times I do indeed comment, but I am not sure if I am going way out on a limb or if I am forcing unfounded approaches to the texts. I do not want to seek in these poems a catalogue of images and particular formulae, but rather it is my hope that the reader dares to experience the poem as an opportunity to find new angles and to open a space for whatever he may find there, for whatever may affect him whether it be on the first or subsequent readings. I am proposing a life-long perspective like that assumed by the well-known child poet Luis Hernández in his work The Beach that Doesn’t Exist: You were a child, Abandoned Always You were so. You were familiar with the most elevated poetry difficult, subtle; but also the path direct and gentle (138)

What I would like to highlight in this brief poem is the long-term perspective that in reality has to do with imagining the entirety of life in a

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way that is open to vital contradictions. The poet, therefore, responds not only to “high” culture, but also to daily life. The reader, in turn, does not have before him a fixed, decipherable signifier, but rather an exploration of possible answers. As I bring up different poems or other artistic artifacts, I reveal a magisterial intention in the montage that I am constructing as in Diana Bellessi’s “Silent Teaching”: They say that Lao Tse said to Wen Tzu: All things mysteriously are the same, just as one stares straight ahead like a newborn calf does in order to see what appears to be absent always and already there; in the kindly look of the master I imagine his love for all things Above all those that are smooth and small Rising up in their swaying motion Where what is lost is recovered Just like the breeze among the reeds (“Poems,” 59)

The lyrical “I” proves herself to be sensitive and in tune with the movement of all things. Perhaps by underscoring this ecological focus I am able to inspire an attitude toward reading that I hope will not be diluted in an unsuccessful attempt to seek academic clarity. I seek subtlety, the nuance, the underside of things, the connections between two things that have never been united, “the smooth and small,” the coexistence of irreconcilable opposites. At times I do not really know what I seek given that I have gotten into the habit of being open to whatever I find, and that affects me oftentimes in surprising or astonishing ways; what the artist Abigail Child calls the “strategies and forms of creative opposition,” “deselective attention,” “multiple positionality,” and “cross-referencing the units of film and language.” That is what I do when I read poems. By projecting this searching onto other areas of life, what I propose is a poetic focus on existence. I have armed this book with the pieces that I scatter like seeds throughout; and also with disperse reflections, readings, fragments, and notes about the topic of ecology, which, as applied to the literary field, I have expanded until I have accumulated infinite projects and renewed my searching attitude toward all life. I see, for instance, that the list I have collected of videos and films in the section entitled “Eco-cinema” illustrates concrete struggles for environmental justice, brings to the fore the nearly invisible effects of slow violence, or simply reveals the

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Introduction

extraordinary courage of the communities that incarnate the notion of “good living.”

Advance Warning to the Reader I want the reader to take her time with this variety of proposals, recommendations, and approaches, since I cannot hope that anyone could assimilate all of the information in just one encounter with an entry and in an instant. I recall a quote from Mark Twain, so apt for those of us who have spent years working on some initiative: Realism is nothing more than close observation. But observation will never give you the inside of the thing. The life, the genius, the soul of a people are realized only through years of absorption. (173)

The entire gamut of reflections on and questioning of the norms that regulate our notions of family, community, and nature will seem absurd and unintelligible if we do not take into account the process of absorption. Thus, I am opting for a fragmentary structure for my ABC book that obviously responds to my own reading, research, and creative preferences. The reader should not expect that the artists whose works I chose to investigate always deal with the theme of nature, nor are they selfproclaimed or famous environmentalists. Or that because I am interested in ecology and I admit that I prefer poetry that it is inexcusable to omit poets who are rather well-known for their treatment of nature, such as José Watanabe. Certainly I will have to leave out numerous excellent poets, and although I may not cite poets whose work I value, like my friend Roger Santiváñez, something of his work will be present in my selection and in the way in which I approach poetry. The format of this ABC book responds to this strategy of absorption. On the one hand, I want the reader to take his time. The entries can be read in any order that the reader chooses. Let the reader, in an opportune moment, select any entry or reread one that is particularly interesting. Ideally, I would prefer the reader to write his own poem or compose her own creative work. On the other hand, my purpose is to introduce key concepts of ecocriticism and to apply them to the reading of literary texts and films made in Latin America as well as the United States, in part to test if ecocriticism has productive possibilities in the area of literary and cultural studies that do not simply shore up current hegemonic powers. I also aim to produce a book that inspires many readers and authors to cultivate a receptive attitude, as Ida Vitale suggests in On Plants and Animals:

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Perhaps my unconscious purpose is to discern the reserve of spiritual tension that nature holds forth. To be attentive in order to accept the multiple things that it gives us in the form of spectacle, the lessons and the warnings it offers, would be the proper response to what we find upon coming into this world and would constitute, it seems to me, a natural courtesy offered in kind. (17)

To discern that aspect of mutuality is as important as thanking someone for a heartfelt favor. To observe what surrounds us, and at the same time, to think about what cannot be seen but still affects us. To follow the path of what whatever does indeed work. And also what may not work. To tend to our wounds, our errors, our slips, and our failures. I would also love to carry out what José Emilio Pacheco has called “focused attention” on those worlds that are imperceptible, because they are microscopic, mysterious, and immeasurable, but I know that what I place in the reader’s hands in what follows is rather a series of pages of good intentions, in which I seek an honest reflection on the ecological imagination not only through the word, but also through the visual image, given my creative interest in crossing and mixing creative genres such as poetry and film. A reflection that encompasses the most obscure and incomprehensible zones of our being, a being that includes its place of dwelling and its very process of becoming. A reflection like Antonio Ramos Rosa makes in The Secret Apprentice: poetic prose about the complex construction of life. The apprentice is whoever imagines and constructs while remaining alert to the tyrannies of mind and vision. I want this imagination to be understood as a means to cross through a garden with many paths, with many caves or grottoes, with many possibilities. My hope is that the reader will be able to open all of the gates, or at least many of them, and to find himself swept away by the productive discomfort that changes whatever in his behavior promotes waste and squandering.

From The Margins Some Latin American authors have produced work that articulates a challenging imagination with regard to nature, and yet is has been barely noticed. Such is the case of Armando Rojas Adrianzén’s poems that I have recovered from a very slim, yellowed edition of Rogues’ Art; these poems find echoes in other entries or poems from the present ABC book. My intention is also to speak the inexpressible of this imagination by including the work of some filmmakers and ecoartists that have expounded interesting points of view concerning nature that challenge stereotypes and concepts of nature that continue to shape our vision of the issue. Since the

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Introduction

first few days of my university studies, I have had to confront that sensation of existing in the margins, since I was intrigued by matters and forms that interested very few; perhaps I must assume the blame for not finding any interlocutors. What is certain is that I also perpetuated that feeling of low self-esteem by publishing my ecological point of view in diverse journals. And I suppose that I continue laboring in the margins, although it might sound like a cliché.

Almost Reason I write about what is wrong in the world; about what the majority of people do not even realize, which is equally wrong. At least I seek in my own contexts and surroundings what works and what does not work, what is stagnant and what needs to be nurtured. Yet, how can one come up with a sound idea that is free of ethnocide and atrocities that societies cover up unconsciously or out of fear? And how do I achieve this without dragging along environmentalism’s halo of insufferable austerity and unappealing self-sacrifice? I will make completely mine the enlightenment achieved in Patricio Guzmán’s documentary Nostalgia for Light (2010) with respect to the silencing and the brushing aside of the indigenous question in Chile as a forgotten past while other more remote pasts, such as the archeological or the astronomical pasts, are recuperated. Where can we write about such things? Why should we continue that tendency to unearth and uncover? Am I as crazy as those women in Nostalgia for Light, who search for their loved ones in the driest desert on Earth? I would have to return with renewed enthusiasm to the work of José María Arguedas or Roberto Juarroz, whose most moving voice unleashes a yearning for a lifeaffirming encounter. My intention is that this book be a tiny grain of sand in that type of fruitful reconsideration. In principle, as part of a practice of reading without borders, this book ought to give an account of the infinite number of books and other creative works that forge what I will call the ecological imagination. In and of itself, it is contradictory to propose a book on that theme and to restrict it only to Latin America—Gamaliel Churata’s revalorization questions my use of the term “Latin America,” which makes me think about “Indo America,” but that makes me uncomfortable insofar as it, in a deliberate and provoking fashion, excludes the linguistic and cultural diversity of the continent. I accept the contradiction into which I, too, sometimes fall innocently as I comment on my various sources of books, videos, websites, film festivals, and many other forms of art. I accept the limitations that derive

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from it and I therefore propose a book that brings together my eclectic spirit, but also the critical principle of refusing to produce authoritative discursive formulas. I know that little by little, having accumulated many essays about ecological themes, I have realized that I need a different format for rewriting those essays, for questioning their rhetorical language; or that I need to leave it all by the wayside to defend itself. I had definitively begun to absorb the styles of perception and affinity upon my first contemplation of the stones of Cusco and my readings of José María Arguedas, of the river poetry of Juan L. Ortiz, and of Roberto Juarroz’s continuous reflection of imaginary composition in his vertical poetry. Many decades have now passed and I realize that these imaginative hints of contact and exchange have taken seed in me, they have branched out and they are giving fruit. At times in the form of an encounter, at other times in the form of an interruption, oftentimes in an experience of reciprocity. Some of these fruits have, in turn, transformed into something else altogether. I am now more attune to the birds; I grow enthusiastic about flavors, both new and familiar; I feed the compost pile with scraps from my kitchen. I know that the roots that interest me also grow in the air and build bridges. I reread even more fervently the entire world, as well as the book on my nightstand. But all of this would suggest to anyone that I am not willing to deviate from the theme that I consciously pursue: the ecological imagination. What happens when I immerse myself completely in Lucrecia Martel’s films, which challenge and nurture my ecological perspective in such a profound way? What do her non-linear films and her brilliant declarations—such as “All that is alive, flows, it breaks down boundaries. Just a few yuyos can crack concrete. We’ve all seen it” (El Tribuno, Salta, Argentina. July 26, 2010)—rouse in me? I am also interested in the audiovisual production done by community and indigenous organizations that are making headway in confronting the traditional oblivion into which these cultures have been relegated. I proceed by attempting to think with the most workable, personal, and productive concepts, while eschewing those that are less collaborative. I also want to listen to new voices, to proceed as I have learned since I left my native city, through the association and intuition of my own imagination and thereby to use and reuse the connections that I continue discovering as part of a vital, daily praxis. I want to learn about the existence and the substance of thousands upon thousands of relations that form the foundation of our imagination. Such an undertaking requires a great deal of time and is based on the relationships that define us: with our mother language and with other languages that we learn later. The relation

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Introduction

with the various animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms. The relationship with those we love. The relationship with our bodies and the space we inhabit. The relationship between teachers and students, parents and children. In short, all the relationships we establish throughout life. I also refer to new relationships and the relationships that we renew or seek: our relationship with the dispossessed; our relationship with the nurturing of relationships; our relationships with “good living.” Certainly in order to unlearn all that is taken for granted—such as the notion that humans are separate from nature and the masculine form is the generic form in language—we have to cultivate an attitude of mindfulness. To be mindful of ideas. Of automatisms and images. Of systems. Aware of planned obsolescence. Of the lack of care. Life-long. Staying alert. Sharing returns and departures, leaping over borders, growing, healing, composing with freedom, solidarity, creativity, and improvisation. It is time for imagination to be more important in our lives than escapist fantasies or illusions produced by reason or promises of power. We have become lost; the multitude of losses have left us speechless and stuttering, suffering, overcome by complaints, and we act as if we were in the know, but we have no idea what is happening to us. Thus, it is essential to cultivate an ecological imagination—strange, perhaps, but vital—that cuts through everything. I present it simply as an irresistible, never-ending passion for creating and composing, an uneasy love with a good sense of humor, a celebration of body and soul, molecular and planetary. I am interested in writing about the benefits of water, earth, sun, and my love for life. I endeavor to translate all of this excitement and absorption of readings, experiences, and cares into an ABC of ecological concepts that responds with thematic, historical, geographical, and cultural relevance to the environmental challenges of the twenty-first century. I want to provoke existential questions about the loss of mountains and other sacred landscapes, of species, of failed relationships, with the intention of sketching out an affirmative life path, to readjust its typical course, just as migratory birds know exactly how to arrive at their destination. Along the way they live, they know how to live with their faces to the sun and stars, the wind and the vast expanses of sand or water or trees or mountains. Those flights scatter seeds in my soul. Seeds for the imagination and for traveling through this imperfect present.

ACCLIMATIZATION

The accommodation of things as motivated by a close relation with the Other, which is the environment. The sensitive adjustment under the effects of daily alienation and agonies, adaptation of the species, slow rooting in a place, familiarity with changing circumstances, acceptance of what is incomplete, openness to the unknown. But also the state of being fed up with disruptions, with the abuse of paralyzing intrusions brought about by slow violence. Successful acclimatization implies a capacity for evaluating the climatic surroundings and an opportune knowledge of basic necessities, without losing sight of the diversity of living beings or the diversity of the methods of classification and knowledge. It also implies accepting the limits of the process of said adaptation: for example, not being able to control or understand adaptation at the cellular level. Coexistence of a conscience that is informed about environmental deterioration and the imperfect ability to recuperate and repair life that is expressed as a survival strategy. A poem from Tiny Kingdom (1983) by Ida Vitale embodies the complexity of this survival tactic: Acclimatization At first, you withdraw, you wither, you lose your soul in the dryness, in what you don’t understand. You try to reach the waters of life to illuminate a minute membrane, a tiny leaf. Do not dream of flowers. The air stifles you. You feel the sand reign in the morning, all that is green dying the sere gold rising. But, without her knowing from somewhere far away

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Acclimatization a voice takes pity, moistens you, briefly, happily like when you brush by a low-hanging pine bough right after a rain. Then, against the deafness you rise up in song, against dryness you flow forth.

ALIENATION

Emotional distance or dominant discourse’s firm belief in the autonomy of the human subject, a belief that causes individuals to perpetuate the idea that humans are one thing and nature quite another. This idea includes the notion that nature can be summed up in the stereotypical image of a landscape without people, in nature’s incarnation as a seductive female figure, or in the idea of nature as a necessary escape from the madding crowd of the city. For the poet Galway Kinnell, humans have already spent centuries thinking of nature as a type of inert matter, since the time when the sacred was fused with the concept of heaven or the celestial. This instance when everything on Earth was no longer considered sacred is the source of what we call alienation: We are part of nature just like anything else, and it is only our particular self-image that makes us delineate an absolute division between man [sic] and nature. (111)

Anthropologist Rocío E. Trinidad echoes this thought in her interesting article “The Perverse Connection: Domestic Violence and Violence against Animals:” We are not alone; plants and animals also make up this planet. If until now we have made them invisible, it is time to see them. If until now we have not learned to treat them with dignity and respect, it is time to learn. (128)

The inexhaustible enumeration of this separation’s deplorable effect on the human soul is the fodder for a great deal of poetry and meditations on the way to overcome that separation through writing. In that regard, I like poet Claudia Masin’s (b. 1972) thought: …writing is joining back together whatever is already united, what was always united, it is confronting the great forces of separation: fear and pain, not in order to vanquish them but rather to tie them to a loving breath, to a breath that makes them part of a living breath that renders us indiscernible from the rest of the universe. (74)

Alienation

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In a poem from 1973 by Luis Hernández, such divisions do not exist due to the chromatic action of the sea, the sun, the sky, and the mist: What the Flowers Told Me One way of living Is to live Without pausing Over the grass Over the naked Grass. And the afternoon’s Gentle sea breeze Brings birds upon the sand, Birds in multitudes And something else atop The stones On the beach. (The Island Novel, in Vox Horrísona, 61)

Sea of flowers, of reflections, or of water? The irony of this poem emphasizes the alienation of color, the alienation of life. Nevertheless, alienation is much more complex and deeply rooted in today’s world. It takes on its most scandalous and insidious form in what seems to add credence to the lie: the eco-cynicism of the extractive industries, which contaminate not only the environment, but also language, in the process. The sense of alienation that their activity projects, as it flows through the economy and through globalized communication systems, crosses all boundaries. This is what we cannot call by any other name than “greenwash,” a term officially accepted in English in 1999. In any case, it is a falsification of the principle of sustainability on behalf of those companies. Such lies multiply through the language of marketing and push environmental organizations to envision a law that regulates such flagrant falsification. The Totobiegosode tribe demanded justice for the lies told by the Brazilian ranching company, Yaguarete Porá, which, according to the group Survival, was awarded the “Greenwashing Award” of 2010 for its proclamation that it was concerned about the conservation of the environment while it quietly deforested immense expanses of the Totobiegosode ancestral lands. On an avenue in Lima, though it could have been any roadway in any large city in Latin America, a huge billboard sponsored by Toyota says “Listen to Nature,” while displaying the latest car model in the center of the image. This type of alienation is smooth, subtle, attractive, and

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constantly renews itself, prospers, and floods the city on billboards and signs. The promise of harmony with nature that it proffers is a flagrant lie that also serves as a convenient screen to shield us from urban squalor— the billboard that I saw on my way to the Jorge Chávez Airport hid a bridge that has been blackened by pollution. Coincidentally, at that time I was reading a book published in Lima— whose title, Smoke of Distant Fires, I associated with the image of ecocynicism that glossed over the traces of pollution—and I thought about the ironic look at reality that would be an ideal way to disarm this type of environmental alienation. Eduardo Chirinos (1960-2016) knows how to translate the alienating process via ingenious images of separation and decay into a deep reflection on language, as has been the case in all of his sizeable poetic production, a personal inspiration that is always generous in suggestion and form: once the leaves broke free from their branches it was spring they could not support the weight of the snow the sun shone darkly the deer came down from the mountains the rats fled the swamp everything before me was an allegory but I did not write at all. (“What the Birds’ Song Reveals,” 85)

This critique of language in the hands of the poet is no simple play of Quevedian contradictions. It is a sensibility, a call to abandon our role as consumer, not only of falsifying language, but also of a world of values and materialistic habits in consonance with the economic cogs whose logic does not accept those flights of the imagination, which, in the case of this poet, are neither ingenuous nor indifferent to that capitalist manipulation. What the birds’ song tells us does not matter in that mechanism of greed; which, by way of contrast, is only interested that this type of discourse not be understood beyond its own logic. In that sense, we could say that the poem discourages, or at least wrings the neck of the swan 1 of, the prevailing alienation. The poem relies on the reader’s creation; the author confesses that he does not write. So, was it the reader who wrote . . . ? The poem is a call to venture into the process of production rather than consumption. 1

This phrase refers to the first verse of the famous sonnet by Enrique González Martínez (Mexico, 1871-1952): “Tuércele el cuello al cisne” [Wring the swan’s neck]. The poem attempts to “kill off” Modernismo, a Latin American literary movement whose most exemplary author is the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío. The swan emblematizes the movement due to its appearance in several of Darío’s poems.

THE AMAZON

The Amazon is a vastly diverse story of conquerors and naturalists; of rubber barons and rubber tappers, of indigenous people and shamans, of river dwellers and prospectors, of freed or marooned slaves, of novelists. The river dwellers, for instance, are a population of indigenous descent who no longer possess an identity that is clearly “native” and who no longer speak any of the native languages. Michael Uzendoski distinguishes them from colonists in that the river dwellers have a profound knowledge of Amazonian ecology and of the cultural paradigms of the river area. Throughout the Amazonian region, asserts Uzendoski, we find a continuum of rich and complex relations between natives and non-natives (“Fractal Subjectivities,” 55). For Candace Slater, a pioneer in combating stereotypes of the region, the Amazon is an encounter of waters, a giant for foreigners, a shapeshifter for various inhabitants. Slater understands the complex Amazonian reality as a convergence of images and histories of earth and water, and of golden utopias and enchantments, which, according to the critic, provides the foundation for effective action with respect to the preservation of peoples, plants, and animals of Amazonia. According to Ana Pizarro, who has expertly compiled this diversity of voices, the history of the Amazon region is a paradoxical paradigm of the weakness of the geographical, cultural, and symbolic borders on the international scene. The Amazon is a terrain of contradictory voices whose destiny is debated by the drug trafficker, the guerrillas, paramilitary groups, and the State military. And amid such huge disputes, the voices of its common inhabitants are heard: river dwellers, indigenous peoples, and rubber tappers who confront the challenge of modernization. If in the collective imaginary the Amazon is the last bastion of an earthly paradise, in the imaginary of some of its inhabitants and some culturally sensitive visitors it is the land that holds the promise of new utopias where diversity, cultural plurality, and pristine spaces are harbored. For some poets, the Amazon is an errant polyphony that is occluded by the thick cloud of our prejudices. Without a doubt, it is also the ideal place for lifting up one’s voice, as Néstor Perlongher (1949-1992) does in his book Aerial waters (1991), a verbal act that summons forth life forces rather than outline a catalogue of voices to name:

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XXII This winged pine in changeable wilderness Count of Villamediana Forest Asceticism: the water only as a excuse or channel for the trunking of the trunk among the branches, fluvial subtly, the flow of the canoe romping through the branches, making it a sibilant shell case, wine-red sparks were born from the loving encounter of the bend of the canoe and the knot of the ladylike tree, stooping to encase or feminize her nets, on the other side of the stream, enveloped, vegetation that entered the water, an aquatic transformation of the branch, they sail through the forest.

Through the naming of its components, the representation of the tropical forest resists being described in personalized terms. Rather, the poetic voice opts for channels, currents, and flows, to characterize the jungle in a sensual language; in other words, to characterize the jungle as an opening to climatic ecstasy, to syllabic pleasure, and to rhythmic meditation. XXXIV The Man Fish enticed the Amazonian lady who threw herself swiftly to the furthest reaches of herself of those sounds (musky ivory) that enveloped the pleats of her skirt and rings of her earrings and the arms above all the naked arms of those smooth dolphins that pull her caressingly distracted attracted by the spiral eddies tossed thoughtlessly into the tide of the river’s mud content to devour her erecting a multicolored border on the banks of the jungle.

Whereas Perlonger’s poetry chooses an open and sensualist route, which we could characterize as environmental wisdom rather than a neobaroque literary program, Pizarro’s essay, in a more academic vein, traces a political and semantic map of Amazonian voices in order to conclude with an environmental wisdom slant: To study these discourses is also to position oneself from a perspective that allows us to visualize future humanity’s pressing problems stemming from the current power plays in the international political arena. (239)

I am not going to refer to the novels that represent this diversity of voices from the perspective of a learned aesthetic. Pizarro studies a few of them that are quite interesting (160-171), like William Ospina’s novelistic series about the conquest of the Amazon. I ought to mention that there are many scholars and artists intent on recovering the stories of the Amazonian

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peoples, and they are publishing recompilations of Amazonian myths, such as Juan Carlos Galeano’s poetry collection or children’s books like Cristina Sono’s The Whistling Forest (2010). Although I know little about the poetry production of Amazonian authors, I am interested in commenting on a few poetry collections that I hope will pique the reader’s curiosity about their promising diversity, as exemplified by the anthology of Amazonian poets that Jeremy Larochelle recently published (2014). Josemári Recalde (1973-2000), a high school friend of mine from Lima, wrote Amazon poems that have to do with the jungle in a mythicalhallucinogenic sense. Poetry and life come together in an irreproducible fire that perhaps is but a pale reflection of the life-giving heat of the cultural construct that encompasses dozens of languages and a wealth of biodiversity. His poem “Wampach” picks up this idea, along with the daily sensation of carrying a bag—a thing—and converting it through a strange metamorphosis into part of human sensibility: Wampach How well the wampach grows accustomed How well the wampach grows accustomed To the granite of the park benches in Lima Whether night or the day When the Sun bends toward me. All of it shifts to the generous roughness of the solid; … At the moment I take the wampach Once again I’ll feel like an aishman, And I will wander the ways Each sense leaping from one entity to another; it is the hour of every hour wampach it is the high hour, the one that throbs with pure durability, the one where we will appear leaving behind this time the hour of vitality and maturity; wampach… the natural hour of happiness and tenderness, the hour to embrace one’s neighbor, to kiss at every moment that from our heart a light radiates to fall upon us serenely wampach in order to see ourselves…

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It is then that I carry you like a child, Papoose-wampach, For the nakedness and In the dexterity of life, For the naturalness of green magic And also for the magic of beautiful offerings. Wampach, Authenticity and palm tree Music seduction That over there on the mountainside could be heard. …. Wampach, History and hunt, Wampach Tobacco and sadness, Patience and simplicity, Annihilation: wampach Wampach of the everlasting day Wampach of the century A star’s entire trip, Desired lily of freshness. Encounter: wampach, Dawn: wampach, Recognition: wampach, Wampach revealed as strength and softness, Conceived in the mathematics of forest gladness, Wampach, Adventure Wampach Adventure and weave Wampach of rites Wampach of myth, Unusual wampach of love and peace, I doze to your warmth and I go my time, Before your light I bow down, Former trophy and friend, Successor of other natural Worn-out bags, When the Earth Is a clear expression Of the nakedness of perfection.

Sadly, Recalde died very young. Yet despite his limited poetic production, he introduced us to a natural sensibility, rendered magical by his use of myth, which creates and personalizes an object, as in the poem

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“Wampach.” In this poem, we witness the creation of a personal time that is simultaneously ecological, melding a verbal summons similar to that invoked in Perlongher’s Aerial Waters. The lyrical “I” translates his jungle environment into a narrative failure and a suggestive opening for existential thought. Recalde echoed many Amazonian poets and prose writers that defined subjectivity by means of fractal relations with animals, plants, waters, and spirits. This fractality can be observed on different scales in the repetition of the form of cosmic dimensions seen in a tree trunk, a cloud formation, a mountain, or riverbanks. Would it be too much of a usurpation to think of the jungle as something that is already mine? As I read poems from the Amazon, I feel an enormous desire to familiarize myself with the oral traditions and the languages of that region, to transport myself to that environment, but all I can do is recognize that desire in myself. Yet, how can I describe what I feel? How can we incorporate this connection that recognizes itself as part of denied and marginal history of cultural recounts into ecocriticism? Although Pizarro’s essay indicates a renewed look at Amazonia, I now invoke a type of imagination manifest in Juana de Ibarbourou’s “The IceCold Pitcher:” I am convinced that in some ancestral life, now thousands of years past, I had roots and boughs, I flowered, I felt the heaviness in my branches, which were like juicy, green arms, smooth fruit, heavy with sweet juice; I am convinced that a very long while ago, I was a humble and happy bush, rooted in the hilly shore of a river. (“Premonitions,” Complete Works, 421422)

Why does this type of extended voice grow increasingly mute on our continent? First, I want to make a personal observation. If I have continued thinking about the jungle, it is not only due to my brief trip to Iquitos or the abundance of Amazonian images that I have available to me in pictures, photos, and videos, but also to poetry’s power to revive this vital intensity in an urban context and to the capacity for finding such vitality in other habitats. In other words, what is most important is to cultivate that ecologist’s passion that takes me from the dazzling of my own imagination to the compassionate complicity with my eventual conversation partners. Although it begins as an imaginative process, it nevertheless focuses on natural elements and from there incorporates the experiences of the senses. That is why I always feel like a stranger, with a desire to write “poetry without a country,” whenever I disconnect from my feelings and in my imagination I find not a single echo of nature’s presence. Could it be the need to fill the void that impels me to write about the secular lack of

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interest in nature poetry? The good thing is that one can always find such mental and moral meditative exercise, which leads us to more remote, more beloved regions, that are simultaneously contemporary. Resistance to the consumerist dynamic is incarnated in the reading/writing of a poem. Perhaps I am being too naïve when I think about the importance of remembering what our societies have so stubbornly forgotten, such as respect, fear, and veneration with regard to nature in Latin America. And the following questions that Juana de Ibarbourou asked resonate within me: How many trees have been felled so that I may have all of this? What enormous jungles have been knocked down to furnish all the houses of the world? I am filled with sadness thinking about the mourning of the dew, of the bird, of the wind. I am filled with anguish imagining the pain of the injured branches, of the mutilated trunks, of all the Earth’s jungles chopped down by the shining axes of the loggers. This wood, now immobile and silent, how it must have whispered and flourished once upon a time! (“Trees.” Complete Works, 432)

The historical and cultural references that abound in the titles and poems in Carlos Reyes Ramírez’s The Owl’s Glance (COPÉ Prize, 1986) do not drown out the ancestral voice that flows through the poetic “I.” The metamorphoses of the historical subject go hand in hand with the ancient alliance among “man, plant and stone” (33). The jungle terms barely invoke the same continuity compared to the ruin caused by Western progress, but they do not demand a solidarity worthy of privileged citizens. Such a solidarity would be on the side of paternalism among superior beings (we, the humans) and inferior beings (animals, whatever is “wild”); but The Owl’s Glance is a courageous approach to the vegetable, mineral, and animal world, a desire for belonging and a passion for environmental justice. Why read The Owl’s Glance so many decades after its publication? Why do I find its conciliatory perspective so necessary? The conciliatory perspective is contaminated by history and subtly denies the conception of the word as a manifestation of an external essence and myth. The affirmation of life is fragile and tenuous, although it always openly proffers the signs of collective memory, with a thirst for justice and bewildered by the apocalyptic disgraces of the twentieth century. In the poem “Yarapa,” for example, the poetic voice appears to expand in the landscape: From Moyombamba climbing up a fragile rope I blurred the outlines of your image, Yarapa, sweet water

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The Amazon Among waters, Song that was broken, song that was broken, Cloth dyed by luminous Capanahua hands. The Moon is still and you call me. I have seen not only this, But also your name bottled in red clay, Since then resentment took breath from my lips And I hated you and loved you Like an animal covered in waxy spines. (37)

The fragment can scarcely give an idea of what an attentive reading of the entire work offers. Nevertheless, the tone that insists on revealing something that memory has forgotten can easily be traced through this excerpt. The rivers grow quiet, but “the song that pants out a brutal report” is heard (42). There is always something that reminds us of lost battles, a vague awareness of nation, the lyrical “I’s” struggle, not as an emblem of individualism but rather as a product of a natural history, filled with ruptures and oblivion. Although there is a specific temporal reference in one poem (the year 1983), the most important reference therein is to dreams: “the gravely injured body’s unforeseeable ascent / and our impossible stone a rain that breaks / the windowpanes of memory that ventures forth” (“1983/Years,” 20). The poems from the collection’s second section (which lends the book its title) invoke allegorical beings that are rooted in vegetable, animal, and mineral nature, such as the poems “In praise of Sinacay” (33-35), “Yarapa” (36-38), “In Which We Speak of an Expedition to Yaquerana, the Siege and other Adventures” (39-42), and “On the Exhibition of a Suit Made from a Yagua Palm” (45). For example, in this last poem, the suit in question resists being an object for “immemorial Archeology” and becomes simply “material steeped in humours that the earth / recognizes” (45). The item stops being looked upon as an object that has been uttered and agreed upon verbally and becomes merely an “intrepid thread,” “a piece of enchantment,” which sadly burns up like a dry leaf. This poem’s success lies in its presentation of the jungle, not as a possible symbol of otherness or as something that could easily be assimilated into urban life, but rather as a revealing vision of the temporal and material condition present within the historical context of looting and destroying nature in the name of progress. The lyrical “I” attempts to retain the sense of a biodiverse community beyond any possible historical reading, in which violence obliterates the dispossessed. With María Fernanda Espinosa’s (Ecuador, b. 1964) Jungle Tattoo, I experienced something much more intense and complex than with Reyes

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Ramírez’s book. I read the poems displayed on the page in the form of a tree, which fascinated me so much that I proceeded to copy them all out, poem after poem, intuiting the restorative pleasure of timelessness while savoring the form of each of the poems. I had already read with avid interest a great variety of self-affirming poems that had employed a strategy of dismantling the dominant subject position, and I ought to confess that what fascinated me most were their strategies for affirming a position of solidarity with women who were powerless and/or exploited by different cultures and social classes. Jungle Tattoo is a lovely find, which illustrates quite well how literary practice assumes, by nourishing the reader’s imagination, the challenge of being constantly mindful of relations—among humans, and among humans and the more-than-human world—and of listening keenly to the patterns of domination that are at play in each instance. For that reason, we must do away with our fear of words, or better yet, know what is behind our words and transform them into something productive. Espinosa is a poet who has not only studied the territorial rights of indigenous peoples, but also their self-determination and environmental interventions in the Amazon jungle in Ecuador. Since 1996 she has worked as a consultant on conservation initiatives as well as indigenous and forest-management matters for the intergovernmental panel on forests for the United Nations, the International Wildlife Fund, and the International Alliance of Indigenous Tribes of the Tropical Forests. She has also held many other official posts in the Ecuadorian government and currently serves as the Minister of Defense. Espinosa maintains that Western feminist organizations and their academic discourse have little to do with the voices of indigenous women from the Amazon region, first of all because indigenous women have been involved in the ethnic struggles of indigenous organizations organized by men and second because ethnic struggles have not been addressed in the various agendas put forth by the feminist movement. Espinosa mentions as her critical sources some Marxist feminists, ecofeminists, and some postmodern feminists, (“Indigenous Women,” 250, note 31, 254). Yet her poetic discourse shows a delicate work of co-penetration with the Amazonian reality in which anthropological and biological knowledge sustain a profound respect for the indigenous by including them in her discourse, which is intimately connected to the rich, complex world of the jungle. Indeed, I want to highlight a certain transformation in the observing subject in a process of self-criticism of her Western cultural components upon accepting herself as an active member of that ecological community. In a sense, Jungle Tattoo could be considered a pioneering discourse of a fruitful and

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democratic intercultural relation between the Western world and Amazonian indigenous culture. Unlike Reyes Ramírez’s book, in which the scope of the poetic “I” is neither complete nor clear with regard to the biodiverse community, Espinosa’s book represents a desire to incarnate an attitude of attentiveness and commitment, free from the dynamics of colonization and disdain for the cultural and biological richness of the jungle. Perhaps Espinosa’s poetry reaffirmed my deep desire to communicate with the more-than-human world and to approach topics of integrity, dignity, and responsibility. How I would love to see those topics hold a preeminent place in the Latin American social fabric. The first thing that I could capture from the physical act of copying Espinosa’s poems was the feeling of the whole, the insistence on the arboreal outline of each poem, which was configured as a form of connection, commitment, and responsibility; this helped me consider my life as a relation with nature that in turn improved my relation with the rest of the planet and with my fellow humans. It is not that I had been indifferent to the destruction of the tropical forests, nor of its flora and fauna, nor of the ethnic groups that dwell there, yet reading Espinosa’s poems led me to pay attention to the cottonwoods that I am accustomed to seeing in Denver; from the pleasure of daily observation of what thrives in the shadows of those trees I was led back to the reading of the poems. Just as I would glimpse the squirrels scampering about so agilely, all the birds whose collective songs disrupted their surroundings, the occasional ducks, geese, and foxes with whom I cross paths on my bicycle—in short, an entire world that goes unnoticed by the hurried city routine—the suspicion that I was participating in a type of ritual that I did not totally understand would rise up in me. This suspicion becomes an extension of the act of writing, of transcribing letters onto a piece of paper. From an ecofeminist standpoint, Greta Gaard believes that the outdoors shapes human identity. One of the most valuable experiences that the natural landscape offers us is the opportunity for a different type of perceptual orientation, a different way of situating oneself in relation to the environment (17). With Jungle Tattoo something strange happened to me, and the only explanation that I can find is that at the level of my unconscious, my yearning to reconnect with the tropical universe required an effort from my imagination to reproduce its vital energy. Reading the poems reproduced an attempt to capture, momentarily, the biological and cultural richness that is being erased from the map by the modernization of the Amazon economy—but it was not only that. Although it is true that poetic discourse forms part of an ecological discourse insofar as it shows love for the forest and the fight to save it from environmental disasters, the very

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form of Espinosa’s poems sets up a recreation of the living and complex world of the trees in the reader’s spirit. From the first poem we perceive the intention of generating a vital reaction that also proposes a radical transformation of the sense of self, revealed in its loving motivation toward a more extensive relation with being, a relation that in some way depends on trees. The temporal is inside us Like their metamorphosis in frogs Tied to writing In order not to die We entwine verbally Jungle-like Vines seeking the echo Thus the past remains Empoemed.

Time is intimately connected to the contours and rhythms of the jungle. Its necessary recognition, in this case by means of the poetic word, is not to capture a concept or cerebral understanding of the Amazon’s reality, but to feel the nearness of the breath, the flowering of life and our coexistence with nature. Writing aspires to participate in that natural rhythm. Thus the word is not spoken to care for the tropical forest, but rather it serves to suggest quite the opposite: the trees take care of many other beings that in reality include human beings. Time is not measured in terms of money, but in dawns and dusks. In that way, the forest itself becomes an ideal context for visualizing a truly democratic culture insofar as it is the place where the time of any and all beings is considered valuable and where our parsimonious sense of time adapts to nature’s cyclic rhythms (Gaard, 23). Before losing itself in a rhetoric of an attack on deforestation, the poetic word centers itself and pauses on its love for the flora and fauna that depend on the apparently silent life of trees. A valid premise for developing a political struggle for the Amazon forest is to enable, through language, the interconnected presence of all beings, one that resists disappearance, even while knowing that physical and economic deterioration is inevitable and extensive. The use of Amazonian words, of identifications and alliances with animals, plants and peoples, is almost always given in terms of their relation to trees. And there is an explanation for it which is the plural and ancestral memory of the tropical forest: the trees provide a refuge to animals, modulate the weather, screen the wind,

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store rainwater, and exhale oxygen; they are the lungs of the planet, making life possible (Udall, 14). Jungle Tattoo is beautiful evidence of why we need to pay attention to the trees’ grace insofar as it represents a bastion of resistance to the culture of indifference, a symbol of a type of generosity that asks nothing in return. The poems circulate through different zones that can be read as ecosystems, but do not try to describe the arboreal reality either from an economic or a scientific perspective. Therefore, I am also interested in underscoring the ethical and aesthetic perspectives derived from that complex relation between the art of the word and the existence of a nature that is both rich and vast, and that sadly is threatened by death. When Espinosa writes, for example, about butterflies and birds that will lose their habitat, the somber tone of the poem turns into a very current elegy on the squandering of life: XLV The butterflies Are going to die in the humidity They have cut the wood from their own salty Forest Neither aloe nor angel’s trumpets will make them breathe Nor will the halos of electric lights Or the quail They will sleep in their roost Upon the cotton of a ceibo tree And they will become caterpillars again Heirs to the images and constellations Inventors of colors with eagle eyes So much spilled pollen So many useless wingbeats

What stands out in this type of poem is the diversity of beings whose lives are interdependent; and in that interdependence there is a fragile and ephemeral diversity. The tenderness in the words that describe those beings not only reproduces an enormous sadness for the loss of equilibrium, but also frames the change of rhythm. Another interesting characteristic of Espinosa’s collection is the insistent treatment of the natural world as a beloved “you” that is not defined by rigorous gender roles, one that avoids reproducing a dynamic of domination found in the heart of the family. The sense of family is broader than traditionally seen, and it is not established from a fixed point of view. Thus it is important to observe the lyrical “I’s” transformation

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throughout the poem. A great many poems display a playful tone concerning emotional preferences, in particular a great passion for relating to nature. It is a gamut of emotions, from tenderness at a happy reunion to anxiety of separation, a flow of contradictions that frame the sense of belonging. The farewells encompass a variety of suffering simply because it is a question of the plural being who endures the amputation of its most vital part, its roots, its trees. The consciousness of these conflicts appears from the beginning of the book. Poem VIII poses the problem of the difficulty of carrying out a successful relation with such a diverse and infinite nature. The space hidden in your ribs Is echo and silence in a piece of your sprig your magic the unexpected magic of a plant that is born in another one next to your eyes whirligigs of light or bark as cold as a snake’s skin all night long it fits in your skinny ribs lateral and transparent butterflies How to embrace you? Invisible Sea horse (25)

The mechanism of this poetic word is characteristic of a crazed love for the other—incarnated in the figure of the embrace—that winds up being the self in its expanded consciousness, at least as I said, expressed toward a nature that is not seen as an object to be exploited. There is rather an almost religious admiration that takes us back to the structure of myths and beliefs that surpass the strict limits of an individual, isolated existence. That insistence on a wise legacy in regard to a coexistence with nature becomes more explicit in a few poems, such as when the Xingú men (Poem LXI, 111) or Yanomami (LIII, 115) are mentioned. Espinosa’s expressive talent must be appreciated visually while recognizing the tree forms that shape the contours of each poem, but also with an attentive ear, since the rhythms are of decisive importance in recognizing the poems’ insertion in the living tradition of the jungle: “the same hoarse voice/of all the ages” (LVII, 123). In the context of the 1990s, this poetic discourse proposes a very unusual task: finding someone who wants to listen to what the trees say, to reflect on the current inability to understand nature’s language, and to plant the seeds that will lead to a transformation of our

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mentality. In other words, confronting our urban-centric and patriarchal culture requires a constant effort and attentive intelligence in order to readjust those dominant systems. This is not a matter of shoring up dichotomies—in this case, tropical forest/city. I believe that my readings show a contrary tendency that actually draws natural life into urban life. My reading is conducted in the context of armchairs, rugs, lamps, and plants, all the while feeling the strong presence of the trees just beyond my windowsill. But that does not detract from the book’s telluric tone, since it manages to subtly express a real geography by means of the voice of the jungle’s memory. Mauricio Ostria González makes an astute observation about Juan Pablo Riveros’s poetry that can also be applied to Espinosa’s work: both poets coincide in their effort to recuperate, reinterpret, and resemantize areas of Latin American culture that have been submerged, hidden or forgotten in the discourses that constitute national or continental imagery (109). If the reader of Riveros’s work cannot avoid being caught up in the book’s effort to immerse him in an extinct cosmos, like that of the Selknam, Yamanas, and Qawashqar in Tierra de Fuego, the poem’s tone is an invitation to overcome the cultural isolation into which Latin America has been forced for more than five centuries now (Ostria González, 113). A curious paradox in Espinosa’s poetry is that her readership is urban. Although it does not purport to claim any cultural or ethnic specificity, her poetry is emphatic in its imperious need to redefine our relationship with nature. It does so in a manner that cannot be accused of imposing politics, but rather of unfurling a loving, patient, subtle, profoundly spiritual and supportive poetry. That is why I consider this radical poetic discourse in its amorous conception, not only because it recovers the ancestral and sacred love for nature, but also because it presents it as if it were a personal, interior passion. The melancholic, amorous tone of the majority of the poems is probably quite similar to some of Reyes Ramírez’s poems. The amorous experience dissolves dichotomies, like the one that separates the individual from her environment. In these poems we hear the echo of voices that ought to be reintegrated in some way back into urban life, while they attempt to restore the connection between the human and the non-human. The poems condense the crucial urgency of knowing the Other in the midst of a lack of belief, in postmodern terms, that takes us back to the undetermined position of the subject and object. And that Other includes “rings of larva,” “palm plants like tongues,” “a forehead stained by a kiss,” “song of mahogany and saffron,” “the immense leaves,” “touch and tree bark,” “cardamom in lukewarm coffee, “naked snail,” “your daily rite,” etc. Sonia Leak mentions two things of importance in

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postmodern irreverence in this poetry: 1) nature is the locus for displaying the theme of sensitivity, of love and of a discovery of the body; and 2) the recovery of world-views that differ from Western notions and that span from the sowing and fertilization of the beloved object to the dynamics of sensorial experimentation “allowing the senses to revel in total freedom within a poetry of tenderness” (n.p.). Even though it may be an insufficient reference, the following poem is not only an emblem of that cordiality among species, but also and above all, an eager attempt to combat the humanist ideology that is centered in the masculinist imagination that is incarnated in language itself: XXXIV Sing me a verse Awaken my body Give me an ending in your labyrinth I want to be your invisible ally Your adolescent buzz Your daily ritual Tireless Escape From that fear From the ancient whiff of tragedy From the heavens without gates I want Sing to me (77)

The poetic voice leads me to a sense of the radical search for life from a concrete responsibility for the world. The language registers the need to act while under pressure from modern society. In a long-term perspective, the dynamic of coming to know the Other, of understanding that Other as a plural organism of live and interconnected beings in the shade of tree, becomes a process for self-knowledge and for incorporating different perspectives into that knowledge as a way of sympathizing and existing with nature. Those processes of consciousness are painful, because they come to realize the disappearance of entire tribes, of thousands of species and plants, of names that no longer grace anyone’s lips. But the language is articulated in order to relate positively to that damaged nature in an affective manner that is more aware of biodiversity. Amazonia (2003), Juan Carlos Galeano’s (b. 1958) poetry collection plays with the poet’s own “jungle” autobiography in an imaginative and

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humorous way. Perhaps because of that, the book has merited many an edition. In my humble opinion it is innovative in its endeavor to unite Amazonian mythology with modern urban life. The difference is not the personification of beings of diverse scales and types (from stars, to entire landscapes, animals, vegetation, and daily objects), but also the humor in that personification and respect toward Amazonian culture. This poetic vision yields tender results, incorporating a fractal perspective of subjectivity that is not limited to the human, but is also interlaced and cohabitates with the non-human world. Spirits, animals, things, trees, people, all relate to one another, fall in love with each other, live together daily, experience together, spend time together. This is not merely a surrealist personification or a simple literary device that is imposed on Amazonian culture. The legends preserve their local flavor and incorporate into their active presence the contemporary experience of living in the Amazon region. I will include only one example that also serves to question the myth of harmony by employing a humoristic vision of nature’s unpredictable and dynamic vulnerability: Fish In the Amazon, the peacock basses, pacus and other fishes, Tell me That they are very worried about the dangers that Threaten their children. “Our babies do not know how to tell right from wrong; they almost never obey any longer and they are easily caught with fish hooks disguised as fruit.” These fish are correct,” I think, upon seeing how The Amazon fills up With men in boats that carry bait Of many colors. “Lately, so that our children do not eat any of that fruit,” they tell me, “we have had to scare them with the same stories and fables that are told out there.”

In the poem, the dialogue between humans and fish encourages a movement towards understanding nature not as a resource, in this case for the fishing industry, but as a service that nature bestows. The fish form

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part of a food chain that is dynamic, fragile, and frequently in flux. The personification permits the reductive vision of the fish to be overcome and thus enriched; from a vision of them as food and an economic resource to one in which they are an active part of diverse ecosystems who possess their own history. This poem about fish (2003, 57; 2011, 38) as well as other poems such as “Play” (2003, 60; 2011, 42-43) expand the Amazonian perspective to the planetary scales. The humor goes beyond the local: Siblings Mountain and Sea use the river that unites them As a common ground to play. One day the Sea takes to tugging on the Mountain and she overturns her cauldron of volcanoes on the lands, the houses and the people. When the Sea least expects it, the Mountain tugs on the river And the Sea drowns hundreds of animals and the fishermen That live on the banks. “The worst thing is that the biggest river is perfect for playing,” says an old woman. The people beg the universe and the stars to Teach That pair of brats to mind their manners. The universe and the stars respond that they don’t want to get mixed up In family problems.

In a subtle, direct way, the universe of people includes unusual interlocutors such as the stars and the sea. The difference in scale does not matter, and the equality between universe, mountain, sea, star, and people, which others may understand as a surrealist touch, is rather an example of the Amazonian world-view. Galeano has directed a very revealing documentary about these mythological stories that form part of the Amazonian imagination and about which we still know very little: The Trees Have a Mother (2008). This film also uncovers the importance of these fantastical oral stories in the fight for environmental justice. Like the prolonging of a song about trees’ memory, some Amazonian poets insist quite innovatively on the difficult marriage between matter and consciousness, between culture and nature. Camilo Gomides and Joseph Vogel have written essays concerning the critical issue of Amazonian

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The Amazon

deforestation, and I would like to highlight a presentation that I saw twice about Darcy Ribeiro’s novel, Maira, which bears witness to a threatened and dying environmental wisdom. Jorge Marcone has studied the so-called jungle novels’ complexity from a broader perspective than Ana Pizarro’s. Marcone conceives of this novelistic sub-genre as modern, urban subjects varied response to the sometimes frustrating experience of modernity, whether lived in the city or in the tropical forest. This diversity notwithstanding, a common element in this sub-genre is the offering of an alternate image of a border, in place of the stereotypical idea of the Amazon River Basin as a paradise. Our ecocritical reading of Amazonian narratives and poetry counterbalances the anthropocentric literary tradition; these texts fine tune our senses and nourish our imagination; they give us that emotionally charged air of the jungle, filled with unique stories and a biodiversity that is fundamental to this Earth; voices and unborn spirits that demand an essential place in all environmental discussions.

BIOCOENOSIS

The following text is by Ida Vitale. RFB. The notion of biocenosis—the group of living beings that inhabit any given space—did not form part of twentieth-century mankind’s mental map, although biocenotica has existed as a branch of ecology since 1920. Thanks to the research carried out by experts in this field of science we have the fairly new concept of the true interdependence among species, which has given rise to successes in the eradication of many infestations. Perhaps today few people are familiar with the Grape phylloxera, a hemitera that lethally attacks the roots and leaves of grape vines. Charles Valentine Riley, who discovered the North American origin of this scourge, combated it by proposing grafts of resistant species. As a result of this research, he discovered a species of Australian scale insect that fought the blight on the California citrus industry. Given that biocenosis took note and advantage of the fact that one species can act upon another, a catastrophe that would have forever changed the livelihood of many people in several countries was averted. Today that infestation has lost its virulence, and I believe that the name Phylloxera is only remembered in vintners’ circles. During my childhood I used to hear about the Grape phylloxera every time I would display the same insistent pestering that many children do, persistent as a summer fly. The name of the now controllable disease formed part of the everyday language of a more-orless informed population, even among those who were not involved in any way in the grand scale cultivation of grapes. Under normal conditions, the combatant against a certain undesirable element can itself become an infestation, and does so within the very bosom of nature and at its own very efficient pace. It has been said that, thankfully, the shrew is not the size of a lion, as it would decimate the earth, given its ferocious attack upon anything it eats, whether it be insects, worms or mice. Foxes and mountain lions, in turn, hunt the shrew, although these predators do not actually consume them due to their musk glands which produce a very strong odor. As an insectivore, the shrew is very useful to the farmer, who may reject it for its malodorous secretions, which like the skunk’s, serve as a means of defense against dogs and other larger animals.

BUEN VIVIR

The idea of buen vivir, or good living 1 , is nothing new. But the concept, insofar as its environmental meanings and signifiers suggest an ecological orientation, originates in a way of living found in the Andean communities, where the concept is based on a common way life shared with other humans and nature alike. Sumaq Kawsay for the Quechua people, Suma Qamaña for the Aymara, Vivir bien for the Bolivians, Ñanda Renko for the Guaraní, Küme Mongen for the Mapuche. The meaning of buen vivir varies somewhat across these cultures and according to their specific practices. Eduardo Gudynas points out that this concept is not traditional in Aymara culture, but rather something new, representing a cultural recreation (“Tensions,” 243). He also underscores that this diversity of meanings constitutes a way of generating an alternative to the dominant ideas of development. The similarity between the concept of buen vivir and certain tenets of deep ecology, which complement one another, showing similar convergences, affirms that such complementarity is precisely the foundation of the constructive space of buen vivir. The fact that the concept of buen vivir is recognized in the constitutions of both Ecuador (2008) and Bolivia (2009) reflects an important change in the systematic marginalization that the indigenous peoples and their ancestral lands have endured for centuries. Already in the 1980s, anthropologists had used a similar notion—conviviality—to emphasize the affective side of sociality among the indigenous communities particularly in Amazonia. (Overing and Passes, 16-17). Nevertheless, buen vivir, a concept that is still “under construction,” aims to overcome the common acceptance of the idea of economic development. As Gudynas observes, “it is a relationship that generates obligations and responsibilities, a connection where we ought to listen and learn to understand the message that come to us from Nature” (“Tensions,” 244).

1

In “Buen vivir: the Social Philosophy Inspiring Movements in South America,” Oliver Balch notes that “buen vivir” expert Eduardo Gudynas advocates for maintaining the Spanish term for this movement and resisting its translation into English.

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All of the ecocinema that is discussed in this book with reference to environmental justice and slow violence could be considered a privileged vantage point to observe buen vivir in action. It is more difficult to detect its influence in the literary realm, although given our definition of the concept, we could propose a reconsideration of the habitual ways of reading literary texts. Most certainly, the majority of poems, stories and novels mentioned in this ABC book would provide us with ample materials to discuss and observe buen vivir at the level of language, character, themes, and principally at the level of the scenes and components of the non-human world depicted therein. With respect to this last point—the environmental aspect of literary works—we would have to ask ourselves if it implies a defense of progress; in other words, if it considers the environment as a mere source for extraction and commercialization. According to Gudynas, one proof of the validity of buen vivir “consists of verifying how nature is interpreted, and how the environment is articulated as alternatives to development” (240). I was thinking, however, more along the lines of a proof of sustainability, of a way of knowing if whatever is being done, whether it is extraction, exploration or transportation, employs means that are not unsafe, polluting or destructive; that is to say, a means of evaluating the environmental impact without perpetuating the self-deception or the rhetoric of those who refuse to take seriously this environmental crisis that we are all facing. It should be possible for everyone to say that they live well and that they defend buen vivir. In order to take this discussion to a literary level, since Gudynas speaks of the concept in the context of the political and the economic, I would posit the example of Fernando Contreras Castro’s short novel, Kind of Blue (2009), in which a jazz sextet composed of alley cats rescues a blind child, Arturo, who has been abandoned in the streets of San José. It is an ingenious fable of friendship between species that demonstrates the power of a community that cooperates according to buen vivir. The cats have their own voice and speak to the child as an equal. Arturo, who becomes a talented trumpet player, has many teachers among the felines. He listens to Freddy Freeloader, the feline narrator, but also to many other voices: Freddy’s grandfather, who had handed down to his grandson many valuable life lessons; the other band members; Valentina, the band leader’s girlfriend; and cats from other places in the city. This connection and communication between species suggests a long-term perspective that is necessary not only for a slow reading, but also to nourish the notion of engagement with the lives of our loved ones as well as with the nonhuman world. Freddy explains to Arturo:

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Buen Vivir The struggle against fear lasts a lifetime. Arturo, it’s a battle that you have to win every day, always starting from scratch. That same battle, oddly enough, is what keeps you alive and it’s what feeds desire and happiness. (46)

CELEBRATION

Lullaby, song of the earth, bubbling up of the soul, outpouring of gratitude to celebrate life in this world. Transversal projection of the musical subject or the poetic “I,” without separating culture from nature. A leap that, rather than differentiating, unites instantly without fixing an identity, because everything flows and changes. Something similar to life processes in blurry, imprecise zones. At the same time, leaps like those in celebrations and festivals that pay homage to, and give thanks for, the wealth of the seasons in the spirit of life and mutual recognition. In this way, the juxtapositions and coexistence among realms that are traditionally separate demand an integrative perspective that is typical of poetry, which rejoices in and echoes grace, affection, and lightness. One of the texts that best exemplifies such an integrative perspective is José María Arguedas’s (Peru, 1911-1969) poem in Quechua, “A Call to Some Doctors,” which in today’s world can also be read as a wake-up call to urban culture about its alienation from nature. The poem’s imperative tone conveys the urgent necessity of long-term vision, as we can appreciate clearly from this passage: Take out your binoculars, your best glasses. Look, if you can. Five hundred flowers from several potato plants grow on the balconies of the abysses that your eyes cannot reach, on the earth on which night and gold, silver and the day are mixed. Those five hundred flowers are my brains, my flesh. (43)

Sadly, Arguedas’s scant poetic production is barely known outside Peru, which is a shame since the quality and intensity of his geological and cosmic sensibilities deserve—now more than ever—greater attention from an environmentally aware readership. Two outstanding poets have devoted a prolific amount of their poetry to the celebratory act of nature. Pablo Neruda (Chile, 1904-1973) and Jorge Carrera Andrade (Ecuador, 1903-1978). Neruda is better known as a public figure but his connection to nature is extraordinarily diverse and suggestive. His is a poetry as vast as nature itself. In his early poems

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Neruda contemplates admiringly the world as matter, while the surrealist perspective of the Neruda of Residence on Earth (1935) presents new angles in the midst of chaos. By Canto general (1950) nature becomes political, epic, mythical, whereas in his three books of odes, it is joyful and appreciative. In the rest of his work, as Durán and Safir indicate, nature is alternately imaginative or contemplative (33). In Extravagario the celebration of his proximity to both sea and earth becomes an endless passion for the stars and his earthly destiny. For Durán and Safir, nature in Neruda is a vital force that breathes life into the weak, fragile human existence, a force that, in his last works, Neruda seeks in solitude. Life is transitory and nature is its source. When Neruda wants to speak, he thinks of flowers, stones, waves, and animals. His sensibility is made for listening to those voices from nature. Carrera Andrade is another poet who admires and loves nature deeply, whether in his short experimental poems in the form of haiku, such as Microgramas (1926) or in his celebratory poems about cosmic connections (The Ineffable Lake, 1923; The Apple’s Role, 1928; Bulletins from the Sea and the Earth, 1930; Biography for Birds, 1937; among other books). His poetry consistently reveals the importance of attentive observation in order to participate in life’s natural transformations, but at the same time he also assumed a pessimistic stance whereby separations appear more real (Planetary Man, 1957). Although Carrera Andrade’s poetry is not as universal as Neruda’s, in his last books he insisted on the importance of the cultural treasures of the indigenous peoples; for instance, in the series of short poems called “Quipos” (in Terrestrial Vocation, 1972) he shows the sensual ties between objects and beings in the cosmos. In the wake of these monumental works, many other poets have endeavored to celebrate nature without opposing it to, or separating it from, human reality. In this vein, we could cite Peruvian writer Vargas Vicuña’s (1924-1997) selected poetic prose pieces that represent the Earth’s life-and-death rituals as a spectacle, as well as Luis Cardoza y Aragón’s essays, memoirs and poems (Guatemala, 1904-1992), as genuine proof of the profound feeling that marks a “cosmic sense of the Earth” (The River, 459). Cardoza’s memoirs can be read as a lucid and impassioned exercise in uniting human being and nature, without falling into the trap of nostalgia for the “idealized countryside” which was in Cardoza’s words “foolishness; we have to see the oppressive reality; in mine [landscape], I feel as if I were bathed in ash and ants” (49). Therefore, when faced with the question “What does it mean to be Guatemalan?” Cardoza answered “To be a brother of Shakespeare, of The Volcán de Agua, of Martí, of San

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Juan de la Cruz, of Huracán, the Heart of the Sky” (787). His poetry exemplifies the poetic recreation that contradicts the negative view of exile. His poem “Uprooted” ends with the following lines: Oh! deaf-mute pain, wave of stones, already in your cosmic night of seed the murmuring of my mouth is moss. (Complete Poetry, 207)

The lyrical “I” integrates itself into the existence of the cosmos by processing distances and conflicts through a sensibility very similar to that of the exiled Peruvian poet, César Vallejo, who found himself “impassioned,” “perplexed,” and “still with Andean dust on his boots.” (The River, 219) Among the poets of the later generations, Alberto Blanco’s (Mexico, b. 1951) poetry stands out for its ample and versatile development of the idea of continuity and survival of living beings, including those normally considered “inanimate.” Few works dissolve with so much energy and detail the duality between nature and culture, which according to Octavio Paz “manifests itself almost always as an unyielding opposition” (Shadows, 252). Blanco, by way of contrast, brings together these separate poles by means of the numerous transformations of those who participate in the unceasing life-and-death ritual. Blanco’s versatility as a writer fluent in multiple genres is unquestioned. His poems demonstrate a clear ecological consciousness, but also a delicate experience of interconnectedness; the reader must use her senses in order to achieve those vital connections. It is a transaction that demands that “the world be seen with newly virgin eyes” (Acosta, viii) as well as an awakening of all five senses. In the poem “The Swallow,” for example, the animal is a symbol of the poet himself as he tries to find connections, transforming himself into pure energy that flows with the tree and the wind. In another poem, human identity embraces its cosmic dimension, which is expressed as acceptance: The enormous relief we feel as we contemplate the mountains in the distance as we see the flight of a swallow or as we listen to the conversation between the wind and the ash trees, is being—for an instant— in meaningful contact, united with an infinite number of beings that are nothing more than what they are and that do not wish—not the least bit—

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Celebration to be anything else. (The Book of Birds, 26)

The poetic “I” expresses not only the poet’s humanity, but also his passion for relating to the collective dimension, which includes all natural beings like the mountains, the swallow, and the ash trees. The connection is a momentary opening that implies a relief from the burdens of separation and extinction, both of which always present a looming threat. It is, in short, a tiny allegory of cyclical duration. The pleasure of belonging to that living tapestry is found in the wild, natural state of beings that “do not wish—not the least bit—to be anything else.” Here the relationship with the ancestral wisdom of the indigenous peoples becomes obvious. Blanco includes that perspective by mentioning his own blood: his love for his daughter that flows and overtakes “a horse in the light of the moon”: “A horse escaped from the circus / and entered into my daughter’s eyes” (Raw Material, 15). Nature’s presence is not external: “Since then my daughter feels a yearning / for grassy plains and green hills . . . “ (15). The variety of celebratory poetic forms demonstrates a deep sense of exploring nature, which is the means to revive our perceptual and emotive abilities that urban existence has atrophied in us almost completely. This recuperation is achieved in the context of a trip, a day’s journey that is a metaphor for experiencing contact with nature. In the prose poems “Triptych after the Flood” (Dawn, 91-93), the poetic subject is alternately a salmon fighting the current, a starfish in a riptide, a word seeking its luminous moment. The poem allows the reader to feel the process of transformation and flux. Blanco has conscientiously managed to extend a bridge between nature’s unfathomable richness and our impoverished habitat, which we continue to exacerbate through our usurpations and neglect. With Account of the Guides (1992) Blanco intensifies his vision of the voyage through transformations, lights, aromas, flavors, energies and shapes: The gaze does not rest: it tucks in Earth’s blanket. There where the body rests, the eyes are drawn, trusting. Water travels over the harmonica of the rice paddies. In our world the essence of rhythm exists.

Blanco’s second collection of poems, Time and Mist (2005), reiterates this diversity of natural voyages, incorporating into this all-encompassing identity a poetic voice that, rather than uniting with, alternates positions and points of view with countryside, anti-countryside, stones, haikus (or “parallel lightning strikes”) or animals. In Account of the Guides, a unique book, Blanco adds specific references to Mexico and the United States, but

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the trips are impossible to describe according to some orderly concept, such as a clearly linear plot line. Edges become blurry, just as reality pushes the limits of experience and of the intellect, attempting to reveal a harmony that would have been lost by our conscience, anesthetized from inhabiting the planet. Thus, many of the poems demonstrate how the gift of celebrating life belongs to humans and non-humans alike. The fascination that animals exercise, according to Blanco, “has occupied a key place in the development of the most valued conceptions of the human being” (“There Is No Paradise,” 29). Animals as symbols of the human soul are magnificently represented in the poems of José Emilio Pacheco (Mexico, 1939-2014) and Antonio Cisneros (Peru, 1942-2012). In the work of these poets, the animal world becomes, among other things, a history lesson, although the Peruvian may have insisted on situating himself from a place that harbors a hidden aversion to the animal world. Nevertheless, his poetic voice seems to stem from an everyday, attainable animal subjectivity. Finally, it is essential to highlight the cultivation of the haiku in Latin American poetry, an area in which Alberto Blanco certainly emerges as one of the traditional short form’s greatest experts. I invite the reader to read and reread these haikus, to choose a favorite and to recite them aloud from memory. To pique the reader’s interest, an example from each season is included here: Spring: What limitations? The bird trapped in his cage Does not cease to sing. Summer: The summery sea How it lifts up its flowers Of white froth and foam. Autumn: Even the green leaves Carry their shadows within The dry leaves of brown. Winter: And in the darkness Exists a single blank page Waiting for a dream.

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According to Antonio Cisneros, this almost systematic form of short text maintains: a relation that speaks directly to the cult of nature; a clear and spontaneous vision of the outside world, that finds pleasure in the preciousness of color and in the various forms that nature generates, all of which moves us in a particular way that penetrates instantly to our very being. (128)

We should celebrate the always fresh and ever changing breezes from day to day, continually renewing the culture that celebrates the planetary body, a culture in which obsessing about difference and identities has no place because it is a celebration of great resonance, one made only of earth and water. In his poem “Grace,” Guillermo Siles (Argentina, b. 1967) celebrates the grace born of perceptual ties and corporeal experience that dances with sensitivity, reviving the ancient dance of the natural world in The Taste of Fruit (2008): To the air lend your grace Little dance, says the body in movement the hands draw colors and each chord aroma of the countryside lightens its feet. May the people’s joy return as light and may grace descend chacarera, gato or candombe keys and centuries, lost mute magic recovered in yesterdays. Eye for an eye Tear for a tear in a desert of salt pulsating inside with kisses not with words or what is the idea, duende, of feeling skin exactly as we feel the rain.

COMMITMENT

The commitment to honor and respect all of Earth’s creatures every day. The perceptive consciousness of the environment is not enough to develop an acute awareness of time and place. How then to resist the processes that disintegrate cultural identities that an inconclusive modernity has imposed on Latin America? Such a consciousness only makes sense when it is embodied in ecological commitment. Something that is more difficult to perceive in our present circumstances, like city traffic in which abuse and arrogance leave no room for an alternative way of thinking, one which would unite the self, the machine and the polluted environment in breathable, more livable air. Nicanor Parra has written his “ecopoems” to pave the way for a more explicit commitment on the part of the author or the reader-pedestrian: Third and final call: PEDESTRIANS OF THE WORLD UNITE (1983, 157)

Thus, the poems in which infinitives as moral imperatives predominate could be considered programs of action for ecological commitment. I have chosen the following poem (Tenth Vertical Poetry, 17) that Juarroz read in a conference about ecology in Mexico in 1991, in his presentation entitled “Poetry, Literature and Ecology,” which I was lucky enough to see when ECCO, the international television channel, broadcast it. The poem is a formulation of ecological commitment: We have to remodel man’s house, Prune it like we prune a tree And insert in its most sensitive material The delicate graft of life, So that the house grows along with man And also becomes smaller with him. We must also humanize man’s house And defer its destiny of ruins Or of devastation by the barbarians That always surrounds it, To that end teaching it to breathe alongside man

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Commitment And even to live and die with him. Or to prepare it at least So that when man falls Or escapes or evaporates, Man’s house will conserve for a little while Something like the replica of his image, A transubstantiation or reminiscence Of his short memory Before surrendering it, better than other men, To the subliminal publicity Of the anonymous winds of the world.

The metaphor of “man’s house” could be considered an androcentric figure that would situate the discourse that frames it within the unique reason of dominant Western modernity. But in the context of Vertical Poetry, it appears to refer to the way that human beings relate to their habitat. The infinitive construction repeated in the first lines of every stanza manifests an urgent call not only to change the nature of the humanhabitat relationship, but it also implies a reconsideration of what is human. In the first stanza, the verbs indicate transformations that ought to be introduced into the “house” (“must be remodeled”) through several metaphors concerning the care of the earth (to prune, the delicate graft, to grow and become smaller in his company). Thus, “man’s house” could be a metaphor for the “false habitat” that Berleant defines as the environment of our industrialized, commercialized societies that impose homogenizing images and routines that do not respond to human beings’ genuinely natural necessities (92-93). The natural figures that are integrated to the notion of home and land of origin (“the house”) express rather the continuity and unity that are being built in concert with humans. Juarroz proposes the imperative of “humanizing” the habitat and giving it a longer lifespan. I understand this as an extension of the concept of what it means to be human; this in an against-the-grain effort in which the way of achieving such an imperative is specified through the insistence on humankind’s participation in the process and on the learning of a rhythm of life that includes sharing breath and death. In this way, the unity and integration established from the poem’s beginning are reiterated in a very active way, that is to say, in a mode of commitment. In sum, it is no longer a matter of prolonging life, but rather of preparing a future free of human domination. This future would be the transformation of the habitat in a human replica, which, in turn, would transform into an aerial, mutable reality, redoubling the fatal destiny of ridding ourselves completely of the idea of the subject. The uncertainty of this future is suggested by the

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vagueness of the human replica: (“for a time,” “something like,” “a transubstantiation,” “short memory”). The poem’s final image is that of an end to cosmic life, in which there is no possibility of having an identity, not even one that is mobile. The “anonymous winds of the world,” however, do not emphasize a single apocalyptic characteristic of that end, because it is possible that, just as it destroys, the wind could create another form of life. But the poem’s apparent androcentrism, symbolized by the figure of the house, in reality is no more than an emblem of a lost connection in modern times caused by the irreparable destruction of our habitat. For Berleant, that balanced connection between human beings and their habitat should be sought in those preindustrial villages that have survived two centuries of technological and socio-historical changes without losing their individual, local character. Today’s challenge is to reconsider our cohabitation with the natural world without falling into the myth of ecological equilibrium even though it is undeniable that the idea of harmony has an integrative function that also urges us to pay more attention to the theme of biodiversity because it is through it that a productive and respectful relationship to the natural world is maintained. Many environmentalists and ecocritics would think of this relationship as a human act of selfrespect. The poetic self, even though it recognizes human limits to connect with the complex functioning and the fragile time of earth, proposes a type of action that modifies the course of the devastating consequences of remaining disconnected from the Earth’s organic dynamic. This does not mean, however, that the ecological moral imperative is free of a sense of belonging. But in the poems that most evidently show an ecological consciousness, we find an underlying critique of culturally fixed identities—nationalisms, religious or political fanaticisms, etc. If in some of the poems in which a type of identity can be found it is a mobile construction that continuously forms and transforms according to the dynamics of separation and connection. Richard situates these dynamics on the plane of “shocks or alliances” that the “I” experiences in everchanging circumstances (213). The critique of fixed identities is carried out through human recognition of the limitations of perception and of our relationship with the Earth. Nevertheless, the ways to achieve this commitment can be very diverse and the majority of time can express a certain discomfort and disorientation. In a survey on the poetic task, the Cuban-Spanish poet Rodolfo Häsler (1958) chose a poem that expresses one of his greatest concerns, “how to resolve the situation into which we have been placed,

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surrounded by nature, and we no longer know what to do with it” (386387): In the place of writing Do not enter here. Oracle of Apollo Upon entering the garden, former creator of life, You expect to be met by the blackbird’s whistle As he plays hide-and-seek, hopping among the stones, Little more than a childhood memory to accompany you, His ebony head hiding the riddle. What can you say to the blackbird, only your silence is apt Trying to guess the spark given off by the naming. You can deny him your jagged breath, Your infinite rage at so much injustice, The golden sea that beats the Catalonian shore, It doesn’t matter, he is never going to recognize the intensity, Never going be to judge in your kingdom. The blackbird scratches in the flowerbeds, His footsteps raise suspicions among the vegetation, A line of hydrangeas, gardenias, the lemon tree, A fruitful writing as a result of tending to the roots, poetic traveler that the blackbird expands in its beak.

The poem completely contradicts the poet’s explanation. The blackbird is not part of an environment. He is the place of writing, the commitment. There is no other external environment. The daily and attentive commitment to not separate ourselves from our surroundings is also achieved by fusing the passion for the detective genre, or our passion for detective action, and ecological action. Cosima Dannoritzer’s (Germany) documentary Buy, Toss Away, Buy Some More (The Light Bulb Conspiracy, 2010) enjoyed a great deal of success when the Spanish communications giant RTV aired it in Spanish before also making it available on the Internet. I mention this documentary because it is narrated in several European languages so as not to present an obstacle to understanding and criticizing the environmental crisis. Stories that denounce planned obsolescence are fascinating and worthy of detective fiction. Another form of commitment arises between activists’ and grassroots environmentalism—the wildlife defense committees that proliferate in Latin America as a result of environmental injustice—and artistic practice both in and out of schools. Here I would cite all the literary texts and documentaries that portray the struggle for environmental justice in a creative, against-the-grain fashion.

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Ecological conscience is incarnated in the commitment to connect the I with the non-human world by means of a complex strategy of environmental perception in which it doesn’t matter so much to distinguish the oppositions between the human and the non-human, but that it is indeed important to unravel the scenarios of risk and the environmental injustice in which we participate. It is a question of programs of action and movement that are integrated to Earth’s destiny via rhythm: “Rhythm is everything; already prior to being born we can hear life’s rhythms, the world’s rhythms, inside our mother’s womb” asserts Rodolfo Häsler (384). It is valid to think, after reading Juarroz’s and other poets’ work, that in our plural America, the first “green” discourse has been poetry, for it has formulated before all else the urgent need to transform our relationship with the environment. And not only poets have allowed themselves to be led by their bodies and their ties to the non-human world—principally through their musical ear. Human commitment to its cosmic connection is followed as one follows a captivating rhythm. In this rhythm, social movements advance toward social justice and refuse to be bought out.

COMPOSITION OF PLACE (COMPOSITIO LOCI)

The phrase as formulated by St. Ignatius of Loyola in the Sixteenth Century originates in the heart of the European Counter-Reformation. It is perfectly exemplified by the Jesuit Missions on the American continent who were cut down by colonial power. In the context of today’s globalization, composition of place consists of countering every one of the negative dimensions of globalization with a defense of planetary life. Pedro Mas Bermejo’s enumeration of the problems associated with globalization seems to hit the nail on the head: The serious environmental problems, the demographic explosion, massive unemployment, great migratory movements, the rise in crime, the expansion of the drug-trafficking industry, the worsening of interethnic and religious strife, the spread of poverty and indigence, the feminization of poverty and the workforce, the appearance of new illnesses like HIV, and the resurgence of traditional epidemics long thought to be nearly eradicated (tuberculosis, malaria, cholera, etc.) (“Salud ambiental, desarrollo humano y calidad de vida,” 454-455)

We can only form sustainable places by means of specific ecosystems, cultural diversity and the autonomy of local populations founded on principles of environmental rationality. Enrique Leff has spent several decades formulating a concept of sustainability from the vantage point of political ecology as the savoirs we need to create a sustainable world. Sadly, the word “sustainable” is an empty term within an economic rationality that shores up false illusions of unlimited progress: Natural resources are atomized and ripped away from their function and meaning within complex ecosystems in order to integrate them into the chain of biotechnological production and into the logic of financial profit, thus destroying their basis in ecological organization and their cultural significance (Leff, 7-8)

The criterion that is rarely on anyone’s mind, that is applied least often when countering every one of the negative dimension of today’s globalization, is precisely keeping in mind the environment as a savoir of

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cultures, as a diversity of cognitive and productive appropriations of nature. We can no longer continue regarding the environment as a universal economic value. Instead, we must, as Leff suggests, think of it in its ecological, technological, and cultural entirety. This supposes setting aside the dominant paradigm of the sciences and thinking about problems from an alternative globality that does not destroy biodiversity, that reduces the indices of deforestation and desertification, that replaces the technology based on damming waters with alternative technologies that conserve biotic resources and that sustain levels of subsistence and production. This implies sustaining a dialogue of savoirs in a terrain that is unthinkable for the sciences, conditioned and determined as they are by economic logic. “Faced with the project of establishing a system of economic compensation that obliges us to reevaluate everything according to the yardstick of the market, environmental rationality opens itself up to nature’s diversity and to cultural ways of life” (Leff, various authors). Until now, very little terrain has been covered in the dialogue between the technical sciences and ancestral cultures. The environmental wisdom of the originary societies of Mesoamerica, the Andes, and the Amazon region is a basis component of the ecological imagination.

COMPOST

Writing as decomposition is one meaning of compost. The material that I use in my writing appears to come from a compost heap. Little by little, through the passage of time, we squirrel away or begin to accumulate, like in a compost heap, unpolished material that we put aside or discard. Whatever we may happen to forget forms part of this compost heap; it is material rich in its roughness, which generates a certain heat through its own alchemy and, although unattended, nevertheless exists. Compost is something dark, messy, and disorderly. Tlazolteotl is the Nahuatl compost: what is old, deteriorated, catabolized, decomposed, and dirty, yet at the same time naturally regenerated and renewed by means of mythic, religious wisdom. This is a cycle of decomposition and composition. In this sense, pre-Colombian culture rejects the homogenization of its different cultures and diverse histories so often imposed upon it by colonization. This Nahuatl compost is an expression of diversity, a pre-Colombian wisdom that foresaw the recycling of all that exists, since death did not represent the ultimate end of things but rather the transition to another state or phase of a cycle. According to Patrick K. Johansson, the deity who alludes to the old and the fecal is Tlazolteotl, a goddess who represents “the vital integration of an agreeable erotic evolution and a disagreeable fanatical regression:” Tlazolteotl consumes filth, that is to say, what is old, deteriorated, what is lacking, dirty, fecal, putrefied, cadaverous, all of which regenerates in the anagenetic dimension of her divine being. The result of this digestivegenetic process is the new, the good, the clean, the healthy, in short, existence. While men eat the good and defecate the bad and the dirty, the goddess eats what is bad or dirty and defecates (or gives birth to) all that is good. (23)

This Nahuatl goddess of love and the abject exemplifies the need to incorporate a natural being’s putrid aspects into its more noble aspects in the furtherance of life’s continuity. What stagnates in the soul decomposes there, making it is difficult to detect the fertile side of the decomposition process.

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The compost of writing is made up of true and daily worries and obsessions that give shape to one’s life. It is the very matter of writing in the sense of having nourished the root of one’s self. Compost does not come from thin air; it is not a case of getting hold of one of those ideas floating around in the ether. The compost of writing is shapeless matter, discarded but productive, where the writer obtains vital matter, with depth, dynamism, life’s heat, fermentation. This compost consists of profound feelings, dreams, forgotten readings, pressing needs, sensations, intuitions, hunches, and discoveries. Manure gives me another impression and fertilizer sounds too chemical. Humus and silt evoke larval literary movements, which recall the cycle of decomposition/composition. But the ecological imagination ought to find a way of decomposing stories that separate us from nature, in the manner that microorganisms as well as numerous worms, other tiny creatures and fungi, eat organic residue in order to transform residue into nutrient-rich material in the earth. This is by no means an easy analogy. Compost nourishes the ground by means of a long chain of transformations, and not only by using the organic leftovers from our kitchens; this compost is a dynamic, living mixture that needs to be nourished and requires care: to retain more moisture, to defend itself from disease, to withstand changes of climate, in short, to grow. To nourish, nurture, the most basic, fundamental verb, the most rooted verb that makes us participants in the earth’s processes, that enormous dance of insects, worms and microorganisms that eat plants and animal waste and then add nutrients to the platform on which all that is living stands. A good beginning: the compost that nourishes the earth must also nourish our body; in other words, we should not fail to recognize that we are made up a series of processes and tiny beings. Now we can think of writing as compost with more conviction. Yet for the majority of us the earth was never anything of ours, it was nothing we ever possessed. Always the nourished earth. Thus we write in her and about her. Writing also nourishes. The earth is some of us extending our hand and also the birds that peck about when they eat. What nourishes the ground, nourishes the body. All that is bad in this world sets up obstacles to this nourishment. How can we rid ourselves of what is bad? Only by pushing it very far away? Something similar happens with shit. We do not want to know because we are in the dark about the possibilities and the significance of decomposition and the degrees of transformations that occur in the earth. What nourishes our body is not so easily distinguished from what nourishes our emotions, our impulses, our aspirations. Life itself is not only nourished by recuperating energy that is lost, but also by nourishing capacities, by sharpening its ironic wit, by “staying in shape.”

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This transformative process is incarnated in the breath as a continuous invitation to not stop, either in the inhalation or the exhalation. The vector of this life-giving nutrition is the alternation between day and night, the changing of the seasons. What nurtures is an interior dynamism, a vital process in which the being polishes itself, decants itself, separates itself, disengages itself and reengages itself. Nevertheless, this nutrition demands learning how to allow one’s vitality to ebb and flow continuously. There is no obstruction, only attention to the functioning of the livable/viable, without fixing a position. It is a condition of always being and growing, alert and light. Allowing oneself to move and to regenerate along with the rhythm of the world’s invitation. The only way to find material worthy of art or ecoart, for the production of life is to care, to collaborate, to share. We must break with our personal atavisms and reinvent a way of life. In order to circulate in the diversity of cultures and species, we must do so. The final poem in Cristián Basso’s Insect Love expresses a perspective on compost that emphasizes how nothing is wasted in the natural cycles of decay and renewal, images that also speak to the process of composting that strives toward a transformed person, who perhaps barely withstands indifference in the process of return: RETURN of the SOUL Shouting and chance. The girl banished the crest, And walked without mist adorned in fog. A bee hummingbird awaited her At the foot of her bed. And he predicted forests of wire fence; A lake with her shadow Swimming in impatience. Tremulous membrane. The flowering horizon of tree-shaped cadavers. Chance and shouting. Wandering, with her rising blood she saw the bridges upon which she would meet her larva string themselves together. (116)

I like how the poet succeeds in expressing the very process of change and of a release in concert with the world’s invitation. Although I do not understand the poem completely, the poetic voice demands a focus on decomposition. Rather than remaining mired in the paradigm of the

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separateness of beings and states, Basso expresses the inseparable union between feeling and thinking, between the body and nature. In the poem “Lituntunaku chan” (24), from the book Ilikgoy litutunakunín (Songs of the Totonac People), Manuel Espinosa Sainos composes an image of what nourishes the earth, by highlighting the lifesustaining collaboration among species. The English version lacks the rhythm of the original poem but maintains the powerful metaphor for life found in a voice that is born of the ants’ labor: Totonac Ants They approach the old tree, The Totonac ants, Entangling themselves with its trunk, Black lianas. Their bodies like braids, Carry off leaves They chew Their palate sweetens up. The echo of the leaves Weaves songs The ants listen, Fertilize the roots, Give birth to the voice.

In the world of the Totonacs’ song—in the context of the entire poetry collection—the ants allow the voice to be born, incarnating in their laborintensive existence the soul of the Totonac people in the form of the seed’s song that is sung along with the birds, with the goddess Aktsiní or the God of Water, Kiwikgoló, or the god of the mountain, the flower, the mud wasps; a song that quenches children’s thirst and that echoes ancestral songs. Nothing is lost in that chorus of voices that “copulates / with the song of the birds / the flowers’ aroma” (23). This multiple song evokes the spirit of compost that is not only the result of the chain of bacteria, fungi, worms, etc., that transform what other species do not use into nutrients. The cycle ends or begins with the fertilized earth, nourished by that choral music that is also a Totonac word from Ixtepec, Puebla: Blessed be the voices That clothe themselves with the sun Rain of flowers Voices of the Totonac (23)

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Espinosa Sainos’ poems pursue the collapse of the world’s layers through the metaphor of choral song. Each level is impregnated with the song where we all dwell together. In this way, the song is similar to the concept of writing that Alejandro Zambra expresses: “writing is like caring for a bonsai . . . pruning the branches until you reveal a form that was there all along, crouched and waiting” (215). Espinosa Sainos’s earth poetry is composed of elemental words that have been written by a hand with dirt under its nails. It serves to remind us that the diversity of species forms a chorus that does not sing in praise of a culture of waste. The ant ensures that the seed stays its course. Each labor, each presence, creates the conditions for the continuance of the renewing cycle of life. Nothing is wasted in these rounds of decomposition and composition.

CO(S)MIC CONNECTION

What connection do the stars have with a tiny animal that a child observes on the beach? Great Chief One-Side-of-the-Sky, a character in Luis Hernández’s (Peru, 1941-1977) poetry, could respond to this question with sensitivity and grace. And perhaps we would not believe him: 2 Great Chief One-Side-of-the-Sky has bought Frosty ice cream. With Superman on the wrapper. And he contemplates the buildings. Once I saw. A squirrel in a walnut. Now I eat chocolate with nuts Sublime in a Movie Theater. You’re a liar (Quatrain of my Life [Novela]. Chapter The First: The Movies. The Novel of the Island. Vox Horrísona, 57)

Hernández creates a likeable, comic character, a playful alter ego, who dismantles the solemnity of the literary game through his planetary vision. Hernández distributed his later poetry in notebooks that he decorated with colors and drawings—publishing only three slim volumes of verse in the 1960s. In 1978, the majority of his poems were compiled in the first edition of his complete poetic works, which continues to be reedited and reread. But it is through his fictitious character that Hernández plays with his alter ego and develops a fresh and subtle humor: 1 Just as the Sun begins to rise Great Chief One-Side-of-the-Sky sings. Atop a bed of sand the celestial water he sings. The diaphanous mist manages the cold. But no. The entire beach, the beach where we went, is a series of planes of light. In a hut, a beach hut, next to the wooden pier, Great Chief One-Side-of-the-Sky drinks Fanta and Tuis. (The Island Novel. Vox Horrísona, 59)

Although the character’s marginal status is exacerbated by his alcoholism in fragments that aim to emphasize his errant, self-conscious isolation, he does not fail to exercise a certain charismatic attraction that reveals a way of connecting with the world-as-planet through daydreams: Great Chief One-Side-of-the-Sky smokes Inca brand cigarettes in the leadcolored gloom of the movie theater. He dreams about his childhood: a cast

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for a broken limb, and a dog who ate crackers, including Animal Crackers. And it does not seem strange to him to daydream in the theater. Then they turn on the lights and he goes back into the street, enveloped in a strange melancholy. (The Mottled Pond, Vox Horrísona, 88)

These daydreams take on nuances of science fiction through the character’s metamorphoses. Shelley Álvarez, one of the many names he adopts, performs celestial music: “In his soul he carried Sirius the star, the Sun and the great planets and an impeccable solitude. (…). His space ship, elephant or Volvo 121, awaited him resting in the fog” (BOOK THE SECOND, Vox Horrísona, 113). From my perspective, such a strange and multifaceted character is ideal for expressing that co(s)mic love that he articulates not only as a singer, but also as a keen listener and a kindly, tender vagabond: Songs He Accepts I accept the sun ice cream the weeds the wires the fences the gardens and the lawn the sea foam And beer I accept the endless streets. Great Chief One-Side-of-the-Sky drank from the tulips in the serene night of the grasslands. Then he observed Antares, that far-off star, infinite star, Spring of the curved Universe. He had always loved stars, sodas and movie theaters filled with mist. The Scessel pouch forms a tiny diverticulum that later becomes the pharyngeal pouch or the Luschka’s tonsil. Upon leaving the theater, he ate tripe on a corner alight with kerosene lamps: Athenians, he read, I believe that they more than anyone denounce me. (Avenue of Eternal Bleach, Vox Horrísona, 108)

Reading Hernández’s notebooks, it becomes evident that he was fascinated by artists (poets and musicians) who “used their existence to set the poetic plot of the Universe to music” (Ars poética, Vox Horrísona, 101). In the collection of notebooks entitled “An Impeccable Solitude,” the alter ego is a pianist whose various alternating names evoke the English Romantics (Byron, Shelley, Keats): Great Chief One-Side-of-the-Sky or Shelley Alvarez, John Kyats Alvarez, Prince One-Side-of-the-Sky,

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Aleksandr Alvarez. This play on names comically underscores the feeling of existing in a world already created by music and the words of others. A more serious version of this connection (both intertextual and cosmic) calls to mind the ecological dimensions of poetry in another way. Poetry would become “comic” if we were to superimpose Hernández’s humor upon the profundity of Roberto Juarroz’s vertical poetry. Indeed, other comparisons come to mind. What would happen, for instance, if we were to compare “An Impeccable Solitude” along with Dr. Hernández’s other notebooks to a recently published novel? Do critics also have the right of “poetic license”? Throughout my readings and rereadings, I follow the voices of the singers who wander through the city, whether it be Lima or New York or Brussels. In Hernández’s poems, the wandering point of view often winds up on the beach or in a bar, while in Open City (2011), a novel by Teju Cole, a Nigerian psychiatrist roams through the New York streets carefully observing the places and people not seen by others. Why not compare him to Great Chief One-Side-of-the-Sky who also roams and sees everything as part of the Cosmos? But that is a project for another time. In Vertical Poetry Juarroz presents the process of searching for cosmological connection as a journey of self-discovery that can not only occur through the mere intellection of the interrelatedness of things: I do not know in what places I imagine myself, desolate regions where I am never alone, signs that seem like a body or at least the mouth of my thought, vapors or religions of hearts that are beginning to exist in that moment, archaeologies of former weaknesses, grapevines where the bunch is already wine, parasols for a sun that has just disappeared, supplements of everything, hustle and bustle of my most remote remains to the impossible pulp where I become possible. To construe myself is like tying the laces on the only shoe that allows me to walk barefoot through a forest where only the trees walk, an absolutely foreign forest surrounded absolutely by me. (Third Vertical Poetry, II.2)

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The poem’s theme, the paradoxical thought of the poetic “I,” responds to the need to eliminate the dualisms of mind/body, religion/knowledge, possible/impossible, and present/past, among others. The contradictory multiplicity of Juarroz’s poetic spaces are the self’s own spaces, not at all comparable to those that could be found just anywhere, such as in Cochabamba, Temperley or Barcelona. The spaces of the poetic “I” in the poem constitute unusual expansions in which the self is reflected with uncertainty. (After all, the phrase “I do not know” opens the poem). Each verse becomes a new reality that does not submit to rational logic, which brooks no such contradictions: there is a spirit that no novelistic character could conceive, also light matter, a living body, fleeting energy, a memory of collective traditions. All these images of spaces are partial symbols of a greater, more complex organism. Juarroz constructs another grammar of the image that, without Hernandez’s humor and delicacy, nevertheless invites the attentive and curious reader on another imaginary, and challenging, voyage. These spaces unknown to the poetic “I” comprise a great body that refers to Planet Earth. More than an organic unit, it is a living machine whose power to create is reiterated with ambivalent images of creation and destruction like the “mouth” that not only refers to the actions of eating and speaking, but also to the point of intersection between exterior and interior worlds. Natural images are posited as an important foundation for this Planet (“body,” “mouth,” “hearts,” “grapevines,” “bunches,” “wine,” “pulp”). Not one of the images corresponds to a rationalist, cognitional perspective; that is to say that not one of them is separate from the organic reality and the rational level. The natural condition of the grapevine as equal to the wine is a symbolic conjunction that is directly linked to the religious traditions of Antiquity, which considered the vine as a symbol of life. According to Eliade, the Mother Goddess was given the name “Mother Vine,” representing her as a never-ending source of natural creation (Cirlot, 462). The ambivalent symbolism of the wine compliments the creative powers in the poem as it refers not only to blood and sacrifice, but also to youth and eternal life (Biedermann, 383-384). The integration of the various levels, which are typically thought of as separate according to the rationalist vision, allows us to think of an effective strategy to evoke the energy necessary to renovate the organic unity that the fragmented individual has deemed to be lost, thus signaling an integral connection to the greater organic unity already mentioned as the only possibility for recuperation.

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The phrases “arqueologies,” “parasols for a sun that has just disappeared,” and “supplements of everything” underscore the sense of loss of the cosmic whole despite confirming the connections among the various levels of reality. The “archaeologies of former weaknesses” emphasize the value of the search for that unity through not only an understanding of the past, but also a recuperation of the emotive capacity that is naturalized in the next verse; the plural form “grapevines” renders the multiplicity of the creative aspect of life more evident. The “hustle and bustle” that leads to a “remote” past concludes in an inexplicable transformation: “the impossible pulp / where I become possible.” What is interesting about this transformation of the lyrical I, converted into an impossible seed of thought, is the method of shedding light on the strategy of integration with the environment. This conjunction of the poetic subject reiterates the need to transcend its individual limits, the humanity/nature dualism and the traditional ways of thinking about subjective identity as something disconnected from the emotional level. In his “vertical Fragments,” Juarroz had already resorted to this image of the seed as referent for a consciously ecological activity, beyond the subjective construct typically identified as “I:” We search for fruit that matures backward, toward its own origin, back to the seed. Fruits that break the pattern of the seasons and discover the machinations of hidden harvests. Those fruits would be a luxury in the self’s own opulence and would reveal a deep-seated freedom, that perhaps would console us in the face of the scandal of our miniscule and nearly hideous freedom (“Fragment 95,” 237)

From the look into the past we move to the moment of changing our perspective toward the future with a complex image of the individual as integrated with his or her environment. Self-reflection is defined through an imaginary turn that overcomes the traditional notion of space that the individual ostensibly occupies. The lyrical “I” is tied to a shoe, which does not impede him from walking barefoot, transformed into a wide variety of walking trees. This image is rather unintelligible due to the symbolism of the “strings,” the “shoe,” the “trees,” and the forest. The emblems of the forces of cohesion and binding that each of the figures carries notwithstanding, the idea of the lyrical “I” as a changing and dynamic integration of elements of a different nature is posited. I see that the metamorphoses of names work better in Hernández’s ludic poetry, but we are not playing on a different game board. In Juarroz’s poem, it does not matter who is tying the shoestrings. The fact that the strings belong to a certain shoe not only indicates social status, but also the instinctive level,

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which is reinforced by the meaning of the foot that occupies the shoe, as a relation and support between body and earth (Biedermann, 140). The contradictions between wearing a shoe and walking barefoot, between walking “where only the trees walk” suggest the need to overcome the mind/body dualism. The forest—through which this transformed “I” travels as he thinks—is a complex symbol of the unconscious and of danger. The obligatory analogy would be to bring up Birnam Wood, which apparently moved to Dunsiname to fulfill a prophecy that Macbeth misinterpreted. But the reference to non-cultivated plant life, which obscures the sunlight, symbolizing earth, has more to do with an ecological theory of the ego. The “trees” express developing, propagating cosmic life, that evolving condition that Bookchin highlighted as the principal characteristic of nature. The image of “an absolutely foreign forest / surrounded absolutely” by the lyrical “I” not only refers to the primary unconscious processes and their role in the subjective processes of meaning, but also to the sensorial and intellectual conjunction in the task of recuperating and highlighting a cosmic vision. Modern rationality perceives the inferior level of the natural as an external reality, which threatens the rational control that belongs to the predominant subjective existence. The yearning to deepen our understanding of the origin is expressed, but that knowledge implies a gradation of moderated contemplation, which rather than a visual conjunction, pursues a corporeal conjunction with the cosmos; the tactile plane of the shoeless foot is projected figuratively onto the forest in the form of the walking trees. This process of transformations announces a tense wait to feel an intense aesthetic awe when delving into the hidden being of things. The condensation of time and the multiplication of space are marked by partial symbols, which underscore a discontinuity in the discourse indicating a continuous flow of the living and the non-living in the same sphere. It is in a brief poem where this unstable aspect of nature is particularly deepened: Life learns its lesson From the movement of the inanimate; The attestations of water, The decisions of the wind, The mute rhythms of a stone. Life learns its lesson From the movements that are surer than she is. (Fifth Vertical Poetry, 15)

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The water, the wind, and the stone, cosmic figures that traditionally have been interpreted as originary elements of all living things, are associated with the “movement of the un-living” as a supreme “lesson” that “life learns.” But this cosmic trait is externalized in the enumeration of the movements that are surer than life. First, the water, from the ecological perspective of the search for a cosmic unity, could be considered a marker of immersion and profundity. The attestations could allude to a permanent return to a preformal state, “with its double meaning of death and dissolution, but also rebirth and new circulation, since the immersion multiplies life’s potential” (Biedermann, 372-373). The water circulates and the poem emphasizes its character as an irreversible and permanent channel; Juarroz commented on this aspect: “We have also betrayed water, because we haven’t been able to preserve, to absorb its transparency. This is frequent in my poetry.” (“Conversation in Temperley”). Juarroz was referring to the following poem (Twelfth Vertical Poetry, 40): We have also betrayed water Rain does not distribute itself for that, The river does not run for that, the pond does stop for that, The sea is not a presence for that. Once again we have missed the message, The open vowels Of water’s language, Its inaudible palpable transparency. We did not even learn To drink its transparency. To drink something is to know it. And to learn transparency is the beginning Of learning the invisible.

The lyrical “I” seems to articulate a call to recuperate the ability to communicate in water’s language. We must learn to overcome the lack of communication that Juarroz criticizes here. Returning to the poem about the lessons that life learns, the wind is another key element that can fertilize and renew life, as we could easily imagine if we think about pollen and other fertilizing movements produced by wind. The wind also calls to mind its powers of destruction as underscored by its maximum effects: the hurricane, synthesis and

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conjunction of the four cosmic elements (Biedermann, 382-382). As a figure of lightness, the wind forms part of the aerial point of view where words circulate and matter grows ever thinner. The cosmic trait that connects the wind to the search for foundations is its role, shared with the other basic elements, in the life process. Finally, the stone symbolizes the unity, strength, and initial solidification of the creative rhythm (Biedermann, 326). The mute rhythms probably allude to all that the stones enshrine and detain in their timeless material aspects: their resistance to aging and disintegration. But their muteness makes us think about the need to adapt the perceptibility of touch in this new orchestration of the senses. The perception of the environment requires a functional interaction of all the senses without privileging or isolating any one in particular. Rhythm is a sensitive form that organizes the perceptual field as a determined model of thought and feeling, which would permit the application of the dynamic notion of the interval as a recurrence among asymmetrical elements that reproduce the same formation. The “rhythms,” by dint of their silence, reiterate an unexpected association of meaning that allows the subject/object dualism to be overcome, albeit for a fleeting moment. The recognition of regular cosmic movements of the body: “the attestations of water” could refer to the systole and diastole that move the heart; “the decision of the wind,” to the intensity of inspiration and death; “the deaf-mute rhythms of a stone,” to the vocal chords’ search to produce lasting messages by way of their tensing and relaxing motions. By breaking apart the notion of a perceptible, fleeting time in the “the mute rhythms of a stone,” Juarroz emphasized a cosmic aspect that transcends the individual limitations of the living and gestures toward the cycles of what lives and “what does not live.” The search should not be carried out only on the cognitional plane, but also on the terrestrial and corporeal levels, in that space where the poem formulates the need for learning. This education does not consist of perpetuating rationalist dualisms, but rather of transforming the rational state by integrating the emotional level: a process of learning about the cosmic cycles by means of the deepest sensorial orders, where a new form of subjectivity is expressed, a subjectivity attune to its ecological surroundings and which manifests a will toward total conjunction beyond the cognitional plane. Juarroz refashions the “I” by means of his use of “life,” defined in a way that goes beyond any separate and isolated certainties. The third “vertical fragment” of Juarroz’s fifth book shows the cosmic dimension of the “I” as a fusion of planes that are traditionally separate:

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A flock of birds or signs Floods the air with style And also the center of my thought.

In these verses the rich integration of the poetic discourse to the conjunction of the intellectual and corporeal plane is clearly seen. The recourse to ambiguity enriches the possibilities of the lyrical “I’s” expansion where the borders and limits of each level—physical or biological, mental and literary—meld together in a movement of allencompassing activity. The only verb in the fragment underscores the direction and way of being of said movement apparently external to the subject. “To flood” not only refers to the strength of the threatening natural phenomenon, but also serves as a metaphor for the expansion of cosmic energies, which, therefore, are condensed into an opposing plane from the open and elevated plane of the “air.” The aerial context of the proceeding verses maintains the ambiguity of the various levels of reality, communicating the lyrical “I’s” ability to improve his ties to nature as well as his ability to transform his “style” of thinking. In another one of Juarroz’s poems (Sixth Vertical Poetry, 99), the poetic “I” uses the same recourse of erasing the limits between the physical and the mental: With roots in place of the flowers And even in place of the fruits, Choked by excess air And lucidly drunk with thirst, Dazzled by the mental celebration That will be glimpsed Like the transparent dance of all things, I try to anchor myself to my own solstice Of possible and impossible impossibilities. And after flowering roots, I will try to lay a flower In place of the root.

The living and changing figure of the tree inverts the traditional notions of reality in order to reach not only the origins, but also the cosmic forces represented by its subterranean and aerial elements (“roots,” “fruits,” and “flowers”). This inverted tree is an insistent metaphor for the body in Vertical Poetry and may, in turn, be considered a metaphor for the aesthetic capture. The tree symbolism is not depleted by the vertical form of representation of the cosmic generation and regeneration; nevertheless,

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from my perspective it is fundamental to consider the metamorphosis of the “I” in the form of the inverted tree as a human strategy of understanding cosmic density. There is a euphoric tone caused by the sensitive saturation of the cosmic elements that produces a confusion between the physical and mental planes. The succession of states of saturation produces a delay of the unexpected by means of the multiple metamorphoses and the reiteration of the initial inversion of the roots as signs of the search for foundations. The excessive absorption of air and the exaggerated need for water are extraordinary metaphors for the basic conditions of the poetic capture that reiterate the exaggerated self-consciousness of the lyrical “I.” The air is associated with the realm of the creative process, just as the water symbolizes, in addition to the unconscious, both wisdom and the origin of all that is living, the universal union of potentialities found in all living creation (Biedermann, 372-73). What the aerial and thirsty tree feels converges with the process of incorporating the cosmic vision into a ritual of the mind (“mental celebration / that will be glimpsed”) in the space of sensory apprehension (“anchor myself to my own solstice”) of something that is difficult to imagine (“possible and impossible impossibilities”). This lyrical “I’s” ritual of the metamorphosis can be compared to the unitary vision of the cosmos in which all its elements are interconnected and in perpetual movement (“a transparent dance of things”). In the poem’s conclusion, the elements of the tree are repeated, but this time in a new and startling inversion. The flower has been traditionally linked to the ephemeral nature of things and beauty; for its form, to the image of the center (Biedermann, 135-36). By virtue of its inversion and its characterization as “a flower/in place of the root,” the poetic “I” confesses the secret of his thought: inverting functions, uniting extremes, and condensing cosmic elements in an unexpected point of inversion. It is a pity that it is not a mischievous inversion like Hernández’s that tends to be accompanied by tenderness as well as color. Juarroz’s inversion throws us directly into the greatest of inversions: the inversion of everything. The multiplicity of meanings does not allow for an exact understanding of the aerial and thirsty roots of the poem. They could well be metaphors for words, which, in turn, assume the fragility, beauty, and “center” of the flowers. The “flowering of roots” can be understood as a euphoric process that condenses Juarroz’s poetic program, guided as it is by delicacy. Thus the positions of the lyrical “I” are integrated in the poem, without falling into the trap of a rationalist posture rife with anthropocentric dualisms. The ellipses of the euphoric elements underscore the economy of expressive resources that should be seen as a product of the integrative

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consciousness of this “I” that expands or overflows. The level of emotions moves to the tactile level, where the overcoming of individual anthropocentric consciousness occurs by means of a new way of perceiving. This new perspective focuses on human connections to nature, causing perception to mix memories, beliefs, and associations with the perceptive senses. Dualisms such as contact/distance, mind/body, internal/external, and contemplative/active impoverish the perception of the environment and do not allow us to discover the connections between what has traditionally been categorized as human and non-human. In another poem (Thirteenth Vertical Poetry, 56), in which the poet insists on eliminating the aforementioned dualisms, Juarroz presents the sense of smell as a means of connecting and reconnecting our humanity to the planetary dimension: The elemental fragrance of coffee Reintegrates us into the cycle of odors, Into that magnanimous border of the world That our madness has also laid aside. Why do things have a smell? Why does a body expand with their perfume Until they touch us in other ways, Until they are exhaled and envelop us In a metamorphosis That evokes another version of things? Because everything is a limitless outpouring Compelling emanation that tells us That things are not where we see them. The impassivity of the universe Also has its effusions.

The same ascending impulse seen in the previous poems is incarnated here in the symbolism of the “elemental fragrance of coffee.” The air filled with perfumes is a figure of the delicacy that allows Juarroz to unite thought and feeling. Thus, the lyrical “I” sets his discourse into motion through the conscious and unconscious intentionality of finding the foundations of the cosmic universe. The configuring element of the sensory plane is highlighted. Smell is a deep sense that allows us to establish contact that is impossible to attain by means of the cognitive plane’s usual patterns. From the detail of a daily yet fleeting moment—the scent of coffee—the lyrical “I” assumes the characteristics of a liminal

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space of a fragile and evanescent reality that nonetheless allows him to acquire the consciousness of environmental perception; one that is not dual, however, and one that serves as an antidote to the madness of being disconnected. In that transitory and dynamic instant of capturing fragrance, the poetic “I” is reintegrated into an original order that had been lost, and that he hopes to recapture. The odors, unnoticed until the moment of transformation, become “compelling” correspondences that unveil new meanings, whose fascinations guide the attempted conjunction. Thanks to the sense of smell, the contact of “a body” that expands in conjunction with the “I” produces astonishment, expressed here through a series of questions. Things are not only the product of perceptible iterations, but also bearers of hidden meaning. The odor evokes the object that produces it and leads to a process of the discovery of the relationships and correspondences that reveal the deep character of the metamorphosis provoked by the union of the cognitive and the sensory planes. The totality is not manifested as an odor, but yet by virtue of its ephemeral nature and its unseen volatility, it is connected to a hidden dynamism. The odor approaches the lyrical “I” via the hidden side of its being. Objects like impassive being are reintegrated, by means of their odors, to the difficult encounter with the exalted “I,” whose fleeting olfactory sensation is a form of fruitful waiting. Objests are not only perceived, but also beings capable of perceiving. This active flux crosses the fragility of physical reality; everything is a motor for mutual influence. The lyrical “I” perceives connections with the nature that he smells, but he also puts into practice a special consciousness of all of the senses functioning in concert thanks to a corporeal reality that moves and acts in accordance with its cultural and physical environs. According to Berleant, we could call this experience “the aesthetic sense of the environment, by which the subject could move beyond the divisions between mind and body in order to experience a sense of the continuity that unites human beings with their surrounding natural and cultural conditions” (17-24). The lyrical “I’s” transformations allude also to tree symbolism. This time instead of integrating a lower level of “roots” to the upper level of “flowers” via the trope of inversion or via the olfactory projection of the coffee bean, Juarroz presents the level of a reduction of the space that the “I” occupies: “a plant stem,” traditionally associated with a central place in the cosmos. The transformations—from subject to subject to object—now are internal and presented as another alternative to realize connections between the physical and mental planes: The leaps in memory Correct memory

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But also forgetfulness. Sometimes inside Sometimes outside But always designing another sphere. The leaps in memory Recover the delays in being, But also the advances. The roses return to the rose bush, But they learn also To flower without the rose bush. Everything can become a stem (Eleventh Vertical Poetry, I, 29)

Of all the sections of the complex cosmic organism of a plant—roots, stem or trunk, branches, and leaves—in this poem only one single element indicates the coherence and functional efficiency of the entire organism and it appears in the final verse of the poem in the guise of an ecological aphorism. The lyrical “I” is presented as an unexpected transformation on the mental plane, a metamorphosis, but barely reveals the method of its transformations, only with the notion of the “leaps of memory.” Then, we witness the instability of these transformations and the incessant mobility of the transformative effect. These leaps not only permit the recuperation of the temporal dimensions of the past and the future, but also assure the apprehension of the organic unit (the “being”). The swift change to another level of reality with the partial symbol of the rose and the rose bush completes and specifies the integrating sense of the preceding leaps. These metamorphoses of the lyrical “I” allow for a projection onto the natural world of a primordial characteristic of the imaginary world that rationalism privileges as independent of the natural world: the creative power of the imagination. The roses also move, they “return,” but they also “learn to flower without the rose bush.” Natural beings become independent of the cognitive and rational gaze to share with the imaginary world their capacity for creating from nothing. This way of viewing whatever is natural can be considered a reflection on poetic creation as a game played by the absent “I”—less attractive and understandable than the one proposed by Luis Hernández with his colorful notebooks. Juarroz’s is a game that mocks hegemonic ideological paradigms in order to generate the possibility for a presence that originates in the unspeakable realm of language. If in the poem about the inversion of roots and flowers, the mental plane gives way to the plane of natural transformations, the biological plane gives way to the imaginary by means

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of the strategy of inversions. In this poem almost the same interdependence of levels occurs, with the difference being that the lyrical “I” is absent from the poetic discourse and assumes only a mental and natural projection toward the cosmos as a predetermined condition in the guise of an imaginary entity with a life of its own. The very fact that it is possible to transform into a “stem” can be interpreted as a desire to participate in the organic unity of the cosmos, thus assuming the Earth’s creative power. The quote from Paul Celan that closes (or opens?) Selva Dipasquale’s book, Meditations on the Forest (2007), also has that same image of the stem that is going to grow. Yet it also can suggest—above all to those who do not reduce discourse to a conclusive meaning—that it is necessary to love the natural flow of things and that to do so implies a new way of seeing reality. It is a question of beginning to see that many realities have nothing of the “stem” in them and of feeling that absence of the “stem” quality as a sign that it is urgent to find what is natural and to participate in the sounds of the desert, which subsequently becomes a forest or planetary body. Not only for Hernández but also for Juarroz, this is a connection between the human imagination and natural processes. Hernández invokes it in his play of strange names and streets, of nocturnal, melodious conversations: “to pass by several horizons,” “a same harmony of sky and earth” (Avenue of Eternal Chlorine, 106). Juarroz would call it “natural imagination” (Kovadloff, 3). While one of them wanders around concentrating on the poem’s avenue, the other laughs, sings and paints his poem of the avenue. Both are distilled expressions of a deep love for the planet. Both are jigsaw puzzles.

COSMOPOLITAN COMMUNICATION

One of the most urgent problems facing worldwide environmentalism is effective communication among cultures. How can we adopt a planetary focus without developing local community concerns, as well as justice at the local level? We have to rethink the way in which global networks shape cultural agents. There will be no respect for difference if we do not overcome abuses and if the focus stagnates on restrictions that do indeed exist in nationalisms and localisms. In order to understand communication among cultures and to take advantage of the concept of solidarity, we must pay attention to the cultural mediators and producers that have successfully built a bridge between cultures. The anthropological and literary work of José María Arguedas (19111969) is emblematic of that eagerness to communicate from a zealous, difficult-to-translate perspective. The figure of the translator is key in ecocriticism’s development insofar as it aspires to be planetary. In that sense, all of the efforts to translate ought to be a mutual, rather than a univocal, response in the service of a dominant language; of lenguicide that necessarily creates poverty, of a monolingual culture that originates in the fear that denies and destroys the verbal flower. Sadly, this is what happens with Spanish, as it has come to dominate many of the indigenous languages such as Mayan, Totonac, Quechua, Aymara, Mapundungun or any of the Amazonian languages. Ecocriticism, therefore, should take advantage of Arguedas’s legacy. The Andean Castilian that Arguedas forged did not imply a clean, uncontaminated translation of the other language; on the contrary, the politics of impurity or mistura between Castilian and Quechua indicates that the role of the translator is to serve as a bridge between two cultures. Translation is an arduous task, the result of a creative process by which the primary cultural affects and perspectives are not censured, but rather adapted or respected through delicate and earnest lines of egalitarian communication. This heartfelt alliance, founded on the communication between people or groups from different nations and cultures, serves as an excellent model to apply to the ecological realm. But this international exchange occurs only when cultural forms of identity establish their sense of belonging beyond the local and national levels, by imagining how the global perspective frames local and national contexts. These forms of global identity embrace what has been learned through

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culture, but do not anchor their highest values in just once place; they are open to other traditions in the wider and more mobile context of migrations and other displacements, of global economic and communication networks. These cultural forms respond to the formidable challenge from a very lucid critique of North American environmentalism that Ursula K. Heise has formulated: we must visualize how to support ecologically the defense of the non-human world and the defense of the socio-environmental movement for social justice, not merely from our ties to local places, but also through our ties to territories and systems that can only be understood with relation to the planet as a whole. One image that in some way makes me think about the possibility of using the global from the local vantage point comes from the documentary War by Other Means (2010), in which the Surui defend their territory from deforestation by using Google Earth, and without ever leaving the interior of the Amazonian jungle. The image is not meant to be exotic, but rather a powerful example of how the Internet affords eco-cosmopolitan possibilities for the network of communities that fight to defend their principles of sustainable life, unlike the lack of fight of the generally passive urban citizens, characterized by their complicity with the “system.” I consider Miguel Gutiérrez’s (1940) novel, Babel, Paradise (1993) to be a twist on the theme of intercultural imagination as cosmopolitan communication. Although the term “cosmopolitan” is typically associated with a first-world elitist perspective, there is a new use of the word in critical parlance that can be seen in novels like Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North or in films such as Dirty Pretty Things directed by Stephen Frears or The Edge of Heaven directed by Fatih Akin. Insofar as this new type of cosmopolitan communication does not fail to take into account either cultural diversity or inequalities of class or of income, we could link it to the theme of environmental justice. Gutiérrez’s novel refuses to privilege the environmental question, but rather takes on the themes of the capitalist system’s marginalization and exploitation. Although the novel raises doubts about the possibility of cosmopolitan communication, it also attempts a new version or experience of it, which ultimately fails. Is this type of intercultural communication naively utopic? I believe so, much like the short film, more or less contemporary to these other works, The Music Tree (1994), co-directed by Sabina Berman and Isabelle Tardán. A brief re-reading of Babel, Paradise alongside a study of the short could serve to ponder the limitations of this utopic concept and to seek out

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alternatives, especially since both the novel and the film redefine utopia by means of a fiction concerning communication. In The Music Tree, the child protagonist endeavors to learn to play the violin from an itinerant teacher who reads her thoughts and shows her a tree that produces music while illuminating its foliage. The girl is overcome by a great desire to play music barefoot in the Tabasco jungle. In spite of the fact that the film’s magical realism can feel a bit anachronistic, the final scene of the girl playing music by stepping rhythmically on the planks of a wooden bridge leads us to contemplate the act of communication as emanating from the body itself and, thus, to lay the foundation for an ecological perspective. Gutierrez’s novel is a tale of cosmopolitan communication in the guise of the narrator’s political intervention in an international assembly in the supposed socialist empire of China. The narrator, a Peruvian traveler (an interval?), regales the assembly with a series of tales that capture his audience’s attention. In the speech, he proposes to live in solidarity in the midst of authoritarian societies and to be able to communicate with other cultures within the context of hegemonic languages. The novel’s discourse, replete with patriarchal stereotypes and commonplaces, brings up to date, using the words of Humberto Maturana, perhaps involuntarily egalitarian conversations that constitute the matristic background of European patriarchy and reveals them to be a still active seed. Through his own experiences, the traveler in Babel discovers something similar to what Ann Diller calls the ethics of care, a key aspect of the foundation of her pluralistic, egalitarian pedagogy. Gutiérrez’s novel coincides notably with the egalitarian aspect of feminist discourse—even though the protagonist is a researcher who specializes in Amazonian language and even though the scene of his multicultural encounters is not a classroom but rather a fine hotel called “Reservation.” The anthropologist James Clifford doesn’t manage to free the bourgeois hotel from its history as a site of European practices and meanings that are associated with the literary, the masculine, the middle class, the scientific, the heroic, and the recreational (106). Gutiérrez perhaps succeeds in raising the theme of communication above any gender, class, racial or national determinants. The hotel is employed in the novel so that certain utopic possibilities of communication can be realized. I am referring to the post-traumatic values of intercultural communication that the traveler accumulates as a fleeting utopic behavior, values that tend neither toward war nor abuse but that avoid the cultural alienation that is part and parcel of hierarchies, obedience, control, and discrimination. The novel’s setting in an Empire that has declared itself to be revolutionary allows the traveler’s experiences to suggest a critique of

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authoritarianism and to reveal the imperial system’s weakness. But I want to insist on the positive vision of what the novel foreshadows. Gutiérrrez underscores at least two crucial points that tend to be associated with nongovernmental alternative movements: an effective intercultural dialogue and a healthy ecological consciousness. Both the narrative frame of the dialogue in the assembly and the content of the traveler’s adventures are a pointed critique of the Left’s political work in both Peru and China. José Alberto Portugal has already written a very intelligent reading of this novel, underscoring the bitter bias of the imagination that sustains the novel as a satire of the socialist utopia, which in other ideological contexts can be seen in some of Mario Vargas Llosa’s novels. Although Gutiérrez contextualizes his novel within an authoritarian tradition of the Left, he winds up enriching that very tradition by softening the authoritarian bent. I want to emphasize the affirmative and celebratory aspect of the novel because I am interested in the perspective that proposes to overcome the disorientation and unease of those who still identify with that political tradition. The novel encourages the reader to identify with the traveler to do the same, to communicate with other similar foreigners. It is a matter of overcoming social isolation or becoming part of broader groups without jeopardizing any individual principles that may belong to the antiauthoritarian traditions. In that sense Gutiérrez is ahead of the political agents, given that his traveler character is an emblem of a political subject who is able to act and to lead a process of intercultural communication. The disrepute of the political parties and their failure to come to an effective articulation of social movements has marked the 1990s as the anti-political decade and as the heyday of governmental mafias. Nonetheless, Gutiérrez’s novel lays out a series of utopic proposals that are not so easily recognized as such. And I believe that, in this way, his novel succeeds in studying a key dimension of the collective unconscious on which he bases his community praxis. In the past there was human conviviality that in the immediate present has been lost—the main character admits to having suffered the loss of his family but without forswearing his faith in cosmopolitan communication (Gutiérrez, 12). The traveler lays the foundation for what could be the true basis for a new humanism: the utopia of communication, his unreal happy communitarian account, the practice of cosmopolitan communication. The principle obstacle to cosmopolitan communication that Gutiérrez’s novel narrates is the nationalism and ethnocentrism of the Assembly’s participants. Of course, these impediments are not only ideological, nor do they stem from the tensions of migratory fluxes that shape diasporic cultures. Effective intercultural encounters move the protagonist away

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from the Spanish-speaking groups living in the Empire, thus he speaks of “the reactions of the people in my colony to the friendly relationships and camaraderie that I had established with friends of other races and nations” (Gutiérrez, 38). The novel casts doubt on, in Clifford’s words: “the organic, naturalizing bias of the term culture—seen as a rooted body that grows, lives, dies etc. . . .” (101). Latin American cultural ethnocentrism consists of the observation of differences based on one’s own values and norms, from an air of cultural superiority that is symptomatic of the root problems of a lack of communication and ideological isolation. It is a matter of a very healthy self-critical distancing with respect to one’s own culture and political traditions. Isn’t this what ecocriticism requires to dialogue with different cultures from a planetary focus? The questions the protagonist asks determine principles and norms that made international conviviality possible and reveal a mindfulness that is attentive to virtual alliances. The coexistence of individual as well as collective aspects allows us to understand how autonomy and interdependence are shaped into the fundamentals of communication. The traveler feels a natural attraction for all that is not part of his own tale. But his story is not merely fantasy or imaginative anticipation of the future, since the conditions necessary to realize ideal communication are very concrete. The connection is explicit in two passages from the novel: There reigned a common sense of compatibility and solidarity, born, I assume, from knowing themselves to be excluded from the other communities of Reservation. (47) The norm—the implicit norm—on which our own community was based (allow me to repeat it) was solidarity without any other limits but respect for privacy and free will. Human kindness, communication and understanding, dedication and openness to the request for affection and desire, and why not, my friends, help and attention if one of our own needs it without violating the sovereignty of one’s own decisions, these were the forms of conduct that governed our relations. (201)

Now this narrative language may sound like communications theory, but it never abandons tangible examples even when the traveler mentions that the formation of the groups had nothing to do with racial, political or religious factors (47). Then, the traveler explicitly formulates the principle on which their conviviality stood: “accepting individuals just as they are” (49). The narrator not only makes use of memories from his school days to stress his frustration with his permanent objective of communicating with others, but also formulates a utopia of communication:

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On one level of reading, when the traveler speaks of his enthusiasm, his “infinite luck in finding the kingdom of utopia” (70) corresponds to an ironic or satirical distancing with respect to the rigid notion of utopia. The level of communicative consciousness is very high because the narrator is not only ready to observe and interpret cultural differences from the others’ perspective, but also willing to suspend his own judgment of being necessary, since it is a question of framing the process of communication in an egalitarian circuit, eliminating any sort of power play: If they don’t impose any conditions on you and you don’t have to pay any tribute to be admitted into the community, then you are ready to give yourself up entirely and to donate all that you have. I, at least, propose to be supportive and caring, cordial, respectful and tolerant. (70)

The certainty of inclusion not only explains the absolute complicity lived without fear of any kind, but also plots out the emotive process that is necessary to be much more conscious of the different elements in the process of communication. In that sense the awareness of changes and what works from alternative points of view during the process of communication—what Miguel Rodrigo calls cognitive competence—plays a decisive role in both self-knowledge and cultural knowledge. Cognitive complexity leads to a deftness of interpreting in a less rigid and more adaptable fashion. The traveler also possesses an emotive intercultural competence that is produced when one is able to project and to receive positive emotional answers before, during, and after cultural interactions (Rodrigo, n.p.). Tolerance functions to productively assimilate ambiguity and uncertainty. Empathy is also indispensable for feeling what others feel. The traveler expressed his curiosity for knowledge, for learning about other cultures; also his willingness to break down any barriers to change whenever and however necessary. Empathy is also a desire to know oneself and to reconstruct one’s identity, which, according to the narrator’s critical stance toward Latin Americans, turns out to be a recognition of oneself in other cultures. Another mechanism that the narrator reiterates is his ability to compose stories through his desire to deepen the bonds of friendship and of trust.

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Depending on the listener, the traveler is able to adapt his way of communicating to the needs of his interlocutor, as he did with all those who made up his exile community, including his New Zealander colleague: “taking up the only topic about which he was truly passionate: engineering as applied to the construction of daring designs all of which were difficult to execute” (78). Careful non-verbal communication is the first step in successful intercultural communication. According to Stella Ting-Toomey, a positive synchronic interaction facilitates the development of quality intercultural relations. Communicative adaptability requires cognitive, affective, and behavioral competence, which defines the willingness and commitment to learn about other cultures and their subjects. It also defines the desire to understand, respect, and support cultural identity and the ways in which we communicate with others, and to do so with sensitivity and care (TingToomey, 141). The traveler, then, seems to employ the non-verbal component with extreme caution, always making his extraordinary capacity for adaptation and connection patently obvious, just as he used to with his African friends and others with whom he shared a passion for music. Amid questions about how to erase social inequalities, how to understand the most noble as well as the most atrocious human acts, and how to unmask the heroes of the past, the traveler expresses his doubt with regard to the utopia of communication: “Was it possible to change life from the ground up so that conviviality and completely open human communication could be achieved?” (192). The narrator configures and absorbs a concrete utopia into this experience of friendship among intercultural communicators—many of the members of this exile community were translators. This implies a sort of symbolic exchange that seems to me to be particularly pertinent. The traveler cherishes his memory of the liveliness of the utopia and embodies a series of creative tendencies that he probably learned from his many friendships. He cultivates a sense of curiosity and interest in his immediate surroundings; he looks at problems from all the perspectives that he can; he always keeps in mind the complexity and differences among groups and cultures; he is sensitive to different situational peculiarities that might occur; he orients himself according to the present as indicated by his five finely tuned senses; he cultivates joy and delight in his daily interaction with others; and he practices divergent thought and lateral learning (TingToomey, 268). Thus the narrator specifies the mechanism for this projective transformation in his memory where the figures of his companions in exile (“the lines of the body, the texture of the voice, human obsessions, qualities of the spirit”) will accompany him like

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“benevolent beings” whom the traveler “could invoke in moments of fatigue, tedium or hopelessness” (Gutiérrez, 203). The exposition of cosmopolitan communication in Babel is neither a theoretical phenomenon nor a universalist platform, but rather a praxis that is attentive to the cultural context and values that are in involved in the process of concrete communication. On this point the traveler takes pains to explain that the utopic does not presuppose a change of nationality or the complete adaptation to another cultural reality. The narrator exchanges the notion of space as something external, separate from the actors of communication, for a fluid notion that implies interaction and communion among these same actors. In other words, the individual believes that he can avoid the destiny of his discredited political community, by imagining that, henceforth, the best defense for the individual is not found in the national collective, but perhaps in the system of solidarity of his immediate community. Where he will most clearly find it is in an individual way of establishing relationships: I have tried through succeeding approximations to give you the most faithful and concrete idea possible of what a terrestrial paradise, or if you prefer, as I said before, the kingdom of utopia can be. I know the spatial connotations that both terms give off make their comprehension somewhat difficult, but their existence does not allude to a specific territory, zone, region, country, continent, island, but rather to a circle of relations in which communication, union, and understanding of both body and soul are possible, without which any proposal for an open humanism would be illusory. (204)

A radical concept of communication is proposed between the lines here, and it has the advantage of overcoming the impasse of using a common language and of achieving convenient and just alliances. In international communication, the use of a common language— predominantly English and French, and to a lesser degree Spanish—covers up the fact that communication among representatives of all humanity is inhabited, by intercultural definition, by the invisible presence of prescribed representations and values associated with the principles, basic ideas, and visions of the world. Cultural interpretations of these concepts are rarely made explicit in international meetings or negotiations. The final surprise in the traveler’s tale—that each member of that utopic community spoke his own language—does not detract in any way from the communicative proposal, since the contents of the communication were always highly contextualized to allude to the dynamic of following a dominant language and to wind up being dragged along in the waked of its

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values and representations. The contextualization essentially is given through body language that serves to lay the foundation for the affinities and sympathies that form friendships and other relational ties that bind us to other humans. It is undeniable that the exaggeration helps to understand the perspective of international cooperation as a mutual education about people’s potential to use certain abilities and talents in their own creative ways. If one wants to take advantage of this intercultural approach to which we find ourselves privy in the twenty-first century, the traveler’s utopia is an enviable precedent and an illuminating foreshadowing of perfect understanding and communitarian union: There was never a misunderstanding. We never argued to impose our own way of thinking on others. And that is why harmony and solidarity always reigned. Thus, as I told you at the beginning of my intervention, the confusion of languages, far from being a condemnation as in the myth of the Tower of Babel, can be the essential factor in union and understanding. The basis for our new humanism as we have debated in this meeting. (Gutiérrez, 224)

The implausible fable of the traveler also intrigues me on account of another key to communication that is much more difficult to explain. Throughout the novel, many encounters are founded on non-verbal artistic symbols—a painting, a piece of music, a drawing, a landscape, etc.— which foreshadow the conditions of fluid existence and a certain disposition to communicate interculturally. The first example is a painting by an Australian friend, which refers to essential attitudes, such as an “almost religious respect” for certain herbs and plants used by the Indigenous—that displace racial considerations for an ethnic identification. The traveler understands that his friend identifies with the painting’s indigenous woman “in peaceful harmony with the universe” (Gutiérrez, 101). The traveler’s observations about his physical environs denote a sensitivity toward the goal of urban health, in contrast with the pollution and violence of the native habitat (144), despite the fact that healthy ecology demands certain sacrifices such as putting up with the smell of manure that helps increase agricultural production (145). Several trips to green zones reinforce the playful tone with which the traveler demarcates the utopic community of exiles. Each connection refers to a different landscape: for example, the desert steppes of the Australian filmmaker that the sensitive traveler somehow makes his own. Sometimes he uses the vegetation of various Peruvian geographic regions as his referent: lignum vitae, the luxurious vegetation of the jungle, the groves and woods between the Jalca (high altitude grasslands in Peru) and the

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Andean Puna, and the eucalyptus trees (176). The interesting thing is that he exposes his interiority to the projections of those other landscapes that also hold a special fascination for him and his sensibilities. In his visit to the Botanical Garden, the traveler is moved by his African friend’s tenderness: I was touched upon recognizing among the trees from the high, colder zones, such as firs, pines, and birches, a Peruvian pepper tree and an Andean coral tree and a breadfruit tree and two Pará rubber trees in the section of the garden dedicated to tropical and subtropical flora. Nevertheless my tenderness was nothing in comparison to the emotion that overtook my colleague from the Congo and his three sisters when they discovered a tree that is native to the hot African plains. It was called the baobab, my friend told me wiping his tears away (…). He continued speaking to me in that reverent tone about the tree, relating to me so many stories and legends, that I would have listened to with more attention if the guy from Buenos Aires hadn’t been so near to us, since he ruined the experience of the Botanical Garden with his jokes. “But this is a disaster, che!,” he said to them, “I was hoping to find the Tree of Knowledge here!” (169-170)

The Argentine’s joke serves as a sort of comic relief, but also points out the very globalized weakness of not listening to others, let alone to trees. These millennial beings rise up like an extension of the traveler’s positive collective experience. The trees are not valued as property, pollution reducers or temperature moderators, but simply as strong affective ties whose impact on the psychology of those who visit the empire is one of serenity and peace (Dwyer and others, 137, 140). The visit to the “perfumed glade” during the excursion through the “Mountains of eternal mist and light” leaves a profound mark on the traveler’s consciousness, and he allows himself to be carried away by the magic of the name and by his insatiable curiosity. The trip to the forest is another example of detailed descriptions, exaltations of the soul, and, at times, an incursion into unconscious terrain. At no time does the traveler take these experiences in the forest as a soapbox from which to proclaim any sort of ecological activism or to pontificate on a theory as if he possessed some privileged knowledge of an incontrovertible truth. The ecological consciousness should not be understood as moral pressure exercised by the decline of the planet, but rather as an alliance of undeniable strategic importance for the traveler’s utopic purposes: Seeing the Hindu master with an acacia flower in his hand, I told myself that the perfumed glade wasn’t a metaphor for an ideal, symbolic or

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imagined space but the naming of a reality that could be enjoyed from the attentiveness of a vigil. (178)

The traveler’s very significant departure after nearly four years in the Empire cannot be explained only as a “call of the wild” that he says he feels drawing him back to his country to continue his labor as a linguist. Nor is it a phobia for the authoritarianism and weaknesses of empire that tend to irritate the narrator in Babel. It is, rather, a matter of aptitude and of proving himself in the landscapes of his childhood and of a new life, since he felt “Serene, at peace with myself, finally sure that I was a man who was fit for friendship, for confidence, for solidarity and human coexistence” (216). The recognition of new contexts for positive interaction must pass through alliances with nature, what Enrique Leff calls a dialogue of savoirs: to reintegrate oneself by means of alliances and relations that can be carried out in integrative cultural structures, such as the love for trees. It is a matter of an ecological consciousness that redefines the displaced political subject to a level of his personal transformation and that expands this subjective component to other collective dimensions—the social imaginary. This expansion is important to note: it is social in the Assembly and in his professional role as a linguist; it is also an exploration of the real unconscious from the problematic of the body and of social repression; it has a relational and symbolic dimension (Kidner, 66). Gutiérrez’s novel, in all its impurity and imperfection, is an exercise in the ecological imagination of the utopia of cosmopolitan communication. This could very well be the root of a type of communicative interaction in tune with a political ecology that validates environmental wisdom. As Eduardo Gudynas points out, the traditional themes of the Left, such as social justice, quality of life, and social liberation could not be achieved if environmental components were not incorporated into the ideology (38). In the 1990s, Gutiérrez made a first step toward that convergent movement and now in this century, we must pay attention to the use of social media that social and indigenous movements are developing with the help of artists and writers.

CULTURAL HERITAGE OF THE POTATO

What is revealed in Ugo Carrillo’s Yaku-Unupa Yuyaynin (Water’s Memory)? What do these poems say about the benefits of the potato? Not being able to answer these simple questions expresses my embarrassment at not having learned the Quechua language, which would allow me to read Carrillo’s poems. Alison Krögel, a colleague and friend at the University of Denver that I met in Cuzco, told me about Carrillo’s book and showed me her copy complete with all of her own notes. Krögel published a book about the oral and visual narratives of resistance in the Andean communities that grow potatoes. This cultural heritage is supremely rich, replete with emotional resonances and connections that today give me the tools to relate to those who sit around my table. I will spin a few tales with the intention of awakening interest in this rich environmental heritage. With their vivid colors and their earthy flavor, the red potatoes that I grew in our improvised garden, made me think about the porous division between urban and rural. The fact that I could grow potatoes in the midst of the city and that I was able to prepare typical Peruvian dishes with those same potatoes opened new horizons in my life that served to overcome the obstacles that I seemed to be feeling, including the sense that my life was missing a meaning, a purpose. In that first moment of harvesting the potatoes, I felt an emotional numbness and a cold, lifeless boredom. The potatoes were there to prod me into activating new ways of seeing so that I could suspend my judgment in order to overcome that anxiety—so ruinous to my soul—and that alienation that would not allow me to connect on a productive level with my peers, whether human and non-human. The potatoes that I grew there emblematize not only the memories of that period in my life, but also a life-affirming thrust toward the future. I suspect that my alienation was not a unique experience and therefore I also suspect that a large majority of the Peruvians who saw The Milk of Sorrow, Claudia Llosa’s second movie and winner of the Golden Bear award at the International Film Festival of Berlin, neither understood nor enjoyed the film; indeed, they no doubt felt an alienation similar to the one I felt upon contemplating those potatoes in Denver. What moved me most about the film—the potato in the last scene—did it also perhaps move other spectators? In the film’s last shot, the potato is finally liberated from

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its status as symbol of stagnation and of invisibility—that vaginal obstruction as the Andean female protagonist’s traumatic defense—and appears as the flowering symbol of life’s promise. The protagonist smells and cares for the potato and its flower, thus laying claim to her own destiny in the great capital city [Lima]. I wonder if there could be a richer and more suggestive symbol in that film than that of Magaly Solier in the final shot. Both the potato and the protagonist/actress can be considered cultural ambassadors for Peru in the world. I doubt, nevertheless, whether the public saw either of them as such in that final image of the film.

CYCLES

Life flows in cycles. The circadian, which follows the sun everyday, the melancholic, which tends to be tied to the phases of the moon, and the agricultural cycle, which adheres to the seasons of the year. Hormones, brain activity, subcellular systems, the entire body is designed according to cycles. Circles, returns. The cardiac cycle: diastole, systole, diastole: relax and start all over again: seven, eight, ten million cycles in a lifetime. (Ortiz, 40)

Cycles run underneath, atop, in the middle, inside, and deeper inside; they are antidotes like laurel trees, threatened by extinction due to the “mask of progress,” like the arbutus or strawberry tree, or the generous and resilient Tara tree. Cycles like the dance of a flower or a hummingbird. They sustain quinoa fields, and air currents, as well as streams of thought. They also cross over unstable splits in subjectivity or intervals like sudden cracks or Juarroz’s dark fruit that drips the juice of night. Cycles are reborn in dreams, in light, in the fountainheads of natural springs, in the bouquets of mignonette and gardenia flowers used in weekly prayers, in metamorphoses, in the thousands of varieties of potatoes, in imaginary countries, in the perspective of an insect, in errant polyphony, in seeds, in compost, in more tenderness, in voices . . . And the intestinal, sexual and muscular cycles and the cycle of the constellations. (Ortiz, 41)

The cycles of our fears, the cycles of hopes—not false ones—the cycles of all the days or years or centuries or eras. Even if a few clocks melt, other clocks will point out that there are always cycles. The cycles of memory also help to understand the processes of change, rhythms, and labyrinthine trajectories. In the end, we are like one of those games of skill with dozens of interlaced rings and one single way to solve the puzzle; but finding it ends the game. (Ortiz, 41)

Life continues running in cycles of the Other. At times those cycles are a constant questioning about the unspoken: where does the intestinal cycle

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end up? And the cycle of encounters? How do we cultivate the praxis of alterity that I like to call “the rehearsal of Otherness?” One dies in a propitious place and becomes a signpost? Autumn, winter, spring . . . In No Nightingales Alight on My Finger, Eduardo Chirinos expresses the flow of cycles as a metamorphosis of falling leaves in this magnificent composition of light and shadow: Moon of the Falling Leaves1 Moon of falling leaves. Or better yet, Moon among dead leaves. With what image can I name autumn? The moon covers the leaves forever, It bathes them with a cold radiance. And if they fall It is not to die, but rather to shine more brightly. Everything shines more brightly upon falling. Your silence Shines with me tonight and I Do not want to speak of autumn Nor of the falling leaves, nor of the moon. In order to console myself, I tell myself That each death is regeneration, that the earth Will swallow the leaves, that it will transform them into trees Or birds, perhaps clouds or streams. But the moon is insistent in its shining And it says that it will see me again As always, among the dead leaves. (43)

The world is a tradition that maintains itself in the tension between destructive and creative forces. Waranqa waranqa watapi kallpachasqa yachayniymanta, mukutuymanta, astawan wiñaymi vida, mana samaq mundu,mana samaspa paqariq mundo, tukuy pacha, wiñay.2

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The title of the Spanish poem is in English. These are the last two verses of José María Arguedas’ poem “Huk Doctorkunanman Quyay” (“A Call to Certain Academics”).

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Cycles Greater than my strength learned over thousands of years; than the muscles of my neck hardened over thousands of months, thousands of years, is life, my eternal life, the world that never rests, that creates without tiring; that gives birth and gives shape like time itself, limitless and whole.

DREAMS

The dreams of the oppressed are planted in the earth and are watered through all the bitter seasons. Their suffering could make them farmers of dreams. Their harvest could make the world more just and more beautiful. It is only the oppressed who have this sort of difficult and paradoxical potential (Okri, 130).

“The Pongo’s Dream,” recompiled from the Quechua oral tradition and recreated in Andean Castilian by José María Arguedas, is barely the tip of an enormous iceberg that sadly continues to be ignored by present society. I recall that the first time I heard the story, I intuited its powerful social and ecological wisdom, where the lesson of reciprocity and justice projects a powerful image of inversion between the powerful, white oppressor— covered in honey by the angel in the dream—and the poor, humble Indian—covered in excrement in the dream—whose outcome condemns the pair to lick one another for all eternity. As if one intuited with all certainty that the impunity of the powerful will finally come to an end—at least in the dreams cultivated by those poor Andean peasants, who do not embark on the road to revenge perhaps because it implies a recognition of their own weakness in that quest. The interpretation that Santiago López Maguiña and Gonzalo Portocarrero (2004) offer is ambiguous: on one hand, the unresolved conclusion to the oneiric story could leave open the possibility that the landowner might repent and lead to a just act through an admonition so that the abuser changes his ways and recognizes the humanity of the pongo, who, in turn, pardons his oppressor; thus, the cycle of abuse and revenge is broken. On the other hand, if there is no forgiveness, the inversion of the humiliating situation only perpetuates the violence of this cycle of revenge. In this indication of reversals of positions of power, the gods of the vanquished struggle to return from the underworld and are lying in wait to restore order. Dreams resist a personal and closed interpretation, as Luis Andrade Ciudad shows in his study of the world of dreams in the south central Andes (2005). Andrade takes into account ethno-historical documents, lexicographical sources and field interviews to study the functions of dreams in the individual and social lives of those he interviewed, as well

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as their mechanisms for interpreting the dreams. On one hand, dreams are a privileged space to receive “visits” or messages from the sacred world and also the realm of the dead. This oracular function has not been studied very thoroughly. It could have a therapeutic purpose whereby the dreamer believes that he can liberate himself from bodily ills, such as poisoning or the “dark” arts, thanks to the intervention of sacred beings like the Virgin. On the other hand, and more generally, dreams serve to anticipate or predict, a process through which the dreamer winds up understanding and employing oneiric symbols according to a shared knowledge: where corn or wheat signify good fortune, ropes and foxes indicate travel, toads and hens “injuries,” snakes and fish attract money, and flowers are for baptisms and births. However, all such symbols do not possess a stable and unified meaning. In a country marked by the marginalization and oppression of important sectors of society, such as the case of the Quechua-speaking men and women of the south central Andes, viewing dreams as part of a social story leads us to recognize their function as a space of exploration and searching for distinct alternative for life, and at the same time, as a means of consolation for those denigrated men and women who suffer injustice and need on a daily basis.

What can I do to access and explore that rich, infinite world that, it would seem, is the privileged space of the poor? Is it possible for me to meet an inhabitant of those other worlds in my own dreams? I ask myself these questions intuiting that solidarity is a valid entry into the dreamstate. A leap like this: in Nelly Reichardt’s film, Meek’s Cutoff (2010), an Indian character captured by some settlers who are trying to find a shortcut to the state of Oregon in the middle of the nineteenth century speaks in a language that is almost extinct. His speech is presented without subtitles in the film: What does the Earth say? I don’t know. What does the sky say? I don’t know. Who are those people? I have no idea. This could be a dream. I’m not sure. If my brother were here, I could have someone to talk to. Brother Moon, you are very quiet this evening. You are not helping me at all. (…) Is this a dream? I don’t believe that it is. I don’t know these people. But they have come to me and spoken to me. They have made me bleed. I am almost sure that they exist. That means this is not a dream. And if it is a dream, what a dream it is.

The spectators have no way of understanding what the Indian says. Couldn’t it be that in dreams we have a valuable opportunity to listen to a

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voice that we may not understand otherwise? Or perhaps that what the sky and Earth say requires another type of rationality? One of Roberto Juarroz’s poems allows me to inquire more deeply into this line of questioning (Eleventh Vertical Poetry, IV, poem 10): In the universal sinkhole of dreams Accumulates all that man has dreamed, But also other dreams That complete the parabola: Animal and vegetable dreams, the blind dreams of things, the gods’ mute dreams, the failed dreams of nothingness. And if we are unable to guess In what order they have been stored, It’s likely that there is no dividing partition And a secret osmosis Allows them to communicate with one another And at least there they interpenetrate one another, Like the bones of an ossuary, Pollen in the air, Mutations that intermingle in the wind Or the shape of things When they conclude their fall. And it is also likely that the sum of the whole One day will begin to weigh so much Or become such a dense image That it will transform into a palpable substance, Something like an incorruptible and belated model Of what the universe could have been.

Juarroz knows that the paradox of the individual dreamer belongs to the collective dimension, that it is plural, unknowable in its entirety, the stuff of much reflection on the part of artists from vastly different time periods. In another oneiric poem, Juarroz tacks onto that collective dimension “an irresistible will to continue the narration,” a will that is “loose energy in the here that is everywhere, / that does not distinguish between lives and deaths / between being a man or something else” (10th, poem 15). The cosmic dimension leads us in a fruitful direction in order to think about dreams, or at least to approach them as an effective, albeit unusual, method of listening. Isn’t it time, indeed, to listen to the Quechua-speaking

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peoples who believe in dreams, to those who understand the other dimension, the humble rural peoples, the shamans? Or at least to have at the ready a notebook to record the dreams like the majority of those who explore this unknown world? I vividly recall many childhood dreams in which the Pacific Ocean overflowed the limits of the green coast and invaded the streets of the neighborhood in Lima where my family lived. The recurring image of the water overtaking our living space is still present in my more recent dreams in which various people walk around with their feet submerged or in chasms where the rocks seemed to be in the shape of birthday cakes. I very much suspect that all that I have written about my dreams is a limited and uncertain recollection that serves as a starting point toward developing an attitude of listening. I recognize the courage of the indefatigable activist Derrick Jensen in writing a voluminous book about dreams as a form of access to other dimensions— not specific ones in logical terms although he makes an excellent argument in support of his conjectures as a guide to beginning to remember how to live, how to deprogram our cult of the scientific, materialistic, instrumentalist, mechanistic and managerial perspective, how to reconnect to the flow of life, and how to engrain the abilities of perceiving and learning about those other sides of ourselves that are neither recognized nor easy to discern. In the same vein, the documentary The Medicine of Forgiveness (2009) by Delia Ackerman and Alonso del Río about ayahuasca offers another look at the issue of accessing other worlds whose importance many of us have yet to recognize. In the documentary, Benito Arévalo, the Anaya shaman of the Shipiba nation, exhibits an environmental wisdom that is in danger of extinction. Will we be capable of dreaming in his world? Will we also lose the ancestral wealth of the Wayuu shamans who are known to us through the work of Michel Perrin, in his The Dream Practitioners? Or will those worlds fade away in the already debated but crushing process known as “progress?” It is time to listen to the speech of the poisoned dolphins, the cries of the stratosphere, the howls of the deforested Earth, the caterwauling of the dry winds over the encroaching deserts, the screams of the people without hope and without food, to the silences of strangled nations, to the passionate dreams of difficult artists, and to the age-old warnings that have always lurked in the oral fables of storytellers and shamans. (Okri, 132)

It is time to listen to dreams like the one revealed in Elicura Chihuailaf’s poem:

Knots like Stars: The ABC of Ecological Imagination in our Americas When the Waters of the East Sing in my Dreams Withered grass am I Waving To the rain But then I feel The first drops That fall upon the land May this water moisten me! I hear myself say, dancing Among the flowers Upon waking I arise Thrilled Keeping myself upright in the aroma Of a lavender bath ,

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ECO-ART

Can we conceive of an art that is both open and of this Earth, one that mixes artistic genres indiscriminately? Instead of pointing out “this is film,” “this is dance,” “this is opera,” “this is narrative,” and let us not forget wayward poetry . . . Can a theater of encounter without distinctions exist? The condition necessary to cultivate our ecological imagination is the construction of a field of beginnings: a chaotic juxtaposition of projects; an assembly of participant-creators; a promiscuity of collaborations; sites of construction that have no end. Eco-art has to belong to this type of temporal community of active interlocutors. The eco-artist assumes the role of curator in this public scene of exchanges. Open-air art juxtaposes and overcomes boundaries with weather, vegetation, other living species, light, and the seasons. In other words, it is an art that is adaptable, hybrid, and flexible. An art that is more sensitive to the Earth, both at the international and local levels; one that is grassroots but also professional. An art that nurtures the Earth while simultaneously nourishing our lives, our life’s breath, our vitality—that inseparable communion of body, soul, and spirit. Eco-art gives full form to an ample field of artistic practices and of interdisciplinary collaborations that seek the restoration, protection, and preservation of the world. Practicing eco-art implies a framing of the relations between the human and the non-human in just such a way. Rather than showing the collapse of ecosystems, for instance, eco-art attempts to communicate the power of the arts of the Earth so that people can delve into the mysteries of the root. More than didactic, this public art is evocative and defiant. Eco-artists navigate the slippery spaces of identities, of otherness; they recuperate visions, develop modes of exchange, question what endangers Earth’s well-being. They facilitate learning through an attunement of our senses and create alternative ways of knowing, at times subtly and at times overwhelmingly. What might Vicente Fajardo’s granite sculptures or the totality of the Chilean exhibition in honor of Gonzalo Rojas’ poetry entitled “Stones’ Imagination” evoke? And what about the primal trauma of the natural, what Gonzalo Rojas called “the trauma of being born,” that “mooring to the Earth, to that infinite, oceanic and Andean zone that is America?” Will the plaza of Intihuantan sculpture that Fernando de Syszlo mounted facing the sea in Miraflores, Lima evoke a similar sensation? To the Quechua

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world it is the place where the sun is anchored down. Lima with its sky, so grey, also needs an Intihuatan with the magical purpose of holding the sun fast (…) facing the sea, on one of those breakwaters that are the permanent witnesses of dusk. What might Diane Wiesner’s reforestation projects in Santa Fe Bogota evoke? Or the rooms made from recycled plastic bottles collected in Monterrey in 2005? Or the ecological river remediation park in Morelia, Mexico, for which the principal project author and designer, Mario Schjetnan, won a prestigious prize for Sustainable Construction from the Holcim Foundation? What does Mapuche artist Francisco Huichaqueo (1977) recuperate with his videopaintings and his experimental films such as Bird People, Che Úñüm (2007)? Or moving back to the enigma of the Andes, what do the wise and magnificent stones of the sacred valley of the Urubamba tell us? Shall we follow along with Juan Luis Martínez and his phonetic plot to observe the language produced by birds on a deeper level? What do the kiawe, or huarango, trees painted by Sérvulo Gutiérrez tell us and to whom did he address his poem “The Kiawe Tree” (Huarango)? … if among the sands I find you Kiawe give me hope perhaps you don’t remember me, I used to eat your seeds when I was a child, you were so kind to me, and I will not forget.

Eco-art works through this language of transparencies that seems to pass through the human ear without our realizing it. Some eco-artists, like Monica Millán (b. 1960), verbalize their ecological perspective. I first became acquainted with her work thanks to the cover of Selva Dipasquale’s book of poetry entitled Meditations on the Forest (2007). The installation belongs to the exhibition “Resonating Gardens” (2001), one of whose images of a suspended bird’s nest immediately made me think about the sophistication and beauty of natural architecture. Millán’s work interests me because its confrontations with nature provide new perceptions and because those objects made from natural materials that emit sounds particularly intrigue me. To what point do her Embroidered/Bordered River series and her exhibitions States of Earth (2004) and Interfaces (2006) communicate to us that we are made of mist, water, leaves or kissing frogs? The following statement that Millán made confirms the subjective conception of landscape that captivated Watsuji, and shows the connective dimension of this practice:

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Eco-Art I believe that landscape draws us, defines us. A person who grew up in the city is not the same as someone who was born in the pampas where the plains demarcate the line of the horizon, a space that in turn does not exist in the jungle of Misiones where nature comes right up to you, dwarfs you and can bleed you dry. That difference appears in my works that are like vast curtains without depth. My work is a narrative plot like a great textured drawing that can trap us.

The type of ecocriticism that analyzes works like Millán’s will have to dismantle the ideologies and the master narratives that mold the individual and social values that separate the natural world from human sensibilities. It must shed light on our nuanced and complex interconnection with the non-human world. Eco-art serves to recalibrate society at the level of sustainability, which invites the human and the non-human to unite with one another. Millán herself, upon describing her experience with the Museo del Barro in Asunción, Paraguay, underscored her connection to the weavers that gave rise to her exhibition The Frenzy of All That Is Slow. This aspect of environmental collaboration invites us to rethink urban planning, landscape architecture, civil engineering, and water management from the perspective of eco-art. In that sense they can be considered methodologies of engagement with the habitat and with the key matter of sustainability. Yolanda Gutiérrez (b. 1970) is another eco-artist who has been able to exhibit beyond the borders of her native Mexico in countries such as Turkey, France, and the United States. Gutiérrez works with materials taken directly from nature, such as animal bones, shells, sea sponges, lianas, thorny branches, feathers, and leaves. One of her most famous installations, Sanctuary, stands out for its use of artificial nests that successfully attracted birds that had previously fled the Xochimilco ecological zone after Hurricane Roxanne. Gutiérrez’s eco-artistic work finds inspiration in pre-Hispanic poetry of the Americas and in the tradition of the haiku. She actively seeks to enrich her creative heritage through fieldwork: for example, her experiences with the Yoreme communities of Sinaloa or with the Totonacs in northern Veracruz, in addition to other indigenous groups with whom she has interacted in her exploration of some of the multiple relationships that these communities maintain with the natural world. In her “Artist Statement” on the Web, Gutiérrez writes: …my work’s purpose is to make art a medium for deifying nature as the source of life, origin and reflection of our own being, seeking to communicate to the spectator that nature is a part of us, making him/her

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aware of our unconscious, but nonetheless no less irresponsible separation, from it.

Each sculpture, each installation that she prepares, possesses enormous emotional and cultural weight. Gutiérrez maintains: There is a moment in choral song when you can’t hear: it happens when all the voices reach the same vibration. Art depends on the very same phenomenon. There is a moment when art reaches a resonance and a synchronicity. (Grande, 49)

Gutiérrez’s open-air installations generally show the precarious equilibrium between life and death and the need to conserve natural reserves. The force of her objects derives from their aesthetic and intellectual adaptability to each space in the installation. These objects seek not only to awaken our awareness but also to break down our ingrained consumerist habits. They create visual metaphors of extraordinary power and moving beauty. A fascinating and splendid oeuvre that encompasses recreating nests in devastated areas (Sanctuary, 1994); installations of floating spheres in a polluted lake in Mexico City (Virgin Drops, 1995); floating lamps in a Turkish reservoir (In Pain’s Light, 1997); a floating serpent that combines Greco-Roman and preHispanic cultural traditions in Saint-Pierre Park in Amiens, France (Moonwater, 1991); the offering of lilies made of bamboo, recycled paper, and sweets made from honey to raise awareness of the disappearance of the world’s bee population (Thanks, 2008); or the biodegradable planters and baskets in the Charmarande Contemporary Art Center near Paris (Seeds of Utopia, 2009). Dominican artist Alejandro Cartagena’s (1977) photographs challenge the tradition of displaying landscapes devoid of human presence by portraying the effects of industrial damage on the landscape without diminishing any of its vital aura. For the artist, landscapes reflect society. His series Mexican Surburbia (2008) shows the drying up of the streams and rivers next to the urban expansion in Monterrey in northern Mexico. These photos of decaying spaces are images of greed, rage, tragedy, disgrace—the irreparable and invisible tentacles of urban sprawl that manage to affect everything. An example of slow violence in its alienating guise? Cartagena’s work is an example of what Ursula Heise calls “ecocosmopolitanism,” an ecological imagination that, while tending to the local, rejects remaining in, and speaking from, one particular place. This penetrating and varied photographic work, which can be enjoyed on the artist’s website: http://alejandrocartagena.com/, is a continual effort to

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observe society in a more complex and all-encompassing manner with all of its political, social, ecological and cultural nuances. Cartagena seeks to study the symbolic meaning of how things are built, taken apart, juxtaposed, and planned, and also how those plans are subsequently undone. The photographer asserted: We must look at why, in spite of their weaknesses, the suburbs still continue to be built, who is allowing them to be constructed, what are their consequences and what are the various components that comprise them. (Uddin, 13)

Pedro Mairal’s novel Salvatierra (2008; translated as The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra) is a concise story of a landscape painting, the fruit of sixty years of work, whose digital reproduction is exhibited in a museum in Holland. The work reminds me that eco-art can also be incarnated in novelistic form. The novel’s plot is fascinating: the painter’s son, the narrator, searches for and eventually finds a fragment of his father magisterial painting and then endeavors to save the work from oblivion. For me the successful aspect of this book is that it narrates the mysteries that this painting, which is over four kilometers in length, documents about a small provincial town and the nearby river. The narrator falls asleep in the shade of a tree, thinking about what the novel posits to the reader about the significance of his father’s eco-art, a fusion of art and life, the unlimited capacity for absorption: I woke up an hour later, looking at the top of the tree, without any sense of my own self. I felt as if I were in one of those long stretches of branches that Salvatierra loved to paint: the pure space among the trees, the dense mountain, with hidden birds, an almost abstract composition, often used as a transition between scenes, as if the observer’s eye were passing by at the same height as birds fly on the mountain, filled with shadows dappled with light, secret, intimate places where there are no human beings, where the eye observes as if it were flying without touching the ground, jumping from tree to tree, solitary, secure in its height, in the mountain thicket of the Roman cassie trees, locust trees, spiny hackberry, coral trees in bloom, among little birds like the vermilion flycatcher, skylarks, the blond-crested woodpecker, thrushes, parrots. (95-96)

With colorful imagination, Rember Yahuarcani’s (1985) pictorial work rescues the Amazonian culture of the Uitoto through images of halfanimal, half-human beings. While the dyes that the artist uses come from natural roots, his canvasses are made from the llanchama tree, native to the Amazon. Juan Carlos Galeano, who knows the Uitoto artist, has used

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one of his paintings as a cover for the popular edition of his Amazonian poems (2011).

ECOCINEMA

The term ecocinema refers to films with an ecological consciousness. Such films articulate human beings’ relation to the physical environment, the Earth, nature, and animals from a biocentric, not anthropocentric, point of view. Ultimately, ecocinema relates to life itself. (Lu, 2)

A necessary notion in order to choose appropriate films and videos about environmental conflicts and, in reality, to reflect on film and new media related to spectators that seek to challenge or motivate their ecological consciousness. According to the first ecomedia workshop offered by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), ecocinema is a classification of films that lend themselves to fostering an awareness of the fruitful but problematic relations with natural life. However, this consciousness is neither explicit nor intentional. Films that mask or eliminate such consciousness ought to form part of ecofilm studies. We need to study films and videos from their ecocinematic potential (Monani, 2011). Ecocinema is not a closed category; nor is it a type of prescriptive visual art. Although it is a concept that is in constant construction, like buen vivir, ecocinema serves to organize film festivals and academic research that challenge our perceptual habits concerning the more-thanhuman world. It is thus considered a seed to cultivate the ecological imagination that crosses dividing lines, both racial and national. This concept of ecocinema also depends on cultural diversity and environmental factors of a specific context. In the case of ecocritics who are interested in reflecting on ecocinema from Latin America, we must ask ourselves the following questions: How do ecofilms stimulate spectators to be more ecologically observant? How does it help spectators be more sensitive to the ways that the films reflect, shape and challenge our perceptions of the human and more-than-human worlds? Ecocritics ought to study and discuss cinematic theories and practices; they need to imagine how ecocinema engages with environmental justice, narratives of risk and the critique of globalization. Is this the appropriate context for criticizing the colonialism that is still in place in the Americas? Surely it is necessary to better understand the social and cultural realities the stem from the cultural dominance of

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technology and other lifestyles that hegemonic powers impose. These social and cultural realities continue to create a type of audience that is complicity and apathetically immersed in the colonial mindset, far from feeling any notion of responsibility. Ecofilms’ audiences need to cultivate responsibility for creating and giving from what they receive. If audiences learned to respond to ecocinema by acting, engaging, and committing, it would transcend the realm of daily life. In ecofilms about sustainable lifestyles, the director needs to show the connection between local reality and knowledge, and the experiences of other cultures and places. The four stories that comprise Yaku Patsa (2010) could never accomplish the artistic ingenuity of the examination of the physical and spiritual drought seen in the Chinese film Yellow Earth (1984), an example of a tradition that we can include thanks to a recent book about Chinese ecofilms (2009). Nor do I believe that all the noteworthy Latin American films on the migrant experience can be compared, moving from the classic El norte [The North](1983), to more recent films such as DeNadie [Border Crossing] (2006), Sin nombre [Nameless] (2009), La misma luna [Under the Same Moon] (2007) and Norteado [Northless] (2008). In Chinese films, family and community fragmentation are part of an extensive environmental vision that is difficult to compare. There is somewhat of an emphasis on framing the effects of urban planning and demolition as part of a method of understanding the process of modernization as a ruinous, toxic space that destroys the environment and something other than the merely physical. I am referring to a complex philosophical tradition of harmony that twenty-first century China appears to have forgotten. Contemporary filmmakers analyze, contemplate, parody, and subvert the overwhelmingly utilitarian and economic landscape. The fake pyramids, towers, and bridges in the amusement park setting of Jia Zhangke’s The World (2004) symbolize an urban world in progress that is sadly empty. The characters in this world of marvelous façades suffer the false promises and hardships of their social reality. Chinese cinema presents the national obsession with construction as a glamorous trap, which simultaneously trivializes the sense of place. This direction—of a country in an unbridled construction boom—puts ecology and the entire Chinese population in checkmate. I would be interested to learn more about Chinese films, whether they are concerned with relationships between humans and animals, or whether they describe non-urban ways of life with originality and creativity. Will we be able to view Niang Hao’s films with a religious focus within an ecocritical framework? Following this brief introduction, I have included a list of films, documentaries, and shorts that I know will help the reader realize that the

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ecological perspective is not simple, but rather plural. Those who see and digest, including haphazardly, a portion of this list will discover a marked social representation in favor of the struggles of indigenous communities and other groups that have prioritized ecological themes as a principal item on their agendas. This contrasts with a lack of true interest in ecological matters on behalf of the power elite, governments, corporations, and experts, one that is very difficult to expose. Many videos on the Internet are narrated in English. Economic logic becomes universal as a result of current society’s ideological apparatus; it always trumps ecological concerns. Nevertheless, I have never underestimated film’s power to awaken consciousness and to promote social change, along with a change in mentality. I know that the limitations of any incomplete list are many, but the suggestions here can at least stimulate the reader to consider more points of view and to realize that ecocinema’s alternative production in our Americas is not insignificant, and it can help expand the possibilities of a dialogue of savoirs among marginalized cultures and one’s own culture.

List of Ecofilms The list is organized alphabetically by director’s last name. Every item includes the ecofilm’s title, country of origin, year, length, and a brief description of the plot or theme. Although I recognize that it would be ideal to name not only the director of each, but also the groups involved in each production, I ought to note that it is very helpful to name the director—or person responsible, which is how some indigenous communities prefer to make and to refer to their production—in the sense that it will allow the reader to investigate the film’s availability at libraries or via search engine. Therefore, I have indicated with asterisks some of the titles’ availability according to the following: * Available on YouTube or vimeo.com **Available on Culture Unplugged Most of the videos and films available on YouTube and Vimeo are in Spanish and/or indigenous languages with English subtitles. All of the ones available on Culture Unplugged have English subtitles.

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Achahui Quenti, Rocío, Dir. Mujumama. Mother Seed* Peru, 2010. 17 min. A documentary about a seed ritual that still takes place in Raqchi, the largest Inca temple and surrounding quarters and granaries Kollkas, 100 km from Cuzco. Ackerman, Delia, Dir. Fertile Seeds* Peru, 2011. 4 min. Andean peasants marched with the Mayor to the main square in Lima to protest against government permission for the use of GMOs in the Peruvian food industry. —. The King of the Desert Is Dying* Peru, 2008, 10 min. The Huarango—or Guarango—, an endangered tree in the Peruvian desert, is being cut down for charcoal. This tree is an amazing life attractor from Pre-Columbian times, and we see inspiring efforts to save it. —. Wings of Life. This Is the Voice of the Birds* Peru, 2015, 4 min. A visual poem from the perspective of birds on how the hand of humanity is accelerating rates of extinction of entire species, yet we behave as if we have forgotten that nature is the source and support for all life, including ours. Ackerman, Delia and Alonso Del Río, Dirs. The Medicine of Forgiveness. Peru, 2001. 20 min. A journey into the world of Don Benito, an ayahuasca healer from the Amazon. Also a portrayal of the sacred role of ayahuasca. Ackerman, Delia and Mariana Tschudi, Dirs. Mother Ocean* Peru, 2011. 11 min. Instead of being revered as the ancient Peruvians did, the sea today is used as a marine landfill. Climate change and a need to change fishing methods are also interwoven into this film made with love. Álvarez Zambelli, Carlos, Dir. The Land Is Ours* Spain, 2010. 4:32 min. This experimental animated short was produced with the Association for Cooperation with the South (ACSUD) as part of a campaign to denounce attacks on the indigenous peoples of Latin America and their territories and resources.

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Amazon Watch. Defending the Rivers of the Amazon** Brazil/US, 2010, 10 min. This video is in support of Brazil’s Movimento Xingu Vivo Para Sempre (Xingu River Forever Alive Movement). The tour allows viewers to learn about the harmful impact of, and alternatives to, the massive Belo Monte Dam Complex on the Amazon’s Xingu River. Bazzini, Maya, Dir. Leufú** Chile/UK, 2010. 36:29 min. The film follows the Andean community of Rupumeika, whose inhabitants struggle to stop a multinational corporation ultimately trying to annihilate them from their territory in the name of “renewable energy” and “progress.” Berlinger, Joe, Dir. Crude. US/Ecuador, 2009. 104 min. An epic story of one of the largest and most controversial legal cases on the planet: the infamous $27 billion “Amazon Chernobyl” lawsuit, pitting 30,000 rainforest dwellers in Ecuador against the U.S. oil giant Chevron. Bernstein, Danielle and Ann Slick, Dirs. When Clouds Clear. US/Ecuador, 77 min. One remote Ecuadorian community’s radical resistance to a proposed copper mine that would level the town and destroy its way of life forever. As two invading mining companies become increasingly brazen in their attempts to infiltrate and control the area, the Junín community must coalesce into a united resistance in order to survive. Boyd, Stephanie, Dir. The Devil Operation. Peru, 69 min. A gripping David and Goliath tale of corporate espionage unfolds in this exposé of torture, intimidation, and murder of Peruvian eco-activists and indigenous farmers. Brescia Seminario, Carlo, Dir. Yaku Patsa [World of Water] Peru, 2010. 34 min. Four residents of the remote Conchucos Mountains in Ancash, Peru share their stories and rituals, as they relate to water. A carpenter recounts how his ancestors called for water during droughts. A mother shows how to make maize beer. An archaeologist narrates an origin myth. A mountaineer describes the effects of global warming on glaciers.

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Brossens, Peter and Jessica Woodsworth, Dirs. Altiplano. Belgium/ Germany/ Netherlands/Peru, 2009. 109 min. When a mysterious sickness afflicts a remote Andean village, the inhabitants’ fears turn to anger, which they direct against a team of European medics until one young woman learns the sinister truth about the source of the illness. Burlage, Jason, Dir. My Land (Mi Chacra) US/Peru, 2009. 100 min. (TV version 52 min.) The story of Feliciano, a young indigenous Peruvian man, and his wife and son. They live in a small farming village in the mountains above the Sacred Valley. It is a chronicle of indigenous life from planting to the harvest, and through a season of work as a porter on the Inca Trail. Feliciano has been instilled with the belief that life in the city would be better than the life he leads. Cabellos, Ernesto and Stephanie Boyd, Dirs. Choropampa: The Price of Gold. Peru, 2002. 75 min. When a devastating mercury spill by the world’s richest gold mining corporation hits a quiet peasant village in the Peruvian Andes, a courageous young mayor emerges to lead his people on a quest for healthcare and justice. —. Tambogrande. Murder, Mining. Peru, 2007. 85 min. Tambogrande is a town in North Peru. This is where the majority of the national fruit production comes from, including mangoes and limes. The relative affluence of Tambogrande became endangered in 1999, when foreigners began exploring a gold deposit beneath the town. The people of Tambogrande preferred mangoes over gold, so they revolted. Capelli, Luciano, Dir. The Sky Is Burning** Costa Rica, 2010. 56 min. An astonishing effort to rescue the tropical dry forest and other environments inside the Guanacaste Conservation Area. Capelli, Luciano and Manuel Obregón, Dirs. Symbiosis: Piano and Rainforest. Costa Rica, 2011. 55 min. Seven musical pieces put together in the middle of a dry rainforest in Guanacaste, Costa Rica. Exploding biodiversity incarnated in monkeyspiders, and several bird species play wonderfully along with Obregón’s piano music.

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Cartoy Díaz, Emilio and Cristian Jure, Dirs. The War for Other Media. Argentina, 2010. 79 min. Thanks to laptops, speakers, radios, newspapers, video cameras, cell phones, etc., indigenous people have been integrating mass media to strengthen their claims and the recognition of their rights. Based on four experiences—Francisca in Red Aymara of ERBOL Bolivia, Almir in Amazonia incorporating the Internet, Matías in Radio Mapuche from Patagonia, and Ariel working with video in the villages of Brazil—this film shows how people use their own mass media to resist environmental violence. Chiapas Media Project and Promedios, Dir. La lucha del agua-Water and Autonomy. Mexico/US, 2006. 56 min. Indigenous communities in Chiapas, faced with a lack of potable water, are solving the problem while protecting existing water sources. Conversations with the Earth & InsightShare, and several Andean communities, Dirs. The Rights of Mother Earth** Peru/UK, 2010. 9:43 min. A joint project between five indigenous communities in Peru with the message: “We wish from our hearts that these rights we are proposing will be recognized, and that people across the world will recover their sense of harmony with our Mother Earth.” Participating communities: Perka, Puno; Karhui and Queromarca, Cusco; Chaka, Ayacucho; Perccapampa, Huancavelica; Cochas Grande, Junín. Facilitated by: Sabino Cutipa, Rosio Achahui, Pelayo Carrillo, Balvino Zavallos and Irma Poma. —. Conversations With The Apus (Sacred Mountains)** Peru/UK, 2009. 11 min. The Apus, or sacred mountains, are the guardians of climate and the source of all pure water and thus have the power to protect or devastate communities living on them. This film was made as part of a campaign to resist evangelical authorities and this video has resulted in local people taking up against traditional practices to nurture Mother Earth. Facilitated by: Balvino Zeballos and Rodrigo Otero. Córdoba, Samuel, Dir. Tumaco Pacífico** Colombia, 2008. 90 min. A journey into the pile dwelling—Afro-Colombian communities of Tumaco, on the south Pacific coast of Colombia. Giving voice to their residents, this documentary reveals the bravery and wisdom of those who honor the Pacific—the ocean that feeds and bathes them—in spite of their

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poverty. Tumaco Pacífico is an immersion into the daily life of a culture surviving in an endangered environment. Dannoritzer, Cosima, Dir. The Light Bulb Conspiracy. The Untold Story of Planned Obsolescence * Spain/France, 2009. 77 min. [TV version 52 min.] This film combines investigative research and rare archival footage to trace the untold story of planned obsolescence—the deliberate shortening of product life spans to guarantee consumer demand. This film travels to France, Germany, Spain, and the US to find witnesses of a business practice that has become the basis of the modern economy; it brings back disquieting pictures from Ghana, where discarded electronics are piling up in a huge cemetery for electronic waste. Esparza, Gilberto, Dir. Nomadic Plants* Mexico, 2010. 9:36 min. This Project of Community Art shows the process of creating a nomadic plant close to the Santiago River in El Salto, Jalisco (Mexico). The plant is a small automaton robot that moves towards water when its bacteria require nourishment. It contains vegetation and microorganisms living symbiotically inside the body of the machine. This self-sustaining robot can help to clean industrially contaminated areas. www.plantasnomades.com Fernández, Pablo and Andrea Henríquez, Dirs. The Voice of the Mapuche Chi Mapuche Nütram-A Unique People, Mountains Are No Border** Argentina/Chile, 2008. 113 min. The Mapuche defeated the Spanish invaders and do not recognize the border that Chile and Argentina have tried to impose. Presently, their struggle is focused on maintaining their identity as a people and stopping the encroachment of multinational corporations on Mapuche ancestral territory. Fontán, Gustavo, Dir. The Plunging Shoreline. Argentina, 2008. 64 min. This experimental film captures the strong connection with the nature of the enormous wetlands of Entre Ríos by adopting the perspective of Juan L. Ortiz’ poetic work. Franca, Belisario, Dir. Amazonia Eterna** [Eternal Amazon] Brazil, 2012. 88 min. This film is a lyrical, poetic documentary that presents a critical analysis of how the world’s largest tropical rainforest is understood and

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utilized. Executives, politicians, and environmentalists working together with indigenous tribes and riverbank communities are currently constructing a model for using nature to extract its resources while generating work and income, with minimal environmental impact. Galeano, Juan Carlos and Valliere Richard Auzenne, Dirs. The Trees Have a Mother: Amazonian Cosmologies, Folktales, and Mystery. US/Peru, 2008. 71 min. This documentary illustrates the importance of indigenous narratives to those who dwell near the city of Iquitos, Peru, and view rivers, plants, and animals as sentient beings. This film depicts a mother’s attempts to find her lost son with the help of a local shaman—resulting in various magical explanations for his disappearance and eventually producing a rich tapestry of tales and visions from all over the community. González, José Alejandro. Everyday with John* Colombia, 2011. 7:32 min. A camera follows a waste picker, showing his daily recycling activities in the streets of Bogotá. González-Rubio, Pedro, Dir. Alamar* México, 2009. 73 min. A father of Mayan origins and his son Natan spend their last days together before Natan returns to live with his Italian mother in Rome. Spending their days at sea, their relationship grows as they connect with life above and below the surface of the sea in the area of Chinchorro. Guzmán, Patricio, Dir. Nostalgia for the Light. Chile, 2012. 90 min. This film is a remarkable meditation on memory, history, and eternity. Chile’s remote Atacama Desert provides stunningly clear views of the heavens. But it also holds secrets from the past: human remains, from preColumbian mummies to the bones of political prisoners “disappeared” during the Pinochet dictatorship. In this otherworldly place, earthly and celestial quests meld: archaeologists dig for ancient civilizations, women search for their loved ones and astronomers scan the skies for new galaxies. Henríquez Carmen and Denis Paquette, Dirs. Cry of the Andes** Canada/Chile, 2010. 85:32 min. A journey to the heart of the Andes Mountains where Pascua Lama is poised to become the world’s largest open pit mine. However, for the indigenous people and farmers living in the valley below, Pascua Lama

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threatens their only source of water in one of the driest places on earth. In a war between corporate and social values, two men are leading a fight to defend their valley and way of life. Now, one election will ultimately determine the true price of gold. Herrera Campillo, Nubia, Dir. Recicladores: Invisible Doctors of the Environment* Colombia, 2011. 8 min. A waste picker reflects in his daily work as an ecological labor in the streets of Bogotá. Huichaqueo, Francisco, Dir. Bird People-Che Úñüm* Santiago-Valdivia, 2007. 22:33 min. An experimental video in which Mapuche symbols and characters are set in motion in an urban context. Iskander, Mai, Dir. Garbage Dreams. Egypt, 2009. 79 min [TV version 55 min]. This film follows three teenage boys born into the trash trade and growing up in the world’s largest garbage village, on the outskirts of Cairo. It is the home to 60,000 Zaballeen, Arabic for “garbage people.” The Zaballeen survive by recycling 80 percent of the garbage they collect. When their community is suddenly faced with the globalization of its trade, each of the teenage boys is forced to make choices that will impact his future and the survival of his community. Lee, Lara, Dir. The Battle for Xingu** Brazil/US, 2010. 11:09 min. The Brazilian government is proposing what would be the world’s third largest hydroelectric dam, threatening to destroy the biodiversity of the Xingu River basin and deprive these people of their rights to a sustainable future. Cultures of Resistance was in Altamira in 2008 for the Xingu Alive Encounter—one of the largest-ever gatherings of indigenous Brazilians—to witness the spectacular determination of the Amazon people to protect their way of life. Kenner, Robert, Dir. Merchants of Doubt. US, 2014. 96 min. A film about the deliberate manipulation of science and public discourse in order to muddy our understandings of certain risks. Based on Naomi Oreskes’ book, which reveals that for more than 50 years American society has been suffused with doubt, artificially manufactured by a small group working on behalf of corporations who stand to profit from our

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doubts about everything from cigarettes to asbestos to flame retardants to, most significantly, global warming. Le Saint, Reneé y Jean-Louis Descroix, Dirs. La Chaquitacclla en Chicheros* Peru/France: 3:57 min. Indigenous community labor in action, removing the soil with the “chaquitaccllas.” Márquez Vela, Alejandro, Dir. Self-Preservation* México, 2011. 10 min. In what appears to be a conference, a mysterious character gives an anthropological discourse on human nature about our typical selfpreservation and our self-destructive drive as a species. Mayol, Manel, Dir. Apaga y vámonos [Switch Off]. Spain/Chile, 2005. 82 min. One of the world’s largest dams, Ralco, on the river Biobío in Chile, opened in 2004 after numerous clashes with the Mapuche people. The land of this ancient indigenous community has been flooded by the Spanish multinational company Endesa. Milanez, Felipe and Bernardo Loyola, Dirs. Toxic: Amazon. Brazil, 2011. 65 min. Zé Cláudio and Maria—environmentalists, nut collectors, residents of New Ipixuna in Brazil, and martyrs—were killed in May 2011 by two gunmen. This film explores the violent struggles now taking place between squatters, foresters, government agents, and environmental activists—all guided by their own beliefs and values about what the future direction of the Amazon should be. Mora Calderón, Pablo, Dir. A’i: Guardians of the Forest. Colombia/Ecuador, 2012. 52 min. For the first time ever, a leader of the Arhuacan people from the high peaks of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in northern Colombia travels to the tropical jungles of Ecuador to meet his counterparts from the Cofan Nation, A’i. They are united by their common interest in sharing with each other their sacred connection with their own territories and desire to preserve their forest. www.cofan.org

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Nogueira, Fernando and María Cabrejas, Dirs. Tekoa Arandú. La comunidad de la sabiduría* Argentina, 2006. 97 min. Tekoa Arandú means “Community of Wisdom.” This little Guaraní town, Pozo Azul [Blue Well] frames the cultural reality of being part of Mbya culture in our times. Olmi, Boy, Dir. Guardianes de la selva* [Jungle’s Guardians] Argentina, 2012. 29:43 min. A project to regenerate thousands of deforested acres by growing “yerba mate” in the shadows of the forest. This is an excellent recollection of acts of care and solidarity among humans and non-humans to incarnate experiences of genuine sustainability in the region of Canindeyú, Paraguay. Olmos Morales, Lucio, Dir. Ix Tasana Tiyat-El llanto de la tierra* Mexico, 2008. 7:17 min. Produced by the Indigenous Art Center Xtaxkgakget Makgkaxlawana and the Short Film Workshop Totonacapan, this popular short film recreates the planetary dimension of pain through a suffering female body in the frame of a written Mesoamerican Code. Otero Heraud, Rodrigo, Dir. The Voice of the Seeds** Peru, 2011. 31 min. In this documentary Andean farmers share their feelings towards their seeds, which they have been nurturing for several thousand years. They also share what they think of GMOs, which were almost allowed to enter the Peruvian Andes, a region of mega biodiversity. Oteyza, Carlos, Dir. The Voice of the Heart. Venezuela, 1997. 97 min. Environmentalist efforts to unmask illegal extractive practices and a love story at a radio station in the rainforest clash with reality in a fictional thriller. Papacostas, Andreas, Dir. A Secas* [Dry] Mexico, 2011. 2 min. An animated short on water conservation with a clever symbolism of a woman dancing-swimming until the water is gone. Patiño Sheen, Cristina, Dir. Meet My World* UK/Peru, 2013. 53 min. Twelve children from Amantani‘s Boarding Houses wrote scripts, teaching traditional skills from their communities that make them proud of their culture. Patiño Sheen helped the children turn their scripts into instructional short films.

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Polizzi, Nick, Dir. Sacred Science. Peru/US, 2010. 77 min. This film follows 8 people with life-threatening diseases into the Amazon for a month-long ‘healing’ from local tribespeople who claim to know of special herbs and treatments that science hasn’t yet discovered. As the last hope for most of these people, they leave their lives behind and hope that this sacred healing works. Polgovsky, Eugenio, Dir. A Leap of Life. Mex., 2012. 21 min. The growth of industry in Guadalajara and the incessant pouring of toxic and chemical substances into the Santiago River have devastated this once pristine area, and now also poison the town itself. For 30 years a family—Graciela, her husband Enrique, and their daughter Sofía—have dedicated itself to fight against the indifference of the authorities and the impunity of corporations to rescue what was once a river full of life. Reggio, Godfrey, Dir. Anima Mundi. * US, 1992. 28 min. This dynamic collage conjures up a sense of the force of nature by following a path which goes beyond habit, calling forth the deep rooted and archaic sense of man’s “being a part” of nature. —. Evidence *US/Italy, 1995. 7 min. A haunting look at children watching TV as an alarming and tragic image of human alienation from Nature. —. Koyaanisqatsi [“Life Out of Balance”]* US, 1983. 86 min. This film wordlessly surveys the rapidly changing environments of the northern hemisphere. While it may seem to be a simplistic screed against human pillage of the planet, the film invites a more complex assessment of the place of man, science, and faith in and out of nature. —. Naqoyqatsi [“Life as a War”] *US, 2002. 89 min. With a variety of cinematic techniques, including slow motion, timelapse, and computer-generated imagery, the film tells of a world that has completely transitioned from a natural environment to a human-made one. Globalization is complete, all of our interactions are technologically mediated, and all images are manipulated. From this (virtual) reality, Reggio sculpts a frenetic yet ruminative cinematic portrait of a world that has become officially post-language.

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—. Powaqqatsi [“Sorcerer life, an entity, a way of life that consumes the life forces of other beings in order to further its own life”] *US, 1988. 99 min. This film reveals the everyday beauty of the traditional ways of life of native people in Africa, Asia, and South America, and shows how those cultures are being eroded as their environment is gradually taken over by industry. This is the most intensely spiritual segment of Reggio’s philosophical and visually remarkable Qatsi Trilogy (the titles are Hopi phrases). —. Visitors. US, 2013. 87 min. Footage of nonverbal human faces watching something that the film never shows, urban abandoned landscapes, the wetlands of Loussiana, a close-up of a gorilla at the beginning and the end of the film arrange a cinematic experience for meditation. It reveals humanity’s trancelike relationship with technology, which, when commandeered by extreme emotional states, produces massive effects far beyond the human species. Rivera, Alex, Dir. Sleep Dealer. US, 2008. 90 min. A sci-fi thriller depicting an uncannily familiar future when infomaquilas, new factories in Mexico where people are physically connected to computer networks to handle robots in the United States, fulfill their North American bosses’ “American dream” by supplying them “all the work, without the workers.” It explores with astonishing imagination themes of migration, technology, globalization, and social justice. Ruiz, Carlos, Dir. Open Sky. Argentina, 2007. 98 min. This documentary tells the story of poor communities of Famantina and Chilecito, La Rioja, Argentina, in their struggle against an imminent implementation of a strip mine. Sapienza, Stephen. In Peru, Gold Rush Leads to Mercury Contamination Concerns* US/Peru, 2011. 8:10 min. A PBS Newshour program about the extensive gold-mining operations that have stirred major environmental concerns over mercury contamination in fish, fishing wildlife, and humans.

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Sepulveda, Sebastián, Dir. El Arenal. Brazil/Chile, 2008. 54 min. This documentary was filmed in Brazil with Chilean production and focuses on the Guajara community, whose peaceful lifestyle and beliefs in the Amazon rainforest are threatened by the construction of a bridge. Solanas, Fernando, Dir. Land in Revolt: Impure Gold* Argentina, 2009. 92 min. This documentary exposes the plundering of underground resources and the contamination that results from unsafe mining techniques. Stanton, Andrew, Dir. Wall-E. US, 2008. 98 min. This animated film follows a robot named WALL-E, who is designed to clean up an abandoned, waste-covered Earth far in the future. Tendler, Silvio, Dir. The Poison Is on the Table* Brazil, 2011. 49 min. This film deals with the risks of pesticide use in agriculture and how this model benefits large transnational corporations at the expense of public health. It also reveals, among other things, the alarming statistic that Brazil uses 5.1 kilos (11.2 lbs.) of pesticide per person per year. Since 2008, Brazil consumes agro-toxic products like nowhere else on the planet. —. The Poison Is on the Table II. Agroecology to Feed the World with Sovereignty to Feed Peoples* Brazil, 2014. 70 min. This documentary updates and goes deeper into the evil consequences for public health, caused by the use of chemicals in agriculture. This second feature focuses on possible alternatives, respecting the environment, the country worker, and the consumer. Totoro, Daúno, Dir. Úxúf Xipay. The Plunder** Chile, 2005. 73 min. This film tells the Mapuche story about the multiple dimensions within their process of organization in Southern Chile. Urrutia, Ximena, Dir. Harvesting Water* Mexico, 2011. 10 min. This film depicts the effort of an engineer, Enrique Lomnitz, and how he started with the help of the Lady Clara Gaytán on Isla Urbana (Urban Island). It is the first installation of a simple system for recollecting and using rainwater in Mexico City.

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Vallejo Torres, José and Carlos Vallejo Torres, Dirs. Hananpacha (The World Above)** Peru, 2009. 52 min. In the native Quechua language of the Andes, “Hananpacha” means “the world above.” This work offers a stunning visual ode to the landscapes, people, and wildlife of the Lake Titicaca region of Peru, a region known as the “capital of Peruvian folklore.” Varda, Agnès, Dir. The Gleaners and I. France, 2000. 82 min. Beginning with the famous Jean-François Millet painting of women gathering wheat left over from a harvest, the film focuses on gleaners: those who scour already-reaped fields for the odd potato or turnip. It is an investigation that leads us from forgotten corners of the French countryside to off-hours at the green markets of Paris, following those who insist on finding a use for that which society has cast off. —. The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later. France, 2002. 62 min. This documentary revisits the characters and issues of the original, and explores the many emotional and creative responses elicited by this oneof-a-kind film. Vázquez, Alonso, Dir. Feel Like a Mountain* Norway/Peru: 5 min. This short film is a voyage of self-discovery—a personal odyssey of the filmmaker. It is a coming of age story that is full of hope. The film depicts how forests play so many different roles for so many people, from natural resources for indigenous livelihoods to comfort and inspiration for a young boy. Vicuña, Cecilia, Dir. Caleu, Chile/US, 2010. 11:06 min. Caleu (“to be transformed” in Mapuche) is an ancient ritual site in the Cordillera de la Costa (coastal mountain range) in central Chile. Until recently, it was a site of “chino”” rituals. In 1995, Cecilia Vicuña conducted a workshop to support the revival of the “chino” dance. In this film, Cecilia returns to Caleu. The community and the chinos gather to watch the video of the workshop at the Caleu School in 1995. —. Khipu/Ceque* Chile/US, 2010. 3:14 min. The khipu or quipu (“knot” in Quechua), a notation or record-keeping system created 5,000 years ago in ancient Peru, consists of cords tied in knots to carry meaning.

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—. Kon Kon, Chile/US, 2010. 54 min. In this documentary poem, Cecilia Vicuña returns to Con Cón, the birthplace of her art in Chile, where the sea is dying and an ancient tradition is being destroyed. The word Con alludes to the sanctity of the cycle of water—from glacier to ocean to cloud—a circularity intensified by the repetition: Con Cón. The “bailes chinos” created the “sonido rajado” (torn sound), a multiphonic music of the pre-Colombian Andes. Based on dissonance, the ‘bailes chinos’ are a collective trance dance to increase the life force of land and water. —. Minga of the Invisible Clam, Chile/US, 2010. 1:55 min. The minga (Quechua) is a collective work undertaken for the common good. The beaches of Con Cón, formerly rich in clams, were depleted by overexploitation. Here, the artist organizes a collective ritual to call the clams to return. —. The Death of the Sea. 12:28 The Chino fishermen and poets of Central Chile denounce the death of the sea in Con Cón due to pollution and overfishing by trawlers. —. Valparaíso* Chile/US, 2010. 6:33 min. A conversation between Cecilia Vicuña and José de Nordenflycht about the forgotten patrimony of water in Valparaíso, Chile. The site was originally settled in Pre-Columbian and Colonial times due to the abundance of fresh water provided by a multitude of springs. Today these springs are polluted and dying out. Recorded January 2007. Vizcarra, Gastón, Dir. Ukuku* Peru, 2009. 20 min. Ukuku is a mythological Andean being—half bear, half human— whose sworn duty is to climb to the snow-capped peaks and retrieve the ice that many Andean people consider sacred. Desperate to fulfill his sacred mission, wise Mama Coca points the Ukuku on his urgent quest, traversing Peru’s vast territory. His journey takes him ever closer to the modern Peruvian coast. Watts, Michael, Dir. Laguna Negra** UK/Peru, 2009. 24 min. This is a film that explores the core values of a native subsistence farming community in Huancabamba, Peru. The fabric of this society has been severely threatened by large-scale mining, and the destructive outcomes of imposing a capital-intensive model of development on a society based on traditional values.

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Wolf, Aaron, Dir. King Corn. US, 2007. 88 min. Two recent college graduates travel to Iowa to investigate the role that corn plays in an increasingly complicated and dysfunctional American food industry. After planting their own small crop of corn and tracing its journey through the industry, they are alarmed to discover that corn figures into almost everything Americans eat. The consequences of this are examined through interviews with various experts and industry insiders, providing a balanced look at this American agricultural issue. Yepes, Gabriela, Dir. Danzak. Peru/US, 2009. 19 min. Nina is a 10-year-old girl whose life dramatically changes when her dying father and master Scissor Dancer asks her to fulfill his last wish. Using José María Arguedas’s story “The Agony of Rasu Ñiti,” this short film, distributed by www.filmmovement.com, creates a nonstereotypical representation of indigenous artists who migrated from the countryside of Southern Peru to the shantytowns around Peru’s capital city, Lima. This film explores how and why a specific Andean cultural manifestation—the Scissor Dance—is passed on to younger generations in urban environments. —. To Live Is a Masterpiece.* 2007. 25 min. This is a letter to an artist that is followed and interviewed by the filmmaker in order to show how his poetry, installations, paintings, and sculptures are related to a long, cultural history of pre-Columbian traditions that question our current values of living.

ECOCRITICISM

The ability to study cultures from the ecological perspective. As the literary and cultural study of nature, ecocriticism endeavors to erase the divisions between the human and the non-human. To further its development, it employs methods from disciplines as disparate as biology, political science, the natural sciences, geography, history, philosophy, ethics, architecture, anthropology, archeology, postcolonial studies, environmental history, art history, and literary studies. Ecocriticism took shape as an important critical movement in the decade of the 1990s in the United States and England as a genre of literary studies that has energized the work of a significant number of critics, researchers, educators, and editors. One can read numerous collections of books and compilations of articles, as well as websites that demonstrate the various schools of thought. Some of these tendencies have indeed been very prolific in their critical contributions, as Greta Gaard summarizes in her panorama of the new directions in ecofeminism (2010). Others have been nearly as fruitful, such as phenomenological works or those that appear regularly in journals like Capitalism Nature Socialism, not to mention the poststructuralist approaches, among many others. Timothy Morton has dedicated an entire book—one of those that we tend to read in one sitting—to this ecological way of thought, which is intrinsically dark and mysterious while thinking big and tying up all loose ends. Distance is not permitted because it intimidates with its strangerthan-strange, the Other, any Other. Ecological thought is not subject to national borders, and although I use Morton’s words without much of their Derridean context, it is a way of thinking that has to do with warmth and tenderness; with hospitality, marvel and love, vulnerability and responsibility (77). And given that it is vast, it encompasses everything. It ponders what is not beautiful, what is not cold, what is not splendid (84). It has to imagine how to love the heartless, the radically different (92). It compels us to recalibrate our sense of justice (120). It is a way of thinking of others, of their interests, of how we ought to act toward them and their very being (123). Ecological thought can be pleasant, but also disagreeable. But once it is thought, because it is as irresistible as any true love, it cannot be un-thought. Like the literature of nonconformity, Morton’s contribution exceeds the world of neat academic definitions and

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divisions, but that does not mean that it does not influence the expansion of the limits of ecocriticism. In his preface to Ecocríticas: Literatura y medio ambiente (2010), Patrick D. Murphy asserts that ecocriticism has to do with food “not only in the figurative sense but also the literal; not only intellectual nourishment but also the real food that sits before us on the plate” (13). Murphy is among those who believe that ecocriticism has sought to keep the academic study close to environmental practice. Accordingly, ecocriticism provides: a constructive way to initiate a connection between nature and literature with the goal of critiquing whatever is destructive, unethical or instrumentalist, on the one hand; celebrating and promoting the constructive, the environmentally ethical and ecological on the other. (13)

At times ecocriticism proves itself to be very open and uninhibited; at others it appears to be a timid movement, always subject to the confines of political correctness. At any rate, ecocriticism began by basing itself principally on ecology, natural history, and environmental studies, and by examining “how humans interact with nature and how these interactions inform and are forged by symbolic representations of nature” (Murfin and Ray, 125). At the very beginning of the movement, Cheryll Glotfelty was already comparing ecocriticism to feminist and Marxist criticism, and defined it as the study of the relationship between literature and the environment (The Ecocriticism Reader, xviii). In spite of the openness of the definition or the various fluctuations of the movement, as Niall Binns observes, “hundreds of critics are working in this field, which is necessarily interdisciplinary, faithful to the ecological premise that everything is connected to everything else and confident in the certainty that to try to detach the aesthetic quality of a work from its context (socioeconomic, political but also ecological)” is simply a simplicity of Harold Bloom and company (16). Lawrence Buell has written important books that not only are sources of inspiration for environmental praxis, but also have given a sense of direction to the ecocritical movement. According to Buell, ecocriticism continues to grow in scope and importance for various reasons: 1) the field of application for ecocritical research is vast—not only in duration, since it ranges from the Sumerian text, the Epic of Gilgamesh, to the modern day, but also in scope, given that any imaginative artifact presents footprints of the environment, in one form or another; 2) the planet’s environment is one of the most pressing issues of the century because of the decline of its

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sustainability (“The Ecocritical Insurgency,” 699). Buell’s characterization reflects a moment of transition in ecocriticism that seeks an informed understanding of the natural world and/or the natural sciences (703-704). Ecocriticism bases its critical practice in environmental education, and therefore it also strives to restore the importance of the referent in the face of the postmodern perspective—the ancient question of the mimetic nature of literary texts, of the relationship of the image to the “real” world. Ecocriticism should encompass an understanding of landscapes and regions in order to develop a theory of place with three converging perspectives—place as a symbolic structure, as social construction, and as ecology (Buell, 706-707). Binns talks about this perspective as a stimulant for ecocriticism especially “for the stress that it places on a literature of place and for its insistence on a binding relation between the atmospheric contamination of a place and the parallel contamination of its inhabitants” (22). This direction in ecocriticism has been complicated by the difficult convergence of the local and the global that encompasses varied avenues of research and application in postcolonial studies, but it is still not bearing much fruit in ecocriticism. Another key characteristic for Buell would be the questioning of anthropomorphic norms by which “ecocritical exegesis should take up the issue of literature’s sensitivity—or insensitivity—to the history and phenomenon of human dominance of the nonhuman world; and should look for symptoms of autocritique, troubled uncertainty, alternative environmental-ethical models thinking.” Ecocriticism demonstrates notable progress with respect to limiting anthropocentrism’s enormous influence, pointing out the asymmetrical power relations that have justified the mistreatment of animals and women throughout history, along with other equivalent pathologies (707-708). In addition to the study of animals, there is a wide range of posthumanist currents and biological sciences that are building a promising exchange with activist groups for environmental rights and sustainable economic policies. I am still impressed with the case of Temple Grandin, who redesigned McDonald’s slaughterhouses in many states in North America based on her own experience with autism, which brought her closer to the suffering of beef cattle and motivated her prolific environmental activism. Finally, Buell mentions ecological rhetoric as a primary means to communicate and disseminate the movement. The basis of this rhetoric lies in 1) “the interdisciplinarity of its vision”; 2) its capacity to connect literary representations of the environment not only with the social sphere, but also with the scientific realm 3) the “transferability and pertinence of ecocritical expertise—the exegetical and conceptual tools requisite to

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textual analysis—to virtually all aspects of ecocritical inquiry” (708-709). Buell is among the few ecocritics who have managed to make abundantly clear the need to incorporate the comparative study of literatures from various cultures into ecocritical discourse. Nevertheless, Buell only mentions two internationalist activists, Patrick Murphy and Scott Slovic, in a footnote to his article, calling them “honorable exceptions” to the absence of a “comparativist spirit” in the movement (700, note 4, 710). Ecocriticism has become increasingly more difficult to explain due to the multiplicity of methods and disciplines that have come to give shape to the movement, but also because, as Greg Garrard astutely observed in the first issue of the European magazine Ecozon@ (2010), it serves as an intellectual enterprise against sexual, natural, racial, and social oppression, and should thus seek its principal alliances in biology rather than in philosophy, ethics, or literary theory. Garrard identifies four key areas that are already in the process of developing such ties: “biosemiotics, risk theory, environmental history, and philosophy of biology” (23). In its early stages, ecocriticism had signified a cultivation of a sensitivity to the Other that was in principle the natural world. This is what has been called the first wave of ecocriticism, in which both a representational obsession with the environment and a search for a pristine arcadia without any trace of social and transnational presence proliferated. Rob Nixon had already identified four points of environmentalism that caused resistance in postcolonial studies—and we could add Latin Americanist cultural studies—including: 1) the predilection for discourses of purity about the virgin wilderness, 2) the preference for a literature of place, 3) the focus on the United States, which from a feminist critique had been attacked as white elitism, and 4) the constant subordination of solitary and atemporal moments of communion with nature (“Environmentalism and Postcolonialism,” 235). The second wave is characterized by revisionist approaches in cultural studies that are oriented toward the environment. And Scott Slovic speaks of a third wave that we could call “planetary.” Slovic also makes the crucial observation that the use of the “wave” metaphor does not do justice to the process of expansion or to the changes in ecocriticism, and that additionally the so-called waves are not successive. At this point in the trajectory of the movement, no one can deny that the relations between humans and the natural world have reached a critical juncture: the Other which the first wave considered to be the natural world has now become the collective-we. In the context of the third wave, the divisions between culture and nature have come to an end. For Ursula K. Heise, who studies ecocosmopolitan narratives through Ulrich Becks’s theory of a society of risk as adumbrated in his Sense of the

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Place and Sense of the Planet (2008), it is also important to dialogue with the sciences. Thus, she also pays attention to biodiversity as the axis of fruitful epistemological challenges for ecocriticism, such as the listing of species and their cataloguing. Ecocriticism is not an easy field to summarize due to the diversity of political and interdisciplinary influences that found it: Somewhat like cultural studies, ecocriticism coheres more by virtue of a common political project than on the basis of shared theoretical and methodological assumptions, and the details of how this project should translate into the study of culture are continually subject to challenge and revision. For this reason, ecocriticism has also become a field whose complexities by now require the book-length introductions that have appeared over the last two years: Greg Garrard’s Ecocriticism (2004), Buell’s The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005) and, shorter and sketchier, Walter Rojas Pérez’s La ecocrítica hoy [Ecocriticism Today] (2004).

And I would add that collections of essays continue to appear, and although they do not have Garrard’s or Buell’s unified critical vision, they open new directions in the movement: Annie Merrill, among others, has edited Coming into Contact: Explorations in Ecocritical Theory and Practice (2007); Fiona Becket and Terry Gifford, Culture, Creativity and Environment. New Environmentalist Criticism (2007); or the neither short nor sketchy collection edited by Carmen Flys Junquera, José Manuel Marrero Henríquez, and Julia Barella Vigal, Ecocríticas. Literatura y Medio Ambiente [Ecocriticisms: Literature and Environment] (2010). This abundance of publications is merely the tip of an iceberg that does not seem to be melting in its contagious enthusiasm. Can this be considered another type of global warming? I suppose so, given that it is a warming song like the generous sun. There are many issues in Anglo-Saxon ecocriticism that I believe could be very productive to consider in the field of Latin American and transcontinental studies. Primarily, ASLE and similar organizations in other countries with fewer resources offer the opportunity for dialogue and education. The challenge is to establish alliances and connections with artists and activist movements in the Global South. I realize that this implies confronting the controversial topic of thinking globally, which will be met with a great deal of resistance. But I believe that this resistance must be overcome due to the promising nature of the approach that is now being called “planetary.” Furthermore, I think that it promises a way to approach the sciences and to develop a dialogue of knowledge and savoirs

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that can be processed from such an intersection with the sciences, especially the biological sciences. This will open up many new fields of study, although such a diversity of exchanges and explorations may produce a methodological instability that may compromise the interdisciplinary dimensions of ecocriticism (Milne 284). The emphasis should be placed primarily on finding solutions and constructive applications. Another important point is the rich reflection on the rhetorical traditions of representation and perception that seek to dissolve the division between culture and nature, subject and object, body and environment; I think especially of the possibility of this rhetorical knowledge along with anthropological and archeological studies, which are more open to social organizations and indigenous grass roots movements. Heise believes strongly that ecocriticism is one of the most exciting and politically urgent advancements in literary and cultural studies today, because ecological issues are situated in a complex intersection of politics, economy, technology, and culture and they allow us to see both negative and positive implications on a global scale, an indispensable commitment to the theory of globalization (“The Hitchhiker’s Guide,” 513-514). One could say that ecocriticism contributed to enriching the North American academic field and that it echoed beyond its walls into the public sphere: in ecological activism, in open-air community experiences, in alternative journals, in the work of filmmakers and artists, in a stronger presence in the media and the state, as well as in nongovernmental organizations. Moreover, ecocriticism has ceased to be perceived as a first-world elitist movement given all the changes brought about by its, at times, difficult alliance with various ecofeminist trends, postcolonial studies, and the momentum of environmental justice movements in and out of the United States. Thus, the role of ecocriticism has become a current topic of unusual commitment. As Rob Nixon reaffirmed to me when I met him at a conference called “Cross-Cultural Ecocritism(s),” one of ecocriticism’s principal challenges is determining “how to broaden the base of environmentally committed people, who integrate perspectives derived from an environmentalism of the poor.” He spoke of a long history around the world where people’s livelihoods are actively engaging in environmental practices that are integral to their cultural survival. A key issue that Nixon explores in his research is how to create a common base for activism without imposing an American idea of what passes for environmentalism, where writing, imagination, and creativity can be powerful forces for opening lines of empathy and understanding across

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cultural boundaries. The truth is that ecocriticism has not connected enough with cultural theory’s idea that identities are constituted of scattered alliances, of mixes and fragments with diverse communities, cultures, and place. Or that precisely these mixes could be crucial to constitute “identities” that would function politically like subjects capable of mutuality and generous empathy. Despite the abundance of its intellectual production, and of its generous capacity to align itself with various forms of political organization, Anglo-Saxon ecocriticism suffers from a very serious problem that is very rarely discussed in public: monolingualism is currently one of ecocriticism’s most serious intellectual limitations. The environmentalist ambition is to think globally, but doing so in terms of a single language is inconceivable – even and especially when that language is a hegemonic one (Heise, “The Hitchhiker’s,” 513).

Heise points this out in her review of the best-articulated theorists of the movement, Lawrence Buell and Greg Garrard. A profound discussion on the theoretical sophistication and analytical subtleness that ecocriticism could gain by a rigorous consideration of literary works and other cultural artifacts in other languages (“Greening English,” 297). I recall my feelings of shock and incitement when I discovered that ecocriticism knew so little about the literary production on nature from non-Anglo Saxon cultures. My continuous efforts to construct a bridge between Hispanic and AngloSaxon ecopoetical production through conference participation and articles lay bare the idea that non-Anglo-Saxon perspectives were buried away in isolation and that needed to change. My collaborations with Patrick Murphy, not only in a special issue of Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s Hispanic Journal about ecology in Latin American literature, but also and especially in his international recompilation of studies and bibliographies of English-language literary production on nature, The Literature of Nature: An International Sourcebook (1998), confirmed a profound interest that happily has ceased to be insignificant in the archives of ecocritical research. One of the manuals that I consulted while writing this project came to serve as a rich source of international ethnic studies despite being in English: The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (2005). Perhaps it is in this new direction and in dialogue with the wellestablished and growing movement in English that we can initiate ecocritical cultural and literary studies in Latin America. Compared to the abundant British and American bibliographic production, critical pieces in Spanish are few indeed. There are few special editions dedicated to ecocriticism in academic journals: Ixquic (August 2000), Anales de la literatura hispanoamericana (2004), Ecozon@ (2010) and the journal

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NERTER (summer-fall 2010). Few, too, are the books on the subject; I can mention only the work of Nial Binns, Steven White, Walter Rojas Pérez, and the ecocritical introduction that Carmen Flys Junquera, José Manuel Marrero Henríquez, and Julia Barella Vigal edited recently. Neither do we see a proliferation of ecocritical projects, courses or seminars such as those that Jorge Marcone offers regularly at Rutgers University. Similarly, blogs on ecocritical topics are few; Alejandro Cartagena’s (Dominican by birth but now has a photography studio in Monterrey, Mexico) and Montserrat López Mujica’s (Spain) blogs come to mind. We would have to turn to grassroots movements. In 2002 in Peru a special issue of the Catholic journal Páginas (Pages) on “Ecology: Caring for Creation” was published. We have to create greater focal points to garner greater visibility for the movement, to bring together various efforts to think ecologically and to refract the global currents into manageable and more significant sectors that work at numerous levels. Ecocriticism as a field of resonances not only opens itself up to future creations, but also serves to revise what has already been done in cultural and literary studies, which can now be reread by nurturing the ecocritical impulse. One example would be Mercedes López Baralt’s presentation in the 2004 seminar “Arguedas and Peru Today.” López Baralt underscored José María Arguedas’s creativity from the perspective of his close ties to the world “with keen delight” through music, “of the matter of which we are all made.” According to López Baralt, those songs “warm up plenitude” and connect intensely, wisely, and lovingly the human and the non-human worlds: the poetry of a huayno (Songs and Tales of the Quechua People, 1949), the songs of the zumbayllu top, of a humming insect (a brilliant passage from Deep Rivers, 1958), the groans of a large pig whose head Arguedas scratched (The Fox from Above and the Fox from Down Below, 1971), and the friendly voice of a pine tree, 120 meters tall (The Fox from Above and the Fox from Down Below, 1971). Why is López Baralt’s beautiful work not listed among the files of ecocriticism? There is no justification for omitting it. Ecocriticism ought to bring to light the already completed work of those who do not consider themselves ecocritics. If I were to prepare an anthology of literary ecocriticism from Latin America, I would immediately think of López Baralt’s analysis of Arguedas’s work, and I would also be much more attentive to other critical works that have already been published, although not necessarily by critics who label themselves as ecocritics. Although ecocriticism does not appear often either in editorial or academic circles, it is an educational thrust, difficult to categorize certainly, whose aim is to develop environmental wisdom. David Orr

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conceptualizes the ecological crisis as a fault line in education. Orr points out that educational institutions represent an unknown leverage point to achieve a more sustainable development, since education up until now has been designed to show students how to conquer nature and industrialize the planet (x). Nevertheless, those who ought to lead this academic change, the local producers, see themselves doubly excluded from the system. They have an almost invisible presence in schools, and basically are being displaced or minimized by food industries and other economic activities derived from corporate trade agreements. In this context, ecocriticism can act as a bridge and encourage a dialogue of saviors, which, instead of being situated outside of classrooms, would link professionals and researchers with various grassroots movements. This inclusive and generous aspect of ecocriticism makes me think about how fragile divisions are, whether national, regional or academic. In time, ecocriticism, along with the ecological commitment of those who practice it, such as Enrique Leff and Timothy Morton, can become a more allinclusive and understanding community, a supportive community that functions as a sort of great library-ayllu. Roberto Bolaño said that the library was the best incarnation of complete generosity, an idea I have confirmed many times, since 1991, for I have lived and continue living from the use of libraries in the United States. For me the library more than any other existing democratic institution is a pillar of the community that concretely articulates our common civic mindset. Therefore, the community to which I want to belong ought to incarnate a collaborative network inspired by ethno-literary works such as José María Arguedas’s and all of those who translated and tended their cultures and their community ties. To belong to such a community is to become tinkuy (an encounter, a bridge) among cultures in order to sow the best seeds in an economy of honesty, patience, and health. Thus, in the spirit of organizing and initiating a dialogue, I wonder what ecocriticism can offer transcontinental cultural studies. Ileana Rodríguez relates Latin American ecocritical perspectives to “the processes of colonization, modernization, exploitation and oppression.” The ecocritical contribution, according to Rodríguez, “resides in reevaluating different transcontinental projects.” In other words, there is no way for us to do away with research from the North and to confront the results with political struggles for justice for the South. But, for Rodríguez, it is also important “to value natural resources as much as social resources.” Indeed, it is high time we establish the centrality of our Earth and of social prominence that derives from the focus on Earth, leaving behind any arrogance that might, for example, fail to see the relevance of the ayllu as

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national and international reserves of support. Moreover, Rodríguez asks us to “evaluate alternative indigenous epistemologies.” This is the realm of anthropology, and there are numerous reasons to continue thinking about interdisciplinary collaborations and to take advantage of projects that are already in progress at all institutions as long as cultures and political profiles are respected. For example, upon analyzing protest movements against transnational corporations of either mineral or petroleum extraction, the tools used by environmental justice theories could reinforce an alliance among those who research and apply advances in biominerology and other sciences in order to combat the environmental crisis. Ecocriticism aims to break up privileged, ethnocentric, and despotic frameworks in order to recognize non-human cultures and to push for the need to rethink our premises about gender and nature. This last objective could be seen as a strategy to overcome, once and for all, the patriarchal traditions ingrained in the Latin American collective unconscious.

Of nature and fruit Gamaliel said in 1963: The true aesthetic capability of the Americas is in the blood of the Indian and thus the way to formulate an American aesthetic is to make America an Indian world;

What does ecocriticism say about this crucial matter? How do we respond to the critique of the myth of the “ecological Indian,” which in my opinion does not take into account indigenous movements? I do not wish to enter into the exclusively indigenous discussion that would imply constraining ecocriticism to one single perspective. José Manuel Marrero Henríquez critiques the possible narrow-mindedness of an ethnocentric typology in his article on Latin American ecocriticism. Open, planetary ecocriticism needs to promote revision, rereadings and reexaminations of the most diverse cultural artifacts, from the cave paintings in Altamira, to Gamaliel Churata’s polyglot disorders, Victor Erice’s films, Ugo Carrillo Cavero’s Quechua poetry, Eduardo Subirats’s proposal, my biologist friend Marcos Milla’s narrative projects on the cellular scale, Alejandro Jaime’s interventions and intersections with disparate landscapes, Vicente Fajardo’s granite sculptures, various artists’ visual experiments, Alberto Blanco’s and Gioconda Belli’s children’s books, and the essays about Santiago Kovadloff’s suffering—and onward to any such work from any place from any time.

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Given such a vast corpus, the task of comparing regions, continents, and different worlds is urgently necessary. Nevertheless, comparisons cannot be sought until the basis for the ecological imagination is established with whatever is on hand. Such a beginning is not a bad idea. How can we generate interest in the ecological and in the value of a longterm vision of our relation with the rest of the planet? A reader’s guide will not suffice, nor a book here and there. Nor can it be achieved through a cultural campaign. It is a matter of a general summons and open dialogue, but, as I mentioned, from the reality of what we have on hand. In spite of all this, Churata’s observation about the blood of the American ancestral peoples is a good start to think ecologically about our continent. The idea of the cultural heritage of the potato could serve as a perfect model of the diversity we need to defend us from the threat of monocropping. In that way we could dismantle biotechnology’s perverse key—genetic engineering at the service of monopolies like Monsanto’s. We could consider the potato’s point of view as an instructive introduction to the natural history of the dominant imagination, as Michael Pollan does in The Botany of Desire. Other American ancestral legacies that should be studied can lead us along the routes of the economies that Vandana Shiva calls living. Literature also records them. Niall Binns recognizes the importance of the search for harmony with the natural world in ecocritical discourse and stresses the search for the golden age in the images taken from the indigenous world that Ernesto Cardenal creates in his poetry. He also stresses this same aspect in the work of Mapuche poets Leonel Lienlaf and Elicura Chihuailaf. It is also critical to highlight Steven White’s exhaustive study of Pablo Antonio Cuadra’s work, as well as that of other Nicaraguan poets, precisely in this aspect of drinking in indigenous myths and stories about trees. With respect to Andean literature, it is important to add other names along with José María Arguedas, Gamaliel Churata, William Hurtado de Mendoza, Eleodoro Vargas Vicuña, and Edgardo Rivera Martínez. Ecocriticism would inspire a rereading and revalorization of this Andean literature. And it would not have to start from scratch. Groups like the editors of Mar de Soroche, a journal from Bolivia and Chile, express an inclination toward the future, while exchanging a clichéd obsession with the past, for a rebirth that creatively and vigorously resists monolingualism. There is also a list of authors whose work I do not discuss that will expand this creative vein of the current culture of disorder and mixtures: Mapuches, Mayas, Quechuas, Aymaras, Achuars, these errant polyphonies open up the field of literary and cultural studies in our Americas.

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It seems to me to be very positive to take into account this aspect of ecocriticism that is going to have to be present in increasingly relevant comparative impulses; ecocriticism also comes from other continents and other cultures. If some may wonder how and where cultural artifacts ought to be compared, through which historic moments, regions, languages, and cultures, we must begin to deepen our questions and to think about what those comparisons offer in order to respond to the most pressing strains on our environment. That is why ecocriticism avoids narrow ideological perspectives; it does not fall into the trap of obsessively trying to force a certain point of view, but rather proclaims itself as a planetary movement. As Anthony Lioi asserts: “There is no difference between the subject of theory and the cultural object, between professors and students” (755). What a difficult reconciliation between the planetary push and the pull of the local! The awareness that quite often the local is simply squashed and disdained by the drive of economic progress makes it difficult to conceive of planetary dimensions that do not tend toward exclusion or elimination of the local. It is useless to lecture without taking into account the student’s reality, which implies paying attention to our natural surroundings. Perhaps out of all the theories and methodologies that are available to us, ecocriticism presents itself as a limitless and stimulating empathy for minor subjects: the marginalized, the “losers,” those who have been crushed by the immoral and cruel system of exclusions and divisions. And this included bioluminescent mushrooms (Mycena luxaeterna), bacteria, disoriented bees, our new neighbors, sea turtles with undigested plastic base in their stomachs—yes, the bags that I so thoughtlessly toss in the trash or that are carried off by the wind and that wind up in the stomach of some defenseless animal without my knowing about it. And if in some way we could know and sense that bag’s trip, perhaps we could imagine a bit about this dark side of life, how destructive it is and how we are accomplices in its most heinous processes. Then, and only then, can we change those processes. Is it a mystery that would explain our environmental disasters? We form part of unseen currents that foster slow violence. In order for ecocriticism to succeed in reconstructing the categorical demarcation that we have been accustomed to imposing between nature and culture, we must internalize ecological well-being and honor friendship among species, environments, and our bodies on a daily basis. It all depends on the type of alliances that we are willing to cultivate.

ECOFEMINISM

According to Gloria da Cunha-Giabbai, ecofeminism is a movement that has distinct philosophical, political, and religious orientations, all of which are based on the conviction that patriarchy’s oppression of women is a prototype for the oppression that nature suffers as a result of maledominated society (51). In an excellent introduction to ecofeminism in literary studies, Patrick D. Murphy maintains that ecofeminism is the most adequate means of attaining a fair concept of the Other, insofar as the struggle against oppression has to consider the relation between humanity and nature (7). Ecofeminism is thus the intersection between two critical approaches, the ecological and the feminist, which together function as a liberating mechanism on both the social and the political levels for those who deplore denigration of nature and of women (McAndrew, 367). In a similar vein, but from a completely different perspective, Felix Guattari concludes that “[o]ur Survival on this planet is not only threatened by environmental damage but by a degeneration in the fabric of social solidarity and in the modes of psychical life, which must literally be reinvented” (20). Guattari further explains his critical position by adding: “We cannot hope for an amelioration in the living conditions of the human species without a considerable effort to improve the feminine condition” (21). For Nelly Richard, the feminine is a virtuality, and it is of interest to anyone who sustains a relationship of non-conformity with the dominant (as masculine) or with the masculine (as dominant) or to a subject whose role in this scene of discourses is minor, which is to say analogous to the feminine role and in solidarity with women’s oppression (221). Greta Gaard has made critical review of ecofeminism, insisting on its importance within ecocriticism and responding to key objections to, and limitations of, the movement (2010). In minor discourse studies, I find the ecofeminist perspective particularly promising for its attention to antihierarchical values of openness, of prevention and care, of harmony among all beings. Above all, without attention to the relations of complementarity, it would be impossible within a concrete cultural context to take over the body again without falling into the traditional dualisms of strong/weak, masculine/feminine, superior/inferior, human/nature. Without preambles, this is the principal reason for which women in Latin America will have to

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undertake their own education. Dualisms such as those cited above uphold patriarchy’s sexual and emotional framework. As da Cunha-Giabbai astutely observes while speaking of the inequalities occasioned by industrial and technological progress, the ecofeminist perspective represents a notable effort since it is “only by means of a prior transformation of thought and behavior of the being that provoked the inequality could the normal functioning of the planet be reestablished” (51). A means of freeing oneself from any form of oppression is eliminating any trace of institutionalized hierarchy, including any which may be targeting nature. Failure to see the basic connection between distinct forms of domination and oppression has helped perpetuate abuses. At least that is the open and multiple perspective of a reading of “The Mysterious Metaphor of your Body,” a short story by Nikkei author Doris Moromisato (Peru, b. 1962). This story could be considered an example of the construction of an alternate feminine subjectivity. The innovation is in its ecological and social vision of the human being. The feminine is a repressed voice and potentiality not only in the woman’s body, but also in its relation to the social body and its concomitant separation from the natural world. It is a process of corporeal learning whose unnamable dimensions begin to be discovered within an anticolonialist logic. The experience of the feminine as an autodidactic process has a clear function for social ecology and ecofeminism: love for nature from love for the human species. Moromisato’s story strategically occludes this loving center and surrounds it in a biological discourse in which the feminine voice, challenging the established symbolic order, embarks on an existential learning process. The use of a biological vocabulary serves to frame the realm of sensations and to restore human capacity for feeling at the biological level in conjunction her collective ideals. Thus, the senses are oriented toward the natural. Thanks to this sensory ability, the subject can liberate herself in her imagination from oppressive ideological determinants and construct an ethical political alliance among her corporal sensations, which also form part of the social and natural world, along with individual feelings. This overcoming of an individuality that is separate from nature and the collective is a type of return to primordial sources of collective life without being unaware of their complexity. Such feminine learning assumes the experience of desire as outside of the logic of the heterosexual matrix, which has benefitted the masculine ego, insofar as sexual identities have been internalized as something rigid and controlled by masculine domination. It is thus important to listen to the feminine voice for what types of alterity it presents. My aim is not to

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put labels on the process—such a scholarly activity normally leads to a loss of perspective. I am interested, however, in reflecting a bit on the unexplored potential in the relation between literature and ecology. It is not a question of a story focused on mere self-affirmation of a marginalized sexuality. It is a tale of doing away with the tales that are told in order to not allow oneself to be told, to separate from the social body and from nature by means of the patriarchal ideological sanction. It is a story that links bodies in a transversal way, which, according to Guattari, implies a change in mentality and a new art of living (20). The social, the natural, the aesthetic join forces to create a subjectivity that enriches itself in relation to the world in a fluid and continuous fashion (21). For Patrick D. Murphy: [t]he reinvention of nature depends upon the recovery of the wild, the wild within people, and especially the wild within women, because in the past two centuries, as mechanization and urbanization have reduced family inhabitation of the land, women have been defined more and more in terms relating to domestication, repression, and, most recently, the control and structuring of reproduction. (160).

One of the greatest contributions made by social ecology and ecofeminism is their understanding of a becoming of the spirit and of personality as a continuation of natural evolution. In the story “The Mysterious Metaphor of Your Body,” one of environmentalism’s principal critiques is formulated: the liberation of the human imagination from the destructive and colonizing effects of transnational mechanization and reification (Clark, 351), by means of a reconfiguration of what it means to be human and to be part of a totality that is multiple and changing, transformative and regenerative (Murphy, 160). I would argue that the story functions as a mediator in order to deepen the understanding and feeling of the corporeal experience, the foundation for intellectual activities, within a framework that is free of institutionally hierarchized sanctions. This ecological perspective leads us to the erotics of environmental rationality, to a logic of passions, to a politics of the imagination (Clark, 352). To apply this perspective, we have to cultivate our intelligence, harness our powers of communication, develop our ability to organize institutionally and enjoy a relative freedom based on instincts (Bookchin, 360). It is also necessary to recognize the epistemological demands of ecocritics such as Ursula Heise and Greg Garrard, to not ignore the sciences, especially biosemiotics, risk theory, environmental history, and the philosophy of biology.

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Moromisato’s poetic short story endeavors to narrate in an emblematic fashion freedom from dominant codes through the voice of a public school student who comes from a very poor neighborhood in the great city of Lima. It is a question of a voice that manages to outwit hierarchies and discursive controls at several levels. At the social level, the protagonist eludes pre-established roles; with regard to her gender identity, the vegetable metaphors serve to protect her “otherness”—that being who is different from the patriarchal, romantic norm—from repression and the rigid and masculinist definitions of woman. At the epistemological level, the knowledge generated by the ecological analogies avoids dualist and reductionist conceptions. This voice, a poetic refuge framed by italics in the text, winds up being a bridge to the natural world, a path toward the exploration of the senses; in short, a way of reformulating the repressed existence mired in the paralyzing discourses of conformity and masculine morality. Monica, the protagonist, employs a discourse that allows her to access an identity that is different from patriarchal models, impossible for her school girl companions to decode, but which resists subordinating itself to the dominant codes of class, gender and knowledge. For Enrique Leff, ecofeminism forges a theoretical space that combines the symbolic order and desire in the genesis of the subject with the relation among being, knowing and power. The interesting thing about Moromisato’s text is that can be considered an exercise in the rethinking of the feminine subject as a being in constitutive relation with the world she inhabits. To quote Leff, an ecofeminist reflection leads to a hermeneutics of the subject: to rescue the “ecological being” from her life imaginaries, in her forms of territorialization, her encounters with cultural otherness, in a diverse world, in an ontology and a politics of difference. (“El desvanecimiento del sujeto,” [“The Subject Vanishes”] 168)

In Moromisato’s story, Mónica’s individual, combative consciousness transforms into an expansion of her “I” as a collective consciousness in which the human, the feminine, and the natural are all configured as a relation of vital convergence to continue building a life free from oppression. In Leff’s words, Moromisato not only reinvents a collective identity in the era of environmental complexity, but also provides us with an interpretation of the process of the constitution of that new collective subject. The literary text (the story itself as well as the text that the character within the story writes and reads aloud) can be read as that subject’s territory. The reinscription of being is posited as one strategy for

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liberating silenced, fixed, repressed subjectivity. “The Mysterious Metaphor of Your Body” begins with a text in italics: Yesterday I descended the center of your body, gliding silently along the line that time and all the seasons traced upon you.

As the text progresses, the reader realizes that these words belong to the text that Mónica wrote in her notebook; it is a paper that she is writing for a botany class. Her zeal for the notebook piques her friend Brunela’s curiosity. The story of their friendship, nevertheless, does much more than develop this plot line (the story of two women) inscribed in the context of poverty and violence; the extraordinary description of the sensual games between their two bodies during recess also indicates a rearticulation of the control limited by the discourses of power, which in the protagonist’s erotic feminine experience transversally projects the aesthetic dimension to the realms of the political and ethical. That is why this relationship with Brunela is not reduced to the personal level, yet the words in italics at the opening of the story frame its material and cosmic condition. For example, we see Mónica’s skill in interpreting metaphors. When the teacher asks Brunela what Góngora meant in the line “yawns of the earth,” she has no idea, but luckily, the recess bell saves her. “‘Easy,’ answers Mónica while she opens her notebook, ‘he was referring to caves.’” (95). Mónica’s ability to understand the play of metaphorical language resonates with the text of her botany paper as a way of channeling her instincts and projecting them onto bodily states in order to feel the consciousness of a joyous, lively being. Hers is no ordinary science paper, however, it is a text full of sensuality and references to the eroticism of feminine bodies, that is intercalated by the story of two school-aged girls during a moment of violent popular repression (“the hammering of the machine guns;” “the vendors’ desperate screams” [99]). In Mónica’s paper, “Taxonomy of a Bromeliad and the Effects of One Raindrop on the Leaves in the Subtropical Rainforest” (100), we see the importance of these “roots” because natural bodies (the leaf, the drop, her body) are all intertwined in desire, in a corporal and verbal eroticism that stems from respect, ritual and a reclaiming of their own open, joyful space that goes beyond androcentric identifications. This space is not only reduced to each individual body. Brunela is, of course, surprised and reenacts in her corporal and verbal language repressive mechanisms: “wrenching the notebook from Mónica’s hands, she reads the contents and reacts: “What the hell is this, girl?” (99). When Mónica reads the text out loud, all the other schoolgirls remain silent while the teacher admonishes her “What you’ve just read is nothing but vulgar pornography.’ With

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severity in her voice, she orders her, “I want to see your parents tomorrow” (100). Mónica’s loneliness and her lack of confidence in sharing the transgressive text with her friend condemn the protagonist’s transversal consciousness under a sign of repression, being silenced and put in her place (“they are going to expel you”). Despite it all, her text exists, and it is a sign of the transversal nature of her consciousness, but also an act of refusal to fit into the economic rationality that until now has been the subject’s dominant hermeneutics. With respect to the text as the territory of an alternate subject, we have the body’s sensations, which help the protagonist escape the confines of the school’s repression; these bodily sensations work in concert with an environmental rationality: The aroma of the rocoto pepper and the onions, of the parsley and the freshly washed rue, the chamomile’s and garlic’s firmness overtook her, enveloping her like a maternal blanket, making her feel better. (94)

The contrast between the text in italics and the story’s text is apparent. We can easily recognize connections based principally on corporal states and sensations. Love and the land are entwined in an erotics that is fragmented and disrupted by discourses of power. The lesson is interrupted by a teachers’ protest that is violently put down. This is a key moment in the story because it indicates the awareness of the story’s historical context and possible future developments: it is the beginning of Alberto Fujimori’s presidency, whose shock in his first month in office (August 1990) had as its immediate consequence a drop in teachers’ salaries by 20%. And with this fall in family income, there was a concomitant increase in school dropout rates. In Moromisato’s story, the walls of the school cannot separate the social reality from an awareness of the connections to odors, tastes, and traditions. For example, at the beginning of the story, the men and women who carry “sweet cakes, plaster packages with the image of the baby Jesus” (92) on their backs come down from the mountains. In the school’s patio, the curious girls watch the chaos and repression in the streets of Virarte, and their euphoric bodies hear and smell “barks, detonations, and an acidic odor that begins to irritate the students’ eyes and noses” (97). At the end of the story, when classes are over and each girl picks up her bag, they hear: The women vendors behind the wall quickly collect their blankets, baskets and pieces of the baby Jesus all strewn about on the ground, to begin their long, wearying walk back up into the hills. (101)

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What was once sweet becomes acidic, and the images of the baby Jesus are in fragments, giving metaphoric shape to the sense of loss and desperation. Returning to the text in italics, the discursive dimension of the alternate subject is an emblem of birth, with metaphors of the social body and the concrete body; the first person feminine is a drop of water, an active, desiring body, a scrambling of rigid boundaries and limits in constant flux: “…it was as if everything were beginning, as if the world were reconciled to our embrace, as if the Earth were coming alive again…” (91). The story does not end with the heightened tone of the corporal metaphors in italics, but its location near the end is symptomatic, given that the protagonist seeks pleasure in reading in order to return to passages that relieve the pain of separation and fragmentation. Making a leap, transforming the book into a joyful voice. Manipulating the text in a ritual way, fragmenting it in order to initiate anew other rewritings, alternatives in which the poetic breath of corporal references do not exhaust themselves in a single representation, but rather are elevated from experience. The aesthetic is not a cowardly escape from an unjust social reality, but rather a way to challenge environmental rationality. It is a question of creating and developing modes of being never before experienced, new systems of values, a renewed lust for life, a new gentleness toward nature, generations, ethnic groups, sexes, and especially a new relation to the feminine. The text in italics is not a representation of the imperative of some concrete ecological feminist movement; it is a testimony of the affective contagion that leads to an affirmation of existence, separating domains and elements from their tasks and objectives that were previously codified in order to achieve transversal cuts and to leave behind centers, restrictions, and colonization. It is a matter of a hermeneutical perspective of ecofeminism that is not reduced to an individualism that is identifiable from hegemonic norms. The story’s protagonist knows something that she encoded in her text, in her creative work, as a beginning of her experience with love as a practice of freedom: her love for the text is a metaphor for corporal love, for cosmic love as a way of living freely. When Mónica reveals her secret by reading aloud her botany assignment, she knows that she will suffer repression (100). There is a metatextual mechanism in the story that serves as an emblem of the reawakened ego: the memory of the poetic word, the same words that codify domination, permit abuse, cause separations and multiply punishment. It is a dangerous, but necessary, memory in order to experience an alternative space free of injustice yet filled with pleasure. Perhaps the following fragment from the italicized

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text condenses the erotic, intense tone of the space where consciousness connects with pleasure through writing: Yesterday I entered your body through the densest, most forbidden route; you, tied to the towering, lush lupuna tree which shelters you, I emerging from your sky, from the hot air of the morning to plunge into your ferocious, ferocious center . . . (94)

This is an insistent flow throughout the text that emphasizes the need to counter social and economic crises with vital, organic experience. If all of the texts in italics were collected in one passage, they would comprise a poetic text whose symbolic and verbal flow would imply an erotic reading. Simultaneously, they imply a recuperation of life in concert with the natural world that develops an environmental social sense. As Leff asserts: When facing the knot of determinations that subject the subject, the subject frees himself by rethinking the world to construct another, in the construction of new existential meanings that embody in his being, that dissolve the knot of anxiety, that reopen the will to ability, to be able to love, to be able to live, from the knowledge of the life conditions in the world he inhabits. (“El desvanecimiento,” 186)

In this sense, it is interesting to observe that the immediate frame of Moromisato’s story is an anthology entitled Skin-deep. 15 Versions of Eroticism in Peru. Additionally, in the anthology’s biographical information we learn that the author is the founder and director of the Center for Women’s Communication and Culture (COMYC) and the cultural coordinator for the National Network for Ecological Action in Peru (RENACE-PERU). Moreover, Moromisato organized “Blue Planet: Poets for Earth,” a poetry reading whose manifesto highlighted the value of the word in its “capacity to reconcile elements and energies, to summarize Creation in symbols and keys. . . .” The play of correspondences and emotional vibration of the words in the story, especially the fragments in italics, underscores the importance of a loving and aesthetic ethics that gives direction to political visions and radical aspirations. As bell hooks affirm, without that ethics we will be seduced frequently, in one way or another, into continuing our alliance with systems of domination: imperialism, sexism, racism or classism (243). Resistance to succumbing to such seduction comes from creative textual practice. Moromisato accumulates, in a subtle, harmonious way, strange words in the italicized text, all of which are tied to the natural world as signifiers of a social body that succeeds in transcending its traditional

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divisions. That vocabulary is not only scientific knowledge as codified in an encyclopedia, but also is a verbal eroticism that generates, in turn, other eroticisms. Among many words, we find the names of tree or plants (ferns, lupuna), their parts (stem, leaves), and also their interactions and contexts (dew, butterflies, storms lichen, oxygen). All of these words put into circulation diverse meanings, from the literal to that new vocabulary of cosmic, transversal love that reaches into unnamed zones of the social and human body. For example, according to an environmental science dictionary, a lichen is: A plant composed of a fungus in a symbiotic relationship with algae. It grows in the form of a leaf or bark on rocks, trees, etc. (Durrenberger, 138).

It is evident that each word, such as “lichen,” unleashes an endless chain of biological associations underscored by their chaotic enumeration. This responds to an aesthetic plane that does not deny its ties to the political, social, environmental or psychic planes. The biological impregnates the other planes without dissolving the individual or her cultural identity. The individual uses the metaphor of writing as an image of the body and of being, an integral part of the natural order that does not devour it. Instead of disappearing, the subject interprets, reinvents itself, and makes sense of the post-human frame. The real threat is the patriarchal symbolic order countered here by the liberating biological order. With the help of biology, the oppressed subject says what cannot be said; it is recorded in a notebook, read aloud, rewritten without limitations beyond the traditional representations that prescribe the feminine. It is a question of an experience of the feminine voice that creates its own space, enriching its relation to the world in a continuous mode (Guattari, 21). “The Mysterious Metaphor of Your Body” shows us the difficult experience of learning the intimate function of producing a subjectivity that is free from fixed, androcentric definitions, thus challenging our dualist preconceptions about the human condition in relation to the natural world. Perhaps Denise Arnold and Juan de Dios Yapita’s anthropological study of the songs to animals from a community of Aymara shepherds in Oruro (Río de vellón, río de canto [River of Fleece, River of Song], 1998) points to a new research direction: a cultural paradigm controlled by women. Their extensive study shows a complex knowledge of the social life that the women in the Qaqachaka ayllu incorporate in their weavings and songs. It is a shame that these living Andean systems of knowledge and wisdom are largely ignored today, especially given their close tie to ecofeminism’s political and epistemological themes. We must remember

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that in Moromisato’s story, it is a few Andean women that represent political resistance to the oppressing patriarchal system. The poetic voice of a feminine identity is expressed by means of a strategy of disintegration of traditional roles whose greatest expressive strength is found in nature’s powers and forms. Recent Latin American poetic production displays a great diversity of forms of feminine self-affirmation. According to Susana Reizs, what lends cohesion to the majority of women writers from the Hispanic world is “the determination to redefine femininity in their own terms and by cementing a collective identity founded on the perception of differences and disadvantages” (22). Feminine self-representation is achieved by means of a strategy of (dis)integration of traditional gender roles in a model of relations of interdependence with nature. By traditional roles, I mean the representation of woman as the object of dominant masculine desire, which has been described as “patriarchal bias,” “the master(‘s) voice,” and a “programming of women for melancholy” among other descriptions (Reisz, 36-37). According to Reisz, some of the most powerful obsessions in feminine thought and dialogue are “the body’s glories and miseries, physical beauty and its decline, the ghosts of aging, the affirmation of a purely sexual pleasure, the conflictive relations between physical pleasure and affective satisfaction” (23). I argue that these perspectives can vary to the extent that such “obsessions” are overcome or confronted by ecological considerations, and this is what I would like to examine in the rest of my essay. Gioconda Belli’s early poetry (1948) gestured toward social and ecological liberation. Nevertheless, the later poems (Scandal of Honey, 2009) reveal an awareness of physical decline and a cybernetic confusion that underscore her fading enthusiasm for activism. Steven White studies this weakening of the ecological critique in Belli’s narrative and poetry in his book Arando en el aire. La ecología en la poesía y la música de Nicaragua [Plowing the Air. Ecology in the Poetry and Music of Nicaragua]. White asserts that Belli’s poetry appropriates nature in an anthropocentric manner and that it neither employs a rich botanical language nor displays an understanding of Nicaragua’s bio-climatic complexity (377). I find those combative feminine characteristics from the past to be a product of simplification. More important than the exaltation that of and by itself can occur in a poetic reading, that in fact occurs in a great deal of her criticism, is the fact that the feminine subject refuses to define itself according to patriarchal authority and, moreover, to separate itself from “natural” terrains that tend to be conceived within the nature/culture dualism that is categorically accepted. Reading the books

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that the poet herself compiled in the volume Woman’s Eye I found a recourse to nature not only as a frame for her search, but also as a metaphor and favorable terrain to experience feelings and sensations that would make space for a less rigid feminine “I,” one who was relatively free from patriarchal determinations. For example, in several poems from her first book, Sobre la grama [Upon the Grass], motherhood is defined as the teaching of an ethics of care, and not as a desire for possession and domination. Her poetic discourse resists defining maternity according to patriarchal stereotypes; in its generative function, all the figures of maternal self-affirmation come from nature: the body is an extension of maternal care and is captured in “flatlands” (“Motherhood II,” 33); that extension is a love that unites that extended body with “animals and plants” (“To Melissa, My Daughter,” 41). Greta Gaard insists on a distancing from patriarchal ideology, which is connected to various forms of racial, gender, and social oppression whose fundamental distinction between the “I” and the Other allows for an atomistic and separate individual. Nevertheless, the interconnection of the subject is a feminine characteristic that is more closely related to an ethical system of responsibility and care than an ethical system based on rights and justice. What seems quite striking to me in Belli’s poetry is the invocation of the masculine to express an ethical system of responsibilities that are based on amorous relations. Belli’s insistence throughout her work on the exaltation of the amorous subject has a sense of interconnection. This is not poetry that isolates the female subject and underscores her autonomy. There is a melting of the closed compartments surrounding women’s obsessions. The self-descriptions always reveal a dynamic and interdependent force in tune with nature: “My blood magnetized with nature” (I am filled with pleasure,” Upon the Grass, 4); “I feel like I am a forest” (“My blood,” Upon the Grass, 49); “I am your untamed gazelle” (“I am the Woman Who Loves You,” Line of Fire, 109); “I have to be reborn / strong like the ceibo trees, / beautiful like the storm” (“Compost for Growing,” Thunder, 202). This natural imaginary sadly does not emanate from botanical images from daily life, but rather from an abstract ethical paradigm. Therefore, in her poetry we never come upon the “Mother Earth” stereotype, but rather a symbolic construction of a fraternal alliance with nature. In this sense, the invocation to the loving masculine subject is articulated in the dynamic of natural interdependent elements, like in the prose poem “Under the Rainbow” (Line of Fire, 131), in which the poetic “I” collaborates with the union of “land and sand,” while the masculine presence is “warmth” and “gentle wind” engaging in the activity of making “a little path,” “sowing flowers, little stones under

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the multicolored rainbow that triumphantly appeared after the last rain.” Beyond the distortion that the individual point of view can create, the vision of the feminine subject in plenitude and interconnection exceeds the anguish that seeks to paralyze the feminine in relation to domination. These searches make vital and loving use of nature but without the indispensible precision to found the ecological perspective beyond any sort of individualizing function. This condition of being a consciousness divided into two biotic zones, as White notes to contextualize Belli’s idealization of Nicaragua from the Unites States (388-389), only signals a weakness in ecological representation. This female consciousness situates itself within an ethical system of responsibilities that is expressed by means of a natural imaginary, as we can clearly see in “May” (Thunder, 205): Kisses do not dry up Like malinches, Nor do husks grow on my arms; I am always in bloom From this internal rain, Like the green patios of May And I laugh because I love the wind and the clouds And songbirds’ passage, Although I may be entwined in my memories, Covered in ivy like some old walls, I keep believing in hushed whispers, The power of wild horses The sea gulls’ winged message. I believe in my song’s innumerable roots.

The feminine self-affirmation would be stronger and more effective if the poem included more specific and precise imagery. This reveals an expressive weakness of the ecological perspective even though it does not annul the ethical character of the political utopia that Belli formulates in her poem “Dreamweavers” (From Eve’s Rib, 296-299). The construction of the self is reformulated as “the construction of a world of butterflies and nightingales” (297). This “world of sugar and wind” is a delicate terrestrial song of community yearning that the reader has difficulty separating from the mobile, changing subject who is always attentive to connections. According to Laura Duhan Kaplan this ethics of care supports patriarchy. The refusal to define that subject with the word love stems from an articulation that is broader than feminine identity, one that is not trapped in the individualist and patriarchal illusion. Thus, the decisive importance of

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nature’s restorative energies even though the lack of ecological accuracy in the poetic images makes us think about how complex it is to attempt to approach ecofeminism without the requisite environmental knowledge. Chilean poet Lilianet Brintrup (b. 1948) formulates important questions to understand contemporary female experience. Her poetry offers a feeling of desolation in the feminine subject as an insistent lack of connection that creates the urgency of experiencing a search for union with nature. But this need for connection has a disturbing effect that comes not only from our alienation from nature, but also from our assimilation of patriarchal codes. In her first book, On Solid Ground, the dismantling of patriarchal roles is formulated from an explicit exile in the United States, far from the places that mean anything to the subject (the South, her childhood, etc.). All of these disconnects reach a heartrending force precisely because they are formulated in relation to nature; the feminine “I” not only refuses to play by patriarchy’s rules, but also remains in painful isolation. It is a feminine subject that resists living by romantic coordinates; she therefore suffers from the absence of that longed-for connection: “One is far from everything / after traveling three thousand miles. / That is why I no longer look at the moon.” (“I. About My Autobiography,” XI, 34); “Something tugs on my hair / to prolong my orgasm / that’s coming and deafening like a bison stampede / crazed by the lack of love / that’s coming with the condemning / sound of the exterminating eruption / of all the volcanoes of the Andes Mountains” (“II. From Pure Love,” XI, 71); “the air blew in my ear / and made my feet tremble, tied to your earth, / site of sacking in which we were imbibed by a wind / run through by collapsing words” (“III. Mistaken Horizons,” IV, 83). In these examples, the absolute isolation of the poetic subject is underscored, along with the power of the heartbreaking images of loneliness. Perhaps the insistent image of the feet that walk upon “solid ground” emblematizes a strategy of feminine reterritorialization that cannot seem to find sure footing. In “Notes on a Bird’s Eye View of the U.S.,” the only thing the subject has left is “the crunch of fallen leaves in the night underneath my feet suffering from altitude sickness,” a series of connections that are only held by the word in exile: It is the silent maternal shadow in front of the pot that speaks. It is the whisper of boiling water in my treasured teapot saved from the winter’s imprudent winds. . . . It is one of my feet tripping in the middle of the living room on the back of a mountain lion trapped by the lianas extending from the corridors of the impenetrable forest of my vegetable house. It is a silo filled with dried plants fenced in by my eight-year old animal. It is I, learning to play. The word was delayed in saying something… (101)

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Also in the last poem, “Report on a Trip Through the U.S.,” the feeling of being disconnected is transformed in an instant of communion with nature: some nearby deer are observed. Instead of referring to the violent relation that tends to be established with animals in order to exert dominance over them, the poetic “I” proposes a relation of care and respect. In her second book, Love and Chaos, Brintrup insists on dismantling patriarchal roles concerning love. The natural imaginary appears infrequently and serves to confront the contradictions that the feminine subject assumes as part and parcel of the dynamic with the masculine, as we see in poem IV: Man’s beloved misery Grows worse. Compassion Of barefoot mares That displace me from my trot Every time I extend my words So that they love me. Man’s feared destitution Grows worse. (14)

The poetic “I’s” sense of orphanhood is underscored through a lack of transparency that at times can seem counterproductive to the union for which she yearns. Another example is poem LXV: “Only that / blue being was stronger / than nature” (86). Her third book, The Natural Book, centers its poetic discourse in territories that are inhabited by trees and seas in an attempt to endure the “natural” orphanhood that the feminine “I” verifies in the polluted, destroyed world. The ecological consciousness of the feminine “I” is more evident, and also serves to dismantle any attempt to assimilate patriarchal codes. In the first section, “On Things of the Earth,” in the first and longest poem, an upheaval in the feminine “I” is suggested through the image of the coyote. It is a delicate reflection on women’s desire to be loved, and on the irreparable, painful disagreements between the sexes, which as Reisz observes, “until now great poetry has only registered in an erratic way and in the capacity of exception” (187). This image of the coyote is borrowed from Native American oral literature; it is a cultural loan (unconscious?) that does not ignore the trickster’s heroic and antiheroic roots, nor its timelessness. Gary Snyder notes that the coyote has survived as an incredibly rich symbol and that native traditions have distinguished a

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series of contradictory characteristics in the coyote/man: always traveling, truly stupid, astute, playful, funny, stingy, quick, at the right place at the right time, scandalous. Yet the coyote has also done much good, like obtaining fire for humans (149, 161). But unlike the epic version of how the West was won, it is woman who leaves behind her home and her men. The only thing in common with the Western tradition is the orphanhood of the white subject in search of a place to live. The interesting thing about the coyote figure is that it is an unfinished connection, a frame for the disconnect with the millennial history of the first inhabitants of the desert who experienced a harmony with a place and a way of life that did not deplete natural resources—and thus it was generation after generation. According to Snyder, the coyote is almost like a guardian, a spirit protector. Brintrup not only recognizes the complexity of the figure, but also takes advantage of its trickster nature, the theatricality implied in learning to act according to strict gender roles and society’s rules. In the poem, the poet-narrator explains the coyote’s sorrow, his howl. The poetic “I” possesses masks, like the coyote figure, and that is why she recounts the rending of the natural figures in order to express her own heartbreaking sorrow. The description of the feminine “I’s” shattering is exaggerated by a comparison with the repeated figures of the coyote’s and man’s predatory, violent acts. Nevertheless, a subtle process of metamorphosis shows the coyote without sexual identity, without a pack, existing in a horrible isolation that is exacerbated by “the dark bite of man.” The coyote becomes a wary feminine “I” that survives thanks to nature. Traveling from one world to another allows the undone “I” to be through love. In poem IV, trees and reader share the experience of being alive by fostering ties created by the mutual generosity that frees us from the logic of waste: Never a gesture of rejection Never a bad shadow Never a misunderstood gesture Neither from its wood nor its sap.

In her collection of brief poems, the trees—at times figures of the fundamental disconnect caused by nature’s destruction, at times simple witnesses to life—help generate a learning of non-being. The opening that is achieved by playing the fool is a combination of not worrying about race, of not proclaiming one’s own triumph, of not accepting norms as sacred, and of finding ambiguity and dual meanings as a fount of wisdom and delight. The dissolving of the feminine “I” is carried out through an alliance with nature:

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I ally myself with the rest of the waters Of the world, I look today finally at the sea Because I imagine it Giving us everything and for everyone In the thousands of years in which I will not live.

The poetic proposal here suggests that the feminine voice face the contradictions and sorrows that accompany a long-term perspective. A collective voice is formulated that, nonetheless, does not cease to be feminine. Nature is also an important point of reference that some Latin American poets assume as a key to reading. For example, the feminine subject is transformed in nature in Ana María Rodas’s (Guatemala, b. 1937) erotic poetry, in Claribel Alegría’s laments (Nicaragua, b. 1924), in Luz Lescure’s (Panama, b. 1951) “animal nostalgia,” in Verónica Volkow’s (Mexico, b. 1955) roads, in Dolores Castro’s (Mexico, b. 1924) sunflower lights, and in Dulce María Loynaz’s (Cuba, 1902-1997) incessant search for strength and a space of her own. Many fine poets define the amorous subject through a similar strategy of assimilating animal and vegetable components, in order to create an alternative to the social medium and preestablished roles, like María Fernanda Espinosa in her Amazon poems and Esthela Calderón in her ethnobotanical poems. Steven While extols this last writer for exemplifying two notions of ecocriticism: biophilia, or love for biological life, and topophilia, or love for the place where one dwells. In my opinion, Breath of Vital Air (Ethnobotanical Poems) ought to be read as a timely model of environmental wisdom that extends the importance of poetry as a contemporary social medium beyond the local level. Unlike the other poets I mentioned, Calderón’s work demands a very precise knowledge of plants and their names in order for her poems to be truly understood. Feminine self-affirmation is, simultaneously, an exercise in ethnobotanical environmental wisdom. The precision and vigor of the images in her poems is clear from reading “The One I Could Have Been,” in which vegetable images abound: laurel trees, Pochote trees, gooseberries, poppies, lianas, and mahogany. I invite the reader to read and reread Steven White’s magisterial version of this poem published in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas (2012). The poem’s “compositionism” is not so obvious, but it represents a decisive moment in Latin American poetry: the incorporation of environmental wisdom into aesthetic experience. How is the feminine subject going to free herself from the prison of traditional knowledge? Here we have an initial approach to an ecofeminist perspective that is much less rhetorical and

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more promising: the convivial perspective that is based on the constant commitment of work and vigilance that is not intimidated by suffering or any other obstacles, and that grows increasingly vaster through empathy toward the Other, including the more-than-human world. Is it not a considerable gift to listen to this search for connections?

ECOLOGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

Sprout that grows in connection with earth and water. Knowledge that is nurtured by the natural world in order to grow and be mindful of life cycles. Living presence that grows ever more considerate and caring toward the planet. But also concern, as Ida Vitale expresses in one of her memorable descriptions from Of Plants and Animals: “Proportionately they are few—and barely able to convince the others—those who are aware that the planet is moving quickly to a disaster that is going to overwhelm our grandchildren” (2003, 28). In 1991 žižek was already attempting a Lacanian explanation for our inability to represent the critical reality of the planet, and perhaps a good many of his readers glossed over his explanation of our evasive attitude with respect to environmental problems. An ecological consciousness originates in the natural conditions and environments that lead to a full realization of human potential. Nevertheless, ecological consciousness is not only the result of a psychological expansion of the self tightly encapsulated in an isolated ego, by means of an identification with all humans; it is also a posthumanist concept that entails an identification and interpenetration of the ego with other species, ecosystems, biospheres, and even with machine sand technological systems. Ida Vitale includes this interdependence of diverse species along with her notion of biocenosis, which refers to the community of living beings in a given space. Ecological consciousness also serves as an ideal orientation for motives, values, and savoirs concerning the world. In addition to systems of ecological thought, such ecological consciousness is composed of an extreme ability to enjoy and appreciate things in and of themselves, as well as a synergetic orientation in interaction with the social and physical world (Warwick, 19). According to Roszak, the term “synergetic” conceives of the needs of the planet as the needs of the person, and the “rights of the person as those of the planet” (321). How can we cultivate and learn ecological perception and identity? What type of ecological consciousness can we cultivate? Someone who most effectively dismantles the concept of ecological consciousness is a Mexican chemist who is dedicated to researching the geopolitics of biodiversity and sustainable development: Enrique Leff. In his essays, particularly in “Social Imaginaries and Sustainability,” Leff underscores modern economy’s and technology’s

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inability to understand and resolve the environmental crisis. Leff questions our faith in the market and its ability to appraise and conserve nature and likewise our ability to reflect on the unsustainable conditions that that same market has constructed from the knowledge that it has generated and disseminated. Nevertheless, this questioning of the concept of an ecological consciousness is a critique that makes me rethink the methodological issue of using such a concept and applying it to literary and cultural studies. Basically Leff does not believe that an ecological consciousness can restore our world, which has become unhinged by the categorical imperatives of modern rationality. In other words, Leff does not believe that ecological consciousness is able to combat the practice of unsustainable rationality, nor can it constitute a methodological instrument to dismantle that modern rationality on the theoretical plane. He asserts, “[c]onsciousness adheres to a perception, disposition and answer to the most immediate occurrences in our lives.” Leff accepts that it can even adhere to a standardization of our actions, to controlling our acts, such as when we are careful about wasting water or when we recycle products; that is when “a sense of guilt assaults us for the effects that our non-bodily consumption and for the ecological footprint generated by the economic rationality in which our lifestyles are inscribed (“Social Imaginaries”). But Leff emphasizes the insufficiency of the concept of grasping, controlling, and reconfiguring the circumstances of our existence; “it is an excess of totalitarian reason” to think that a mere consciousness raising can change a subject whose cognitive and imaginative make-up has been configured by the dictates of modernity’s special brand of rationality: whose mind is constrained by modes of perceiving, thinking and feeling reality that are encumbered by a rationality that obstructs any possibility for a discerning look at its own configuration and determinations, as well as the impediments that the established rationality imposes on thought and possible consciousness. (s/n)

The idea of social imaginaries, the concept that allows Leff to construct viable strategies for planetary sustainability, is not analogous to the concept of ecological consciousness. Another great difference is that social imaginaries are not representations of an individual subject, but of a collective being, in which the real of the Earth becomes engrained, generating forms of being in which modes of thought and of feeling the world open up. These are practices, habits, and customs that reflect neither the perspicacity nor the truth of the real, but rather create worlds of life that do not always translate into discursive formations. For Leff, those imaginaries embody the totality of vital acts and are the complex roots of

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social identity. But, could we extend the meaning of the ecological consciousness to this social imaginary and define it in those terms? Some critics would situate the ecological consciousness, almost like Leff, on a global plane and as a consciousness aware of a series of problems that frame the environmental predicament: We have serious global problems: climate change, which we already have with us and among us, the media is covering it more and more; the alarming disappearance of the forest; the deterioration of our farm lands; the water crisis; solid waste treatment; the loss of biodiversity, of living resources; and the loss of aboriginal cultures and knowledge. (Brack, 23)

What does poetry say about this ecological consciousness and the social imaginaries of sustainability? I ask myself this question conscious of the fact that economic decline has reached dramatic levels of poverty, that the search for political solutions has almost always relegated environmental considerations to a second tier. In 1990 the number of Latin Americans who earned less than 60 dollars per month reached almost half the population: some 200 million (Dávila, 199). In 2002, of the 507 million that inhabited the region, 221 million (43.4%) lived below the poverty line and 95 million (18.8%) scratched out their existence in indigence. Despite efforts to respond to the demands of an ever-growing population, the challenges of a declining urban environment have risen at an alarming rate, above all with respect to issues such as garbage collection and disposal, the contamination of water and food supplies, and air pollution. The problem is urgent and threatens the health of not just the local community, but the entire planet. It is imperative to acknowledge national responsibilities “such as the felling of forests, erosion and the damage inflicted by the daily actions of a dense population and intensive agriculture” (H. Mansilla cited by Mires, 81). The result is that large Latin American cities, “swollen to the point of exploding from the constant invasion of exiles from rural areas, have become an ecological catastrophe: a catastrophe that can be neither understood nor changed within the limits of an ecology that is deaf to social clamor and blind in the face of political compromise” (Galeano, 19). Poets wonder how to overcome our inability to hear the ecological chain of being in action, how to give concrete form to the potential for creativity and alterity in the construction of sustainable societies, how to reinvent language about nature that does not fuel false hope in the economic and technological rationality of modernity. This imaginative renovation will occur with nuances of interdependence from a planetary

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perspective and with hints of more directly tangible fluctuations from a sentient perspective. So, what does poetry have to do with this ecological problem, principally seen in an urban context, in its capacity to instill praxes, habits, and customs that surpass an individual consciousnessraising? My hypothesis is that poetry’s influence is indirect, that it is going to function in the long-term, a hidden journey of individual and collective values and attitudes that cannot be described easily and that are crucial sources of energy and revitalization within cultural diversities. In particular for the Latin American, poetry constitutes a practical means to transform his “feeling for nature,” which Danilo Cruz Vélez considers to be one of the weakest on the planet, insofar as Latin America residents are “always trapped in horrible cities” and are simply not accustomed to visiting forests, rivers or lakes (106). I am aware that Cruz Vélez is talking about average city dwellers, not those who live in rural areas or have a direct and intense relation with nature, among whom we can find several poets and a large proportion of the indigenous population, especially those who follow the cultural traditions of the Andean peoples. Before the first world ecologists announced the urgency of a new vision of cultures and of nature to rethink a viable rescue plan and to avoid further damage, Latin American poets had already made the relation between culture and nature the touchstone of their vision of reality and its concomitant ethical considerations. In the face of the atavistic centralism that dominates official discourses in Latin American cities today, awash in their belief in progress and modernity’s unlimited and all-powerful capacity for recuperation, some poets had already suggested a conciliatory critical voice in an alternative space that can at least be compared to the decentralizing discourse of some advanced legislators and some of the struggles of environmental justice movements. In his important work on ecology in Latin America, Fernando Mires notes a significant lag in the First World’s development of a way of thinking that turns to ecology as a critical and analytic weapon (73). Yet it is also significant that at the end of his second chapter, “Toward the Formation of an Ecological Thought in Latin American,” he cites three verses by Neruda as a way of airing new responses to the dichotomy between the modern and the traditional in order to obtain all the possibilities of expanding the language of the social (97). Personally I have witnessed the insufficiencies that the poet’s consciousness brings to bear upon his sincere love for nature, in many cases recognizably “deficient” for being “someone fond of poetry that has lived and been raised in the city and whose interests depend overwhelmingly

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on that fact.” (Huerta, 43). Nevertheless, that is not my impression when I read poems by Roberto Juarroz, Aldredo Veiravé, Gonzalo Rojas, Ida Vitale, Homero Aridjis, Dulce María Loynaz, Juan Pablo Riveros, Esthela Calderón, Alberto Blanco, Luz Lescure, María Fernanda Espinosa, Selva di Pasquale, and many others. These poets that make me think about the phenomenon of the ecological consciousness have a radical importance insofar as they provide a key bastion against the ravages of capitalism’s cultural dimension, which increases and deepens our alienation from nature. The interesting thing about this phenomenon of consciousness is that their discourse is open communication, which connects with social imaginaries of sustainability that sadly are nowhere to be found in the environmental politics of corporations and governments that proclaim themselves to be sustainable. According to Ross, the problem with First World ecologies is not only that their narrative of self-sacrifice is always exercised through guilt, but also that they do not allow consideration of issues of urban ecology and environmental justice. Quite the opposite happens in the case of Latin American poetry, which, seen from an ecological perspective, permits me to think of the poem as a field that generates energies to transform human beings’ current relation to nature. This is achieved primarily by criticizing our alienation from nature and nature’s separation from the cultural; the values of environmental relations determined by colonial inheritance and the possibility of nurturing an environmental wisdom to lay a foundation for transcultural dialogue and alternative politics of sustainability. Through its form, the poem refers us back to the formal integrity of other works, creatures, and structures in the world. Through its form, the poem alludes to other forms, evokes them, resounds with them, and thus manages to become part of a system of analogies and relations by which we live and by which we summon our vital strengths and motivations. In this way, the poet affirms and collaborates in the formality of creation. According to Berry, that is a matter of primary importance, which largely goes unacknowledged. A poem reminds us of the spiritual joy we call “inspiration” or “gift” (Berry, 89). Perhaps this influence is very indirect, and we are talking about a largely unconstructed utopic space, but the poem itself—as a peculiar space in which the articulation of the local is carried out—is a clear source of life energies to elaborate strategies of resistance to the centralist models of social, ethnic, gender, etc. organization. As Leff as already indicated, poetic space is not centered on the formation of an ecological consciousness, but rather it indirectly fosters an environmental wisdom that critiques Western self-sufficient subjectivity, above all through its construction of an imagination that

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recuperates and invents the imaginaries and the will to live without disdaining the symbolic and the unconscious, embroidering on the author/reader’s social fabric more possibilities for cultural creativity. In order to be producers, that is to say, cultural agents that cultivate an active engagement with one’s respective ecological community, it becomes necessary to decide upon a change in a consumerist lifestyle so that the social imaginaries can permeate all of society. Poets do not possess a scientific longing to exhaust all possible explanations and they know better than anyone that there is much in this life of which we are not aware and which cannot be expressed through “normal” language. The awareness of this limitation has led poets to maximize their linguistic prowess and to test the limits of their expressive ability, which reaches its height in that symbolic realm of archetypes where congruence between subjectivity and the natural world is found (Kidner, 79-80). This collective aspect of consciousness cannot be entirely understood if only an individual, rational knowledge is sought, ignoring rituals, myths, and other unifying structures of culture. Octavio Paz observed quite astutely that we ought to pay attention to Latin America’s Pre-Columbian cultures, which, along with current ecological movements and the rediscovery of nature’s value, have a high degree of currency for our modern understanding of nature; above all in their attitude of admiration and collaboration with nature (Barloewen, 275, 279). I dare to believe that long before the early criticism of William Ruecker some two decades ago now, the poem was understood as an enduring and inexhaustible deposit of energy, whose relevance derived not only from its meaning, but also from its ability to remain active in any language and to thus continue transferring energy, functioning as an energy pathway to sustain life and human community. Even today I maintain my belief in the poem as an action that originates in an ecological consciousness that perhaps is transformed into access to the social imaginary that allows for the cleaving and destabilization of modern rationality. The poem is an attack on the predominant cultural conception that feeds like some great predatory parasite on nature and that never enters into the reciprocal dynamic of energy transfer nor in the relations of exchange sustained along with the biosphere (Ruecker, 19). In the case of Latin American poetry, the expression of this ecological conception of the poem is found in fragmentary and disperse ways, without being too far afield from the idea I am describing. I wish to include only one example from Roberto Juarroz’s (1925-1995) “Vertical Fragments,” in which he reflects on the poetic task:

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In life, being and not being alternate. Also in a poem. But in a poem a strange fusion sometimes emerges, in which being and not being combine into a richer reality. To find that reality constitutes poetry’s goal. And maybe life’s, too. (Fourteenth Vertical Poetry, 165)

Although a more explicit and articulate thought about poetry’s role in the formation of an ecological consciousness in Latin American thought is most definitely lacking, I find sufficient sophistication in these fragments to think about our reality in concert with nature, as Juarroz insists in fragment 92: “Poems, like beloved trees, make us feel more alive in their shade” (173). With respect to the artificial separation between human being and nature, Juarroz also insists on a profound transformation from the cold rational point of view that explains the world: The world needs to be. Poetry is the freest and most disinterested path to that necessary resacralization. Poetry recognizes the sacred with a founding dignity for each thing, the essential link that ties each thing to the everything, the portion of quiet, forgotten love that exists in all things. (“Fragment 107,” 178)

For Juarroz, the ecological consciousness is based on a loving projection that opens itself up to environmental wisdom, which could have an impact on the imaginaries of contemporary environmentalism, especially the ecology of the poor. In the totality of Juarroz’s Vertical Poetry, one will also find that deconstruction of the individualist fiction but through a loving sensibility that poetry makes favorable. I know that it is a complex subject, but the very fact of contemplating such an enormous collaboration among poets and their cities seems absolutely fascinating to me. My intent in these last few pages has been to offer a few introductory remarks about how poetry has space for that ecological consciousness which in the process of reading transforms into imaginary access to habits, customs, and visions. A first instance is that poetry reflects upon the relations between humans and non-humans in the great web of interconnections, as we see in some of the poems in Juarroz’s Vertical Poetry, in which he refuses to accept the fodder of “what nature shows each moment, that is destruction in order to make way for reconstruction” (Kovadloff, 3). Juarroz insists on attacking the problem of our lack of knowledge about nature from the perspective of what part nature plays in our constitutive being and what we can learn about living from it:

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Juarroz characterizes our human condition as fragile and fleeting, one that momentarily feels a profound connection to Earth and forgets our collective destiny of separation and isolation. The first six verses constitute a Hegelian metaphor for poetry’s ecological role: situate the human being on the Earth, lead him to the Earth, and thus tie him to the continuity of cosmic life. The sensation of wandering without direction or purpose is explained tentatively in the second line as a characteristic of the “I,” “in rootedness or in exile.” The idea and the emotional ties of forming part of a territory or of being separate from it serve to disconnect the subject from a wider community of both animate and inanimate beings. This disconnect from the “Earth’s function” reveals the need to overcome essentialist myths of cultural identities that have not known how to coexist with the environment. This makes us see the need for the ecological perspective in order to surmount this incompetence in the individual. Denying the links with nature that have been ignored by the rationalist conception of the subject is to deny the important connections among human beings, since those ties express rich and emotive relations of family and friends that cannot be confined to the human realm. The “Earth’s function” is a reconsideration of what it means to be human as part of nature. The Earth is not a world that is external to us—to our thoughts, feelings and desires; it is rather a key dimension of the human universe. Juarroz shared an anecdote with me that is directly related to the complex difficulty of knowing the “Earth’s function.” The story takes place in a small village in the Argentine pampa, where he was invited for a few days: In one of the gatherings, a young man approached me and said “You know how we need this day, and you know how difficult it is to discuss it with the people we see every day, in ordinary life. Sometimes the need is strong, so strong to say to someone I’m going to the open country where there is nobody around, I stop the truck, I get out and in the middle of the country, I start to say this aloud. Sometimes I shout it. ‘All this has remained in here. Do you realize? …What an astonishing thing!’ I go out, I go to the country alone and I begin to say it there, aloud, or to shout. What the heck!” I believe that we have perceived in some way that the deepest thing in us, what we are, what we most are, in that mysterious need to be that we have, the most intense thing about us, finds its way in a sort of unique

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expression. It is a type of expression that is interminable, extensive, indefinable, that neither seeks nor explains anything, not even to save us from anything; it permits no information, nothing. It has no solution for anyone. It especially consists of showing, giving to the other, as Eluard said. I believe that we are not deceived or befuddled simply because we have discovered something interesting. No, it is not anything interesting; it is something that in its very essence constitutes the definition of human nature in its inexplicable situation on Earth. And that seeks the inexplicable in all things, that seeks to turn the tables, shake things up, make them mad, dislocate them to see if they give off a bit more reality, a bit more than appearance, a bit more than what is known as common law. (“Conversation in Temperley”)

Juarroz is a poet that digs deep into the tragic separation of the human from nature, insisting passionately on the need to belong to the cycles of light and shadow, of life and death. Mexican poet Alberto Blanco (b. 1951) follows in that same direction. Blanco has been prolific: twelve books of poetry between 1973 and 1993; another twelve between 1988 and 2003; as well as respective volumes, The Heart of an Instant (1998) and Time and Mist (2005). His poems basically construct a complex lyrical “I,” thirsty for the presence of other humans, but also for the sun, plants, stones, and animals. Blanco’s insistence is similar to Juarroz’s but he hones his knowledge of nature through a direct experience among living beings and by examining the lives of the things that surround him. In “Psalm of the Stone” two verses reaffirm the celebration of the marriage of nature and the body: And creation is nothing more than a love song That swells up from the patient heart (Heart, 342)

Of course the infinite number of themes that Blanco evokes in these poems suggests the need to never abandon human humility in the face of the miraculous fact of life’s full ecological dimension. Some fragments are a call to combat the basic alienation that characterizes city life: Earth stretches like an animal that finally awakens the human dawn of those great building and projects from the dream world the star displays for the first time its new skin (Heart, 497)

Throughout his vast oeuvre Blanco insists on erasing the duality between nature and culture by means of endless transformations of those who participate in the cyclical existence of life and death. His poems

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express a delicate experience of interconnection, in which it is necessary to test the senses in order to achieve vital connections, in an always ambiguous tension with the rational mind and its obsession to disengage from the natural world. In many poems the lyrical “I” is embodied in an animal, whether it be a bird, a fish, a mammal or an insect, a symbol of the poet who takes care to establish connections, mindful of the life energy that flows through nature. Few poets have succeeded in expressing with Blanco’s power the collective dimension of existence that embraces an infinite diversity of natural beings. In and of itself this literature that celebrates the natural world displays a magnificent sense of exploration, which is a means to recuperate the perceptual and sensory abilities that urban life has atrophied almost completely. Haiku, poetic prose, experiments of diverse types, Blanco never finishes exploring the expressive possibilities of an ecological consciousness in continuous formation. A second way of making space for an ecological consciousness and an effective access to the collective imaginary is the loving expression of a real geography based on sensory experiences and on stories of natural elements that have been incorporated into community life. To that end, I reread José María Arguedas’s poems (1911-1969), whose intensity still invites us to revive that intimate and spiritual relation to nature from an Andean perspective. Perhaps no better poem has been written about the co-penetration with the biosphere than Arguedas’s “A Call to Some Academics,” published in Quechua in 1966. In this poem, the emotive invocation is mixed with the desire to transform urban culture’s indifference by cultivating a loving relation with nature, an Andean legacy that Latin American societies still have not learned to appreciate or adopt: What are my brains made of? What about the flesh of my heart? The rivers flow onward, roaring in their profundity. Gold and the night, silver and the terrible night form stones, the walls of the chasms where the river resounds; my mind, my heart and my fingers are made from that stone. (Katatay, 43)

The poem rebuilds its voices from real geography and recycles Arguedas’s same intensity from the symbolic sphere of the reconciliation between nature and culture, much like María Fernanda Espinosa does in Jungle Tattoo, in which the lyrical “I” melds with the jungle flora and fauna in a celebration of life and a denunciation of waste from the perspective of an identity that refuses to acknowledge the limits imposed by modern Western stereotypes. The rejection of traditional gender roles while discussing love announces a clear intention to transcend androcentric parameters for human existence. This is an expansion on the

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concept of love to encompass the entire Earth, which suffers the harshness of industrial and technological advances from companies that exploit and use up natural resources while hypocritically touting their “green” discourses. The poem’s arboreal form condenses the love that circulates, that cannot be defined as static, and that proves itself to be inconclusive in the individual: Memory Is the last touch The first kiss The intact mountain The sun that peeks out a bit at a time The parrots’ astonishment Without branches on which to alight And a crown of a bird That is not a dove It is a hoatzin with crest and all Feisty-feathered fiery-feathered That whistles from its clavichord thorax Memory Is the courting of albatrosses With an orchestra of beaks and a dance of bellies Or the different body of the manatee It is a history of yucca and corn The story of my Japanese eyes Doubly broad mouth To kiss Kiss you The symmetrical cheekbones Your palms Doubly mouth Doubly love that does not return Unmemory

We are made to feel the presence of the world’s diversity of beings through the nostalgic tone that yearns for closer ties to the Earth, in this case the tropical forest in danger of extinction. More important than the denunciation of the disappearance, is the lamentation for the loss of life expressed through the images of the loved ones that are remembered throughout the poem. And at the same time it is the memory of the senses that happily announce a memory of the tropical landscape as an active, vital being that is familiar and dear. The intended reader of this poem is ideal, she does not exist in the city unless she identifies with the complex pay of tropical correspondences; hence we are in the face of a frustrated

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attempt at communication to the extent that poetry is hard-pressed to penetrate the globalizing network of big media through which the urban consumer moves. Espinosa’s poetry reveals a refined ecological consciousness that is in the process of expansion. In the long-term perspective, the dynamic of coming to know another, whether ethic, feminine or dominated, winds up becoming a process of self-knowledge and of an incorporation of the decentered perspectives in order to coexist and get along with nature. On the one hand, I find in some Latin American poets a poetic conception constructed around a longing to repair the loss of contact with nature. I find it useful how some poets have found an expressive forcefulness thanks to nature’s powers and forms, such as Armando Rojas’s and Esthela Calderón’s metamorphoses. These transformations, nevertheless, sometimes remain in the realm of the extratextual and in the reader’s sphere. What I wonder is if adopting a non-human point of view expresses an inclusive ecological consciousness. And I continue asking myself that question without knowing if it also dissolves dichotomies such as city/country, integration/fragmentation or centralization/decentralization. Additionally, I suspect that the projection of the loving sentiment, to mention only one idea that the reader may want to pursue in the text of the poem, is perhaps the product of an excessive optimism that derives from an effective and enthusiastic conviviality; the three poetic devices mentioned—Juarroz’s and Blanco’s philosophical interrelation, Arguedas’s and Espinosa’s sensory tenderness and Rojas’s (and others’) expansive transformation—will overcome those dichotomies and will continue exploring possible connections that offer us nature as a concept constructed from an ecological consciousness. These poets’ restless and tenacious spirit signals a way to open new spaces to feel the ecological chains of being, to shore up ecology’s most urgent concepts, and to reinvent the language that reconnects us to nature. Of the different narratives that allow us the privilege of an active ecological consciousness, I would like to highlight Edgardo Rivera Martínez’s prose (b. 1933), which demonstrates different ecological experiences. Presenting some Andean legends, this Peruvian author indicates that they belong to: A popular Andean cultural heritage, nourished by very ancient local sources, and by others that originate in Spanish medieval narratives, which in turn come from classical and Asian sources. Logically, personal contributions, also worthy of recognition and praise, overlay all of those sources. These contributions engage the concerns of our time, for example defending the environment and ecological conservation. (“Prologue,” 7-8; my emphasis)

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It is not that the author’s critical discourse necessarily forms a coherent thought with its poetic-narrative discourse; it merely expresses its strong tie to the Andean aspect in Peru that primarily sees as a universe of ancestral values, “creator and practitioner of a different rationality, comprised of reciprocity and solidarity,” that is constructed on the foundation of “a loving coexistence with the Earth, a concept of work as a means of community and cultural self-realization, and whose style of relation is joyful celebration” (“Peruvian Literature,” 113). Leff would call this Andean philosophy of life “the imaginary of buen vivir” which proposes, in addition to petitions for historic justice, another form of understanding the world and offers itself as a sample of how human life could reconnect with the natural order. This is a solution that, according to Leff, “goes beyond the reaches of reflexive modernity, of the economic adjustments and the potentials of technology to control socioenvironmental decline and climate change” (“Social Imaginaries”). Rivera Martínez always emphasizes stories within his stories that take into account mythical environmental Andean history, such as in the story that Adrián tells the narrator’s grandmother (“Adrián,” Azurite 113-114). His tale is not only one of great beauty, but also highlights the system of ecological thought that informs it. The story narrates the time when ichu (grass) and corn grew in such abundance that the narrator was left with “an image of a golden age, the taste of an original pureness, the nostalgia for a happy and bygone age” (115). What is certain is that this story within a story recounts a mythic vision of how human greed unleashed the bearers of ice, hail, and thunder storms, by opening a pitcher that the animals begged man to keep closed. But man paid no attention to them and instead of obtaining the treasure he sought, he let loose evil genies that caused fear and panic in the animals, who had to seek refuge in caves and other remote places. The beautiful stories that the servant Marcelina from Jauja tells, are for me the best passages in the novel. They relay a vision of the world and of Andean nature that is full of wisdom and beauty, like the story of the Sullwayta, the marvelous flower on which the rain, cattle, and harvests all depend (106). Also very evocative are several fragments that tell the legend of the amarus, mythic figures from the wetlands that make several appearances throughout Rivera Martínez’s work (153; 213; 423-424), and the story of a fox who fell madly in love with a shepherdess (279-280). The important thing is that Rivera Martínez sees in Andean cosmology “a factor of cultural impregnation” that grows ever more present in urban contexts, both regional and in the capital. When he says “a factor,” Rivera Martínez is referring to what is obvious in the first quote: the need to gain access to different cultural traditions from around the planet. Curiously,

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similar experiences are narrated by several characters in Rivera Martínez’s works, thus illustrating the process of expanding the ego that is isolated and separate from the world of plants, animals, mountains, rivers, and other men and women. Basically throughout Rivera Martínez’s work, his characters’ memories take them back time and again to special places related to nature: trees, animals, mountains, lakes, and at times even plazas or beaches. The most important thing about these exhilarating incursions into memories is the impact that they have on the characters’ psyche; in general, they find consolation and energy, awe and reconciliation, through these memories. As an ecologist would say, human personality discovers its structure through interaction with the more-than-human world (Rodman, 54). In At the Afternoon Game Hour, the author remembers “The Araucaria” (39-41, House; 56-58, At the Afternoon Game Hour) but without any desire to speak about its ability to purify air or its influence on the climate, not even about its rich and millennial history, but only about its “pensive strangeness that astonished me so much” (41, House; 58, At the Afternoon Game Hour). But just as those pleasant memories conjured such lively and refreshing associations, they also caused him to think about the hurt caused by love and occasioned an inevitable awareness that all things perish. In the case of Aliso in “Image of a Tree” (52-53, House; 79-81, At the Afternoon Game Hour), the associations turn high-brow: his different names (Ramram in the Quechua from Cusco, Lambras in Ayacucho, Lamblas in Junín, Lamramas in Aymara, Alnus Jorullensis according to botany) and his ties with Goethe and Schubert are enough to bring him pleasure. In “The Unicorn” (9-48, The Unicorn; 49-72, Azurite), the story’s protagonist evokes a special place underneath certain trees that, in the revised version of the story, lose part of their mythical connotations, although they maintain their spiritual calm. Comparing these two fragments from the story proves to be very enlightening: On those afternoons, I liked to stretch out on the grass, and feel the dense and immobile foliage of these trees above me like a dome of silence. Time, then seemed to stand still for me, and every sensation, every thought, took on a special clarity, and revealed itself as a slow, tangible happiness. At times, I remember, I would be overcome by the suspicion that that place was the abode of some forgotten god, or that it was under some sort of enchantment. (22, The Unicorn)

In the second version, Rivera Martínez chooses brevity of suggestion:

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I liked to stretch out on the grass and contemplate the mysterious dome of trees. Time, then, seemed to stand still, and each sensation took on a slow and special clarity, as if an ancient spell were keeping vigil all around me. That same calm, that same immobility, reigns now. (56, Azurite)

I do not dare say that this change reflects a loss of belief or anything of the kind, but it definitely shows that the author’s work has a conscious effect on his manner of relating to the ecological unconscious. This contradiction between an attachment to life and an awareness of death is best expounded in the beautiful story “A Tree’s Enigma” (Angel, 49-58). Anastas Isakian, a cloth merchant, narrates the story of a mysterious tree, with no name, that provokes thoughts of love and death. For Anastas and his lover Estrella, the tree was not only a site for afternoons of quiet contemplation, but also a source of beauty and a feverish inspiration for love. For Noemi, the merchant’s wife, the tree is a source of terrible evil. She called it Apanjoray, the name of a sinister spider, and wound up setting the tree on fire. From “a presence so full of life and pregnant with mystery and poetry,” the tree went on to become a “charred shadow” (49). I want to delve more deeply into this story’s profound meaning with respect to the ecological experience. We humans are losing the instinctive knowledge of death due to the false illusions that stem from ideas of progress and technology. These false promises of eternal life want us to forget the precarious condition of mortality that we share with the rest of the species on the planet. In short, we have learned to kill, but not to die. As someone longing for trees’ language put it, “when we do not speak our death to the world, we speak our death to the world. And when we speak our death to the world, the legend of the forest stays silent” (Harrison, 249). The love story at the heart of “A Tree’s Enigma” speaks to this dialogue of coming and going among people and nature: where there is always greater love, there is also a greater awareness of life’s fragility. According to Kohak, there is a level of ecological experience that is ignored even in the most fashionable of ecologies, which is the one that moves us to action,and to the use of critical reason to overcome the ecological crisis: the level of intense love for the planet and all its beings, combined in a consciousness of the inevitability of the passage of time and of mortality. These two key aspects of the ecological experience recur throughout Rivera Martínez’s work, especially through his flower symbolism. That this does not necessarily take place only in country settings is most interesting. In the story “Fire Rose” (Angel, 43-47), Tolomeo Linares translates the memory of his beloved Andean landscape,

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which sustains his spirit into his pyrotechnical art in one of the poorest areas of Lima. His story ends when he dies: Burned by that flower that, in some way, had illuminated, even if only for a few moments, the light of his beloved land. But it stayed there, in the air, an invisible, metallic fire. There on the edge of the desert, in memory of an incomparable rose. (47)

Another text related to the fantastic elements of “The Unicorn” is the story of the death of a funeral home employee, José María de Adesio. In “A Flower at the Good Death” (Angel, 93-98), the little plaza of the Church of Good Death is the scene of series of fantastic transformations. When the brilliance of some dried fish in a shop window catches the protagonist’s eye, he investigates their nature at the Natural History Museum and finds out that the fish are native to the rivers and lakes of Amazonia. The lively atmosphere of the plaza becomes a slow accentuation of José María’s sensory experience as he takes in the smell of dying flowers, lights, water density, the warm air, and the movement of the fishes, all of which “encouraged a death in febrile celebration of life” (97). Contact with the whiff of death emanating from the fish “provoked a powerful outpouring of life. Life nourished by death, but no less life because of that. Yes, that is how it should be” (98). When they find his dead body, his hands hold “a showy red flower, that someone later recognized as an Amazonian flower. A flower with an opulent corolla, and the most beautiful flower from that faraway land. . . .” (98) “A Flower in Flames” (At the Afternoon Game Hour, 65-67) takes a similar tack although in this work there is an explicit ecological reflection. The same experience of seeing “some Queen of the Andes flowers” at first conjured lovely memories associated with “the vicuña’s natural shyness” and the “timid modesty of our Indian servant girls” (65). Observing the immense scorched flower spike brought to mind the bitter experience of the ecological disaster, heightening the awareness of the precariousness of life. Moreover, the transformation of this ineffable emblem of life is also a symbol of the threats that Andean cultures are facing: “their harmonious relation with nature, their characteristic work ethic, the cultivation of solidarity” (67). Along with these sad testimonies of how what is most loved is also lost, there are some truly fine stories about death in relation to nature, for instance “Vilcas” (Azurite, 81-97), in which the protagonist, the young shepherd Celio, succumbs during his long, sorrowful march toward a better life. He has an almost religious memory of his Andean landscape, back where “the Juilla pampa and the Huaylas mountain, where he had

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cared for a somebody’s else unruly flock, would be missing him” (82). The Condor’s reappearances throughout Celio’s trek form part of a wordless dialogue whose last moments constitute a “feeling of liberation” for the hapless shepherd (97). This poetic component in Rivera Martínez’s narrative discourse is the experience of death, without which we could not think of a way out of the current massive devastation of Earth caused by human greed: Slowly the dryness of his mouth burned out, as did the emptiness that had prevailed in his spirit, in which there was nothing left but a serenity that looked with a certain sweetness upon the land and the grass, the sound of the air and the frigid warmth of the mountain sun. His senses were absorbed into those last implacable entities, and little by little, ever so gently, his consciousness was extinguished, in a shipwreck illuminated by unformed words—the most affectionate in the Quechua language— stuttered upon the threshold of shadow. (97)

The sensitivity toward beauty in relation to love for nature and an awareness of death also is found in stories where the characters relate to animals. James Hillman asserts that animals have been captivating human imagination for millennia and that they intensify our awareness of our own being (16). The idea that we come to know ourselves through animals appears time and again in the theories of the origin of consciousness (19). At times Rivera Martínez speaks of animals as if he were talking about death, which forms part of the natural and human cycle of life. In his memories of a cat that the old woman Cipriana gave his family, he notes the contemplative nature of the feline who used to stare out upon the fields in the valley toward the Ninacampa mountains, “from where she had come” (“Minor Elegy,” House, 11-13; At the Afternoon Game Hour, 1719). It happened that the cat, when so absorbed in her meditations, would suffer terrible falls, each one more serious than that last. Death is not necessarily the backdrop of all human relations with animals in these stories. Yet it probably does stand out most particularly in stories about the mythical animals of the Andes, such as “Puna Fox” (House, 19-21; At the Afternoon Game Hour, 59-61), a wary fox who is never deceived and whom the people imagine “as in a name, only one name, that fuses with the wind and with the clouds, with the grass and the lightning bolt” as well as a mythical presence, a descendent of “ancient, arcane gods” (House, 21; At the Afternoon Game Hour, 61). There are stories that are expressed fragmentarily, a rhetorical device to frame their mythical origin as well as their ethereal elements, for example “Amaru” (Azurite, 143-149; Angel, 59-63), “Angel from Ocongate”

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(Angel, 13-15); and “Leda in the Desert” (Angel, 113-115). In others, the emphasis is certainly on the brotherhood among species, like Azor the Dog and the fantastical Unicorn (“The Unicorn,” 9-48; Azurite, 49-71). The teacher who narrates the story of the Unicorn converses with Azor at length and feels that the dog pays very keen attention to him. Indeed, the dog and the narrator experience a deep connection with nature: When we reached the summit, the moon comes out—hidden before behind some thick clouds. From up top, we see how it lights the entire valley, which lies in absolute, mysterious, timeless stillness. And nevertheless, there is in the air, on the ground, in ourselves, a hidden noise, which does not come from the forest, nor from the water, like other occasions, but from elsewhere, born in the most remote region of time, in the deepest layers of the earth, but also, curiously, in the deepest part of us and our spirit, and that expands in the atmosphere like a silent, invisible river. Without effort, without violence—in an act of humble, serene subjection— we become one with the earth, with the night—never to be separated. We are its pulsations, its heartbeat, slow and vast. (48)

The analytical separation that is seen in the final passage, once it is revised and trimmed down in Azurite, perhaps reveals a tension with respect to the ecological perspective that the author himself never managed to resolve: a confusion between love of nature and romantic love. The teacher speaks to the moon, using the informal you (tú): “goddess of the night. You are the one who has summoned Luscinda. You are the one who has sent the inconceivable Unicorn” (71). There is also a break in the consistency of the first person plural: “I contemplate the arc of the waxing moon” and a greater abstraction with regard to the corporeal and spiritual dimension of the gazers: And we perceive, then, in a way that is increasingly different, how it expands in the wheat fields, in the foliage, in ourselves, this noise that is neither from the wind, nor the water, but from someplace else, born in a very remote time, while it is simultaneously lost in the distance like a powerful, invisible river. And our descent is revealed, then, like a return to the earthly realm. We pause when we arrive at the plain. I place my hands on the ground that sustains us. “Divinity,” I say, “not ethereal, but rather living. Beginning, dwelling, end, beloved and eternal earth! (71)

At any rate, human self-perception is not limited to the strict margin of individual consciousness. In that sense, Tadeo Pumasunco’s meditations about the piece of azurite that he finds in a cave and that he winds up returning to the “engrossed and millennial repose” of the landscape lead us

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to a moral perspective in which not only humans have rights (“Azurite,” Azurite, 13-23). This story can be understood as an ecological resistance to the utilitarian concept of nature, which is currently being reinforced by neo-liberal thought. This resistance is expressed in an act that affirms the integrity of a naturally diverse being-in-the-world (Rodman, 54). The land possesses its own enchantment, as the beautiful story “Marayrasu” splendidly illustrates (Azurite, 25-47). Probably even more than animals and trees, mountains witness the social injustices brought about by mining. Alfonso’s wish to be a miner pushes him to overcome the lack of light, air, and cultivated fields in order to express his solidarity with all those who were being exploited by the mining industry: It was a land cruelly scarred by galleries, caverns, smokestacks. A suffering land. And together they suffered, the land and the miners. It was no wonder that at times the mineral they extracted had a bone yellow or a blood red tint. But it was a favorable land. How, then, not to hold on to the same sense of solidarity with the land as well as with the men that labored in her depths? (39)

With the belief that Wamani cared for the plants, animals, and shepherds, Alfonso wove his thoughts into a brilliant identity that extended to “a new spirit of snow and rock, but also of birds, springs and shadows” (39). Echoes of these thoughts can be found in the crazy man’s discourse in “The Phoenix” (Azurite, 73-79). This character’s passion for unity and for enjoyment of nature makes us think about the importance of the imagination in the cultivation of that love. His impassioned cult of the bird in the middle of a Holy Week procession signals a recuperation of the sacred from the experience of nature, which is generally disdained in urban contexts. Although trees are certainly one of the most visible and tangible natural elements in the twentieth-century city, Rivera Martínez has continued perfecting his idea about the factors of cultural permeation through his characters’ ability to enjoy and appreciate nature while living in the city. Rather than trees, he talks about the affect that they awaken in the interior life of his characters and in his own psyche. According to Sewall, the ability to pay attention necessarily includes emphasizing the perceptual practices that will help us extend the limited experience of the ego in order to experience the sensuality, intimacy, and identification with the exterior world. Sewall has identified five perceptual practices, modifiable by experience and directly relevant for perceiving ecological conditions: 1) learn to pay attention; 2) learn to perceive relations, contexts, interactions; 3) develop perceptual flexibility through temporal

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and spatial scales 4) learn to re-perceive the depth of things; and 5) employ an intentional use of the imagination. Above all, it is obvious that Rivera Martínez suggests the theme of an ecological sensitivity within urban life in “City of Fire,” whose protagonist is obsessed with “a comprehensive solution to the problems of urban space” (18). It is a strange story that provides an account of the imaginative stimulation that is produced by the descriptive design of an ideal city. This city is planned according to all the demands of the uprooted protagonist’s intelligence brought to bear on facing the stridency and ugliness of urban reality. Like “The Unicorn,” “A Flower in the Good Death” or “Angel from Ocongate,” this story explores the poetics of an extraordinary event, which no doubt reveal the Andean influence in the perception of the physical environment, translated to the context of the city. The very experience of the marvelous, that bridge to happiness, is produced when the imagination disrupts routine physical space, which is insensitive to existence itself: I became aware of the endless possibilities that the event predicted. How extraordinarily stimulating to know that an entire world was emanating from my house! (31)

In “The Visitor,” told from three alternating points of view, we see admiration for “a form of existence that is astonishingly concentrated.” A timid, perspicacious globetrotter wisely transforms the life of an intelligent couple from the city through his perceptive attitude toward things and people, kindling their curiosity to know their rich interior world, which is difficult to decode in spite of the efforts of those who are interested in doing so. A man tells of his encounter with a woman on the beach where he likes to go to contemplate the landscape and to let his thoughts drift naturally (“Encounter by the Sea,” Angel, 71-75). But the story in which an ecological consciousness is most salient is a brief story titled “The Blacksmith,” whose eponymous protagonist constructs bit by bit a metal vine that expands with time. This lonely artist contemplates the artwork in the afternoons and the people admire it greatly: “That beautiful and useless flowering . . .” (92). For me, the blacksmith’s work is a symbol of the ability to enjoy and to appreciate that we find in the majority of Rivera Martinez’s characters, like the feverish funeral home employee who experiences a dazzling life-changing transformation while sitting in the plaza. With humor and simplicity he shows his protagonists’ imaginative richness as they reflect on life in the city filled with that love for nature that is not so obvious and that does not lend itself to an interpretive reduction. The situations make evident the need to act with humility and to

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use cultural knowledge to occasion an awareness of ecological health (Nassauer, 10). But nothing is gained if ecological perception is not engaged. Thus, the radical importance of attentive observation and of its powers for the majority of Rivera Martínez’s characters. Rivera Martínez’s texts reiterate the effort to surpass an ecological consciousness that succeeds in becoming an active inheritance to expand the imagination and foster environmental wisdom by means of the fruitful Andean seed of love for nature. Rivera Martínez’s characters’ voices awaken the desire to construct a sustainable future. The foundation is the intense and beautiful relationship with Mother Earth based on models of care and sensorial attention, as well as the tragic awareness of the limits of living beings in danger of extinction.

ECOSPIRITUALITY

A cohort of erratic divinities: Divine Light. Potlatch of divine light. A granular soul, providing a chorus or an echo. —Néstor Perlongher. Your serpent god eyes that shone like the crystalline eye of all eagles, could see the future, could see into the distance. I am here, fortified by your blood, not dead shouting still. —José María Arguedas. Our Father, listen carefully to our rivers’ voice; listen to the frightful trees in the great forest; the sea’s white, diabolic song; listen to them, Serpent God. We are alive; we still exist! From the movement of the rivers and stones, from the dance of the trees and the mountains, from their movement, we drink powerful blood, increasingly stronger. We are rising up, for your cause, remembering your name and your death! —José María Arguedas. And so it is, and so it has to be, in your name, which falls upon life like a rushing cascade of water, and it lights all spirit and all paths. She hears a multitude of messages transmitted By the dance of dogs, birds, clay tigers. She collects advice written on The wide mouths of old pitchers. She gathers the song of youth In the rooster-shaped incense burner. She calls up voices and words that rest In the heart of the earth Ruperta Bautista Vázquez Oh Father Send us Your energy your light your company the spirit shield send us your light Your company blue energy yellow libidinal Reichian energy like sunlight more light it doesn’t matter if all that light blinds us not if perhaps the afterimage at that hour of the brightest light full light fogs up

Knots like Stars: The ABC of Ecological Imagination in our Americas Like a shadow of the moon the senses pink energy of love felt in the tiny crepe hearts infants romping around a gigantic orphanage rising up in praise in the manner of the sphinx flat bogs of Catan. Oh Father Make us make us good generous kind ready to take the tee shirt from the table the plates on top of the tablecloths the napkins folded to clean the dirt from this house that all shines as it should all gleams in the boreal scintillation of its marvelous look deeply cleft the swift wing the wing that is free from those from whom we ask you to save us Oh Father Help us to be happy to fight to not desist in our fight to not fight in our brow to stop seeing the light to not close our eyes or to close them and that dark night the afterimage to see rise up an iridescent dolphin a rainbow of dolphins an aerial or iridescent dolphinate an arched dolphin Come. Return to my hellish fears. I opened my face with the battered trunks of your fingers. Show me the emplumed remorse of the sunflower to await excavated from your celestial light. Néstor Perlongher Save me from the punishment of understanding! —Esthela Calderón Today I don’t / neither yesterday nor then either / so, at the edge of the day / without faith or because the Other indeed / was like I since / you and with me drowns / god’s thirst or from what / in him or if it is and only / for him the you that / you gave me for you because already / I don’t know if you are or not / here or in the blue/ of the sun’s voice that does not / give light to skin nor love / in the key of C and / to what end do I say/today no more or maybe / yes like yesterday or now / in the hour of our / death, do you see? —Renato Sandoval Spirit is bathed in sighs and retreats in a sign of shouting. The beats die with the last glimpse of the sun, existence is felled by the filth. Candlelight breaks in silence, exhaustion appears in the pupils, carrying colors from the loom. Ruperta Bautista Vázquez

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Everything is reduced to a tiny thing: open your heart and allow God to return there; may the loving little bird return to its nest. He will sing to you, he will sing to you. Ah, when his trills drive you mad! You have no idea. . . . -Have you heard? says the imilla-Have you heard Chullpatullu? And the imilla will have turned green like the muffled carpet upon the pond’s sleeping waters. Chullpar’s bones speak; and, as they speak, they love; and they hate as they love; and if they hate they kill. Woe to the godless and wicked! Their soul and body will be tormented by the dead man. They are alien to life; not a single problem that bothers the young can be indifferent to dead parents. When many stoked fires imprisoned me in the kollos of the pampa they instigated those in charge of protecting the kuiku and his world; and the Mallkis, ever punctual, opened my gates. Gamaliel Churata Necessary conversion: leaning to live in solidarity with all creatures. —Birgit Weiler

Birgit Weiler refutes Genesis 1.28’s version of creation that stresses God’s exhortation to humans to “subdue” the Earth and to have “dominion” over all living creatures. Instead, through etymological analysis, Weiler discovers that the Bible reveals a God who takes great care to limit human authority and power in the world to only those things that are necessary for the conservation and promotion of life on this planet (11-12). In the 1990s Charles Cummings found models of ecospirituality in the sustainable lifestyles of several groups—Native Americans, the Benedictine/Cistercian and Zen Buddhist religious communities, and religious centers and farms that engaged in ecological education and research. Why didn’t he include the grassroots communities in Latin America that emerged in the 1970s? I imagine that the reader can think of some other omissions on his list, but my aim here is to merely tie up a few loose ends in order to provide a more integrated perspective. Who can say if the dominant epistemological perspectives will permit the inclusion of Mesoamerican, Andean, and Amazonian cultural and political diversity? Now in the twenty-first century, one would have to give a prominent place to the communities whose foundation is Latin American Liberation Theology, but also to those innumerable neighborhood, parochial, and community organizations that echo this anti-consumerist, spiritual perspective. Latin American eco-theologians, such as Leonardo Boff, Ernesto Cardenal, and Ivone Gebara contribute to this ecospiritual engagement through their political practice of liberation (Binns, 30-31; Lértora Mendoza, n.p.). With the sacrifices of Chico Mendes (1944-1988)

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and the missionary Dorothy Stang (1931-2005) in the Amazon, spirituality is seen as an inspiration and new paradigm on par with political ecology, indigenism, community ethics, solidarity, and feminism (Betto and Löwy, 98-99). We must listen to the poets when they sing that moment of consciousness in which we feel part of the whole and when we listen to our own heart. Eclipse on Mother Earth, Katatay, The Golden Fish, Breath of Vital Air, Aerial Waters, Suzuki Blues: should I consider my own questions and quests among these books? Perhaps amidst so many varied expressions of ecospirituality, we can recuperate a relational perspective of life as a spiral, and thereby live each moment in which life appears to make sense to its maximum potential. We must recognize that these ecospiritual expressions stem from the mystic traditions of the East and the original Christian doctrine, as well as from our ancestral indigenous cultures.

END OF THE ROAD

End of a habitat, disappearance of a species, expiration of life, cessation, decline in biodiversity, chronic and growing impoverishment of the resources of the natural ecosystems. Typically, the word extinction is used to refer to the end of a species. End, death, but without the possibility of conserving the species; that is, the interruption in the relay of generations, termination without any possible salvation that can be succinctly summed up in this idiomatic phrase; the end of the road. It also includes literature, which is in danger of extinction, but powerful nonetheless. There is no return to life without a surviving generation. A species without any economic value that disappears? That it doesn’t count and protest its disappearance is seen as an illogical and irrational attack on the ideals of progress that governments now use to court favor with the extractive industries in the name of the public good. A threat that doesn’t belong to an apocalyptic story and that no one takes seriously. A fact that belongs to the incomplete but immense, computerized data base on biodiversity that scientific communities evaluate and continuously update, such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List, which is considered the most comprehensive global effort to evaluate the state of the conservation of plant and animal species. Other related sites include The Center for Biological Diversity and the videos from the “What is Missing?” Foundation. Certainty about the ecological crisis, feeling the crisis deeply, as José Emilio Pacheco shows in this simple poem about the complex process of contamination: For the net, for the harpoon you were born. For hooks, asphyxiation and frying pans. We infect your sea with usury. Now you get even by poisoning us.

Pacheco’s wise poetry hardly aims to note that slow violence becomes visible with time, that what humans do to the world, they do to themselves. The new and the old of places and their inhabitants would become a monstrous hallucination if their components broke apart, if they ceased to cooperate in what we no longer understand as a pre-established harmony, and instead as an equilibrium in constant flux that nourishes the universe’s

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biodiversity. This monstrous hallucination is the imminent image of ecological, intellectual, and spiritual disasters that can be understood as a risk of extinction. How do the disappearances of certain species affect ecosystems? And the human soul? Even with the end of the road looming, there are those who ignore the threat completely—I don’t know how, perhaps they believe blindly in the market or in progress—but there are also those who pursue new channels to defend life. There are even those who believe that humans will never die out, but rather that they will leave for unknown places. Non-humans can appear and disappear at will, like humans. Often we forget not only how to return, but also that we can do so at will, principally by means of our dream-work. Those who leave may not like the way they were treated and for that they seek new lands. They will return when they will no longer be abused and when they will be appreciated, as they deserve. We have to end the totalitarianism of economic rationality, as well as the angst generated by the ecological crisis. In sum, how can we end this foolishness that denies that the disappearance of a species does not have anything to do with the end of it all? With narratives of the last opportunity? With dreams that speak to us about other possibilities? With ironic elegies? To what point has nature already vanished? Is any reparation possible? Can we use some levers to restore sustainability to our threatened environment? Between the common notion that everything is fixable and the pessimistic view that nothing can be fixed, popular ingenuity has demonstrated that machines and obsolete infrastructure can be repaired and repurposed to help restore the damaged environment. The process of deforestation and invasions of Amazonia by cattle ranchers and soy bean farmers seems inevitable and irreversible, but the Suruí who live in the heart of the Amazon have demonstrated that the Internet can efficiently defend the right to biodiversity, as can be seen in Emilio Cartoy Díaz and Cristian Juré’s documentary War by Other Means (2009), in which the Suruís’ reforestation activities are laid out. The public campaigns for reforestation support this notion of environmental reparation. There are also stories that exemplify it, such as the community reforestation in the Mixtec region, an effort led by Jesús León Santos. Also, we could cite the fishing cooperative in Vigia Chico which advocates for sustainable lobster fishing in Quintana Roo; the Talamanca initiative that sustains the local economy and defend its ecosystem in Costa Rica; the solar energy projects in rural parts of Cuba, the long legal battle in Ecuador against Chevron-Texaco (See the documentary Crude, 2010); and the eco-planning of Curitiba in Brazil.

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More stories of a similar nature can be found on the EcoTipping Points Projects website: http://www.ecotippingpoints.org/ To the list we could add the growing number of environmental justice victories, carried out by the environmental defense committees in several impoverished regions. Numerous documentaries have shown how these groups have stopped governments and corporations that were trying to destroy and abuse the environment, all in the name of progress. Examples are When Clouds Clear/Después de la Neblina (2007), in which the organized residents of a small village in Ecuadorian Amazonia successfully shut down the extractive activities of two transnational corporations. Similarly, peasants led by a priest who is threatened and watched by ex-spies from President Albert Fujimori’s government, but who are now working for the North American mining company, prevent the destruction of a sacred mountain so vital to the life of their communities in When the Earth Weeps: Operation Diablo (2010). As Mires showed decades ago, in Latin America the ecological theme cannot be separated out from either the “ethnic question,” or the political question. The disappearance of forests, lakes, flora, and fauna implies “the disappearance of ethnic and cultural groups whose knowledge and experience of nature has an incalculable value” (185). I do note, nevertheless, that there is a sense of the end of the road that gives rise to a war-like spirit in organizations and individuals. When a native language is lost forever, does that loss have any repercussions in the cultural and biological diversity of the time? There is a richness that is lost, but for the “one-crop” mentality of those who defend the extractive industries it does not matter that the Guaycurú linguistic group, including the Tobas who have some 60,000 speakers in Argentina, Bolivia, and Paraguay, is vanishing. Of course, this loss does indeed matter to those of us who want to care for and embrace the planet’s biodiversity; we must thus think about this loss, process it, face it. It is a hurt that needs to be expressed and pondered.

Grief Poetry unearths pain over the loss of ecosystems with an attentive look at the tragic disappearance of cultures. In the twentieth century, the number of poets who have uncovered indigenous voices is as notable as the quality of their aesthetic design. In this vein, Chilean poet Juan Pablo Riveros’s From the Earth without Fire (1986) shows, by means of overlapping voices from the oppressed and the oppressors, the wisdom and ecological consciousness of the vanished cultures of the extreme southern

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part of the continent. María Fernanda Espinosa’s Jungle Tattoo (1992) also expresses the pain that originates in the conflict of modernity’s intrusion in the Amazon. It is Ernesto Cardenal’s poetry, however, which provides the paradigm for this expression of grief. Cardenal (Nicaragua, b. 1925) has been recognized for his political influence not just in Latin America, but throughout the world since the 1960s. Despite its propagandistic tone, his copious poetic production is an effective denunciation of capitalist insensitivity and ecological disasters; in short, an expression of Earth’s pain. History and myth intertwine in Quetzalcóatl (1985), in which a Mesoamerican god symbolizes the natural forces and a humanity united with god and agriculture. Cosmic Song (1993) develops important connections among science, ethics, so-called primitive cultures, ecology, and political activism. Turning to urban experience, Octavio Paz writes about Mexico City’s pollution in an exceptional poem from A Tree Within: “I Speak of the City“ (41-48). At the center of the poem, we find a neologism: “I speak of the garbage heaps the size of moun- / tains and of melancholy sunlight filtered through the smog” (45). In the appendix, Paz explains that the last word (“polumo,” translated here as “smog,”) is a combination of the words “polvo” (“dust”) and “humo” (“smoke”), since it is the pollution that is “the result of the mix of dust, from the drying up of the lakes upon which the ancient city was built, and the smoke from cars and factories” (188). These problems that surround the idea of ecological devastation make up the primary concern in Homero Aridjis’s poetry (Mexico, b. 1940). As founder and president of the Group of 100, he led artists and intellectuals in defense of the environment in Mexico, in particular to combat the capital city’s serious air pollution problem. Fernando Cesarman’s anthology Artists and Intellectuals bears witness to this struggle. Lately his fight has expanded to include the world (Flores, 53). In Aridjis’s poetry and activism we discover a balance between his critical and his constructive aspect. His poetry is full of urban images of sick tree and species in danger of extinction, all of which serve as metaphors for the human funeral. For Aridjis, “spirit’s ax / is the one that fells the most trees (Images, 124). Without hiding the pessimism in his terrifying vision, Aridjis’s 38 short poems entitled “Trees” (123-29) seem to hit their critical mark in a way that the hundreds of poems published by the Guatemalan government as part of a contribution to a reforestation campaign never manage to do (Rubio, The Tree in Guatemalan Poetry). The ecological angel and the references to the sun symbolize the anguish over the irreparable loss of a harmonious conviviality with nature. This does not

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mean, however, that his work has an apocalyptic tone, but rather that it gives rise to an imperfect, somewhat damaged sensibility that accepts and assimilates the loss without forgetting or fantasizing in order to elude an unpleasant reality. Obsessing over this loss and attempting to foster a protective, supportive attitude with regard to other species and the environments in danger of extinction is probably a characteristic of Latin American utopic thought. This is the case in Aridjis’s poem about the gray whale, or Ida Vitale’s poem “Fish in the Water” from An Attempt at the Impossible (1998), in which the idea of the infinite enters into the extinction equation in that it signals that such disappearances cause a loss in thought: Like a fish in the water, like a fish, nevertheless, as imagined by Leibniz: fish filled with lake from a lake filled with fishes, infinite fish filled with infinite lakes, on the shores of a same infinite self Then yes, like a fish in the water of a lake from another world where lagoons do not lacerate us.

How should we think about that alternating infinite without also thinking about loss? The poem does not allow for a space in which to think about loss because it focuses on the realm of the very thought of that infinite that dares to consider itself alongside images of a fish in water, of infinite lakes, of a lake “from another world,” an imaginary space where the laceration of the water takes on a shape that belongs to the world of extinction. With delicate subtlety, it expresses the pain of loss and the desire to construct an alternative to that pain. The following pointed poetic prose piece, also by Vitale, suggests the principal devastation caused by the “final human cruelty:” Ecológica—There will be, no, gardens. Nothing but dryness and desperation, straw breezes, trembling in the wind, and from it, the tragic

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carphologies that previously announced some dark day and that now perhaps are the last funeral rites for an annihilated world, gusts of pestilence blowing around among the cadavers. Perhaps a few isolated roars still claw some solitary sites on the planet. Will some wildlife still make love slowly, without realizing their own raggedy coats, without understanding that they are the victims of the final human cruelty? The worn whip of the wind will no longer electrify them, they will no longer run through their own territory, nor spin around wide-awake under the moon, atop the ruins. They will fall asleep, the last one, howling their good-byes among humiliations that they don’t understand, near blackened, but innocent, trees, like the one that Canto XIII foretold in the Inferno. The trees will stigmatize the guilty, indirect suicides, in the hallucinatory scene. But why hallucinatory when there are no longer delusional ones, when on that definitive night there is no longer anybody able to salvage one single word from that language that never managed to pass through the lips of man’s consciousness? (“Ecológica,” Affinities Glossary, 85)

At times, in the twenty-first century the best way to cope with this notion of the “end of the road” is with humor. One of Juan Carlos Galeano’s poems expresses an ironic image of an imminent ecological disaster: deforestation: Eraser Man needs space in his brain for things of importance, so every night he rubs a giant eraser across his forehead. He erases thoughts of the Earth, and each day he awakens with fewer square kilometers of memories. His parents tell him to erase with care. To not get carried away or one day he’ll wind up erasing them. Man assures them that he has had a lot of practice, that he only erases lands and things of little importance. He tells them he knows how to remove the leaves from the trees and leave the houses and the people intact. (Amazonia, 43)

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The poem’s irony summarizes very neatly the issue of an ecological risk that is not taken seriously, or that is simply ignored. Perhaps I should say it is a danger, not a risk. The loss of trees, along with other ecological disasters, are matters that seem very distant, abstract, alien to the human being who does not want to bother himself over such losses. The man in the poem and his eraser represent the disaster that the separation of nature and humans causes. Through its use of the third person singular and its parodic tone, this allegory of loss reinforces humankind’s distancing from the problem of deforestation. What is the most important thing for this man? How does irony function in the last four lines of the poem?

Other Ways of Narrating the End Delia Ackerman’s short documentary The King of the Desert Is Dying (2008) also deals with the risk of losing a certain species to extinction, in this case, the huarango tree, which Sérvulo Gutiérrez has painted frequently since infancy; a tree with deep roots, a fundamental part of one of the most fragile ecosystems on the planet. The images not only show the solitary and thirsty contours of these small oases in the southern Peruvian desert, but also the extremely varied animal life that they shelter. The indiscriminate felling of the huarango tree is the only sour note in the marvelous life-giving gift that it proffers to all species that live in its shadow. The film also documents the symbolic efforts to reforest those deserts. I realize that there are numerous documentaries whose objective is to raise our awareness of the end of the world as we know it, but I feel that poems are what best help me ponder the extinction of the species as part of my desire to protect and multiply life. I know that it sounds paradoxical and absurd, but it is a way to tackle the disturbing notion of the end. Something very different happens in Mayra Montero’s In the Palm of Darkness (English Translation, 1997), a novel that approaches the end in a very original way. Montero writes from the perspective of three dissimilar voices in one narrative space: the impersonal voice of Western scientific discourse that describes the extinction of frogs and toads in various parts of the planet without offering a plausible explanation; the voice of the protagonist, a professional herpetologist whose ability to reason with regard to this mysterious extinction slowly becomes insufficient and faulty; and the voice of the Haitian character whose beliefs and customs who help tell the story, in dialogue with the herpetologist, a story which ultimately ends in the demise of both characters. Together the two characters, the scientist and the member of a secret Voodoo society,

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embark on a voyage of no return that allows the novelist—and the reader, at least in my case—to delve deeply into that evasive and rather unpleasant matter of thinking about his or her own death and into the need to establish an environmental wisdom, which is unfamiliar to scientists and which many of them even disdain. As some of the novel’s favorable reviews suggest, nature speaks for itself and for its inhabitants, in such a way that the extinction of the Haitian frogs also reveals certain historic circumstances of the nation. Traditional cultures gain a little recognizing the severity of the extinction of species. A dialogue of wisdoms occurs— between Victor, the scientist, and Thierry, the Haitian—that at least overcome the usual division—exclusive, discriminatory, and confrontational—between high and low culture and between rural and urban. Montero’s tale brilliantly disarms the superiority of official academic knowledge in contrast to the traditional wisdom of the Haitians. The most important thing about the story is that it makes the reader think more deeply about the end of the road by means of a dialogue of wisdoms.

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

Environmental justice is the organized movement against the disproportionate allocation of toxic waste to marginalized communities in urban and industrial settings. For example, the issue of dumping toxic waste or uranium mining on Native American reservations. Yet this concept could also be applied to historical conflicts over sulphur dioxide; to the fight inspired by Chico Mendes’s sacrifice; to the photographers and film makers that document the pollution of the Amazon jungle, as in the little known case of the mercury poisoning of the rivers of Madre de Dios (Peru) caused by informal mining and verified by the high incidence of mercury in the fish typically consumed by the area’s residents; to the use of carbon dioxide sinks and temporary reservoirs; to the struggles of those displaced by the construction of dams; to the fight for the preservation of the mangroves, and many other cases around the world which do not necessarily have to do with “environmental racism” (Martínez Alier, 218). At this stage, the concept is applied and has been absorbed by the theoretical framework of environmentalism of the poor and I could enumerate many examples in shorts stories, poems and films that illustrate the concept. When debating or introducing the theme of environmental justice, a tendency to privilege economic factors over social ones still predominates, but the imminence of a change of perspective indicates a process of acceptance. “The focus in the future must be oriented toward a development in alliance with the environment and with the poor” affirms Antonio Brack (40). Of this I have no doubt and before providing examples, I want to quote the conclusion to the revised version of Joan Martínez Alier’s classic study The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation: Environmentalism of the poor refers to the conflicts caused by economic growth and by social inequalities, where the negative effects on the environment from the extraction of resources and the dumping of waste are suffered and paid for by socially marginalized social groups. Often these struggles take place along the extraction frontiers, on indigenous lands or on refuges where there is no journalistic coverage. That resistance is ecological even when the movement does not carry that adjective. Those movements of popular environmentalisms tend to lose the fight. Those who win are experts in resolving conflicts due to the death of one of

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the parties, imprisonment, or forced exile, in bribing the directors, in carrying out organized division of communities under the direction of government agents or businesses...Sometimes, popular resistance wins provisionally until a new mining, petroleum, paper or hydraulic investor, backed by the State, appears. But let’s be optimistic: those movements are the principal social force in search of allies throughout the world to channel the economy toward the fairest, most sustainable route. From resistance alternatives are born. (2010, 397)

The discourses that sustain this current of environmental justice in Latin America tend to record the various social actors by any means within their reach. Poetic discourse, especially in an elegiac and denunciatory vein, enjoys a long tradition in Latin America. Yet at times its expressive force does not manage to overcome the cultural limits of its literary genre or its social group, as in the case of the poetry collection To Die in Pasco. Poetic Vigil on the Fifth Day for a City Wiped Out by Mining (2010) by José Antonio Álvarez Pachas, which expresses quite well the pain of a people devastated by mining activities. Nevertheless, I am left with some serious doubts as to whether or not this collection holds anything of value for those beyond the immediate geographical area whose destruction the poet laments. The same cannot be said about Rafael Espinosa’s poetic output, which gives voice to a type of internal consciousness belonging to a cybernetic being. For me, this voice at the end of the first part speaks at a more profound level about the environmental crisis, considering it in its vast complexity: You SOB you don’t Care at all about the environment. Don’t you know that souls in addition to hydrographic systems, agricultural lands and zircons carry an indefinable substance whose touch lends its singular figure to faces, its puff pastry in fondness. Don’t you know that faces are what makes air breathable? Idiot, while disturbing their happiness, you destroy trees. You are cadmium plus lead

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There is a certain ironic tone that evades any discursive classification in order to explain the poem’s complaint. In contemporary narrative, Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s descriptive, provocative story, “The Sierra’s Treasure,” seems to articulate a complaint similar to Espinosa’s, but in a more explicit context in which the narrator, conscious of the environmental and social damages caused by mining activities in Guatemala, listens to the corporate point of view without understanding the destruction of vital ecosystems for local communities. The story includes the voices of various local organizations and, like many documentaries and Alvarez Pachas and Rafael Espinosa’s poetry collections, they are absorbed into a type of opposition to mining activity that evades legal regulations and ignores environmental need to avoid polluting and destroying the environment. I know that some companies, both big and small, attempt to reduce their environmental impact with preventative measures but that is just a drop in the bucket. Nor am I ignorant of the complexity of the problem, if we also take into account the informal mining activity that Stephen Sapienza has documented visually for PBS news. The principal motivation of the extractive industry is economic and ecological considerations are icing on the cake. “When we were children we thought the mountains were there for eternity, that those beautiful giants would never die. Then we found out that we were wrong, the mountains also die like the most fragile of men,” writes a Basque author, Julia Otxoa, in the spirit of José María Arguedas, although far from his beloved Andes. The documentaries When Clouds Clear, When the Earth Weeps: Operation Diablo and Open Sky, among many others, prove that social organizations’ activism and resistance in defense of the environment and of mountains that have first and last names not only are able to stop the actions of extractive corporations supported by the government du jour, but also can heighten consciences and disseminate ecological information to favor environmental justice. For Marisol de la Cadena, we are facing the inaugural moment of a new politics, especially with respect to the case of Quilish Mountain, where the Yanachocha mine’s owners wanted to expand their extraction of precious minerals, and Ausangate Peak where a mining concession has sparked strong local protests. This new politics has nothing to do with the demand for racial, ethnic or gender rights, nor with a representation on the part of environmentalists; this new politics is plural and has to do with bringing non-human natural beings and “bringing to light the hostilities that banish their worlds” (346). It functions more to

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raise awareness that the partially formed alliances between environmentalists and indigenous politicians in the Andean countries emerge from disputed spaces, such as mountains, which for some are a source of natural resources, but for others are a being with feelings and needs to which we must tend. Instead of the cultural problem between universal progress and local beliefs, we see the destiny of the more-than-human beings emerging from a political conflict between worlds. Politics will not be comprised of power relations and silenced hostilities, but of relations among worlds (351-352). In a cosmopolitan sense, these mountains attract the attention of environmentalists from various continents that have raised international opposition against mining activities. According to de la Cadena: Digging up a mountain in order to open a mine, perforating the substratum to find oil and felling trees to obtain wood can produce more than environmental damage and economic growth. These activities can translate into a violation of emplacement networks that make life possible on the local level--and even into the complete destruction of a place. (357)

The emergence in the Andean world of the indigenous can force a fundamental pluralization of politics, but not an ideological, gender, ethnic, racial or religious level, nor in the incorporation or inclusion of marked differences in a “better” multicultural society. Neither does this plurality signify a strategy to gain hegemony. De la Cadena reconfigures the concept of politics as a power dispute within a world. Her nascent notion includes the possibility of adverse relations among worlds: “a pluriversal politics” or “a cosmopolitics” (360). And she expands the limits of the nation-state to traverse worlds. Thus the bitter discrepancies between apparently irreconcilable adversaries could begin. Other documentaries like Fernando Solanas’s Land in Revolt: Impure Gold do an excellent job of unmasking the dimensions of extractive activities’ slow violence, uncovering little by little the predatory and unsustainable face of such industries. The basic issue is to add to this climate of exposure and denunciation a constructive aspect through innovative narrative forms that tell these stories of ecological and social calamities in a way that challenges the dominant politics of representation and identity. New spaces to oppose disputes among adversaries? New means that, instead of modeling behaviors and objectifying humans, produce those who design meanings within a participatory and open culture? To find more disputed areas like the ones Marisol de la Cadena finds? Perhaps I am way off base with my questions. I am aware that the dispersion and fragmentation of discontent will only gain strength and cogency in a convergence of efforts, in the recognition of differences and

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partially connected worlds, in the personal and collective commitment, which can be translated into the organization of social movements, and in the welcome advent of a “pluriversal politics.”

ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE

We have to think the environment by suspending all that informs any thought that does not think the environment. All the phrases belong to Enrique Leff. —RFB Knowing how to exist is, above all, forming part of creation, being worthy of creation.... (Eielson, Nu / dos, 377). Today we know so many things about life And about death. We know The precise moment in which light becomes butterfly. We know that we are only impulses a crossroads of blue fields that now turn into matter now again new fields. We know all this but we do not yet know how to convert such wisdom into a creature that gazes at us alone and that fills us with happiness. (Eielson, Nu / dos, 532)

Traditional Ecological Knowledge From the fault lines of modern thought emerges an environmental rationality that allows us to unveil the perverse circles, enclosures, and chains that link categories of thought and scientific concepts to the rational core of its strategies of domination of nature and culture. The ideology of progress and of growth without limits clashes with the law of natural limits, initiating a redefinition of the world for the construction of an alternative rationality. The existential condition of mankind becomes more complex when the temporality of life faces erosion of its ecological and thermodynamic conditions of sustainability, but also when it opens to the future through the power of desire, the thirst for power, the creativity of diversity, the encounter with otherness, and the fertility of difference.

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Non-Western Knowledge The deconstruction of reason triggered by the eco-destructive forces of an unsustainable world, and the building of an environmental rationality, is not just a philosophical and theoretical enterprise. The latter is rooted in social practices and new political actors. It is, at the same time, an emancipation process that implies the decolonization of knowledge under the domination of globalizing and totalizing thought, in order to fertilize local knowledges. An environmental rationality recovers the cryptic sense of the being to unearth the buried and crystallized senses, to restore the link with life, and with the life desire; to fertilize the humus of existence.

Indigenous Science or Emergent Science Environmental rationality is a way of thinking that is rooted in life, through a policy centered on being and difference. It inquires into and questions the iron core of totalitarian rationality because it desires life. It formulates new arguments that nurture feelings to mobilize collective action, enchantment with the world, and eroticization of life. It builds savoirs that instead of grabbing the truth of the world and subjecting it to its domination rather lead us to inhabit the riddle of existence and to coexist with the other.

Peasant Knowledge The ethics of otherness is not a dialectic of opposites that results in the reduction, exclusion, and elimination of the adversary—the opposite other— even in the transcendence and redemption of the world where a dominant thought imposes itself. Environmental rationality inquires into the foundation of the one and into the ignorance of the other, which have led to the fundamentalism of a universal unit and to the conception of identities as sameness without otherness, which has been exacerbated in a process of globalization where terrorism and environmental crises make their appearance as a sign of the decadence of life, of the will to become suicidal and a murderer of the other, of the loss of meaning that is entailed in the reification of the world and the commoditization of the nature.

Macrosystems Environmental rationality builds new life-worlds in the re-articulation

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between culture and nature, beyond the pretension to force the equalization of the real and the symbolic in an ontological monism; it recognizes their duality and difference in the human constitution. It is a process of emergence of new civilizational senses that are forged within environmental knowledge, beyond all theoretical idealism and the objectification of the world through knowledge. The environment was not, then, the junction of fragmented disciplines, focused on their own autonomous objectives of knowledge; it was not a simple “environmental dimension,” which, continuing the vectorial and factorial, ecological, and cybernetic focuses, could be internalized within systemic approaches and planning practices within the established paradigms of knowledge; nor could it serve as the unifying thread capable of weaving the transversality of “the environmental” through the dispersed and dismembered body of knowledge. The environment was formed in a field of externality to the logocentrism of science, as the “other” of established scientific theories. From that position, emerging environmental knowledge problematizes the “normal” scientific paradigms and promotes their transformation in order to generate environmental branches of knowledge. In this sense, environmental epistemology goes further than interdisciplinary proposals that pretend to induce a hybridization between natural and social sciences to generate the much needed and desired environmental sciences, or to create new disciplines and transdisciplinary methods capable of approaching complex emerging socio-environmental problems.

Systematic Savoirs Environmental rationality is forged from within an ethic of otherness, in a “dialogue between ways of knowing” and a politic of difference, beyond every ontology and epistemology that claims to know and encompass the world, to control nature and restrain life-worlds. This environmental rationality articulates the diverse cultural orders and spheres of knowledge, beyond the logical structures and rational paradigms of knowledge. From threshold to threshold, the concept of environmental rationality is contrasted to the concepts that sustain modern rationality, exposing their own limits through an understanding of environmental complexity. Environmental rationality appears as a mediator between the material and the symbolic, a way of thinking that brings out both the potential of the real and the emancipatory character of creative thinking, rooted in cultural identities and existential senses, in a politics of being and of difference, in the construction of a new paradigm of sustainable production based on cooperative instincts and creativity

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principles. Environmental rationality asserts a new relation between theory and praxis, a politics of theoretical concepts and strategies that mobilize social action towards sustainability. Beyond the totalitarian realism of the theories that have sustained modern thinking, environmental rationality seeks to rethink the relation between the real and the symbolic in today’s globalized world, the mediation between culture and nature, and to confront the power strategies that span the geopolitics of sustainable development. Beyond identifying economic, political, and social causes tied to a collection of socio-environmental problems—contamination, deforestation, ecological degradation, soil erosion, global warming—this epistemological view transcended the stance of systems theories and the holistic visions that led to a will for interdisciplinary integration of existing sciences as a way of resolving the fragmentation of knowledge as an associated cause of the environmental crisis. This epistemological inquiry shows the fecundity of looking at different disciplines from the standpoint of environmental savoir. Along with the development of new focuses of complex systems, and a critical analysis of the coordination of sciences and interdisciplinarity, incipient fields and innovative theories began to be fertilized in the fields of economy, ecology, anthropology, architecture, rural sociology, and law, and in applied problems such as urbanism, integrated resource management, development planning, and environmental law. The theories arising in Europe were transformed from a critical perspective that is borne from the sources of ecological potentials and the cultural diversity of our continent, and were fertilizing new fields of political ecology in Latin America. The concept of the environment as potential is typically and uniquely Latin American. From this epistemological field unique proposals about environmental complexity arose—beyond complex thought and the sciences of complexity—and move from a critique of interdisciplinarity and systems theories toward a dialogue of savoirs to sow sustainabilities.

Ventures of Popular Wisdom The relationship between culture and rationality, between being and knowledge; the assimilation of knowledge by identities, and the rooting of knowledge in ‘territories of life’; the social processes and the cultural forms of re-appropriation of nature, of environmental services, and of the common goods of the planet; the power strategies that can bring about a world of cultural diversity, a globalization process that articulates cooperative instincts, free energy, and a sustainable future built out of a dialogue between ways of knowing. These are open gaps to keep thinking

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and building: the mediation values in an ethics of otherness. This is an ethics of the earth, of sustainability, and of life; a philosophy that allows for the bonding of nature and the spirituality of the people; a philosophy that from the pre-Socratic to modern philosophers recovers “The Reason of Life”; that allows for the re-enchantment of the world. This new ethics enables autonomies to proliferate without fearing the axiological relativism generated by the cult to an insuring unity; this also establishes the coexistence of differences that contain the outbreak of violence and animosity toward the other through a confrontation of interests, senses of truth-regimes, and rationality-matrixes. These are loose ends and suspension bridges, like lianas waiting for other grammatical, epistemological, and political monkeys to catch them to move through the treetops and forests of wisdom. It is an open frame to be further weaved with ideas borne out of environmental rationality. The idea of a sustainable development founded on knowledge and cultural wisdom about biological richness and potential ecological values of the region has been gaining strength. Such research on and practices about the cultural management of nature have been nourished by a rich tradition of ethnobotanical, ethnoecological, and agricultural studies. From this perspective, the environment is understood as a potentiality, not as the environmental costs of development, which is the vision that predominates in the economistic approaches of the North. If the richness and cultural diversity of the South, and the South American territories, were the “melting pot” for the best anthropological theories and the academic culture of the ethnosciences (from Claude Levi-Strauss to Philippe Descola), the ethno-ecological studies opened perspectives to look beyond the study of culture in itself, beyond culture as an object of ethnological research, in order to consider it as biocultural heritage and a source of new perspectives on sustainability. One of the most promising practical fields has been derived to root Latin American environmental thought in sustainable practices of agro-ecology and agro-forestry, which have become a subject of theoretical-practical debates in the field of political ecology, in the confrontation of productivist models with new strategies of sustainable agriculture which are constituting new paradigms and social actors in the construction of sustainability. Here, the theoretical-philosophical-political proposal of the construction of an environmental rationality is sowed in a practical field, where ecological potential, technological productivity, and cultural creativity come together in new agro-ecological and agro-forestry strategies in a dialogue of knowledges between ecological and agronomic sciences with indigenous and peasantry wisdom, in a process of cultural, technical, and social re-appropriation of nature. Thus, new social

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movements and strategies for conservationist and productive management of ecological potentialities and biological diversity are emerging, guided by principles of political autonomy and cultural identity, such as the extractive reserves of the seringueiros (rubber tappers) in Brazil, the practices of the forest communities in Mexico, the cultural management of biodiversity of the Proceso de Comunidades Negras (Process of Black Communities) in Colombia, and so many other agro-ecological and agroforestry processes emerging in different cultural territories in Latin America. Projects of cultural emancipation and re- appropriation of nature continue to happen, from the Mapuche people in the south of the continent to the Comcaac people in the arid northern region of Mexico; from the Amazonic ecosystems and the “cerrados” landscapes in Brazil; from tropical ecosystems to the arid and temperate zones; from mountain to water ecosystems (from high lands agriculture to sea-level aquaculture and fishing communities), in the construction of sustainability based on the cultural being of the indigenous people of Latin America. These are the paths opened by a way of thinking that generates new meanings and orients new actions which nourishes itself with the sap of the cultural knowledges and the ecological potentialities of the living planet that we inhabit, in a movement of social transformation, which is sowing new territories of life and defining the horizons of a sustainable future. We need to get a plural dialogue, direct and close with the indigenous and popular knowledges of the people of the region. Only by putting this dialogue into practice can there emerge a political ethics of difference that orients the cultural re-appropriation of the common heritage of humanity; a democratic and participatory management of the commons that delinks from a totalitarian regime of meaning on nature and from the dominance of the World economic order: which neither submits to the merchandizing of nature, nor to an ecological order, nor to a general sense of the being pretending to unify the views and interests of the people, who are differentiated by nature and by life. Apart from a hegemonic or dominant rationality that forces a consensus in a unified knowledge, the solidarities that must be forged to construct a sustainable future for Latin America and for the world as a whole, must recognize their differences, their irreducible othernesses, in a common sense that cannot be anything other than a future led by the heterogeneneity generated by biocultural diversity.

ERRANT POLYPHONY

Solidarity as practiced among groups from various countries takes many forms and in the realm of ecology it can be found in government, in NGOs, and in local communities. The Alliance for a Responsible, Plural, and United World currently has more than 2000 members on 5 continents. A group of 25 translators, primarily non-Western, met in October 1998 on the Greek isle of Naxos to translate the Alliance’s platform and to mold it in such a way as to enable local socio-cultural realities. The first errant polyphony with so broad a scope. The “Manifesto on Cultural Pluralism and Interculturality” is a discursive expression of this type of international alliance. The Official World Summit on Sustainable Development explains that this errant polyphony flourishes under such types of alliances. How can we participate in such processes of international integration? Is such action only the privilege of the global elite? How can we imagine an alternate media network that breaks the corporate monopoly on communication? How do we refashion and highlight the role of the traveler as a valuable intermediary between new cultural agents? How can the traveler be transformed into an antidote for the destructive homogenization of the processes of globalization? A participative model of communication can lead us toward constructing a polyphonic encounter. That is what happened at the National University of Colombia, through its Memoirs: First Amazonian Encounter of the Dialogues of Knowledge: Leticia in 2008. The spirit of that encounter is emblematized by the image of the weaver and by the invocation of the Uitoto ritual that begins: Jii monifue jafaiki juyakinaa Ninomonaa aiñirioidinaa komuiya daide Izoidemona iyedii buu iñedikue daide… From the beginning of the breath of abundance, From there wisdom emerges, I am saying. From that very place I have given to all, To whom did I not give? I am saying…

The invocation seeks to discover a way to create abundance and wisdom as a friendly exchange of food and communication in order to heal

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and to relate to one another naturally. This recognition of popular and ethnic wisdoms enriches our notion of dialogue that a professor from the Amazon region summarized thus: “Because we are very different we have much to ask one another” (Echeverri, 16). That dialogic role is perhaps best incarnated by the traveler “I” in Renato Sandoval’s (Peru, b. 1957) mature poetry. I include two fragments from his poetic discourse, which has neither beginning nor end, in order to emphasize the aspect of the serialized poem that resists the dominant narrative of a unique and preferred identity. I know that I am not doing justice to these fragments since little will be seen of how they recombine points of views from plural worlds, but I have faith in their suggestive power as I do in all good poetry: The train is coming, there goes my head. (Nostos, 29) Some poem will come out Of this forehead where Restraint no longer lives While over there The winds finish erasing the final frontier. (The Opposite of Flight, 59).

A reading of the subject’s mobility not only encourages a spiritual reflection on travel, but also a fluid dynamic that projects the traveler’s body into a more complex and changing current of winds and extended forms of literary navigation. Sandoval is an indefatigable translator of authors such as Pavese, Quasimodo, Tabucchi, Arnaut Daniel, Tieck, Rilke, Kafka, Södergran, Agren Haavikko, Saarikoski, Stenberg, Dinesen, Boberg, Drummond de Andrade, and Sylvia Plath. In some way, Sandoval also incarnates in his translation work an internationalist role like the one founded in Naxos. It would be prudent for us to study how these various poetic trips challenge the detrimental separation between human and nature. A fusion of human and natural world views is evident in the fine wandering poems that exist between worlds in his collection Susuki Blues (2006), a creative homage to Asian poetry. I will include only one poem that expresses the notion of the close connection between a human and a tree, as well as a bird. The pictograms that introduce each poem foreshadow their vitalist symbolism: The old pine tree advocates lust, but the wild bird screams the citizen’s truth; it is I

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and the perjury that humbles and uplifts me, although also an amoeba that renounces or enjoys neon lights. Nobody knows if the tree grows upward or if the crows brood on the posts. (Buson)

In the face of the heavy baggage that surrounds the idea of the rational “I” who conceives of himself as separate from his environment, Sandoval displays the ironic, joyful look of an “I” who is in turn a tree, a bird, a citizen, an amoeba. Unnoticed and far from conventional nations belonging not only to the eighteenth-century Japanese poet, but also to the urban poet who includes sign posts in his poems and who is transformed by crows. Nations traversed in the poem that are tied together in an alliance of plural discontinuities that defuse venomous fanatical and separatist nationalities. I want to clarify for the reader that this is by no means a complete catalogue of what the ecological imagination does in Latin American culture since I am not aware of the majority of the cultural production in the languages of the many indigenous peoples that populate the vast region. Renato Sandoval’s example, especially in its polyphonic and polyglot curiosity, encourages me to be alert to the vast cultural production that continues far from the official cultural channels. In this sense, it is important to mention efforts such as those that were published with the support of the Scholarship Program for Writers in Indigenous Languages in Mexico: “Contemporary Indigenous Letters” is launching with five bilingual works in Mayan, Zapotecan, Tzotzil and Totonaco. The authors that inaugurate this series are Briceida Cuevas Cob, from Tepakán, Calkiní, Campeche, a speaker of Mayan; Irma Pineda Santiago and Esteban Ríos Cruz, both from Juchitán de Zaragoza, Oaxaca, speakers of Zapotec; Ruperta Bautista Vázquez, from Hueyzacatlán, now San Cristóbal de la Casas, Chiapas, a Tzotzil speaker, and Manuel Espinosa Sainos, from Ixtepec, Puebla, who speaks Totonaco. Accessed June 12, 2011. www.edi.gob.mx.

The versions in Spanish deserve to be savored: Ruperta Bautista Vazquez’s “Hidden Animal,” which I include in the entry on “Metamorphoses” and fragments of other poems of hers in “Ecospirituality.” The complete editions of these poetry collections were published bilingually and are available in pdf format at http://www.cdi.gob.mex.

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Manuel Espinosa Sainos’ Songs of the Totonac People is an excellent example of this errant polyphony of human and more-than-human beings, undifferentiated and connected by this concert of wing beats and other sounds of the Earth. They are lovely poems that inspire us to read, such as “The Twelve Animals That I Am:” A knot in the belly button welcomed me home, in the place where flowers dwell, my tears were tattooed on the walls. The trace of a squirrel in the tree, the flap of a hummingbird’s wing on the flower the howl of the coyote on the mountain, the shining eyes of the possum in the thicket. The tie of my belly button entangled the butterflies’ flight, the dragonfly’s dance above the well, the pheasant’s song, the twelve animals of the hillside, the twelve animals that I am. (55)

HARMONY

Balance in nature, the universe’s equilibrium . . . a deeply rooted myth that has existed for centuries in the minds of philosophers, scientists and authors. I began by seeking out clues to nurture my own imagination in the knowledge and enjoyment of Pre-Columbian cultures. What can we learn from their effort to live harmoniously with the natural world? Observing the Moray ruins in 2008, I admired the fact that the Incas had taken advantage of the first terraces and had constructed more, without destroying anything that had come before. A fairly simple principle to follow: use what you have, without starting over. At Moray I also admired how the construction of the terraces was in harmony with the natural landscape. That laboratory of ecological steps in the form of an amphitheater spoke to me about that principle with the power of a poem that fit the occasion perfectly. Nevertheless, I take to heart Greg Garrard’s warning about the models of a harmonious existence with nature when he criticizes the myth of the “Ecological Indian” for not considering the social and ecological interrelations among the Indigenous and Euro American societies (Ecocriticism, 120-131). In reality Garrard questions the concept of ecology as a science of harmony and equilibrium, basing his definition on a more complex and unpredictable concept of natural reality, in which human beings are dynamic forces whose influence on their environment cannot be accepted as part of a stable, harmonious, and balanced existence. The idea of stability and harmony is part of that myth. Laure E. Donaldson writes about the teaching of the spiritual tradition of the Native Americans in this regard and, from my perspective, thus enriches the discussion of harmony. The connection between humans and Mother Earth is more similar to the prolonged and frequently polemical negotiations to reach an agreement than to the static symbiosis of harmony. To harmonize, however, is something rather fragile and is only achieved through the integral participation of mind, body, and spirit, with a daily commitment to the Earth. For the Native Americans, this was a sacred responsibility and to fail in this regard could bring terrible consequences from the Earth. They believed that resources could fail them and thus developed practical and spiritual methods to ensure life

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(Donaldson, 724). Greg Garrard’s and Dana Phillips’ critiques of this notion of “balance” as an obsolete model of ecology that is still used habitually in literary ecocritical analyses made me think about the necessity of reconsidering this idea as an supporting argument in what I wanted to say about nature. It is difficult to not attempt to “harmonize” with nature, above all if one wishes to care for it and respect it. Yet, for ecocriticism, to harmonize does not mean to reach some ideal stability; to harmonize is a daily pledge to the ecological wellbeing of all creatures on this planet, a type of unstable stability of varying degrees of change and adaptation. It was the poet Roberto Juarroz (1925-1995) who introduced me to this dynamic, planetary focus through his creative commitment to nature. He had an idea of harmony that responded to the chaotic reality of nature in constant cycles of change. Juarroz envisioned the world as a “wasting away of forms” that, nevertheless, was always able to generate a way out (Eight Vertical Poetry, poem 28): When faced with an impossible labyrinth construct another one, even more intricate, that confounds the first one.

This philosophical intuition of alternating worlds is derived from a notion of equilibrium that is not the concept that Phillips and Garrard critique with epistemological clarity. Harmony is a fragile reality within an unusual image of eating (9th, 36): The equilibrium between mouth and fruit is so easily broken like an unlikely spider web. Thus mouth and fruit need a tree that would produce both of them simultaneously. A tree that would generate every fruit and with them all the mouths, without any more distance than the inevitable disjunctions that hinder all that is living, but here strangely combined into one. And then, naturally and without voracity, each fruit satisfying a mouth, each mouth biting a fruit,

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as if a god were springing free from each one. A tree where life is empowered with the secret of ultimate balance: devouring the infinite with its own infinite.

Juarroz anticipates what ecology is documenting scientifically at the beginning of the twenty-first century: that periods of equilibrium are interrupted by even longer periods of nonequilibrium (Rohde, 182). The poem’s dynamic reality among mouths, fruit, and tree are not simple ideas placed one after the other. They represent a dynamic vision of the reality of eating: the points of origin are different and the process by which they pass is the operation of eating, which, in turn, is in keeping with another process of repetitions “ad infinitum” in the act of devouring. As early as the time of his Vertical fragments, Juarroz was distancing himself from a static notion of harmony: “Spirit is more concentration than harmony” (“Almost right,” 61). What did Juarroz mean by “ more concentration”? If we return to a reading of the poem about the unbalanced equilibrium between mouth and fruit, the poetic imagination asks us to overcome the lack of clarity of the image of the tree which unites both living components. Juarroz shows us the complex dynamic of all that is living; the generative character of each being who participates in the mouth’s action of biting a fruit. Is this an elaborate natural metaphor for language as food? An instant of eating unfolds in atypical perspectives that demand great focus and an imagination that is able to understand the image of the tree as a relation that matters more than the daily event of a mouth stretching toward a piece of fruit. A concentration that is not achieved through a quick first reading, but that demands a rereading. In another poem (11th, I, 23), Juarroz defines equilibrium in another fashion, this time with a decidedly more linguistic image, as a fusion of things and words, difficult to perceive: Infinitesimal discourse of elusive particles, surplus lines and parallel, superimposed edges that break away from things and also from words and gestures. Not only do friction and wear-and-tear detach them but also the attraction of an eccentric equilibrium, that does not fit into the law of other equilibriums

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Harmony nor into the migrating heterodoxy of the imbalances. That equilibrium is the least that comes loose, that infinitesimal discourse, is all that deserves our trust.

The poem reinforces the idea of a concentrated attention toward reality, rather than encouraging the search for equilibrium itself. It seems to me that the most suggestive parallelism I find between the vertical poem and ecological discourse is the matter of how to perceive a richer reality through language. John Kricher, in his book The Balance of Nature: Ecology’s Enduring Myth (2009), highlights the paradigm of the ecofunction of biodiversity, not only in order to overcome the methodological gap that the notion of harmony as paradigm entails, but also to sharpen the approaches to this notion of biodiversity. It is important to measure not only the scale of the species, but of the subspecies, of the genetic diversity within a species and of entire ecosystems. Indeed, knowing how much each species affects an ecosystem is not easy. Juarroz proposes a more specific methodical attention that hones in on a detail and the surrounding reality that makes up the dynamic and changing existence of every being. In Juarroz’s poems, the poet prepares the terrain in order for us to be ready to face the disruptions that such a changing reality is going to present. Kricher does not know how to ensure the sustainability of the Earth’s ecological resources amid potentially catastrophic disruptions, yet nevertheless, he offers several keys to formulate a new harmonious paradigm (according to Kricher the paradigm of the eco-function of biodiversity) that does not have as its premise a stable and rigid order for the ecological imagination. Kricher wonders what the earth’s ecosystems have done for us lately: Ranging from purification of air and water, cycling and movement of nutrients, climate modification, generation and preservation of soils and renewal of soil fertility, to seed dispersal, pollination of crops and other vegetation, to maintenance of biodiversity (including the esthetic satisfaction it provides), it is clear that the functioning of natural ecosystems is essential to human welfare. (186)

It is not easy to adopt the change in perspective that Krisher recommends. Scientifically, that change requires more robust theoretical models, the use of better sets of data, and a sound system of continuous revision of the reality of nature. In this sense, Argentine poets Javier

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Cófreces and Alberto Muñoz’s poetic projects surprise us while simultaneously providing a model that should be emulated. In their collection “Song of Vegetable Love,” on the page next to their poems about the plants and trees of the Tigre region in the delta of the Paraná River, they offer historical and biological descriptions along with a glossary of those who have committed suicide in the river, a collection of poems, “The Mobile Cemetery” by Celso Caragatto; a list of islands and ships, as well as an almanac for the region. In another sense, unlike Cófreces and Muñoz’s cataloging and descriptive cornucopia, “vertical poetry” helps to train the spirit to apply that “reality check” in every moment of our lives. Balance as the final goal of cosmic connection “has to be delayed infinitely so that life may continue. In the incalculable calculation of pleasure, things always lose their equilibrium, just a bit off and life is richer far from that balance.” In another poem, Juarroz makes the attention-to-detail training, which is just a bit off, explicit with the following “proof” of confusion: At times harmony abandons all of its traits and momentarily adopts the mask of confusion. Words jumble together then like grains of befuddled cereals, time increases its volume and no longer can you hear the chorus that sings backup for all the silences of the world. The outlines of objects wrinkle as if they had suddenly grown old and that aging entangles all roads, even those that lead to or come back from love which may well be all roads. And other times harmony scatters like a shattered bone, stopping up the channels that feed the defenseless grace of the rose the incomparable nakedness of the hairs that are in love or the caress, the very essence of hands. Confusion is the proof to which harmony submits

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Harmony so that man can discover it at least by its absence since he knows not how to grasp it in its presence. (11th, II, 9)

I like this poem not only because Juarroz explains his method of attention to detail with reference to the matter of harmony, but also because it places the theme of love at the heart of the matter of harmony. Love is the setting for all the pathways that a being can take in its vital relationships. Juarroz is able to articulate his perspective on nature as a complex, ever-changing dynamic that is a far cry from that notion of harmony that originates in a predetermined, obsolete theoretical framework. Harmony is no longer a key notion for imagining our relationship with nature, since it is impossible to attempt to relate to nature from a position of instability. Similarly, the notion of equilibrium is not extrapolated to the terrain of poetic theory in a thoughtless analogy, but rather in a dynamic that is inspired by nature. In Vertical Fragment (Almost Poetry), Juarroz reflects on this aesthetic equilibrium: All things fit into poetry, but only if we push them to the edge, until the difficult equilibrium of being, in some extreme outer limit, strips them of all their burdens and their secret adherences. Only in this way will they be themselves and have a place in poetry.

We ought to seek harmony alongside the natural, but without that predetermined encumbrance of an ideally full stability, which implies accepting the immanent value of things, while including them in our concept of the natural and the human. It is not a simple process, not one necessarily within the reach of the masses; it is neither transparent nor obvious. Juarroz’s poem 44 helps us to reinforce this penetrating and complex perspective: Night’s dark fruit drips the juice of night through the cracks in its shell. And among the black drops like some heterodox filtration there falls, sporadically, a white drop. Nevertheless, harmony is not broken. All of the drops have the same taste. All harmony should comply with the inescapable condition to conserve within itself a disharmony, the dissonance that saves it

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from becoming unreal (13th)

In this poem Juarroz situates the perception of harmony beyond the realm of sight into the plane of taste, where disharmony is key in “checking” the real. The form of using universals is also complex. Juarroz asks us to go to the extreme of this plenitude, not only because he suspects that the plenitude is ideal, not real, but also because what matters in this context is the drops’—whether white or black—precise attitude, a dissonance that allows harmony to pulsate without the naiveté of an unshakeable framework. The Argentine poet Claudia Masin (b. 1972) has a lovely book about this notion of plenitude and in the last poem, which also provides the book’s title, she expresses that precise attitude in the final verses: I imagine that there must be nothing more beautiful to see than that moment of plenitude, when Mother Earth who seems defeated offers up all of her power at once to a world, which neither needs it nor wants it, before She withdraws, as if the forest were the body of the beloved, indifferent to the lover from whose embrace he gently pulls away. I want to be like that, able of withstanding the plenitude without longing for abundance. Let that be enough: the pure desire of leaving the small and the great that we have, our loved ones, although unnecessarily, and to live for one moment surrounded by the things that truly matter: storms, wild animals, the exuberance of summer. (“Plenitude,” 48)

Conditioned by love, Luis Hernández (1942-1965) had already insisted on a similar undertaking of harmonizing, when he wrote the following with such musical and chromatic sensitivity: Harmony Cannot be broken: There is a garden The unusual melody Of some afternoons In the light that filters Through the chords No, Harmony Must not be broken.

Harmony is not something given, preexistent, but rather something undifferentiated, indiscernible, that envelops us and that implies a tie that cannot be broken because it answers to a planetary brotherhood. Harmony is born from daily commitment, from ecological responsibility; not from

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positions of superiority or from distinctions that sadly still contain the imprint of the division between culture and nature or between human and non-human. Neither is harmony born from the fear of chaos, but rather it demands bravery and humility.

INTERVAL

What do we see in a plant that is growing through a crack in a city sidewalk? A sardonic sprout of consciousness regarding the world’s fragility? Can we use that image to account for a suspension in time from our daily unconscious acts? Can we take advantage of that interval as a way to tune in, to carve out a pause or a parenthesis in the routines that isolate us? Does this interval renew the world’s orienting coordinates? Is it possible for a crack in the environment to do away with the cohesive images that live in our brains? The interval that interests me here is a break in the part of our brain that passes judgment. That break serves to incorporate matter typically considered inanimate into the world’s animate matter. For me this interval functions as a positive visit to a place where it is possible to exist without the imposition of the social, perhaps a fantastical and phantasmal notion: in other words, a temporary autonomous zone. This interruption of fixed identities upsets not only various social groups’ normative codes that define rules of conduct, but also the prevalent idea of humans as separate from nature. The temporary autonomous zone cannot be permanently occupied because it is in flux. It is open to the interdependence of all things. Nothing can remain the same for very long in the interval. As a transitional space, it is considered a privileged spiritual zone prepared to challenge any law of stability and therefore I conceive of this temporary autonomous zone as a wetland in its resistant, random and changing condition. These zones withstand any form of control, shelter anything and constantly transform.

Cracks For Juan L. Ortiz (1896-1978), the interval in nature is an occasion to ponder the cracks in what lives as awareness of what is perishable and a sense of imminent death: How strange! How strange that on this autumn morning there is a crack! Tenuous, the light receives new words from the flowers dotting the hills and lining the paths.

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Interval How strange that on this autumn morning, still damp, there is a crack! What escapes there? The fairy dew drops tremble still. How strange that on this autumn morning there is a crack! Nothing escapes there. An emptiness so eerie in its depths. No, it is not emptiness, it is a vague night. A blurry darkness, suddenly, in this damp March light, or this light flickering against the vague night. The flowers seems stranger and the dew more fragile, the green hill made of a more ephemeral glass, the river an ardent flow soon to disappear. Autumn, on your mornings, earth’s pain forms a crack, and the flowers’ words dissipate from the light of dampened feet almost funereal in the vague night. (The Poplar and the Wind, 316)

This crack that produces strangeness in the poetic “I” is a temporal interruption of the environment’s light, and the repetition of the initial verse establishes an inquisitive tone that is reinforced by the negations and vacillation in the verses. The typical pastoral landscape is disrupted by the sense of strangeness present in the atmosphere. The increasing fragility and brevity of the environment are registers of the mortality of the natural world that through a crack appears to dispel its communication, “The flowers’ words,” the signs of a being that feels pain. The images are not clear but they challenge the reader’s objective vision of the Earth, “earth’s pain forms a crack” in how light appears in the autumn morning. Is it too much to ask the reader to imagine a crack like the one that Ortiz imagines in his work? A way of thinking freely about death like a “vague night” in the morning?

Those who read the cracks One of Ortiz’s disciples takes the notion of the interval to a radical extreme. I am referring to Roberto Juarroz (1925-1995), who wrote poems that incarnate and figure this type of interval as a temporary autonomous zone. The interval, a free, yet fleeting space, characterizes the totality of Juarroz’s poetic output: Vertical Poetry. Fourteen books with the same title, yet none of the poems bears a title; in essence, each of the poems can be considered part of a single poem. The totality of the poems therefore possesses a vertical dimension in that all of the poems are related to one another. Juarroz employs fascinating and unusual figures for the interval:

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“a dialogue without gaps between two gaps,” “places without light, or darkness, or mediations, / free space” (Third Vertical Poetry, Poem 20), “seeds of a different time” (Sixth Vertical Poetry, Poem 87), “dismantling of the body and of things” (Eleventh Vertical Poetry, Poem 6), “parenthesis of non-being in the being” (Twelfth Vertical Poetry, Poem 30), “the autonomous language of gesture / . . . calculated change / to awaken latent hopes / that inhabit the depth of everything” (Thirteenth Vertical Poetry, Poem 22), “the subtraction/ that permits the encounter” (Thirteenth Vertical Poetry, Poem 84), and “intermediary sequences / but not from one point to another / sequences among sequences” (Fourteenth Vertical Poetry, Poem 78). These are not simple phrases that disrupt the poems; they are wedges in monolithic blocks of thought that invite us to enter into new ways of perceiving. In Vertical Fragment 88 (“Almost Poetry”), Juarroz explains the poem as an interruption in a dream: “At times a poem wakes us up from a dream. And although we may fall back asleep to find the poem again, we cannot find it. The poems that dreams are made of disappear in another direction.” In Vertical Fragment 95 (“Almost Poetry”), Juarroz attempts a reflection on the interval that merits further study: “Each man manifests a series of superimposed figures. His true figure slips through the cracks of other figures at times, but no one recognizes it. Those who read the cracks are not abundant.” This is the ability to recognize and inhabit the interval, a disposition that requires training in order to understand human reality. Something rather difficult to conceive of if we think about our already ingrained thought processes that imagine everything through the paradigm of linear stories and narrative artifice. This notion of humanity, able to unlearn narrative linearity, transcends the anthropomorphic concept by including the human in all that is natural, even the non-natural things. Why, then, this insistence on being in the interstice, in the changing cracks of being, in the extremes of all that exists, in the natural cycles of life and death? Perhaps Juarroz’s explicit interest in nature explains in part this wisdom of imaging how to incarnate in life and in language the connection with the natural world as a principal component of our life experience, his nonconformity with the “successive scandals / of living without living / and dying without living” (Fourteenth Vertical Poetry, poem 53), that living always “in opposition to the immobile” (Fourteenth Vertical Poetry, poem 91). The following poem synthesizes that dynamic concept of the interval: To quit making these things or others and to make instead more space to add to that which already exists.

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Interval More space for what is behind things, for what crouches in love or in a frown, for what falls without anybody’s help toward the past, for what sinks down as the dead sink. To create more space for our mysteries and our enlightenments, to dislocate what is located, so that we lose it between night and day, to mark the silent times, for what we bear in a whisper for what neither begins nor ends here but has its name here, for the stripped down thoughts, for the words that can only be alone, like orphans detached from the protective refuge of language. And to create again more space so that all becomes nothing more than an interval, without the need of any previous act and no outcome. wide interval beyond the work, until finding the thoroughly homogeneous texture of an interval between intervals.

This expanding unfinished space in the poem functions also as a reading guide to the entire work: the book of poems is an unfinished poem, any poem in the book is an unfinished book. Is the world a book that has yet to be finished? Does the reader become an unfinished world? Those who read the cracks are few in number. These versatile foci of interruptions, intervals, and interstices are relevant to ecological thinking. Nature can never be in a stable equilibrium forever, and the idea of harmony is enriched by points of view from the margins. The breaking down of rigid structures and the creation of more flexible spaces is an ongoing process of composition that the vertical poem incarnates in its language, in the phrase that shatters the limit of everything, as in the end of poem 41 (Twelfth Vertical Poetry): Living seems to be only a brushing against being But perhaps it is possible to stop in mid-brush like a song on a branch, to greet the sun or the birds.

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What “brushing against” does the vertical poem mean? The interval the poem expresses is not merely an attempt at pausing the moment of action, but an effort to think of life as a process that is observed in order to be pondered and felt from the rhythm of natural cycles: the lyrical “I” thinks and feels like a being who lives and dies within the web of relations that are cyclical and “welcomed,” much like the poetic voice greets nature. Ida Vitale (b. 1923) has written an evocative version of the interval as a parenthesis of language. Parenthesis, Fragile House When close-mindedness threatens open a parenthesis, a tepid sign, fragile house that has no more roof than the imagined sky (although it may be arid, acidic, ill-fated, if another opens it), imagine two hands that protect your face, that truly look inside you, pit the sun against winter, sun and human solvency. Although you ought to cross forests of time, tread upon dry leaves on the soil of memory, take care to not be swallowed up by ditches of sudden erosion, seek yourself in the parenthesis, as in words forever silenced.

Everything is a phrase, and the parenthesis that the lyrical “I” opens is a means of pausing the experience of what is closed, what is closing itself off, and replacing it with a fragile space in which nothing is closed. The two hands that are imagined express the poetic stratagem of creating a parenthesis that eludes erosion like another figure of oblivion, of disappearance. The parenthesis, then, is a sophisticated tool to keep the course of existence open and flexible, like that of a flock of birds that finds the exact route to flee fatal closures: lack of food, hostile climate,

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occasional predators, whatever life threatens. The risk of losing essential (re) sources always goes hand-in-hand with the journey of life. The physician-poet Luis Hernández (1941-1977) is well versed in the ludic interval. The majority of his colored notebooks of poems are notable traces of temporary autonomous zones, songs filled with humor and tenderness. They have all been collected in a volume, Vox horrísona (1978), which has now seen several editions. The tone of rebellion against the models of normalcy imposed by Lima’s society serves as a source of inspiration to preserve the innocence and awe of childhood as a vital example of how to disrupt the customary and boring rhythm of daily life: Escape They were drinking beer Until the crew In patrol car PL 45 Did what it always does (The Lilac Sun, 74)

Humor is something that infuses Hernández’s poetic intervals, which take place in parks and gardens or on beaches for the most part, and that his lyrical compositions expand to imaginary places and musical compositions. Perhaps the poems that are most representative of his lyrical/musical tone are those about the sea and flowers, in which poetry is conceived as a disruption in the ugliness of daily life: You are writing about the flower At the ocean’s edge And your dream stops The sea and the movement Of the birds No word Was uttered Between the mystery Of souls and the beam Of the headlights It entertains you This is your dream This is your wish. (75)

The poet reflects on his art while facing the sea as he writes about a flower. Many of Hernández’s compositions are colorful songs that are a gentle self-parody of the literary task. Additionally, the image of arrested

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time expresses a consciousness that is more in tune with nature in its search for beauty. The following poem was published in the edition of Hernández’s complete works: A child looks at Summer As children do With eyes wide open look grandpa How the sand crab that lives In his sand hut Resembles Summer and his silent Song is also beautiful.

I just love the image of the little sand crab, popularly known as the “muy-muy,” that is so common on the beaches in Lima and is used by fisherman as bait. It is a precise image, of minor scale not only because it is seen from the child’s point of view, but also because it includes the child’s voice and his wonder upon observing the tiny crustacean’s habitat, as well as the experience of beauty in the interval, or interruption, of daily life. Indeed, humor constitutes an important aspect of the ecological experience that sadly has found little successful representation in “green” discourses. We have a mere handful of colorful sparks from Hernández’s pen, which could interrupt our anxious fear of fatally neglecting the natural order. Yet, humor expresses a sense of humility that goes hand-inhand with a sense of equality. There is a poem by Carlos López Degregori (b. 1952), “Fearlessness,” that plays with that sense of equality and that does so with a certain sharp irony targeted at the air of superiority that human beings give themselves. The poem’s title is ambiguous, but that makes me think of the poet’s ability to straddle two very opposite meanings, that of a fall/launch on the one hand and that of fearlessness on the other: Upon my desk there is a stone that watches me with its only eye completely alone. One day it left nature behind and for some inhumane reason stayed with me. I come in from work from eating out and from sleeping and I reach out my hand to touch it; there is the stone in love at the disposal of a stone is its fearlessness and its fearlessness is being an animal taken from the world.

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Interval I take the stone and fling it against the windowpanes open to the cold splendor of the morning: I jump and while I fall I wonder who will reach the ground first.

Obviously the allusion to the founding myth of the superiority of the human species is not clearly stated, veiled by an almost imperceptible selfcriticism of the writing profession, or at least the writing space: the desk. It is a subtle criticism, but once it is detected, one can feel humor sling the arrows of its irony with the same force as the rock that crashed “against the windowpanes / open to the cold splendor of the morning.” I wonder if that “fearlessness” can be considered an interval and if that interval can be considered a temporary autonomous zone. I do not know if I am stretching all these concepts beyond their limits, but it could serve as a criterion for selecting art works to recognize the variety of intervals left unexplored and as an innovative way to formulate questions and to sketch out conceptual limits. Would it help us to ponder deeply the originality of the spine-chilling and perspicacious sound tracks to Lucrecia Martel’s films? Isn’t this ability to disrupt dominant fiction perhaps the method employed by many artists who are seeking out new forms? Don’t Abigail Child’s experimental films and Antonio Orejudo’s novels attempt it from this genealogy of distortions? How long will we continue to ignore sound’s artistic potential? We will continue underestimating phonographic art? Is my desire to convert photos made from discarded material into a temporary autonomous zone sheer madness? Would the same thing occur with the documentary’s sympathetic lens? And the crickets’ song? And the Amerindian languages that resist Western molds? And should we understand Gamaliel Churata’s disorder and José María Arguedas’s Andean Castilian? Other possible intervals fulfill the role of readers of the cracks who interrupt stories filled with a superior attitude: water resources management, paintings many kilometers in length, eco post cards, smoke of distant fires, floating installations, meditations and tables in the thick of the forest, knots in the desert, plunging shorelines, massive rock formations that gaze at the sun, storms on the radar screen, reductions of the infinite. They can be means to levitate.

METAMORPHOSES

Writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any livable or lived experience. It is a process, that is, a passage of Life that traverses both the livable and the lived. Writing is inseparable from becoming: in writing, one becomes-woman, becomes-animal or –vegetable, becomes-molecule, to the point of becoming-imperceptible. Deleuze. “Literature and Life” 225

Whoever writes is transformed while writing; whoever reads is transformed while reading. These processes of transformation are becomings. One becomes another thing of different sizes and in completely different realms, without any possible affiliation between them. In other words, becoming something does not necessarily mean that one IS that thing, but rather it means to live indeterminately, since whatever one becomes does not last long, does not play a fixed role, does not occupy a clearly delimited zone. Metamorphosis is a trying on of Otherness that takes place during creation, in contradiction to current beliefs: a trying on of Otherness that is experienced in poetry, in eco-art and other arts. It can be a never-ending conversion into an animal. It can also be an incessant vegetable mutation, which as a transformation butts up against our prejudices and at times encompasses the mineral dimension. This is what allows us to welcome the strange/r with open arms. It is an imaginary condition that can only be conceived of as a crossing over without a beginning, a flow full of nuances like Juan L. Ortiz’s profound breeze. But it could also be Gonzalo Rojas’ dancing stone or Selva Dipasquale’s meditations on the forest or Lucrecia Martel’s fish that dreamed they were cars. I cannot determine categorically what becoming will take place due to the changing condition of the process and also because each process is more of an event than a concept: Cristián Basso’s cherry that invokes another light that fertilizes it or that granular soul that is both chorus and echo in Néstor Perlongher or Ruperta Bautista Vazquez’s hidden animal that incarnates many transformations.

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These metamorphoses are not only imaginary, they are real conditions, although they may not enjoy the same acceptance as dominant fictions. As Claudia Masín writes: To become insect, sprout, air, to become invisible only in order to surpass limits, to be safe and to be able to say our word, which is indeed material and visible and compact like a rock damaged by erosion, swept along by the incontrollable force of the water. (“Particles of Light,” 79)

The metamorphosis creates a temporary autonomous zone of the spirit from which it imagines being responsible for the transformation. In an allusive and associative way, the metamorphosis creates the opportunity for passage to another state of being. The Other, which we imagine as distinct and distant, is not suppressed because it is converted into an intimate proximity. The Other doesn’t appear, it is not recognized as such; it presents itself as a new state distinct from that now unrecognizable Other that is no longer Other because it now forms part of oneself. The metamorphoses depend on the capacity to sustain and generate interconnections between the I and the Other, whether it be animal, vegetable or mineral. Another way of thinking about this is simply to forget the differences usually present between ourselves and what is understood as Other. More than a content that changes, metamorphosis is the becoming of a form that changes in relation to other forms. This imaginary becoming, inaugurated long before Kafka’s metamorphosis, is a way of ecological thinking that is similar to a slow, deliberate, yet changing, attention or observation. Once changed, the observer can transform again, he or she opens up, creating, leaving behind the refuge from which he previously observed, acting, going out to discover without any fear of leaving the refuge. Metamorphoses do not have pre-established goals, they are only transformations, redistributions, and displacements. Their various stages trace an itinerary that erases and then maps anew the former limits between self and Others. Becoming-fish, -flower, -tree, -insect, -breeze, -woman, -child: it is a state of feeling that flows, like writing, and composes a place that needs to be created alongside others with whom we are in contact. Such transformations can be captured not only in the sensory moment, but also in combination with an awareness of the legacy of mythologies and millennial cultural traditions that have witnessed these changes. The “I” is no longer the traditional “male” subject that typically and atavistically controls, dominates, orders, and imposes, who ignores sexual difference so as to perpetuate his position of power—that he sees incarnated in his sexual scepter—and who accustomed to using woman and nature for his

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own benefit. In the metamorphosis, the “I” is totally immersed in the network of relations with the animal, vegetable, and mineral worlds without projecting upon them pre-established and dominant social, racial, sexual, and non-human divisions. Yet, is it possible to undergo metamorphosis without projecting anything at all of what we already possess as dominant heritage? We must reread those who try on unimaginable Otherness, like Kafka, Tetsuro Watsuji, Clarice Lispector . . . We must continue to question and recreate what we believe to be consolidated. To melt that frozen sea inside us. We must unearth poems such as those by Armando Rojas Adrianzén, Alejandra Pizarnik or Luis Hernández and also try to listen to new voices.

Becoming-Tree Becoming tree, like the becomings that confirm over and over again the mutability of being, is not a fixed form. One of Armando Rojas Adrianzén’s (Peru, 1945-1986) poems evokes an attentive look at a tree as the scene of a process of transformation, converting it, rather than in a symbol or theoretical notion, into an innovative perceptive orientation; a sensitive way of capturing the reality of a changing and dynamic world comprised of many layers and nuances, a far cry from any type of classifying or fixing language: When One Peach Tree Branch Finds Another Peach Tree Branch Just as a peach tree branch folds the light and the salty air you stretch out your body without anyone stopping you neither dejection nor the weed And in the middle of May the world stands still The fly carrying off Earth’s bitterness With a weak heart and the hounds unrecognizable in the distance Just as another peach tree branch annuls perfection It disentangles itself from the language of the heavens From the rhythm of thousands of stars Dangerously it bends toward the moss Cones and circles in the slope that has decorated your skin And the sun refuses, from the divine ether it withdraws and bends to stretch itself out in the hollow of a final image Next to its blazing fruits and its birds Just as you and I when desire comes to bend us And you listen beyond the purity of its fine layers

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Metamorphoses Beyond the hiss of the scorpion And in your heart you await more than the stones’ monologue Just as you and I when there are no archangels Nor celestial souls flowing through the grass Nor the dizzying yearning of the earth below the horse’s back But those two branches, useless but marvelously together, in a growing swaying motion on top of the grass This unreal life that has to break open in a real kiss Strange, right? Sublime, isn’t it? Humanly alien What was until yesterday an unfeeling tree With branches of ice and flowers made of shadows Changes quickly in the movement of two logs In the dazzling destiny of some leaves Awaiting the arrival of the buds and the light pattern It is beautiful and colossal to tangle up your head in the light To forget your hands and eyes in the dawn’s breast And all because a peach tree branch wanted to be I in its descent And another branch refused to perish but held on It happens clearly and that is all Believe it by God blood burns on your lips and goes along whispering a new madness.

The fluid lyrical “I” expresses with great ambiguity not only human but also vegetable features. We are not certain if we should imagine a felled tree lying upon the earth. Nor if we can envision a dialogue between a person and a place. What is expressed is the unreal condition, cold and dark, that is being, and its passage to a real condition of encounter in the form of a kiss between the two branches. Human vocabulary is interwoven with vegetable vocabulary. It is not clear who is observing in the poem. What stands out in the poetic skill, however, is the ambiguous voice of a time of “you and I,” that for moments acquires the point of view of two trunks that in turn are capable of emitting a dimension of desire. The becoming-tree is shown to be a process of transformation of death-in-life that manifests itself in a sensitive voice that adopts certain human words to articulate this new experience of vital encounter. I do not believe that a better, more intense and changing description of the process of natural life can be found in another poem. At any rate, the matter of metamorphosis remains situated in the realm of processes. A poetic form of this becoming-tree as mature and complex as the one displayed in Rojas’s poetry is found in María Fernanda Espinosa’s poems in the form of trees from her collection Jungle Tattoo (1992). This

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collection structures all of its poems in the shape of a tree and captures a key characteristic of the cultural reality of the Amazon, where reality is sustained by means of enchantments, beliefs in mythological beings and shape-shifters. The changeable thematics of this book already expressed what anthropological and cultural theories stressed in order to understand the culture of the Amazon, intimately linked as it is to ecology. In order to illustrate this becoming-tree in the Amazonian context, let us read the following poem: The air is a dove an egg the summer plumed sun like a Cofan headdress your body mat of dry leaves that breaks when you arise my dream —night and rain shower— reawakens you tenaciously

The first transformation, from air to animal, does not really allow us to affix any sense to the poem. That soft air that transforms into a bird, into an egg, into a vegetable being whose dream reawakens or revives. Nevertheless, there is an element of the Amazonian culture here in the mention of the Cofán people and their adornment that functions as a symbol of summer: the headdress. That adornment made of feathers, which serves as an ethnic marker, situates the poem in the Ecuadorian context, and is very much a word that nourishes the imagination. In that changing universe, the tree is the setting for the transformations, the plural body of those beings who inhabit the tropical forest, which invents a body for those who transform. The lyrical I barely “reawakens” one of the transformations from her dreams, as if the entire series of changes were cycles that take place in the tree, which in turn is depicted on the page typographically. The becoming-tree is part of a process that is contextualized more explicitly and clearly in other poems of Jungle Tattoo. Espinosa has succeeded in capturing, in brief, yet lush poems, the dynamic of these transformations. The use of the second person marks the dialogic relationship that the poetic voice cultivates. The expressive forces of that second person, not only in Espinosa’s poems but also in Rojas as

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we recall, is a naming of the Other from close by, a presence that is tended to. In the context of the ecosystems in constant connection and flux, the poetic voice in Jungle Tattoo has very little of the stereotypes of inhuman heroes or of gods disconnected from nature. The multitude of vegetable and animal beings that populate the jungle express a biodiversity that finds itself threatened by the market economy’s thirst for extraction. In Breath of Vital Air (Ethnobotanical poems), Esthela Calderón’ poems propose a similar becoming. Her abundant and precise descriptions include dozens of names of flowers, plants, fruits and trees. In many of the poems, the lyrical “I” does not correspond to a person but rather a tree, beside many other trees that also have their own name. It could be said that the poems are like magnetic fields of colors, voices, creation, and summons. Beneath the names of the vegetable world, we sense an endless number of transformations that the poetic language expresses with simplicity, as in the poem “Sapodilla”: I broke through the hard seed they hid in the earth I became the Cid Campeador to cut a path through the taunts From the almond tree, the Lemon, the Jocote pine, the Mango tree and the Nance Which grew quickly and began to bear fruit. Always so small, I lived hugging the ground I am a tree-via cruces Stationary years passed Until my drops of honey could burst forth in April Against the dark sandy landscape. Into sacred fruit I have been transformed For the hopeful ritual Of a pair of emblematic bodies Flooded by the windstorm of time That is not measured by the hands of a clock. Sapodillas! Sapodillas! Dear Client, do you want some? My dear, are you going to buy some sapodillas from me? They’re 3 for 10. The vendors’ cries The women sell singing With their heavy baskets atop the ringed head support They walk along singing out my name They woo in my name. My love, if you like, I’ll give you a taste.

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Are you going to buy some? They are so very sweet!

The becoming-tree in this poem is characterized by a tender, welcoming tone that reinforces the process of the changes that “Sapodilla” highlights in their various forms: tree, waiting, fruit, echo of voices, the emotion of being called, the desire to be eaten, the happiness upon giving oneself up. In short, we witness a subjectivity that is not concretized in the figure of a person but rather in the incessant flow of connections. A flow of joyful surrender. The scene, dynamic and changing, embraces the multiplicity of the vegetable world. This plurality disarms the rigidity of assuming the identity we are given and of conceiving of the sapodilla as inanimate and inalterable. The perspective is multiple in the context of the transformation of the lyrical “I,” incarnated in a tree at the beginning of the poem and as various voices in the final lines. Through the poems in Breath of Vital Air, we can appreciate, including in the subtlest and nearly imperceptible changes, this dynamic universe teeming with life. A form of resisting the powerful influence of fixing the identity, in this case of trees, and thus the poet avoids closing off meaning in the work and diminishing its creative potential. Adopting vegetable forms does not always result in a positive state, neither does it necessarily imply an attitude of exploration. Other poems can express the disadvantages of taking on vegetable form, as many of Gioconda Belli’s poems suggest. In “Metamorphosis” (On the Grass, 1970-1974), the poetic voice comes to understand the agonizing process of the immobilization of feminine identity: The vine is growing out of my ears. My eyes have been converted into moving pistils and my mouth is overflowing with purple flowers. When I walk I keep filling the house with leaves. My branches hinder my body, I keep getting entangled in everything: already my nose

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Metamorphoses has also turned green and my smells have changed, I trip over the furniture and my legs are breaking through the bricks, seeking the earth, entangling me. My hair no longer allows me to move, it is clinging to the walls, my arms have buried themselves until only my fingers are showing while my body has become trunk. With my fingers I touch myself all over reacquainting myself with me among the leaves and the branches and the flowers that fill my mouth and that have stained my teeth. My fingers brush over all of me and their contact is fertilizer for my growing branches and finally, after much resistance, my hands have given up and only tiny thorns are now growing from my nails. My mouth filled with little purple flowers has immobilized my body and I am rendered vine, metamorphosed, spiny, alone, made nature.

Although this transformation’s images of isolation and separation may acquire a negative, distressing note, by becoming a tree and thus nature, the poetic voice also removes herself from the threats of the dominant world. The poem harks back to the Greek myth of Daphne insofar as this metamorphosis belongs to an anthropocentric tradition, in which nature

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signifies nothing less than immobilization in a space that is not social, a forced and irreversible alienation. That condition of being a “vine” may signify a position of imminent change into a being in formation. But what we find in “Metamorphosis” is a refuge that has the great limitation of escaping the dynamism of the vegetable world and of reducing the social and natural dimensions of the lyrical “I.” And perhaps for that reason, Belli’s most recent poems with their cybernetic images show very few traces of that nature. Ida Vitale (b. 1923) is another poet who insists on projecting herself onto the animal and vegetable worlds. But she does not accomplish this through her themes but rather through the perspective that she employs. The following poem is a reflection on the direction and nature of change itself: CHANGES Life can change its branches, like trees change theirs from green to autumn. It can, dark base, dark torture, it can cover itself anew with fruits like a summer month. Ah, but it can also fall, fall to who knows where, as a poem falls, or love in the midst of night, To who knows what depth hard and blind and terrible, touching the mother waters, the fount of all fear. (The Proffered Word, 1953, Reduction, 271)

The lyrical “I” adopts a perspective that reflects change’s potential: life is a cycle and the dark tones become green again, become light through the cycles. Such potential for change also affects the lyrical I who does not know the limits of those changes. The vital space of those changes is positive: the transformations are neither pathological nor negative, although the possible falls are recognized as dark zones. Becoming

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vegetable typically indicates the direction of changes as a renovation throughout the seasons, in a recurring natural cycle of birth and death. The becoming-animal is less obvious in this poem. Nevertheless, this series of variations of intensity that shape this space of possible falls reveals an I that always crosses en masse or in a group. That I that crosses neither possesses nor controls that space. It is an I that, upon crossing territories and situations, becomes a body that is free from the patrimonial codes of identity. It is an I that crosses new fields of perception and of emotion openly and always with connectivity. Juarroz also captures those characteristics of becoming through the image of a fall (4th, poem 64). The repetition of the action of falling constitutes an image of the process that underscores its mutable condition: To fall from life into life but within that life, until we are stopped like a plenary body by the sum of all life. And then to turn the fall around and to fall again.

That “I” that crosses various dividing lines is no longer a stable “I”; it is a fragile “I” that falls continuously. Nevertheless, that image of the fall has a stopping point—we have to imagine the suspension of the fall even if it only lasts but a moment—that plenary body is going to fall again. Is it that our body is nothing more than an instant in a cycle of falls? Into what is our body converted? To what point is it not the “I” that we have predetermined in our own socio-cultural history? If that fall is not understood as a degradation of being, then is it rather a turn toward the skies? To where? Another journey replete with suggestions and notable for its transformations is Selva Dipasquale’s Meditations in the Forest (2007). The becoming-forest expresses an incredible transformation of the desert, in which the metamorphosis is the dimensional body of the forest; this body’s eye is squirrels, insects, yellow leaves, but also images of flight; the interlocutors, pine trees that form chapels; the tide is grass; the forest’s voice is the poem and the poem is a voyage of various voices that communicate with each other and that show perceptual and material mutations of their pensive and ludic becoming; women, bears, sculptures, umbilical cords, and vegetables. The majority are brief poems, but when the lyrical “I” announces leaving its house and speaking with the pine trees, there are four prose poems that express most eloquently the

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becoming-forest. I choose one to serve as a means of encouraging the reader to seek out this collection of metamorphoses: Chapel of the Dark Sea Three pine trees together. Overhead their branches entwine confusedly. Come in, touch a branch with your left hand. Squeeze tightly and look skyward. It hurts. When you no longer see clearly, our prayer begins. Leave. Come back. Break off a bit of a sage leaf. Smell. Make a mark on the trunk in the middle. Touch the earth and listen: “Protection for the men who are transformed into spiders when they come back from the sea. Slowly. Protection for the gigantic spider who will not return.” Squeeze again. Always with your left hand. It hurts. You may go. If you turn around and look off into the distance you will see us covered in black spiders, dying of laughter, swaying to and fro. (53)

Becoming-Insect Rather than a metaphor that gives the reader a form of identification to operate with some sense in the reading, becoming-insect permits patient and careful readjustments and micro-changes to subjectivity in flux. More than interpret changes and identities, this becoming-insect fortifies the capacity to make connections and to try out unstable and ever-changing terrains. It is the permanent condition of crossing boundaries. In the poems in Insect Love (2003), Cristián Basso (b. 1976), manages to convey an original convergence of the amorous condition with the biological condition of invertebrates in a tone that may be nearly unintelligible but that is also strongly suggestive. The poems are the product of a mimetic imagination that seeks familiar reflections and silhouettes, the result of a patient and unleashed irrational power of the amorous imagination that assumes the form of an insect suffering from love sickness. The love manifests itself in the affects: from anger, shouting, fevers, abandon to the ecstasy of the moment. The most interesting thing about the collection of poems is that Basso never resorts to a familiar representation that divides the human from the non-human, the lugubrious from the light, the agreeable from whatever causes discomfort. The poetic voice does not resort to negations or pathological descriptions, but rather to a flow of sensation and intensities of great expressive force. One example from the first part of “Insect Love” should suffice (40): To be dazzling dizziness; to be awake in nights suffocated by sobbing. To say goodbye to all the dead goodbyes.

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Metamorphoses To live death upon hearing a song. The sun anoints me with a deserted sun. To be sleep that falls upon a blanket. To open up your heart; leave it open. The night whispers along with the sobbing. We dress ourselves in darkness like a seaport. The air grows dense crow upon a tomb; the crow laps up the stale air. To be an echo among the foliage that resounds. To be dazzling dizziness; to be awake. To be heart and victory of the beat.

It is the insect’s attitude, the lyrical “I’s” capacity for movement, to change according to the scene and the breathing in consonance with the process of transformation. The becoming-insect heightens the resonances of the condition of being so fragile; a new reflection on the changing condition of vital feeling. Jerónimo Pimentel (b. 1978) is another young poet that recognizes this vantage point and sees in the figure of the insect a source that provides vitality for poetic language: “[insects] are insignificant and simultaneously ubiquitous. They allow me to feel my way to another way of looking.” Under this lens of constant transformation, Pimentel assembles Fragile Trophies (2007), a book that pleasantly surprised critics. It is a book that seeks, by virtue of its quality of composition and its expressive power, to highlight the figure of the insect and its concomitant point of view in order to incite us to betray the norms of observation to which our perceptual habits have accustomed us. “Migratory Locust” is a perfect example: There is always a reason for moving on: The smell of the stale water in the winter ditches Or the lizard’s tongue, A lean verse behind a ball of cotton. The sadness of a cherry tree at its chewed up leaves. And always, good reasons to move on: The fields of broom shrubs that remain untouched, The ears of grain that we have yet to devour. That promise of pulpy stalks in the blink of an eye. I understand why we must leave. But don’t you think that we could stem our leap and dedicate this second of sun to the warming of our wings?

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Pimentel forges the locust’s probable points of observation with the accumulation of detailed reasons to migrate in order to emphasize the need for a rest along the way, for a suspension of the circumstances that impel the migration. It is a break in the rational projection that one supposes would have to determine the direction and profile of that anthropomorphic creation. But it is precisely the adoption of the locust’s point of view that generates a distinct effect than the one typically obtained by personifying the figure of the insect. It is not a matter of metaphors of anecdotal circumstances of dominant narratives, but rather an exploration of a nonhuman point of view. It is an exercise in the expansion of the perceptual habits that also reveals an artistic consciousness in the poet. For Rosi Braidotti, writers, like animals, are engaged creatures that live on constant alert, anxious to capture and sustain the signs that come from immanent contact with other forces (126). In this poem, I wonder what happens if the consciousness were not moral or cognitively different from the locust’s change. What is initially imperceptible about this change becomes visible once our perception intensifies, which permits the irruption of new fields of perception, of affectivity, and of transformation. This spiritual and sensorial spiral of the human articulates the questioning of radical Otherness that comes to be a new paradigm for the discontinuous transmutations without great disruption: an enormous power of adaptation, a resistant armor, that defies the laws of gravity and that operates like a functional machine. In the becoming-insect, Braidotti sees a model for polymorphous and anti-phallic sexuality (157). Even though Pimentel’s poem displays an absolutely uninhibited air of becominginsect, I believe that it ought to be read more generally as an advocate of a process of becoming as understood by Gilles Deleuze: “always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any livable or lived experience. It is a process, that is, a passage of Life that traverses both the livable and the lived.” (225) In another poem, Roberto Juarroz thinks and feels this becoming-insect as a form of exploring the final horizon of perception in a dream world. In other words, the becoming-insect is a dream-like search for necessary points of observation and cosmic connection: The winged insect of fear climbs the sloping walls that separate wakefulness from sleep. The swiftness with which it slips makes it impossible to crush it. Its spasmodic scent scrubs your eyes

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Metamorphoses like a rough rag. The elastic form of its body constantly varies, like an unpredictable substance that renders identification hopeless. Wakefulness would like to go back and separate itself, it appears that sleep is never going to arrive, loneliness opens up its crevices like a crag and it is no longer possible to be anyone. Something shrinks back somewhere, behind the gaze, but it would like to be smaller still. When everything is about to explode, the insect haphazardly destabilizes the space of night and disappears like a hallucinatory secretion in the centerless circumference of these almost vegetable words. (Eighth Vertical Poetry, 42)

Perhaps Juarroz visualizes the anguish of the process by seeking an alternate form of perception. The disquieting effect of not being able to identify the poetic “I” in a familiar way, but rather in a strange way, from the perspective of an insect posits a position of reading the world that cannot be situated in the human reader. Becoming-insect places the perceptive being’s search in imaginary territory. But it is nonetheless a real territory, between wakefulness and sleep, changing, whose language belongs to the vegetable world. How is the insect going to speak if it eschews any identification? Do plants help it articulate a language? Which of our senses perceives that real territory? Not only Pimentel but also Juarroz explore the expressive possibilities of occupying, albeit temporarily, that moving and penetrating zone of perception that surpasses our rigid means of perception. In 1995 the poet Reynaldo Jiménez (b. 1959) founded and designed the journal Tse Tse (Bueno Aires), which, although it initially featured a very humble format, became an important disseminator of Latin American poetry. Jiménez summed up the philosophy of the journal thus: Did the tse tse fly bite? Did it cause, finally, some sort of sleep somewhere within wakefulness or some light in the interior of turbulence? Did it buzz in some interior ear?

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Becoming-particle A biology that is attentive to the intricate collaboration among insects, bacteria, and plants, also studies forms just as nature itself solves disruptions, crises, and readjustments in coexistences: via the cellular level. In their popular book Wild Solutions (second updated edition in 2004) Andrew Beattie and Paul R. Ehrlich maintain that ecosystems can provide us with a great variety of resources, products and services “if we allow them to coexist with us, and if we manage them with foresight, imagination, enthusiasm and respect” (xi). I think about the solutions offered to us by those microorganisms that eat plastic and other chemical waste that pollutes our land and oceans. For the moment, let us not enter into the devastation caused by extractive activities, such as those of the mining, petroleum and fishing industries, which ostensibly bring progress and improve the macroeconomic health of poor countries. There is no doubt that this complex gamut of inspiration and guide for biochemical restoration benefits us by offering new perspectives on matters of energy, medicine, and cutting-edge technology. But, do we really have another perspective of that vast universe that begins, or in any case is infinitely diverse, on the cellular level? What goes on in the spiritual dimension of matter, a granular soul? Rather than imagining a scene from science fiction in which humans are reduced to the size of red-blood cells, we would have to try to imagine the perspective of the social world of microorganisms. Who can translate the living particle? We have already seen that an insect can offer a rather innovative and disquieting perspective. Can we look closer still to what cannot be detected with the naked eye, but that is so diverse and larval? Such an endeavor demands the same flexibility of a microscope’s objective lens. Can a cherry represent a microorganism? Cristián Basso believes so, as we see in this brief poem from Insect Love: To dance in the sun is what my cherry desires. To bite into the wind with its cold face. To invoke another light that fertilizes it. To bear tiny fruit nestled among the branches (Section II. “Larval Stage” 72)

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Perhaps the poet is suggesting that we shrink our focus and delve into the signs of smaller worlds. Desire insinuates itself like a movement from that smaller scale. Why now do I turn to a poem from Nestor Perlongher’s Aerial Waters, whose focus is on language for the sake of language? Perhaps it is because the essence of life transformed into music seems to vibrate in the poem’s very focused passion on language itself. Perhaps, too, Perlonger’s poetry affects the imagination in a way that cultivates uncertainty and ambiguity. Could this imagination correspond to that musical dynamic that “recaptures the spirit of the jungle?” THE RAY’S OPALESCENCE AND PALENESS, vent of liquid jade, was sweeping along in its wake a cohort of erratic deities. Divine Light. Potlatch of divine light in the nereids’ race in the waves, in the froth of the borders. Granules of embroidery, in each globule a bodice, laminated by shards, platinum-plated, a grainy soul, repeating and echoing the dizzying focus of the thick, treacherous waters. Thorns in the waters’ souls, granulations of fish along the snowy acrylic, it collects its jade amidst the gasping, the doubloon of panting in the dubbing, the sage shadow of dreams. Or on the other side of the lace, on which the panting, to attenuate the roaring of the waves, folded up. Was there not an eel living there, who by defying its trench, was transformed into an eagle? Or was it the lizard from the ruins, through thick rubbish dumps, sliding his sparkling tail, to kindle with the friction of its flick the smoothness of the jade? (Complete Poetic Works, 259)

The poetic voice does not belong to a man, nor does it stem from only one perspective. There is a chorus of voices that the images of light continue punctiliously accentuating. The becoming-particle cannot not be fixed; it never reaches an identifiable form. It is rather a space of indifferentiation in which it is impossible to distinguish one form from another. Thus, other transformations with other dimensions appear, such as a becoming-animal that also refuses to remain animal, since the final image of the poem is mineral (jade). What is most evident in this poem is the multiplicity of becomings and the changes in scale. The exact space of transformation cannot be determined: thresholds, spaces that seem to live and change, all comprise this poetic universe. A Tzotzil poet from Chiapas, Mexico, Ruperta Bautista Vázquez, in Xchamel ch’ul balamil, Eclipse on Mother Earth, formulates that quicksand of transformations that resemble Amazonian shape shifting:

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Hidden animal A whirlwind of thoughts threads through the body’s wound. Breath goes dry in the mouth. It tends to the ritual of metamorphosis. It reflects disgrace in the sunken eyes of the sick man, evil penetrates the heart, bundle of belly laughs in his being. Tracks left behind by the beast in a diminishing humanity. Power moves forward in the center of life, an attack on defenseless bones is unleashed, the road of existence clouds over, the depth of the soul beats strongly. The transformation runs through his veins in his throat appears a strange barking, the animal that he hides beneath his skin awakens. The boy disappears and howls are born in his pores.

By way of contrast with Perlongher’s poem, in “Hidden Animal” the becoming-animal occupies the entire space of the poem. There are indiscernible features of a corporal transformation, which are suggested more clearly in the last images of the barks that become howls. The process is arduous and perhaps the unsettling transformation offers the reader not only an alternate perspective but also an ethical norm. “Hidden Animal” questions the parameters of class, race, and gender by proposing a non-human, inorganic, and cosmic perspective.

Becoming-fish The Golden Fish (1957) is a book that I read over and over. The becoming-fish revealed in the book not only retells the Aymara myth and composes an Andean way of thought of great originality, but it also creates a time and space of imaginary transformation: opening new fields of perception, of affectivity in a fragmented and polyphonic being. An uncomfortable position for a reader insofar as this becoming-fish is illegible for the Western monolingual rationality. Although the writer, Gamaliel Churata (1897-1969), is barely known beyond official or canonical circles, the 2012 publication of the Cátedra edition edited by Helena Usandizaga, as well as nearly impenetrable books such as those by

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Andrés Ajens and Reynaldo Jiménez, corroborate the cultural relevance of writing such a becoming. Why has Churata’s book received so little attention? Certainly it demands a great deal of effort on the part of the reader, especially if one wants to practice one’s ecological imagination in that challenging mix of languages, Andean traditions, and unclassifiable literary forms. That is how I read A Whaler’s Dictionary (2008) by Dan BeachyQuick, a poet who works at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. The book, a series of meditations on Herman Melville’s great whale, regales the reader with a more penetrating look at what that “leviathan Moby Dick” could be, thus inciting a more attentive reading. In 2008, the year the dictionary was published, the fossil of a whale with teeth that are longer than those of a Tyrannosaurus Rex was discovered in the prehistoric cemetery in the Ocucaje desert south of Lima, Peru. This predatory whale was originally baptized with the name of Leviathan melvillei (now changed to Livyatan melvillei). A becoming-fish that has navigated through a sea of more than a dozen million years of antiquity and now navigates the waters of literary theory, environmental history, marine biology, and paleontology, as well as the environmental imagination. From sand to wave to dream to flesh to blood to bone to wind to eye to sand. Lucrecia Martel (b. 1963) made a curious film short, just 4 minutes long, called Fish (2010), for the NotodoFilmfest, which is now available on YouTube and numerous blogs. In the film, some fish dreamed they were a car, according to the description on Notodofilm and YouTube. That strange metamorphosis of cars that meld their image into a highway on a rainy night with an image of colorful koi that dream about becoming cars not only sends us back to the artistic and conscious act of stripping an image of all that may be superfluous or anecdotal, but also, in the specific case of the type of filmmaking which characterizes Martel’s work, reminds us of her fundamental interest in generating new ways of perceiving that primarily include hearing. In this short film, Martel explores an unusual association between movement in the animal world and the technological world of automobiles from the corporality of the fish. Martel has declared in several interviews and commentaries that she is interested in exploring, “that contradictory line between what is organic and perceptive and moral laws or laws in general, including language.” Thus, the film’s title makes me think that “Fish” is more of an adjective that indicates the trapped condition of the fish (and the cars). 1 1

In Spanish, “pescados” also means “caught.”

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The film opens with a shot from inside a car, looking through the windshield, our view obscured by the night rain, accompanied by the rhythmic motion of the windshield wipers. There is a line of cars in front of us. Is this what the fish dreamed? Yet, if the initial image is the film’s frame, then are the fish in the pond perhaps what the car dreamed? Martel uses a soundtrack by Juana Molina, a singer and composer from Buenos Aires, who, through her particularly folkloric style, gives life to the puffs of language that emanate from that typical movement that fish make with their mouths. This soundtrack is complicated by the subtitles that do not correspond to the lyrics. The fish repeat one word, but the subtitles say another: “We were all a car / plastic, headlights, we were a car / Sleep, come on! / Let’s go, fish . . . / time to sleep / I hear the horns from last night / We all hear them / Driving, driving . . . / Were there some dogs, too . . . / Go to sleep! Go to sleep! / Highways . . . / tonight we’ll hit the road again.” Were they dreaming about the nightmare of their capture? Did they want to be free? Shall we accept Martel’s invitation to this undifferentiated zone where we are unexpected, not pre-existing? Neither the cars nor the fish are distinguished visually from one another. Are we the cars that the fish dream? The chorus of fish that dream about driving, the desire to be a fish in water, “a grainy soul, repeating and echoing” to quote Perlongher. Once again Martel exploits and explores the careless viewing habits of the typical spectator. Everything can be found in this neighboring zone of becoming, the passage of life.

MINOR BODY

The human body is neither a thing nor a given substance, but a continuous creation. A creative and moving being. The human body is an energy system that it is never a complete structure, nor is it static. The body (...) is the great energy source that generates constructive movement and opens the horizon of the original totality. This totality encompasses the darkest, most violent zones of being and liberates them from the suffocation and tyranny of the mind and of sight. (Ramos Rosa, El aprendiz secreto [The Secret Apprentice], 127).

By virtue of being a site of movement, sensation, and transformation, the body challenges our notions of possitionality, stability, and identity. It is a perpetual construction and destruction. And it is a continuous change of scale and pre-individual, fractional, individual, and collective resizing. The body as a machine, as a collection of rays, of molecules, of genetic archives, and of cells. In this sense, nature is a coexistence of bodies. The body implies a state of emotion and of perception that cannot be seen as a rational, autonomous, and motionless organism. Thus understood, this notion of the body served as a critique of repressive, bureaucratic systems, even though in the century it is trapped in sophisticated manipulative systems of affects that attune it with cyberspeed to the capitalist system’s cycles of accumulation and spending. The body that resists this insidiously ubiquitous, and disguisedly intrusive, manipulation is an unstable and changing site of movement and sensations. This notion transcends microscopic, individual, collective, mechanic, and natural levels. What is a minor body? Is it something the size of a cell? Something that is so far removed from us as to seem almost foreign or is it an alienated object that holds us hostage? Eyes, muscles, bones, hidden sex organs, tired feet, pain, all manifesting themselves. That is what happens with the sweat, tensions, frictions, hunger, thirst, solidarity, and imagination that are the body, which can be a she, or a he, or a species yet to be discovered, but also the voice that expresses anger, tenderness, anguish, melancholy, impotence, ecstasy, and a thirst for justice. That voice is the body that goes beyond its own limits as a body in and of itself.

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Spare parts also form the body. Is there any way to orient ourselves in this labyrinth of bodily mysteries and secrets? In cinema this critical notion of the body is incarnated in the actor’s body that represents an oppressed minority: woman, immigrant or child. The actor’s body presents complex restrictions and manipulations. The marginal subject shows her body as the sad residue of the system. Nevertheless, her imagination, her wandering, and her acting underscore, from her fragility, the possibilities of seeking alternatives to preestablished roles and dominant values. Foucault extended the critique of this body as an object of the capitalist rationality, as an object of a controlling morality and of a sexual repression. Indeed, theoretical interest in the body—in French social theory—is explained because of its value as a repository of desire, irrationality, emotion, and sexual passion (Turner, 24). In light of Gilles Deleuze’s work on cinema’s movement-image and time-image, I am able think of the body as that locus of movement and sensations that theory can use in analysis. Referring to the films of Rossellini, De Sica, Ozu, and Godard, Deleuze develops a theory of the time-image in which film uses optical and sonorous situations in order to free itself from its dependence on stereotypes, actions, and the empire of the movement-image. This involves a type of memory that is no longer anchored in fixed signified (meaning), but which blows up so that what counts is what the spectator associates due to that significant “aperture.” Thus, certain sounds, objects, images, phrases or dialogues function as memory triggers, and not the narrative formulas that condition the audience—formulas that may include the film’s themes, and that produce a more restricted, fixed, and easily forgotten meaning. What Deleuze analyzes as cinema of the body and cinema of the brain can be applied to study the body in Latin America cinema, in which: “ . . . the body will always retain the imprint of an undecidability . . .” revealing a non-choice of the body as the unthought (203). Images do not “organize themselves according to sensory-motor schemata” (203); the cut has replaced the association of images that become a direct presentation of time. This time-image “puts thought into contact with an unthought, the unsummonable, the inexplicable, the undecidable, the incommensurable” (214). Deleuze questions the cinema of action by explaining the very break-up of the sensory-motor schema: These are pure optical and sound situations, in which the character does not know how to respond, abandoned spaces in which he ceases to experience and to act so that he enters into flight, goes on a trip, comes and goes, vaguely indifferent to what happens to him, undecided as to what

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Minor Body must be done. But he has gained in an ability to see what he has lost in action or reaction: he SEES so that the viewer’s problem becomes ‘What is there to see in the image?’ (And not ‘What are we going to see in the next image?’). (272)

It is not easy to discuss the methodological applicability of Deleuze’s notion of the body in cinema. I fear getting bogged down in the issue of representing the Other. Perhaps this fear comes from the usual optical representation and the dominance of narrative logic that joins images into a whole by subordinating them to a certain topic or theme. I do not want to repeat and recycle what magazines, journals, manuals, and books say, or purportedly say, about Latin American films’ themes and ideological messages. How do spectators incarnate what they see in that cinema? Does it make sense to talk about a visceral gaze? Do we believe that the spectator is prepared to ask herself about what she sees in the image? Can she shed the dominant perceptual habits of our culture and not think “What is going to happen next?” My work on film is informed by the theories of several prominent film studies scholars, such as Laura U. Marks, Anne Rutherford, and Daniel Frampton, whose analytical tools are based on the emotional and the sensorial. It is no surprise that I found no such methodology applied to the vast field of Latin American film studies. Film reviews and comments abound in magazines and blogs, but the notion of the body is still an overlooked subject in this field. One of the few mentions is found in one brief chapter from Gonzalo Aguilar’s book on Argentine cinema: In the body, a possible narration is followed. In a society that organizes body visibility from a restricted model of beauty, the new cinema shows the body as accumulation, history, récit. (“Actors’ Politics,” 220)

This possible narration is a slippery terrain where it would be very fruitful to apply the perspective of active filmmakers and spectators. A radical change in how we write about Latin American cinema is needed in order to improve the experience of watching films, as Daniel Frampton states, “by more suitable and poetic reference terms for moving soundimage actions of form, and that these terms can come from understanding film as a new mode of thought” (171). Even though there is a great diversity of cinematic styles that do not form a consolidated movement such as Italian neorealism or the Nouvelle Vague, what is called “New Argentine Cinema” proposes a consciousness of the body, which demands that the spectator take on a new role, one that is different from the typical viewer of Hollywood entertainment or any of the other hegemonic models

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society imposes. In films by Lucrecia Martel, Celina Murga, Pablo Trapero, Adrian Caetano, and Lisandro Alonso, just to name the most accomplished and recognized active filmmakers, we can appreciate an aesthetic and a vision of the body not only as the physical and symbolic basis for a social critique, but also as a new sensibility of the spectator. Corporal decline, physical abuse, tenderness, solidarity, generational ties, overpowering and underlying desire, reminiscences, and blind racism are the pivot points for constructing and understanding complex characters in abandoned spaces, situations free of illusions or ideological scripts. These characterizations are the primary components of an uncomfortably lucid look at social decadence and global injustice. This lucidness is grounded in the body. In this setting, the spectator learns that the other senses besides sight play a key role in the deconstruction of hegemonic perceptual habits. It is through a process of the time-image that the spectator is able to acquire a different consciousness that overcomes existing mechanisms that repress through fixed meanings.

Woman The primary subject of Caja negra [Black Box] is the feminine body as a visual language. Film critic Gonzalo Aguilar emphasizes actor Dolores Fonzi’s body in this film as part of the potentiality of human visibility because of its contrast to her grandmother’s skin (Eugenia Bassi) and her father’s strange and afflicted body (Eduardo Couget). Instead of presenting a traditional symbolic interpretation of the female character—that is, the young girl represents an example of support and self-sacrificing dedication to her loved ones—Aguilar focuses on the character’s formal aspect. Nevertheless, critical reviews of the film do not address the perceptual challenges of this cinematic style, which appeals to the senses and which aims to achieve a material and embodied perception on the part of the spectator. In its formal aspect, Luis Ortega’s film does not rely upon the typical narrative identification, but on an identification that focuses on the actor’s body, and then dissolves on the screen into the tactile perception of the spectator. Here we have a dialogue between the time-image and the spectator’s thought. In her memory, she accumulates tactile sensations, so we can see the film not only as a metaphor for human contact, but also as independent images of the character’s vitality. Here, the feminine body does not conform to any ideals of beauty nor to any typical manipulation of desire; it serves as a mode of seeing that situates what is viewed at distance and places what she feels in her own body into a continuum. It is what Laura Marks proposes when she suggests that we follow and

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cultivate our perceptive, emotive, and sentimental abilities by always thinking of the meanings that motivate them (“Introduction,” Touch, xiixvii). The close-ups of the young character as she massages her grandmother’s wrinkled and dried up body relate to a different narrative logic than the images of this same young body riding a bike, to the extent that these general shots make us think of her independence and productivity, as a girl full of vitality and capable of making important decisions. The shots of the male neighbor watching her do not necessarily frame her as an object of desire, but only intensify the female character’s vitality and activity, as well as emphasize the material and experiential context of the bodily affects. Usually that identification follows narrative lines, or even a discussion of desire. Here, it passes through the unthinkable zone of sensations and situations that are directly related to the affects, to the very body of the spectator. I like this challenge of sensorial spectatorship, even though it is so difficult to avoid the realm of affects and emotions without falling into the traditional categories of narration. I like what Emilio Bernini suggests as a cinema of thought by contrasting modern ideological and political love for film with the New Argentine Cinema’s poetics of abstinence: …films that have chosen to show rather than interpret, to minimize spoken expressions about what discourses can tell us about the world, to remove definitively any judgment about what they are narrating. (31)

Bernini asserts: “what contemporary Argentine Cinema does not judge is a small world” (31). I would argue that the characters’ body is the frame of that small world: in Mundo grúa [Crane World], the body of Rulo, the unemployed protagonist; his son’s body; the characters’ bodies in Adrián Caetano’s films; the father’s afflicted and skinny body in Caja negra. The feminine body does not appear in opposition to these bodies, because its relation to masculine bodies does not follow the binary pattern of subjectobject of desire, that is, the traditional gender binary. The feminine body is a continuous shot that invites observation, like Ana’s body (Camila Toser) in Ana y los otros [Ana and the Others]. Apparently, her indecision and aimless wandering, which establish an inversion of desire narrative, define Ana’s character: the ex-boyfriend is the object of the desire. The film shows Ana’s body in continuous movement and in interaction with her friends, with Paraná’s landscape, and with a little boy. Murga’s film does not follow a formulaic narrative, because it tells the ambiguous path of slippery desire as a key to reunite with the familiar people, things, and places (friends, loves, land, river, memories). The displacement toward movement is multiple: a body in the landscape, a body looking for another

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body, a body moving in accordance with its own wanderings and its gaze, a body questioning itself, a body indifferent to language contradictions (a character declaring “I am not interested,” while his or her actions prove otherwise), a body opening a door and entering into new territory. Murga shows life’s fragile, meandering, slippery journey without drama and through a questioning body that is fully mobile. Another actor focused on her body is Antonella Costa. The characters that she plays in Garage Olimpo by Marco Bechis, in Motorcycle Diaries by Walter Salles, and in Hoy y mañana [Today and Tomorrow] by Alejandro Chomsky are excellent illustrations of a feminine body unhindered by traditional gender stereotypes. Her characters are not talkative, and the tactile approach relegates the representation of the repression of the female body to the background. María, the adult educator who is kidnaped and tortured, or the leper that Che visits in the Peruvian jungle, or Paula looking for money during a long night in Buenos Aires, all of them are feminine bodies in movement, free of stereotypical representation, without any idealization. These are sensitive, damaged, marginal, but self-conscious, bodies. The body is the means of surviving and avoiding the imposition of typical female roles. Even though their stories are so different, these three films have in common a bodily dimension: suffering, clashing, and breaking through a skin that articulates an existence for each character. It is a body that speaks without words, yet that is nevertheless eloquent in its exposure of the gloomy and recurring truth of our society. All of the discussion about Lucrecia Martel’s films can be rethought through the lens of an embodied gaze, in a tactile process similar to the one that Antonella Costa’s body carried out in the aforementioned films. Film critics have already emphasized sound as a primary element of Martel’s aesthetic, but it is necessary to develop an evident tactile treatment of the image in order to think of what the filmgoer’s body perceives. Aguilar highlights a key and all-inclusive fact when he explains that the protagonist of La niña santa [The Holy Girl] does not follow the subject-object opposition of the gaze. The girl does not succumb to the male doctor’s gaze, but rather she follows sounds in a foundational sensorial movement: [Amalia] encloses herself in a sound labyrinth and she uses sounds, touch and even smell to trap Jano, the man she wants to save. She leaves behind the visual order to be able to move in another one, comprised of sounds, smells and surfaces. (“La niña santa y el cierre de la representación,” [“The Holy Girl and the Closure of Representation] 101)

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As Aguilar states, the holy girl’s body “is beyond representation in a world in which representation frustrates all possibilities of desire.” (105) Here we are on the slippery slope of irrationality where Martel demonstrates a masterful and conscious filmmaking that does not aim to please her spectator, but rather to create an opportunity to unlearn perceptive habits and feel more deeply the corporeal aspect of existence. Martel had already represented the feminine body as a desiring subject in the alcoholic mother of the teenage girls in La ciénaga [The Swamp]. The mother offers an important key to understanding the decadence of that social class through her simple gestures and with the corporeal mark of her disorientation. The dissolution of a traditional narrative approach in this story cannot be explained by the use of a new narrative, but by the preeminence of irritated, hurt, sweating, fallen bodies in continuous shock, jumping around, and losing their balance. These are bodies that do not react, even though they follow sounds, touch, and rub up against one another in their wandering and listless movements. The images do not belong to a story, but to a physical presence. They express a potentiality that goes beyond social roles and authoritarian law. They are observant bodies, but they are blind. They feel and they get hurt. They palpitate and they question themselves. Is this not an obvious attempt at a strategy of new spectatorship? What does the spectator experience through these feminine bodies in perpetual motion and wandering? Can we say that feminine stereotypes are replaced and collapsed instead of falling into the trap the usual game of being the objects of the masculine gaze? How does this affect the spectator’s body? Can this activate the spectator’s sense of hearing, touch, taste, and smell?

Immigrant The immigrant’s body in Latin American cinema is a vast field of study that merits closer analysis. There are many films that articulate this body as a complex image full of wounds, ambiguities, frustrations, and possibilities. Some powerful examples of this enormous corpus are Tin Dirdamal’s documentary DeNadie (2005) and Alex Rivera’s science fiction film Sleep Dealer, whose script was written by David Riker, who had previously directed a classic immigrant-driven film La ciudad [The City]. In all these films, immigrants find their own voice as a result of their difficult bodily experiences. In DeNadie, the bruised, injured, and humiliated bodies of the Honduran people who travel on train roofs through Mexico is the extreme image of this invisible violence. In Sleep Dealer, the immigrant’s body is described as a fragmentary being,

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connected by cables to a vast web of robot-workers, detached from his homeland. Nevertheless, that film ends as story of ecological consciousness by reconnecting the body to the water that the northern military transnational state has appropriated and dammed. One of the best films about the immigrant’s body is Bolivia by Adrian Caetano. I agree with Aguilar that critics saw Bolivia as a stereotypical representation of popular sectors of society. Although this film shows a Bolivian immigrant’s reality in Buenos Aires from a documentalist and minimalist point of view, it also shows how the structured society produces that stereotype of the immigrant (Aguilar, “Palabras hirientes: la discriminación en Bolivia” [Hurtful Words: Discrimination in Bolivia] 168). The body of the undocumented Bolivian barbecue cook (played by Waldo Flores) contradicts the social discourse of the immigrant stereotype through the character’s diligent daily acts that he carries out with dignity and even charm. The protagonist’s body gestures toward the non-place that immigrants inhabit in the city in the shots of Freddy wandering through streets, working in the bar, in contrast with all the insults, bigotry, and exploitation he suffers. His is the immigrant body under aggression. A body that vanishes and nobody notices. A body that society automatically ignores. A ghostly body whose very existence challenges the dominant fear of the Other instilled in the xenophobic characters from Buenos Aires. But this body is also a desiring, persistent, vital existence that clashes with the notion of time, because it is a body that has no time or space. There is no room for this body’s self-representation. Yet the film’s images afford him voice, shape, a very precarious framework that lodges in the spectator’s imaginary like a thorn in her side. This body becomes an effective antidote against social alienation, which prevents dialogue among cultures. Will the spectator feel the absence of the immigrant’s body as a thorn in her side? Beyond the drama that is told in Bolivia, I am interested in what Freddy’s body triggers: a collective discomfort that assaults the spectator’s consciousness and nerves. But from the standpoint of speculation, the question of the spectator’s aesthetic experience could be considered impressionistic and even whimsical. Yet this absence-presence of the immigrant’s body works as a punctum, as a new space to redefine the body’s gaze toward a corporality that does not yet exist and that struggles to express itself politically.

Child The child’s body leads us to different approaches about the body in film. I want to reflect on the young actor in Valentín (Rodrigo Noya), an

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autobiographical film by Alejandro Agresti, which will serve to point out some of the virtues of what Aguilar deems actors’ politics (“the New Argentine Cinema has carried forward, in its choice of actors, a politics of the face, the body and the name,” 220). It is a process of inquiry about connections to the real world. The actor, or in this case the amateur or nonprofessional actor, brings his daily life to the screen. The charm generated by his body, and by his ability to improvise, meshes beautifully in the film, even in a Hollywood-style narrative. Beyond the cliché of the autobiography of a postmodern prankster able to rebuild his happy world, we see a child’s body that speaks from its youth, from his cross-eyed face, from his dreams of greatness, his training methods, his natural empathy for his peers and adults. Is that what is needed in order to not feel guilty pleasure for all the reactions that Valentín awakens in the spectator? Are we going to continue denying the emotional validity that Agresti’s film offers to indulge our tears and other possible emotional reactions? In spite of the melodramatic charge of Valentín, there is a corporeal component that runs through the story line. The abundance of shots of the child’s body serve as memory triggers, and, according to Aguilar, the face becomes a political expression, like the one Luis Buñuel or Argentine filmmakers from the 60s established. Perhaps Valentín’s face represents a serious flaw in Latin American collective sensibility: the indifference toward the abandonment and abuse that children still suffer on the continent. The pure idealism of Agresti’s vision clashes with Rodrigo Noya’s acting. This performance articulates children’s collective voice, as his body avoids being absorbed by middle class rhetoric to the extent that it aims to provoke a visceral reaction on the part of the spectators. This can be considered a rejection of the middle class adult world, and the body is enlisted as raw material for the artistic idealism of the director’s autobiographical character. In Marcelo Piñeyro’s Kamchatka, Harry (Matías del Pozo) takes the classic position of narrator of his family’s story under military persecution. Despite Harry’s nom de guerre inspired by Houdini, it is in his fragile, impotent body, which harbors his parents’ idealist command to escape, that the spectator notes and feels all the cracks in the clichés about guerrilla heroes—suffering from unjust repression, a happy family destroyed by military dictatorship, etc. The child’s body vibrates and triggers sensations throughout the film with narrative efficiency, but these sensations cannot be subordinated to the film’s theme or the accuracy of its historical context. These subtle sensations are a subtext in the film’s reception, and critical reviews paid no attention to them. The youngest brother’s body (Simón, played by Milton de la Canal) intensifies these

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sensations with his ailments and his natural resistance to the narratives that are imposed on him. The child’s body is never shown as explicit sexual corporality as we see in La ciénaga, even though I found many similarities among the young children in both films, such as the sensation of being trapped, their condition as repressed bodies under continuous scorn by the adult world, etc. In La ciénaga, the child’s body is full of wounds, scratches, traces of violent worlds that they do not control. The cousins’ desiring and aggressive bodies announce in their wanderings their allegiance to a racist and decadent society, and also their powerful vital potential to evade repressive rules. This potential lives in their skin. Words are superfluous here in the delivery of this powerful subtext: it is the alive and afflicted body that, beyond all risks and danger of being stuck or exhausted or even dead, moves with alertness and pure life. In this essay, my aim has been to think not of the body’s image, but of the body itself, which dialogues through the image from the first moment of the film’s viewing. Sadly, I do not excel at using the right tools to account for this sensorial experience, spell or meditative state that film can produce in the active spectator. This dialogue is a thought that begins with sensations: feelings that are experienced, stimulated, and developed by the spectator herself, even when watching the film on a small screen. Can we consider the technological apparatus of cinema as a body? Will we continue ignoring the intimate, sensual and memory-stimulating relation that we project on the moving image? Can we think of film in a new way? What is the body telling us? Will we continue seeing the body as separate from its natural connections? Or must we re-train our five senses?

POETIC MATTER(S)

What is a poem made of? And in a book that is not made up of poems, can we find poetic matter(s)? Can poetic matter be conceived outside of a book? I asked myself these questions while rereading “Zumbayllu,” Chapter VI of José María Arguedas’s novel Deep Rivers. In that chapter, the young protagonist and narrator wonders about the meaning of the word zumbayllu, as something more than that top that other children are going to make dance. Since then the sonorous, linguistic and cultural associations of zumbayllu have stayed with me, focusing my attention on the sounds that plants and insects make, all of which explains my predilection for bird songs and the inexplicable power they have to invigorate my spirit. It is curious that a book I read when I was fifteen made me so sensitive to the reality of the countryside in and around Cusco. But since my best friend from childhood is from that city, I could imagine quite clearly the detailed stories that he told that took place among the fields filled with potato flowers and other colorful blooms whose names I did not know. Rather than responding to those initial questions with some definition of poetry— something that not even literary manuals can definitively demarcate—a slow reading of Deep Rivers made me contemplate how I read poetry, and I am going to attempt to answer these questions with a reading of a poem that illustrates why a poem works. The precious matter produced by Gonzalo Rojas (1917-2011) resists a convincing explanation; there is a precious matter that insists on being heard on its own because it is a matter of experience in an open space. It is an invitation to participate in a dialogue that encompasses both interiors and exteriors. The geography that Rojas covers demands, neither maps nor planes, but a sensibility that begins by listening to things, an experience that the poet shares with, and prolongs in, his poet-listener. It is an experience that transforms spaces, places, and moments into an intense vitality. Rojas pays homage to speed by eliminating any type of difficulty in the here and now. It is akin to holding onto a lightning bolt in a second and living it as if it lasted an entire lifetime. Jaime Giordano describes this poetry “as voice, rite, happening, not only in its recitation but also in a private reading” (111). It is the practice of slow reading in an instant that seems to be a rapid reading. It is precious matter that, as a poem, does not abandon its natural conditions; it is a process that belongs to language but

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also to nature. In few poetic works are we able to see so clearly the staging of the communion between human being and the more-than-human world. Rojas’s is not a poetry that praises nature, but an ear that is attuned to the very cosmos. It is also a demanding ear, since this poetry requires of the reader-listener a moral dimension toward life: integrity, dignity, responsibility for the all, for the one. Rojas is a pre-Socratic poet that speaks the language of Quevedo; he is a poet tied to the Taoist spirit that conjures itself in movement and in growth; he is a poet that hums from his dark river, that current that swept Celan away and in which he bathed against the current several times like Maldoror, that rebellious teenager who was a divine gift for civilization. Rojas is a poet who wants to speak the world but knows that poetry will not suffice. A poet who would find Arguedas’s text about the zumbayllu as thrilling as I did. Perhaps that extreme love of language, his intelligent self-consciousness, causes us to make an infelicitous comparison to the love of nature. Yet the poems themselves, at least some of them, show in their own peculiar way how difficult it is to separate the word from the community of stony, aquatic, gaseous, igneous, and ethereal beings. Talking about his own poetry and the poetry he loves most (Tala, Residence on Earth, Epic of the Food and Drink of Chile, Altazor, Human Poems 1 ), Rojas points to a shared vision, a way of looking from the perspective of things: It’s that the primary trauma of the natural and the genetic functions deeply in us and its convulsive beauty offers itself to us spontaneously. (10)

The poet is aware of his own place in tradition—“I am part of the chorus,” he has repeated several times—and moreover, he feels himself to be part of nature—“I am air and that is because of the ocean in the great Gulf of Arauco” (“Word,” 10). He returns to the millennial communion between culture and nature by way of the ear, that is to say, the language that most interests him is nurtured by nature’s cadences—Rojas would say “the design of the hum”—and if we were to speak in harmony with his rhythms, as when the verses ring out to the poet, we would participate in the germination and help put into circulation what the poem reveals in an instant. The place where Rojas lived with most intensity, despite his long exile, was Chile. The curious thing, though, is that he does not sense his country

1

By Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Pablo de Rokha, Vicente Huidobro, and César Vallejo, respectively. All but Vallejo were Chileans; Vallejo was from Peru.

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from the perspective of “nation,” but rather from a connection to a nature that yields everything to its poets: The asphyxiation and the gale wind of the Puna, the sun beating down on you until you feel skinned alive, the stony and the steep…And as Mistral said! The rocky crags, the garden and tranquility, the violent tremor that doesn’t cease and that at times erupts cataclysmically, the fierceness of the long, adamantine waters, the forests where the birds fly, all that beauty is being stolen from us in the name of our obsession with technology! The geological and the magical from way down deep, where the Beginning commences, beyond the Patagonian and the Antarctic. (“Word,” 10)

Rojas exchanges the reductive perspective of infancy that emphasized the individual for the point of view of a millennial tree, like the larch trees that Heraclitus typically mentions, to situate his language in a world that listens and in which he participates with his body as well as his senses. Would it be appropriate to introduce a “queer” perspective to see to what point this poet of typically masculine character understands poetic matter beyond the conditioning limits of his own gender? Isn’t this cellular life that is invisible to the naked eye but that nevertheless exists? Reading these circular exercises, the books that Gonzalo Rojas had been writing since his tough childhood, there is no doubt in my mind that we are witnessing a literary consciousness of ecological repercussions. Playing by his own rules, he dismantles his rationality, his machismo, his basic alienation. I am referring to what each poem carries in its wake: that breathing asphyxiation; that pendulum swing between the very open and the extremely cryptic; that instantaneous illumination; that sense of hearing attuned to the co(s)mic song, the insouciant ambiguity, the mad love for stones, the deepest geographies, the genealogy of labyrinths, the reawakening, the consciousness of the splendor of all that is loaned to us in life; all that flows through this poetry of incessant change where we enter, leave, and return to the living, imaginary plot that is our connection to this earth. In the poet’s words: In what I have written, I have tried to see the relationship that exists between the infinite variety of things. My poetry has been an ardent struggle to capture that relationship in a word that was once alive and that contained the integral sum of all that is heard and that echoes: all through the very rhythm of things, of the most intimate interiority… Man is still quartered and fragmented, and he still walks among chaos: that chaos of forty disconnected senses: the proliferation of eyes, of hands, of ears and of noses, until now still not tied to the organic, full and flexible cosmos. (“Encounter with Gonzalo Rojas: The Suns of Darkness” 1977)

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Paraphrasing Heraclitus’ translator, the poem in the particular is similar to nature: a being that constantly integrates itself and disintegrates (Farré, 125). The key is how to attach oneself to the “organic, full and flexible cosmos” (125). I would like to propose an alternate approach to Rojas’s work by following William Ruecker’s line of thought, as expounded in his famous article; a precursor to ecocriticism. According to Ruecker, from the ecological perspective, a poem is a deposit of energy, a formal turbulence, a living thing, a part of the evolution of energy that sustains all life forms. Poems are the verbal equivalent of combustible material, but with the great difference that they are a renewable form of energy that originates in the generative matrices of language and imagination (108). Rojas’s poems carry an energy that does not derive from their meaning, but rather from their capacity to activate themselves in any language and to continue transferring energy, to continue functioning as a channel for the energy that sustains life and the human community. And his is a poetry that demands the listener’s full presence, since its energy is directed toward our sense of hearing, to that possibility of opening ourselves up to change even if it only appears to be the persistent characteristic of a natural being. But whatever is natural flows, metamorphoses. How could I use Rojas’s poems as models of the flow of energy? Is it feasible to use those same models as paradigms for the construction of communities and ecosystems? Infected perhaps by the delirious imagination of the Southern poet, I have had such temerity of thought, but it does not appear to be going too far to sketch out at least a brief attempt at an ecological reading. Thus, I propose an auditory reading of the poems as a liberation from the pent-up energy that flows to the reading/listener and that functions in its collective dimension. The poet himself had meditated on the importance of this flow among his small community of listeners who were unsuccessful in activating the vital mechanisms in a static and repressive reading, as seen in the sarcasm inherent in “Leprosy” (Man’s Misery, IV, 115-16), lightly transformed in “Court Room” (Air Anthology, 42-43; From the Lightning Bolt, 197-98). This type of rhetoric is a pretext, however, since what the poems express and sustain is an interactive field of vital energy that has been (under)mined by modern greed and insensibilities. It is also important to note the change in title: from an outright denunciation—lack of communication is a leprosy that plagues a community—to a playful pun that perhaps borders on parody, “Court Room”—a communication that endeavors to be exemplary. I believe that just a quick look at some of Rojas’s stonemason poems that have opted for the same insistence on a vital poetics should suffice:

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rescuing voices, forces that oblige us to forget the artificial separation between man and woman, between child and river, between cloud and art, between stone and movement. Three decades after its initial composition, his poem “The Mountain Range is Alive” (Man’s Misery, I, 25-29), for example, becomes “Mother at Rest and Mother on the Move” (Dark, 75; From the Lightning Bolt, 210), a title that is the second verse of Gabriela Mistral’s poem “Mountain Range” from her collection entitled Tala. Rojas “salvages” several lines from the sixth part of the original poem and transforms them: the mountain chain is a mother who is at once active and passive, simultaneously still and wandering. Rojas recounts that once he stood upon a rocky crag—he so loved rocky crags—where he began to sing and shout. A mule driver from El Orito said to him: “Don’t shout, sir, the mountain range is alive.” Rojas commented, “With that he wanted to tell me that there is no need to make noise because she will collapse and the concert will be lost, as will the precise order of the stones.” (“Conversation with Marcelo Coddou and Marcelo Pellegrini,” Valparaiso, 23 June 1994, Man’s Misery, 1995, XII). As in many of Rojas’s poems, the titles echo phrases uttered by poets and the rural residents of the mountains, wise phrases that denote a unique expressive consciousness. David Abram, a phenomenological ecologist, seems to refer to Rojas’s poetry when he writes: at the most primordial level of sensuous, bodily experience, we find ourselves in an expressive, gesturing landscape, in a world that speaks. (83)

The word itself is incarnated in the context of communication with nature and the dialogue is diverse, which is manifest in each of the various themes that most obsess the poet: his meditations on the poetic arts, on eroticism, and on the experience of daily existence. I would like to focus on this last theme, since my idea is to shed some light on the rest from an ecological perspective. Some poems are repeated, others change title but conserve most of their original verses, others change drastically, and still others are born from a single existing verse. At times, entire books or sections of books stem from certain poems, and of course there is the surprise of unedited poems. Each book presupposes a distinct order, but then in the same book one will discover a certain relationship and understand that each book is really part of one large book that resists categorization. The reader can crosscheck this verbal “recycling” in the editions undertaken by Marcelo Couddou. Yet it does not help to recognize lines of poetry already seen, echoes of certain cultural registers, if one does not also recognize the

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rhythm of the tides and the fiery nature that is behind every word, which appeal to the reader-listener’s memory in preparation for a future reading. I myself found it difficult to enter into the poem’s rhythm. It helped me to notice that Man’s Misery was going to become The Eternal Fire, which then turned up in Fragments, Against Death. And Dark and From the Lightning Bolt came from Man’s Misery. I was also aided by the déjà vu of 50 Poems and Cross Country and Will and Testament. Five Visions made me reread and I know that a translation into German of Beach with Androgynies has been published. It all flows together like (a) Muddy River. From all of these “breathing” exercises, I would like to listen to one recorded on tape: Air Anthology. In 1995 in Medellín, according to Adolfo Castañón, Rojas read in an open-air auditorium, and made his audience forget about the rain, made them laugh; in short, he moved them. Upon leaving the auditorium among a throng of young people, he heard someone remark, “The one who most impressed me was that Chilean, Rojas. That guy really knows how to chew up the scenery.” (10). Rojas is very aware of the sort of dialogue that he maintains with nature. Even far from Chile, when he was in Caracas, for example, he wrote poems like “Glimpse of a Black Cat” (From the Lightning Bolt, 89) in which that particular animal, a cat that dared to descend the steep, slippery cliff right outside the poet’s study, changed into a rhythmic animal, the poem itself, which, according to May, allows the lyrical “I” to see himself as a “clown without a wire,” relieved of his anxiety over his exile. Nature is presented not as an object, but as a subject in a relationship that also shows fractures, since it consists of a never-ending process of disintegration and integration. The words are merely a fine-tuning of our insertion into the process of the One. Rojas never stops talking about nature, or rather never stops listening to it. In the early days of 1998, while presenting the most comprehensive volume of his previously unedited poetry, he remarked: Every morning I do 10 pliés at the barre in the garden over there, and the roses laugh. Flexion, but not genuflection, I tell them. (“Word,” 10)

The symbiosis of air and word ignites the fire of poetry and becomes an irregular, interrupted current. The paradox of Rojas’s poetry is that the rhythm gets trapped in the disruption of the current, which Paz would call the revelation of the instant. I chose a poem from Will and Testament that I read in Five Visions and that seemed to illustrate in part what I have been saying about the rhythm that is born of the dialogic tone in Rojas’s poetry. It is a poem that has to do with a beloved space from his childhood, southern Lebu, “the carbon relative of the diamond” and a tie to his father

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and the miners, “bloodied feet shredded by the rocks and the stone” (“Eighty”). This poem picks up echoes of another great poem, “The Stone” (From the Lightning Bolt, 15), in which the stones dialogue with a butterfly, the river, and a tree, written from the concrete perspective of his experience of returning to Chile after a long exile—“From that split called a stone I managed to see the threatening sky of Chile itself” (Ortega, 101). This is a dark poem, which I approach while recalling the stones of Cusco and their strange dialogue. With respect to the imagination of the stones, almost anything of a character so copious is not dependable; from afar their animal pregnancy is other, decidedly so, contemporaries of old ones they do not come from the stars their nature is not alchemical but rather musical, few are doves, almost all ballerinas, thus their charm; whether disfigured or sealed, their majesty is the only one that communicates with the Image, despite their firmness they are not androgynous, they breathe without lungs and before being what they are they were machines of air it is told in books that among them there are no Himalayas nor harlots they wear no blankets and their only dress is a flaying they are more sea than the sea and they have wept, even the largest of them fly off at night in all directions and they are blind from birth and they see God, Airflow is their essence, they have not read Wittgenstein but they know he is mistaken they do not go mad, they do not bury their dead the originality in matters of roses revolts them they do not believe in inspiration nor do they eat fireflies, nor do they believe in the farce that is humor, they like poetry so long as it makes no sound, they do no business with applause they turn 70 every second and they laugh at fish, the idea of test tube babies makes them yawn, the most glorious armies seem miserable to them, they loathe aphorisms and waste, they are geometrical and on their ears they wear hoops of platinum they live on sacred idleness. (Five Visions, 62)

May already noticed the magical participation of the rocky matter in Rojas’s poems, and in regard to this poem he pointed out that the stonethought appears as a transparent substance through which, by means of the

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imaginary speaker, we could see the ethical foundation of the poet, indeed of all poets (415). My reading, nevertheless, points more in the direction of David Abram’s phenomenological observations about the power of oral language (89-90) and the resonances of the zumbayllu. The perception emanating from the rocky matter is an inherently interactive event whereby what is perceived becomes the perceiver. The body that perceives, in the verses the stone itself, expresses its sensory preferences and its mode of experiencing life. The language reveals its roots in this complex exchange of perceptions between active matter and the world that corresponds to it. Human languages are informed not only by the structure of the human body and the human community, but also by the evocative forms and shapes of the more-than-human landscape. Abram writes: Experientially considered, language is no more the special property of the human organism than it is an expression of the animate earth that enfolds us. (93)

Rojas’s poem also says it. This eloquent reality butts up against our positivist principles and presents the word to those we never quite manage to hear or to visualize as sentient. The stone’s remarkable capacity for survival, its inexplicable, magical characteristics from a mechanistic point of view, its insistent affirmation of life, all its strength inevitably lead me back to the vibrations of the first chapter of Deep Rivers, when Ernesto, the child protagonist, listens to the rocks and wonders aloud to his father: “Papa, I said to him, each stone speaks. Let’s pause a moment” (Arguedas, 12). For Arguedas, as well as for Rojas, each from the perspective of his own world view, it is clear that human societies, if they want to survive and prosper, must care and care deeply for the planetary ecosystem as an integrated whole (Gorham, 17). The problem I see is that the dominant interpretive community cannot accept, not even for an instant, that a stone may speak, feel, express its likes or its sensibilities, or communicate experiences that the human subject has difficulty calibrating, since he is not ready to transform or transcend his alienation from nature. I myself have asked numerous times what can be heard from those stones from Incan times, why so many centuries have gone by without us listening to those talking stones, and Arguedas captured brilliantly the crux of our lack of communication with nature. Of the innumerable critics who have written about Arguedas’s work, very few, if any, have truly realized the decisive language of the stones registered for just one moment in Ernesto’s narration. That is why Gonzalo Rojas’s poem left such a deep impression on me and leads me to a profound appreciation of the art of listening.

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Humans tend to not listen (to other cultures, to other beings, to other worlds) and Rojas would say in concert with other great artists, “look at men.” As if imagination didn’t permit the isolation of man. Whether it is a stone, a turret, a river, larva, a leopard, the wind or a gust of wind, a top or a zumbayllu, Rojas would never isolate what is natural and make it into an abstract theme. Words throb with life and they carry us to the Beginning, when the first symbols were sung or danced in the air that was inhaled. It is precisely the inconclusive character of Rojas’s poem with its echoes of concrete experiences, of irrepressible desires and of love for the poetic art that challenges the reader/listener amidst his habitual geographic coordinates to plant an indispensable seed to take root in the Oneness of being, which in other poetics could be a multiplicity, in order to adopt a planetary perspective. Listening to the rhythm of things is not easy. Rojas makes the poetic practice seem simple; he makes us think that listening to rocks is easy. What is certain is that it serves as a potent means to overcome the lack of connection with the cosmos and to do so from the perspective of the age of the planet.

PROJECTS

A screenplay whose characters exhibit roots, leaves, wings, beaks, claws, flowers, rivers, rocks, but without being aware of it. Their profiles and facial expressions can be seen as an integral part of the landscape. Also, the writing of a similar novel. Short stories about a great flowering, that is, a moment so imbued with life that it captures what others cannot. Essays on Rember Yarcahuani’s art, from the perspective of what gives life to its environmental power. A short film in which Lucrecia Martel appears in the center of a careful shot about waste pickers in an unrecognizable city. She appears on screen in a wet suit moving her mouth like one of the fish from her film. The actors nevertheless seem to understand her. When they interview her for the extras on the DVD, the movement of her mouth does not correspond to the sound of the words she is uttering and we realize that we are witnessing a new system of perception that, thanks to these close-ups, we discover is more insect than human. “These close-ups of the insect, these maps,” the artist would say, “are conceptual weapons that don’t so much serve to interpret but rather to create points of articulation that capture the metamorphoses, the ecological possibilities, the corporeal intensities and the communicative possibilities that cannot be captured by the perceptual habits of humans.” Video workshops for children in which they observe insects and other tiny beings or process that are rich in natural and playful designs. Video programs and short films that disarm the pillars that perpetuate the gulf between the environment and environmental wisdom and the way in which we think about daily matters in our schools, parks, and other public spaces. A close look at the translator’s role that the figure and the work of José María Arguedas inspires for its environmental wisdom, its engagement,

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and its power to form a connection among the personal, the local, and the political. Participation in video workshops, the drafting of discussion and reading materials for teachers and other community leaders involved in communication. Such leaders and teachers are prepared to embody what many audiovisual productions from interactive networks have accomplished with what they learned while working as anti-colonial agents and as translators. It is a question of arming the collective that includes distinct voices and common practices that alter social conventions and intolerant meanings in order to face the mere fact of opening up more possibilities of thinking the world. Cultivation of environmental stories such as those collected from the far reaches of the world on The EcoTipping Points Project’s website (http://www.ecotippingpoints.org/) in order to foster responsibility for telling stories that are more appealing and indispensable than those that reinforce the myths of progress and of human supremacy, as well as any type of anti-ecological rationale. To add, subtract, multiply, and divide the units of the ecological imagination. In this way, marching only to its own rhythm, an alternative environmental thought is articulated in each project that we carry out.

QUESTIONS

For years now I have been accumulating notes and jotting down ideas to answer the questions that pull the rug out from under me while simultaneously giving me wings. It would seem, though, that my answers have not provided me with a sure path, and I feel obligated, methodologically speaking, to continue searching in the river of questions and in the air of speculation. Although the essays included here were carried out with ecological action in mind—restorative, connective, transformative—many readers may not consider them literary criticism. Critics such as Sven Birkerts mistrusted ecocriticism as a study of literature from the start: Can literature be usefully examined as having some bearing on man and his practical relation to the natural world? And: Can literature—should literature—serve as an agency of awareness? (47)

What was it that drove me to persist in my ecological readings? In what sense does ecocriticism challenge the reader to ponder his/her own attitude toward nature? And without distinctions between that nature and ourselves, can we even ask why? Serpil Oppermann, an academic from Turkey, poses the following questions about a literary text: From what ethical and ideological position is nature textually constructed in a given literary text? What are the political reverberations of this approach to environmental issues? How is language used to create specific cultural views of those issues? Does the constructedness of nature totally decenter its empirical dimensions? How is the text ordered to challenge the reader to confront difficulties and questions concerning the environmental problems today? Do the postmodernist representational strategies obscure the real conditions of nature’s material existence? Do they present partial truths about the environmental issues? Does the absence of nature in a given fictional narrative create any sociological implications about human/nonhuman separation in the context? Does any kind of place (be it natural environment or the urban space) occupy a conceptual and aesthetic space in the narrative? Does nature hold an ontological primacy in the narrative, or is it an absent presence? Does the use of fragmentation, discontinuity, play, and other devices of postmodern fiction suggest any

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ontological alienation from the natural world? Does the environment have a passive subject position? Are there any suppressed ecological elements in this discourse? Does the text generate any fundamental dichotomies between nature and culture? (121-122)

The ecofeminist Greta Gaard makes the text speak from the crossroads of nature and sexuality: How does this text handle the problem of speaking for other species? Does the text depict other animal species as passive agents who need human saviors, or does the text depict the agency of other animal species? If species differences are uses as metaphor, what are the implications for the actual lives of non-human animal species? If speciesism is implicit in the text, how does that perspective shape definitions of humanity, nature, and human-nature relations? What kinds of social and ecological relations (i.e. communalism, reciprocity, dominance) are identified as central to human survival? (“New Directions” 9)

Similarly, the poet Rafael Courtoisie wonders how ants, kangaroos, cats who feed upon kangaroo meat, snakes, trees, moles, and articles of clothing make love: And what about collective love, the orgies of bacteria that constantly make love by exchanging information and parts, fragments of one another like some strange …floating words? And those stones, lying side-by-side, fallen, touching one another at the bottom of the same well? (40-42)

And words? Will any of these questions help me read ecologically and cultivate environmental wisdom? Do I plant potatoes or do the potatoes make me plant them? What can I do to compensate the vegetable world for all that it gives me? How do we initiate the flow of exchange among humanities scholars, writers, artists, ecologists, shamans, political leaders responsible for public policy, weavers, waste pickers, and all sorts of people, including you, my reader?

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What type of collective imagination will favor diverse forms of environmental action and social engagement? Is our collective imagination so impoverished as to be able to speak of a generalized myopia in the face of molecular revolutions that continue pulling the rug out from our understanding of the universe? Are ecopoems a form of feminine sensibility? What other forms of discourse can be as flexible as ecopoems? Where do the thin threads of a poem lead us? Is our journey best carried out in silence, aloud or while singing like the crickets? Can the plastic arts play a part in the genesis of a subjectivity of the landscape? How to bring about a dialogue between the ecological sciences and literature? Why do we insist on avoiding risk theory? Who is willing to translate with the infinite love of someone such as José María Arguedas? Why not reread José Watanabe’s or Alfredo Veiravé’s Natural History? Why not compose my own Natural History? Repeat or innovate? How about both options simultaneously? Paper or plastic? Or neither one of these two alternatives? Can what the critics say or write about the works of Arguedas or Rulfo be considered ecocriticism? Is there a provocative focus in films that opens the doors to perception causing the spectator to engage his five senses? How to connect with the mystery of the world’s rhythm?

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Does it make any sense to take part in a campaign to save the Earth? Why do Nicanor Parra’s ecoartifacts receive such little coverage in the horizon of readings conducted by Latin American society? When will the pedestrian stop being a martyr? Will we ever be able to learn the language of the Jacolote pine and the purslane with her orange Sunday-best shawl? Does Celandine echo more to the south of the fields of Love-In-AMist? Who will read José Ángel Valente’s or Jorge Riechmann’s poetry in the land of “Good living”? To what end do we create a “capacity for withdrawing inside that links, by means of the drama of matter, awareness with the goal of social change, the (American) continent with cells, syllables, the very heartbeat of all that exists?” (Jíménez, 25) To what end do we “absorb the viscous and the slippery” by stirring up roots and plowing through the lake of consciousness? (Jíménez, 26) Is it true that any sort of fanaticism stops us from respecting and honoring a harmonious existence with the natural world? Why abandon the exhortations of the Sacred? What is happening to the pre-Hispanic myths and traditions concerning water? Why doesn’t someone compose a haylli1 or make a video in honor of the fog catchers2 of Fralda Verde, Chile? Why do we not put into practice the sense of orientation that migratory birds possess?

1

A song of triumph among the indigenous peoples of Peru. They collect the fog and strain it to obtain water.

2

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What might the sorrow of nocturnal insects be like? (Eguren, 296) Does the soul only take flight when it abandons us? Who is inspired by the incredible stories of insects that Hugo Raffles compiles? What shall we do with the dissonances that destroy the myth of nature’s balance? Isn’t it dangerous to ignore those dissonances? Doesn’t that lead to the worst sort of authoritarianisms? Do I contradict myself when I think about harmonizing myself to the natural world? Is it a commitment that I will honor on a daily basis? Will those who pollute the environment on a large scale go unpunished like so many war criminals? Isn’t it more important to revive communitarian awareness? How can we call people to the cause of sustainable living in addition to suggesting riding a bike or hiking? Will we submit to cybernetic efficiency without realizing its impact on the environment? Do I perpetuate the division between myself as a representative of a cultural identity and the natural as something external and objective? What do I recognize of myself in my surroundings? What inspiration can we find in the yuyo that manages to infiltrate a solid block of cement? And what inspiration do we find in the never-seen but extremely deep roots of the huarango tree?

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When will the day arrive in which we truly respect the right to equality regardless of race or social status? Regardless of religion or gender? Regardless of species? Would it make any sense to distinguish between sleep and wakefulness? Will the “have-nots” someday no longer be looked upon with disdain by those have? Does justice for the people really exist or is it just an idea on paper? How can we see what cannot be seen? How to deal with this anguish over the idea that everything is ending? CHANGE what?

RECONSIDERATIONS

We have to reconsider the concept of nature; such a reconsideration would follow the lines of Timothy Morton’s thought as he asks us to rethink ecology without “nature.” I cite him because his insistence on embracing what is strange seems to be the essence of slow reading and of a careful analysis of cultural artifacts. We have to reconsider the concept of the environment. Obviously, new ways of thinking are needed in order to change what it means to be human, animal, earth; in effect, each one of these words must shed its habitual, limited, patriarchal fixed meaning. But how can we reorganize the associations that arise whenever those words appear in a sentence? How can we recontexualize and reconsider as intimate what was formerly strange or alien to us? These reconsiderations imply a recognition that is difficult to imagine: attending to the actors in ecological reason; to those who defend the hills, mountains, rivers, and trees; those who defend what we call nature, while simultaneously dismantling the narrow definition of modern society, from which the destructive social imaginary emanates. It is not so easy to imagine such an undoing of our predatory society when I see all around me the most hideous and violent manifestations of nationalism that are rooted in intolerance and an irrational shoring up of patriarchal institutions that are held up by generations-old habits and complicities. Upon thinking about this pessimistic vision, I can also imagine a possibility of open-mindedness and breadth of feeling. Thus, my call for a reconsideration of each story: each one-to-one relationship, of the alliances that weave together different species, of experiences that are enjoyed outdoors, of conversations with plants, of friendships with animals. This reimagined world would know the happiness of reviving the oral cultures of all our peoples—the urban, Andean, jungle, and marginalized peoples—thus displacing our current devotion to ear buds and other numerous ways of avoiding connection. It would know the joy of reforesting the jungle of astute ancestral voices. We should not be surprised that all native peoples do not use pens or that mixed blood people know ancestral stories, but it is indeed astonishing that deserts can be reforested. I cite the example of Jesús León Santos whose decades-long work, using pre-Colombian agricultural techniques and with the

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collaboration of 400 local families from twelve municipalities that comprise the Center for Integral Mixteca Development (Cedicam in Spanish), reforested a barren region in Oaxaca. Such stories of reforestation and reparation allow us to rethink our daily actions from the perspective of a spirit of tenderness and cooperation, of a culture that values goodness. In the poems, narratives, films, installations, sculptures and photographs that I reference in this ABC book, I am interested in reconsidering the lack of strong historical, political, anecdotal, sexual or chronological markers, which leads me to the importance of the reader’s task of incorporating an awareness of nature as part of his/her cultural critique. I am interested in replacing the anti-ecological ideas that only the quantifiable is economic and that economic time is infinite with the simple and heartfelt celebration of life. We must give total recognition to the rights of the Earth, to environmental justice, to the perspective of sustainability and of the sacred. In that way, at least we could overcome a certain anxiety produced by the habit of waiting to see societies grow, forgetting that, in that parallelism used by economists of growth, when it reaches old age, it dies and the cycles of nature begin anew. We ought to truly recognize the irrecoverable loss of energy resources in order to stop our collective madness of denying the damage that we are causing on the planet and to the planet. For this, we have to notice poetic language, or certain poetic effects in the case of narrative genres or even in critical discourse, such as quotes or periphrasis of poems or phrases or images, which reveal the complex transcultural dynamics by means of the dissolution of dominant representations. Or at least this is what should occur in an attempt to read “ecologically” in order to facilitate the emergence or strengthening of new forms of subjectivity that resist any type of theoretical reductionism, such as an extreme textualism or the naïve reverence for the authority of the natural referent. In what other way can we preserve books and convert them into seeds for environmental wisdom? All of which entails a reconsideration of the eclectic method with a new way of understanding the environment: the dimension of complexity is given by means of a dialogue of environmental wisdoms. Those who participate in this dialogue are social actors that mobilize around the desire for wisdom and for justice. Yet it is not a desire that is fulfilled in an imaginary place: it only occurs if the ecological potentials of the environment are assimilated, not as resources or utilities, but rather as possibilities for life, if a new relationship with nature that does not destroy it is attempted. It is only possible if there is community management of

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resources while honoring the principles of ecological and cultural diversity. This can only be accomplished if economic rationality is abandoned and replaced by an environmental rationality that emerges from the dialogue of wisdoms. This will be a productive rationality based on ecological potentialities and on peoples’ cultural meanings. Should we discontinue the use of agrochemicals when economic rationality demands an incremental growth in productivity? Although such a leap from the economy to the environment may appear impossible, a first step is this reconsideration of the acknowledgement of the environment where the time-signifier inhabits the being who is oriented by an ethics of diversity. Perhaps an echo of these thoughts would be the frequent use in Costa Rica of the expression “Pure life” or the stubborn interest for learning the extraordinary sense of orientation and movement that birds possess. Perhaps the fear of uncertainty and doubt, the discomfort of contradiction, are the most common obstacles to the very act of reconsideration. Perhaps to reconsider is an act of editing, of rearming the bases of what informs us about what is most basic. Perhaps it is imperative to continue thinking deeply about these considerations.

SEEDS

What matters most neither begins nor ends with human beings. Meeting strangers is a way of taking care of ourselves. Ecology has neither a center nor edges. I am an insect: I change scale and perceive without awkwardness. Such (a) precise being. The antennae of my senses capture contours in the clouds and shadows in the abysses. I visit the germinating seed. I affiliate myself with whatever combines surprise with fruitful results. Accompanied by the wind, I discover dry leaves and those that are still green. Life is right in every instance. My being trembles: echo of terrible disasters, song of fountainheads, breath among ruins and voices. The will to live has no cracks. I trust in the season of abundance. Everything is a great collage, a palimpsest. “Humans ought to vanish,” insist humans. Plants want precisely the opposite. Everything has its own rhythm, a bit of life, a sentence (a prayer).

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Things are friends that speak to me. Pages are doors that open onto other worlds. I live all the while trying out ways of slowing down the universe that will eventually do away with time. Any day now discarded and useless utterances will bear fruit. I mix archaic impulses with the new. Seeds travel and reach their destination with the passion of insects, birds, thoughts. Tree branches repeat the will to bifurcate like spore clouds. Why don’t I know that the majority of plants and more than half of the animals change sex constantly? Why don’t I learn from plant’s fluidity between masculine and feminine? Poetry is you1, I, woman, country, planet, everything at once. Reduced, brushed aside: a mere blip in the great web of life. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. Our lifeblood has expanded. With no distinction between inner and outer, I am like the river. I unearth precious truths and then I examine them one by one, in confluence. I destroy the associations that machines have imposed on us. I dream that I made cracks in all the ways we purport to shelter ourselves.

1

This phrase comes from the famous poem by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer.

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I suspect that all lineage is an interior breeze that used to be exterior. I dream that I am a Kerouac, addicted to the potato and to the pepper, atop my bicycle. I converse with the image that I saw in my dream. “Trout are made of trees,” it tells me. “Ponder things at their own rhythm and according to your own means,” it continues. “That way you will see more than what they have told you.” Art is a dream of symbols of what I am in the midst of chaos without missing the mark. Generous like the senses, slumber and the idea of distant places illuminate our reading of the world. I dream in order to rest and to refocus. An androgynous instinct guides all lively revision. What strength contemplation and dreaming give! Everything is an upside-down fall. To what point am I able to imagine beyond the vicious cycles? Rather than living in the moment, I live in the environment. I inhabit: I do not occupy space, but rather live in it. Deep: I study the earth for a moment. Deeper: I stretch out my hand and my mind while taking a deep breath. To give without having and to live without fear. Couldn’t words be like the magnetic fields that orient birds during migration? Ecopoet: he who uses poems like a shovel.

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I recover unheard stories: I nourish the being who dies and is reborn, the part that I deny when I am awake. To eat without erosion: is there another way to carry out justice? I gather strength from the starry sky, from living libraries, from forests. Ingenious talent does not nourish unless it can also decompose. To read without haste is like eating without haste. I like to challenge myself and to seek out new adventures, but that implies that I must come face-to-face with numerous deceptions and the decadence of our world. Rich diversity of potatoes, defend us from single crop farming. Make us love our roots. The potato’s treasure resides in the communities that give it life. In order to enjoy and understand the image of the potato, we must inhabit the image. Any image of the Other terrorizes us while simultaneously inspiring us. I bid farewell to the habit of answering without paying any attention to the Lie. When will images cease to be machines that propagate lies? Do we have two eyes because of being the look of joy and death? Our eyes and the surprise of discovery arrive walking like an insect. I notice that everything is of interest to me: sea shells, lamps waves of different strengths, the conversation between two butterflies as they compare the effects of a storm on their wings, etc. Our life ethic stems from the culture of plants and animals.

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The most forgotten teachers die out like the kiawe.2 Is it worth it to remove a mountain for a gold ring? Who takes responsibility for the water that the gold prospectors use, so far from California? The map reveals this land that nobody takes to the Intensive Care Unit. The sea or the mountain threatened by mining is my body. A body that trembles. Earth and sky are enormous mirrors. “We have also betrayed water,” thus Roberto Juarroz began anew a river of words. Very few see the floating plastic that will wind up in the stomach of birds, fish of all sizes and some mammals. The imperceptible worlds of bacteria are traces of the complexity of all that exists. Poisons hide like fear. We ought to heed the spirits of the living and the dead that are all around us. A part of my Other is part of the All. There is nothing more difficult than emulating the wetlands that purify and protect our waters. A bog is the most fertile area into which dreams seep. There unfettered thoughts and fragile trophies of the imagination abound. We are made up of cells: we are a bog with a soul.

2

It is a type of mesquite tree (Prosopispallida), better known as huarango, also called “The King of the desert.” It can live for more than 1,000 years and has roots as deep as 180 feet, allowing Peruvian ancestors found underground water.

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A lake permits neither impositions nor arrogance. I take measure of the landscape to take my own measure, yet perhaps I should measure myself through language. Oh, immense door, I enter the realm of the miniscule. I reflect in order to contemplate, rest, flourish. I get along with a diversity of personalities and species. I go diving, I celebrate, I observe, I control nothing. Who sheds the tear drops of dew? What else rusts inside us in addition to our tenderness? What tree had to die so that I could use this paper to write? A seed to overcome any obstacle. I feel that what is most important is to tend the creative fire. Curiosity about different life forms: in order to open which locks? The best indicator of the power of perception is a sense of humor. I want to interrupt the motor in which we have been raised. When the world opens up her skin, an underground current gives me wings. It seems as if I live in a movie or in a dream. I begin to use my imaginations by inhabiting the space of the Other. I am not saying that we are unaware of divisions. I am insinuating that we should be like seeds. What is human and what is natural are a terrifyingly fragile continuum.

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Anything that excludes generates disastrous inattentiveness. “Until you have dug a hole, planted a tree, watered it and helped it live and grow, you haven’t done anything, declares Wangari Maathai. “You are just talking.” I will be the hummingbird who combats the forest fire without any help from the larger animals. Those who live well make an effort to include everything. What is just and fair echoes in the most fundamental of things. It takes more than a century to listen to a complete sentence uttered by our Earth. I plant seeds of doubt because I love our planet. I think about an art that unspools natural history. I wash what I eat with water, like the healing salve of some plants. I forget, thanks to water. With love, with affection, I take what there is, day by day. Things always change our point of view. Earth has the last word.

SLOW READING

Insistence on caring about what is read, and on considering more than one way of seeing things and one approach, so as to sweeten the encounter on the page. Technically it would be the ideal re-reading. In practice it is the attempt to embody ecological engagement within a temporal frame of greater enthusiasm than the first encounter. In order to nourish a reading of second opportunities, of other outlets, such a reading needs to be defined by a long-term perspective, and the reader’s entire life is barely long enough for such a pursuit. Practical training whose purpose is to recognize alterity; to observe with care and while alternating different points of view by overcoming our limited and limiting habits of perception. All this in order to sense the nonhuman world in the same way that an insect might, whereby we sense the enormous living side-by-side with the miniscule; to inscribe the reading of a cultural artifact in a becoming and to open oneself up to metamorphoses and to reconsiderations; to take advantage of the intervals; to support environmental wisdom. Since the only way to read poetry is by means of a rereading, poets tend to be excellent guides to a rereading of the world. At least, we could say that poets value such a vital activity in order to foster the ecological imagination. Reynaldo Jiménez states: “A nearby noise, a butterfly, the doorbell, my own thoughts in constant disarray, all of this and more obliges me to reread as if I were clinging to a craggy rock above an abyss.” To reread is to seek meaning, an entrance into the Other. In her introduction to Andrea Cabel’s book of poems, Water’s False Attitudes, Rossella Di Paolo described what I mean by rereading: If the reader is one of those people who prefer to gaze upon the river from its banks, he should turn around. If he is one of those who only want to dip his big toe into the water, he should turn around. If what he wants is to throw himself into the bottomless pit, to sink like a heavy column, to spin speedily inside broken nothingness […] if he is ready for all that, then welcome, because that is the only attitude that can discover, seconds later and one step more, the surprising impulse with which the sun rises like a rose beyond the mist… and it carries you along, dear reader, through the air amidst its verses.

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We cannot think of just one way to read and reread the text before us. What we can say with certainty is that it takes time, for some a commotion does not matter; others need silence, but it takes time. The time of being. A lifetime. Of course poets remind us of the parallels between reading and writing. Cuban Poet José Kozer uncovers the root of this interdependence with the image of the “mesh net,” the idea of knowing how to belong to a tradition that continues and grows richer with the creative act of reading and writing in ever-renewing cycles: The country into which all poems flow is a real Imaginary, alive, complex, intermingled, where everything fits and matters, in open participation. There, in that Imaginary, there ought to exist debate, linguistic last rites, verbal restraint, fruition and sobriety, euphoria and sanity. A whole: a mesh net: a stratum sedimented by centuries of creation, strings of poems, and by a now that at the same time is projected forward toward future centuries from its particular strings of poems (in movement). That space belonging to everyone, without any categories of superiority or inferiority, of beauty or ugliness, of transparent or obtuse language, of schools or overexalted individualities, is a space that, in my opinion, implies the making of a better world, a more interesting and mature world; one that is less consumerist and more spiritual….

Rereading implies allowing the current to take you, reaching for the stars, looking through the keyhole, recycling, making the same mistakes, returning to our roots; in short, reading the world without focusing on three or four things, but rather trying to widen our circle as much as possible. Will it ever be possible to imagine the innumerable levels of reality? Not all of us will have an aleph at our disposal . . . To welcome fruitful interferences, to be able to suspend the thread of our reading to return later to the page, to interrupt, to branch out, to find another path, not to be contrary, but rather because rereading or slow reading is precisely that: to take a different route, an unknown one. Dare I dream of doing away with the seasons?

SLOW VIOLENCE

Invisible wounds, verbal abuse, environmental decay, climate change, melting of the glaciers and the polar ice caps, oil spills, deforestation, pollution of our rivers and seas: in short, the pain our Earth suffers. All these symptoms confront us with the fabulous yet unthinkable dilemma of conjuring stories, images, and symbols that can capture the convincing yet elusive effects of what Rob Nixon has called “slow violence.” Growing incrementally over time, it is a violence whose calamitous effects may not manifest themselves for years, decades or even centuries. Perhaps it is also a silencing, sanctioned violence by the dominant discourses that denies existence to all living beings. This violence of far-reaching effects cannot be visualized in the same way as the spectacular type of violence typical of an explosion or a shooting, for instance. Nor can it be enumerated completely due to the vast and widespread nature of the phenomenon. All of the terms that have been employed to name it—hunger, extreme poverty, even epistemic violence—have not managed to settle on an image that, in all fairness, takes into account all of the consequences of this violence. Typically, it is invisible to the eye, which can nevertheless immediately discern other types of more obvious violence, such as physical violence or abuse. Given that this violence requires long periods of time to produce perceptible consequences, it is difficult to track its progress. It is precisely this slowness that causes the difficulty of perception, although we can already see numerous signs of environmental decay and other symptoms of suffering. Indeed, this evasive form of manifesting its impact functions as an anesthesia, if you will, and as a distractor, which in the end winds up covering its own tracks, rendering itself invisible. Thus emerges the enormous challenge of rendering it visible, a project undertaken by artists, writers, activists, organizations that defend wildlife and the environment, political leaders, etc. In order to face the strategic challenges posed by environmental calamities, it is in fact imperative that we face this violence and face it in with an eye toward all of its temporal complexities. Nixon hits the nail on the head by underscoring the importance of giving a name and a functional definition to this violence, so flagrant in the southern hemisphere, which “can help us to revise the conceptual priorities that inform the environmental humanities” (2011).

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Now, this makes me aware of my responsibility as a Latin American researcher and ecocritic to inject into environmentalism all that is creative and constructive, which is the role of the ecological imagination that I aim to highlight here. Speaking about slow violence reveals an ecological awareness that explicitly refuses to disengage itself from any notion of environmental justice or global interconnection. In Latin America, those who lead the discussion on slow violence are the environmental defense committees from various non-governmental and grass roots organizations: the indigenous movements that block roads and highways. Nixon wonders about the expressive forms that are urgently needed to serve as witness to the slow-moving environmental calamities caused by climate change. He astutely observes that in order for things to improve we must not only become aware of slow violence, but also transform it through activism, civil disobedience, and gender discussions in the Global South. We have to give a name to these catastrophes which cannot be perceived easily by the senses and which will continue challenging us to rethink our methods of observation. We must mobilize widespread coalitions to advance the cause of environmental justice and to put a stop to the slow violence caused by the negative impact of globalization. At times I wonder if not carving out time for myself in order to think and to write has something to do with the temporal effects of slow violence. Have I suffered from this type of invisible violence when I have not given myself the space to read and think? Don’t I realize that there exists a slow poisoning, noiseless in its progress? What type of violence is it by which I allowed myself to become a victim, using up all of my personal time for others? Not setting aside time for myself and permitting others to decide how I would use my time . . . isn’t that an expression of violence? Has damage been done? How does it manifest itself? Do we hurt ourselves when we do not manage our own time and our own space? On a large scale, slow violence could be named “ecological genocide,” to use the term coined by Ken Saro-Wiwa, a Nigerian writer assassinated by his own government. Saro-Wiwa publically denounced the social consequences of industrial pollution, for which he was killed amid a generalized indifference toward his cause and his fate. And that indifference, that distancing from issues concerning the environmental crisis, ultimately explains the great difficulty of visualizing the slow violence that destroys habitats and thus a favorable terrain capable of maintaining a sustainable society. Efforts to demonstrate the extraction industries’ negative impact on the health of nearby communities include Joe Berlingers’s documentary Crude (2009), Ernesto Cabellos and Stephanie Boyd’s Choropampa: The Price of Gold (2006), and Stephen

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Sapieza’s reports for the PBS Newshour. And all the drama that surrounds one of the female protagonist’s suicide, committed in protest against her husband’s poisoning in the film Altiplano (2009), serves to dramatize the environmental damage caused by the extraction industry. Perhaps I have already taken some steps to transform in the collective imaginary the horror of that slow violence through my use of poetic language (See the following entries: Acclimatization, Amazonia, Celebration, Co(s)mic Connection, Eco-Spirituality, Interval, Metamorphosis) and through other means (See these entries: Waste Pickers, Engagement, Cosmopolitan Communication, Minor body, Eco-Art, Environmental Justice, Errant Polyphony, and Tinkuy for the Digital Age). I am cognizant of the limitations of ecocriticism, but I also know that its role in discussing and thinking about the most urgent of environmental themes is not just a matter of a diversity of ways to read the environment, but rather its role is to confront slow violence and to set our imaginations to work (dreams, vigils, slow reading, dialogues between worlds, new media, reconsiderations) in order to come up with solutions.

TENDERNESS

The art of the caress, practiced with kindness and sensitivity toward animals; the astuteness of the cat, a model of conviviality due to its independent behavior as well as its dependence on the household caress; unconditional affection, ready to respond with love toward the Earth and its creatures. Tenderness is disinterested sympathy that is shared with the world— animal, vegetable, and mineral—by means of the caress, as expressed in the fluvial poetry of Juan L. Ortiz (1896-1978), like an ebb-and-flow motion that does not stay fixed at one end of the natural cycle. Additionally, tenderness can be expressed by caressing plants with our fingers or with our words . . . Wait. Isn’t tenderness an on-screen reality in Alamar (2009) when the father teaches the plant names to his little boy? Isn’t the caress merely the image of the emotions and the botanical histories that are woven together with names in the poems from Esthela Calderón’s (b. 1970) collection Breath of Vital Air (2008)? Daily practice of this type of tenderness is the only effective means of combating apathy, or cruelty and coldness with respect to other species of animals and plants. Tenderness thus exercised is an efficient amulet for warding off a loss of respect for differences. It also serves as a means of savoring the delicate heat of the moment. A more recurrent and conscious propensity for this direct, yet sensitive, method of feeling will do away with our habits of possession and domination, thus opening us up to the inevitable celebration of the experience of the absolute diversity of things, as we observe in Ortiz’s poem “I Have Seen…” from his collection Even the Air was Moved. In this poem, tenderness for the stray animal that “did not seem to be a kitten” is a way of compensating for the mistreatment and abandonment that were obvious from the tiny animal’s grotesque appearance at the beginning of the poem. This tenderness toward the animal keeps at bay any possible reification or indifference that its ugly appearance could produce in the reader, while also expressing human affection for the defenseless creature. Moreover, as the poem progresses, this tenderness changes into compassion for abandoned children: in and of himself I have loved him, I have loved him with a profound look and a gentle hand.

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And he has responded to me with his little cry from his nightmare doubly caressed. Laugh if you will: I melded with him, I became one with him like with the living call that surrounds us, alive, and trembling in the shadows… And I saw other faces, oh yes, I saw infinite faces of children aged by the horror of another nightmare. The faces of children from the icy hells of cities and towns. The faces of children, oh, from the country and from riverbanks. Their faces grown pointy from hunger, grotesquely thin. And old, old, on the riverbanks. What have you done, for God’s sake, with our own pure shoots? The caress, yes, the pained caress for those elongated heads, for that stiff, dirty hair, for those eyes, haunting and small and wrinkled, And those shy looks that seek us out from the hollow of the common night; yes, the caress; yes, the answer that bends toward us, delicately attentive.

The extended image of the caress in the poem could inspire tenderness in a reader who is open to experiencing the pain of another —like that of abandoned animals or children. The poem moves from the image of a small, injured animal to that of other faces, those of abandoned children from various places, both urban and rural. This transformation from the image of the small animal into the image of numerous young faces emphasizes the notion that the poem develops through the gaze that follows the poetic “I.” The caress obtains a look that responds to him. I do not believe that this is a theme or merely a sophisticated rhetorical device of persuasion; it is the “ecotenderness” that the poem rescues and presents. It is a tenderness that corresponds to those beings that are in direct, sympathetic contact with other beings. A poem from Juarroz’s Fourth Vertical Poetry (1969, poem 27) illustrates the ecological context of tenderness and posits it not only as a method of perception for a lyrical “I” who does not possess one single way of seeing, but rather as a somewhat difficult praxis of infusing tenderness into the world of relationships that is being created by means of the connections that are forged. Another function of ecotenderness? On what side is man’s tenderness housed? On his chest, always relatively open? On his back, always relatively abandoned? On his profile, always relatively unconnected? On what side will the earth feel man most deeply, when he falls down only to rise up again

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Tenderness and when he falls so that others may rise up? Will that side be different for the feel of dust, of stone or of clay, for the desert, the battlefield or the garden? On what side can he be forgotten most easily, killed most easily, loved most easily? On what side does the flight that we carry open up, the fruit that we carry, the nothingness we carry? On what side is man possible for man?

Juarroz’s questions situate tenderness’s important role in the cultivation of the poetic “I’s” sensitivity toward the natural world. At the very least they situate tenderness as the beginning of the process of seeking connections with the natural world. It is the first step of an existential process conducted by a being who, from the start, seeks his “tender” side; in other words, it constitutes the coming into being of the “tender self.” The questions posed by the poetic “I” originate in the many aspects of the tender being and emerge as a tentative testing of the natural world: the body’s points of contact—chest, back or profile; the perspective of a world that feels—dust, earth, mud; the affective ties of those points of contact—oblivion, death, love; and the ways of being that emanate from those points—flight, fruit, nothingness. All of those points or sides express not only the emotions of the tender self, but also its thought. The poem’s final question cannot be understood without the fundamental notion of tenderness that initiates the process of searching embodied by the questions in the first place. In other words, the practice of ecotenderness carries with it a consciousness of the tender self who is coming into being—expanding?—along with the points of contact between the body and its surroundings. The tender self’s consciousness, understood as an ecological consciousness, also wonders about what happens along these points of contact. In Twelfth Vertical Poetry (1991, poem 33), tenderness is visualized through the image of the to-and-fro movement of the waves, making clear their constructive role in restoration: Tenderness dissolves That illusory line That divides the waters Of separation from those of encounter.

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Tenderness is an experience of affirmation, tactile and positive, that has not renounced the ideal of communion with the natural world, although it may not achieve the complete transference of the feelings of connection between the subject and what s/he touches. The desire to be connected is affirmed through the thirst for a bond, incarnated in the caress. The caress is friction, the movement of proximity of the tender self, the flow of the pieces that want to come together, the “being attentive, completely attentive, / to the changing and at times paradoxical concerns of love” (Ortiz, “Yes, on this Earth….” The Poplar and the Wind, 343). The failure of the long desired fusion with the natural world or the impossibility of a transcendental fusion with the natural world (a recrimination made quite justly against ecocriticism by Dana Phillips in The Truth of Ecology), nevertheless, has a positive aspect that ecocriticism happily still holds dear: that failure stimulates an awareness of the limits and fault lines that the self and others accept as a changeable component of their lives. Unlike what its presence imposes and dialogue annuls, the caress founds the ceremony of the incarnation of what is touched and of sharing the tactile experience of the encounter even in the realm of pure thought. Tenderness’s characteristic movement is felt as imprecise, irregular, similar to an ebb-and-flow movement, adrift, but it nevertheless reaches the mind. “We are tender when we open ourselves up to the language of sensitivity, feeling viscerally either the pleasure or the pain of another” maintains Luis Carlos Restrepo, for whom the ecological crisis signals the end of a culture of war and the need to develop a culture that stems from sensitivity and that cultivates ecotenderness. Someone or something feels the positive physical effects of the affective currents and the relation between the human and the non-human worlds without responding coldly and automatically to the demands for profit and efficiency of production. Someone or something is impacted directly by the pollution of our environment and the contamination of our food supply, and through an attentive reaction generates emotive and theoretical processes of reparation that will protect the continuation of life. One of those processes is the cultivation of ecotenderness, like a vital, pleasurable affect that encompasses everything, even the mind.

THINGS

What happens when we discover that things have their own existence? Are we prepared to understand their perspective? Juarroz has a lovely poem in which things take on life (Eighth Vertical Poetry, 39). An unexpected outburst reveals the constitutive instability of the being of things: Objects have begun to explode on their own As if they were tired of the insufferable asceticism Of lacking life. So a glass cracks without anyone touching it A painting dislocates its frame, The bottoms drop out of the closets into autonomous descent The cracks in man’s house Grow ever more quickly As if they were pursuing a different architecture Or perhaps a different inhabitant. Thus, stones also leap up on trees And break open like fruits when they fall, The light bulb burns out while it’s turned off and pencils crack open when not in use and abandon their mineral spine of bewildered graphite, refusing their inert function of transferring to a safer bastion the elusive current that tows the words along. Perhaps an unforeseen slip of the immobile Has led the objects To imitate the promiscuous uncertainty of the living And the broken, lonely statue of death. Or perhaps it is only a matter of a defect In the continuation of some lost form Or of the contradictory fatigue Of the stillest part of the discourse of forms.

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Nevertheless, Although the objects may explode on their own Until the world blows up into pieces Or even if they explode inwards And in some way escape the world, They will not be able to do away with the abyss That has always separated the hand from its multiple shadows Or the foot from its rounds on the roads. And above all everything will follow its erratic impulse The thread of solitude That hypnotizes the objects with its blindness without darkness: To think, To think with them or without them. To think: Casting emptiness into another emptiness.

The objects that act are not those that we habitually observe as active even though they exist all around us in our daily environment. Something has occurred that has radically transformed the vision of the things that used to be considered normal. The objects have begun to change as if they were consciousness in crisis, having their fill of existing without life, without any connection to other beings. The objects change quickly like consciousness when they can no longer withstand the state of isolating immobility. The ideal of static integrity, typically formed by precise referents such as a glass or a closet, breaks open: a metamorphosis of the objects occurs. The things, normally conceived of as inert, immobile, and inanimate, become living, sensing, autonomous organisms. Or, to put it another way, we see in things the agency that we believed to be the exclusive capacity of humans; this is unique in that it presents no difference between humans and non-humans. The objects burst forth as terrestrial organisms that tremble and that are no longer the cultural constructs that were realized with the empiricist confidence of our senses, nature as a foreign object that is dominated by modern Western technology and the belief in “objective knowledge” and in causality. The objects’ animate characteristics mark a change toward an indefinite and unknown zone. The interstices of the “man’s house,” the fissures, the cracks, what breaks—these ruptures “grow ever more quickly,” shaping a fragmentation of space and also of our understanding of the things that occupy that space. All of which indicates that the transformation takes place in some unknown side of things—beings that come to life upon exploding. Even the word itself enters into the movement of these changes, indicating the

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movement of the split. The word is infected by the active search of these things that were formerly static and that now suddenly give unforeseen leaps. These last movements indicate a distancing from the habitual functions of objects; the strength of a stone that breaks, the dark light bulb that burns out, the pencils that forego writing. Things are much more than their utilitarian use. The last word absorbs all of this movement: “to think” and the unusual association that concludes the poem—or does it initiate it? Can the symbolic correspondences between these objects and what our social imaginaries assign them be understood? What happens if what is socially assigned is disobeyed? Translated into one phrase, it is a bit of nonsense/no-sense. The pencils that refuse “their inert function / of transferring to a safer bastion / the elusive current that tows the words along” are an allusion to the rejection of the Western logocentric world of coherence and certainty. The pencils refuse immobility and don’t want to help the people that use them. The pencils’ withdrawal can be seen as a subtle renunciation of the pre-established function of writing or drawing and an opening up to all that things can do. How do we approach this active thing? How can we rethink what we can do with it? Are we able to see all that things can do? They exercise a radical force over their possible observers, since they negate the possibility of being seen from the standpoint of pre-established categories of static integrity that language assigns them. The figures for the inert become animate figures of the imagination that deny the attributes that common sense assigns to a glass, to a painting, to closets, to stones, to light bulbs, to pencils. The factor that unifies them is the crack that fractures them, the break with their designated function. The tremors cause cracks that grow according to the intensity of the quake: a metaphor for the living movement of the objects. At the beginning, the quake is merely conceptual, given that it is the words that transform their usual meanings. The objects break free from the subjects that give them their existence in cultural language, they burst forth “on their own.” This independence occasions a terrible seism and the stereotypes of the static world, characterized by the adjective “inert” and a few key nouns for stable rigidness, such as “asceticism,” “frame,” “bastion,” come tumbling down throughout the poem. In the second part of the poem, the explanatory tone pulls us away from the vertigo of the explosions and places us squarely before the problematic of the thinking subject in the questionable universe of rational categories. What led the objects to “imitate the promiscuous uncertainty of the living?” In the poem’s fourth stanza, we find three possible answers to this question: a) “an unforeseen slip of the immobile;” b) “perhaps it is

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only a matter of a defect / in the continuation of some lost form;” or c) “the contradictory fatigue / of the stillest part of the discourse of forms.” We always think about the possible explanations for things. Previously we had focused on a disconcerting and enigmatic zone of being, things imbued with life and their transformation; probably it was a question of unthinkable space in which objects abandoned their condition as inanimate and perceivable by the senses of any given subject. The questions at the end of the poem are not only addressed to the transformed objects. The explanations resist the movement of things; or it is a stumble or a defect or a fatigue of the motionless. “The continuation of some lost form” is possibly a metaphor for the quality of being given over to the shapeless form of randomness. The act of explaining the movement of things as a defect of being is a reference to the transformation of the rational subject through an intuitive flash. The initial euphoria of these sudden changes is transformed in a speculative tone in the final stanzas: “perhaps,” “maybe,” “nevertheless,” “although,” and “even when” are markers of a stabilizing and rational view of things. The immobility of being predominates in the verb forms. Unlike the dynamic and contradictory explosions of the objects that reveal a new search for totality, the last verses exhibit another quietism distinct from the original because the living things articulate a metaphor that we will call the formal metaphor (since the world is a continuous and passive form that nonetheless is breakable): the objects imitate the very essence of life, but are not part of it, there is no melding with the subjects; they only reflect the impossibility of being animate or inanimate. The objects are agents and they imitate “the promiscuous wavering of the living / and the broken statue unaccompanied by death” because the model is not the subject, but rather the cosmos that oscillates between appearances of lively transience and fleeting disappearances. The transformation of the concept of an inert and immobile universe into a terrestrial organism that can experience unexpected stumbles, simple defects or bouts of contradictory weariness, marks the degree of sensitization of the apparently fixed, static, and established spaces. These spaces are also abstract figures of cultural structures: “the continuation of some lost form” or “the stillest part of the discourse of forms” allude to various cultural premises about the world’s stable and rigid mode of existence ruled by chance or necessity. The ambiguity of this way of representing things permits us to see new limits to the metaphor of that universe that is habitually inanimate and inert. The objective view of things breaks down upon postulating another condition of objects’ unstable being. From the objects’ discontinuity there emerges a terrible impossibility: not being able to occupy the position of objects and

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hence to fuse the subject-object together. Thus, the activity of thinking not only relates to the apparently rigid and stable conceptual schema, but also, thanks to living things, constructs a way out of the sociocultural laws of Western individualism. Who can resist the objects’ powers of seduction upon presenting the abyss that has always separated their body from the unknown zone of unexpected changes? The “hand” and the “foot” are not only parts of the fragmented body, but also tangible proof of the absence of a cosmic unity; the multiple shadows of the hand are the imaginings of the split consciousness of the subject, of points of view toward the outer world. The fragile mental elaborations about the exterior world, in this case, from the corporeal extremities of the human body, are the tactile extreme of its sensorial quality; the “rounds on the roads” is a metaphor for the fragility of the cultural construction, the illusion of making our way toward somewhere. After reading Juarroz’s poem we are left with a tension between the mobility of the initial transfiguration and the immobility of the shape of the world. The fragile sensitivity of the separate, disillusioned subject remains exposed. That subject follows the haphazardness beyond the play of the seduction of objects. Rational thought characterized the object as lacking vision; and, thus, it manages to elude the unstable movement that defines the exploding objects’ fate—a type of death—to live. Who can resist the objects’ movement? Juarroz’s refusal to use static, stable images could represent our resistance to change plans unexpectedly. In the instant of the interruption, or rather eruption, of the living things the usual senses seem impotent and thought confines us to an erratic prison that the human being has constructed through its refusal to see the objects’ fate, a cosmic order that keeps us separate from things. The act of thinking butts up against this movable zone, overcomes it, and separates us from the objects in the face of nothingness: “Casting emptiness into another emptiness” refers to the metaphor of the subject’s absence, primarily that of daily thought. We are on the side of absences, holes, emptiness in a static, still world of the inanimate. This tension between the animate and inanimate world that extends throughout the poem is resolved in the poem’s conclusion through a negative operation of generating emptiness. But the objects’ unexpected eruption is a unique occurrence that signifies the fundamental transformation of the relation between subject and object, in an instantaneous establishing of a new state of things. Thought, as a vacillating activity, begs to give itself over completely to the ritualistic play of absences, basically because the consideration of the emptiness put into play is necessary to make sense of it all. Juarroz insists:

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Man has lost in good measure the enormity of thinking. For me the word “to think” involves a totality of reflection, contemplation, intuition and reason. Macedonio Fernández talked about the search for a poetry of thought—and I do not mean of the intellect—that does not fear using a profundity of this task (of this inseparable human dimension that is thought), but, at the same time, is charged with that ineffable substance that poetry lends it. (“Language, Poetry, Being”)

Thus the resultant impact between the euphoric feeling of the initial dynamic revelation and the feeling of disenchantment stemming from rational rigidity leaves us with a disconcerting ambiguity: either we resign ourselves to the separation of subject and object—that is, we give up the position of object of cosmic play—or we risk a new way of thinking, not constricted by critical discourse, which could be like one of the objects’ sudden explosions. Aware of that ambiguity, Juarroz articulates a questioning of objects’ stability or instability. Asking that question reveals some of poetry’s cognitional possibilities, such as the investigation of objects’ unknown zone, their life that we refuse to recognize. Having the experience of living from another point of view, from another rhythm of daily life, that is not stipulated by binary values such as inanimate/animate, good/bad, or true/false. Such binarism is broken in an unexpected fashion: the inanimate takes on life, is transformed in a bursting out of life that unsettles the subject due to its enigmatic nature. But other metaphors, such as the “thread of loneliness” that underscores the tradition of individualism, embody the conceptual values that prevent us from looking at objects in a different way. The emptiness produced by the tensions between the unstable and the immobile suggests indecision in the face of the challenges of a non-objective view of the world. The ephemeral nature of life could be incarnated in that convergent movement of the explosions; everything is converted into an erratic, cognitional impulse more comparable to an ancestral gaze than a modern one. The poem’s expressive power is extraordinary in its approach to the phenomenon of “wanting to say the unsayable.” The objects’ swift transfiguration allows us to glimpse some of the subjects’ possibilities, but only when they abandon certain conceptual frameworks that originate in the senses, verifying subjective rationalities. The emptiness that surrounds the objects’ ritual play obliges us to reject the nonsense that the rational subject typically assigns to the void. The metamorphosis of thought winds up being a new strategy for understanding life that leads to more difficult association: thinking is a game that consists of collecting emptiness and casting it into another emptiness, wondering about objects’ role in cosmic destiny, feeling the transfiguration that is achieved by looking beyond

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prevailing stereotypes. Bodies and objects are freed from the weight of gravity and the inertia of physical and symbolic laws, when they assume the lightness that makes them enter into the dynamic of disappearing and appearing in subtle, fragile, and ephemeral forms. In “Vertical Fragment 31,” Juarroz insists on this view of things, with respect to the natural world: “The greatest naturalness of nature is the one that manifests itself when it accepts the non-natural completely. But, does the non-natural exist?” Perhaps things have their own point of view and that thought spurs the imagination; let’s no longer insist on avoiding the matter. The poetic text presents an insistent beginning in which there is no narrative whose thread has to be followed to its conclusion. The differences between the organic and the technical are no longer crucial, but rather trivial; it is no longer necessary to distinguish between the common household objects and the natural. Such banal differences only demand our respect and response; they don’t ask for us to raise things up to a sublime place or for us to endow them with pre-established or consecrated purposes. Nothing is preestablished in a world that we believed to be outfitted with rationales, purposes, and causes: the world is a model that needs to be built. We have to ensure that things are not defined by our own obsession for control.

TIME OF THE SEED

Our vision of the possible and the feasible is so restricted by industrial expectations that any alternative to more mass production sounds like a return to past oppression or like a Utopian design for noble savages. (…) ... To formulate a theory about a future society both very modern and not dominated by industry, it will be necessary to recognize natural scales and limits. We must come to admit that only within limits can machines take the place of slaves; beyond these limits they lead to a new kind of serfdom. —Iván Illich, Tools for Conviviality, 1973.

The intention in this entry is to shake up the rigid classifications a bit with respect to the idea of Andean cinema. In Andean cinema the use of the mythical time of the Andean sower might seem a little scatterbrained and anachronistic, but looking at it as part of a search for cultural-political allies outside the empty colonialist rhetoric, it does not seem so foolish. On the contrary, it is urgent to assess Andean culture with respect and admiration, in addition to applying a critical look at it, much like Mariátegui did. Hence, what I call “ecocinema” can be defined as a potential ally that stimulates new spaces of communication through a dialogue of savoirs at a time when globalizing-industrial complexity has made progress and gained ground in contemporary mentality.1 If I were able to choose one of the places that I can feel first-hand that mindset of sheer wonder that penetrates right down to the bones, I would say almost without thinking the Pinkuylluna Mountain in the Urubamba Valley, where you can observe on one of its flanks, in the face of the Inca, the granaries of Pinkuylluna. Just knowing that these granaries were a giant natural refrigerator, which the cool valley wind maintained for a large part of the year in sheltered shadow, always made me think of the need to incorporate this wonderful remnant of the ancient world into the time of the seed. There they had kept their seeds, the fruits of their labor in preparation for times of drought and food shortages. There I had recalled 1

Reading Illich’s quote in the epigraph would even affirm that these industrial habits from more than four decades ago are already part of the strong belief that continues to maintain that nature is only an external resource, the raw material of technological progress.

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the need to be in the land of a thousand and one possibilities. There stood the profile of the Inca, along with many other profiles and faces that I had managed to see in spite of contemplating Pinkuylluna Mountain for only a few minutes. They were, as my dear friend Enrique Leff would say, times of sustainability, periods when the long-term perspective carried weight, when the time of the seed reigned. Time to think about the detail in order to be present. Time to think big in order to think about the detail that was thought, even though everything speeds by in this time of agro-industrial programming, when institutions that were supposed to serve the common good are instead instruments in the service of the logic of the market. It is a time when everything has its price and to have is more important than to be. On this mountain upon which I like to gaze over and over again, however, I can feel the airs of sustainability that may have run through the valley every day for many centuries. I can internalize this vital force not as an idea of balance, but as an idea of biodiversity. How to care for that sustainable land that benefits us with diverse ecological services, ranging from air and water purification, to the generation, preservation, and renewal of fertile lands, to the dispersion of seed, and to the pollination of crops, among so many other pillars of biodiversity threatened today by our industrial habits and inclinations? Or in other words, how to change our unsustainable, non-renewable and polluting habits? The truth is that more than eight years after visiting the Ollantaytambo Valley, of thinking about the wonderful Inca granary on Pinkuylluna Mountain, I barely noticed that I had adopted the time of the seed. I had already grown potatoes on the land we rented in Denver, and in 2014 I experimented with some quinoa seeds. After several months of watching them grow and confirming that the plants were taller than I, I harvested some four kilos of “mother grain.” I could not write and reflect on the Earth without having been a part of this complex and simple process of germinating quite a few seeds. Of course, since the genesis of an earlier, Spanish version of this book project in 2009, I began to learn to plant, tend, and harvest various grains; at the same time, I put into practice what I had learned in a course to become a “compost master” in Denver, at the foot of the Colorado Rocky Mountains, which I consider the northern cousins of the majestic Andes. When we must deal with the hectic moments in our lives, the circumstances of other times can give us insight into observing and acting in accordance with our essential feelings. The moment to retrieve ancestral knowledge, knowledge from other times in the present moment, is another time. It is also the time of being present, like the convergent presence of water, light and nutrients to germinate seed. Does the reader know that a

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seed can wait two thousand years to germinate? This is the case with several seeds that were discovered in the ruins of King Herod’s castle fortress Masada on the shores of the Dead Sea. One of the five seeds discovered there bloomed and grew into a palm called “Methuselah” (Goodall, “Rip Van Winkle Seeds,” 105-107). Indeed, the time of the seed is from another time. It is another time. It is another voice.

Ecocinema as Wayki-ally At this point in the essay the reader will ask herself, how does one relate this fascinating place to the theme of ecocinema? One aspect of Andean culture that I have been researching in recent years is the enormous number of words that refer to friendship in Quechua. And the idea of an allied Andean culture was born from the importance of wayki in the daily routine of Andean life: a principal of brotherhood that became clear to me from my own experience of traversing the streets of Cusco and other towns in the Sacred Valley, and during my interviews and spontaneous conversations to uncover the significance of wayki when I was preparing audiovisual material for a short film that I made about friendship,2 in which I included the mountains, rivers, birds, and winds, because they are also friends and this took me so many years to understand. Until now, I have not been able to find any short or featurelength films that showed the indescribable beauty of the Ollantaytambo granaries. Is that sufficient motive to think about making a video about these granaries? Among academic ecocritics, there is consensus in understanding ecocinema as a window into how we picture the problematic state of the relations among human interactions but also human interactions with the nonhuman world. A window in which we also see how we react to those relations, positively or negatively. A cinematic window that lends itself to the productive exploration of the ecological perspective through careful analysis of film’s various relationships with the world around us (Rust and Monani, 3). In short, it is time to think of ecocinema as a tool for conviviality. This word, “conviviality,” that I unearthed from Iván Illich’s writings in the 1970s, means “the opposite of industrial productivity” (Illich, 1975, 27). Conviviality is a process of transition from industrial productivity as a conditioned reflection to a relation of social creativity, “to the spontaneity of talent” (Ibid, 27). The convivial relationship is not repeated, it is always new, “it is actions of 2

A short film, in digital format, a miniDVD, that has not been shown in any festival until now.

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people that participate in the creation of social life” (Ibid, 27). But it is no longer convivial if it cannot be used at will. It is convivial if “it does not invade the freedom of another to do the same” (Ibid, 43). Perhaps it is appealing to think of ecocinema from the global reserve of solidarity tended in an ayllu and other forms of reciprocity still vibrant in the Andes and in the big cities with large populations of Andean migrants. Since it is something that is not for sale, not absorbed by the repetitive predominate tool, it is difficult to make it attractive to audiences from other cultures. Something similar happened to me with the shorter version of this book that I published in Spanish in 2012; it neither sold nor circulated much in the official literary community. Both in the Spanish version and in this expanded and updated revision of the book in English, I offer among other things, a definition of “ecocinema” and a list of other “ecofilms” with the intent to motivate or surprise the reader with a diversity of quality and convivial exploration. I leave it up to the reader, however, to find on YouTube, Vimeo, and on a special website called Culture Unplugged that potentially “convivial” tool that drives the audiovisual production closer to environmental issues on a global scale, and that in large part lays out a multiple and ecological perspective3. Omar Rincón calls this convivial tool found in film and video: An audiovisual machine of contacts and flows. An urgent communication. We have to deprogram the academy, the university, and communication studies in order listen to other modes of being in life, these indigenous, migrant, feminine sensibilities…and to convert movie screens into a thoughtful conversation. (171)

I know that the ideal scenario to access ecocinema would be a community reception in which a dialogue of savoirs and an exercise full of active viewers and organic creators is highlighted, a nonexistent utopian picture that, nevertheless, is not far from materializing in a reality in which intercultural collaborations and alliances are forged. I refer to the works of Freya Schiwy concerning films’ and videos’ alternative circuits that various rural and indigenous organizations have successfully secured in the past few decades. To what point are we conscious of the need to build dynamic and expansive archives that maintain the openness and creativity 3

In two recent articles, one in English (2013) and the other in Castilian (2014), I provide a more detailed argument as to how some of these ecofilms with an Andean focus, such as Operation Diablo (2010) and Ukuku (2009), lend themselves to pedagogic ends given that they provide discussion materials about the Andean world view, as well as issues such as climate change.

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of this “audiovisual machine of contacts and flows?” When I think of alliances, I try to include in the ayllus’ social basis any foreign collaborations that have lived in Andean communities for a relatively long time and that have succeeded in producing audiovisuals with real ecocritical value. These videos, produced in teams, exhibit the very real possibility of circulating among their respective communities. These films represent the limits of categorical terms, such as “Andean Cinema” or “Regional Cinema.” An excellent study of the use of Hollywood narrative resources in the production of Andean audiovisuals is Freya Schiwy’s work on the “indianization” of new media. Although this study only covers some Andean countries, like Ecuador and Bolivia, its significance is essential in establishing new horizons of investigation and high-profile collaborations as part of a convivial relationship. The varied production of indigenous videos and films is a black hole for official, mainstream criticism because these works do does not circulate through mass-media channels, and thus are hardly noticed.

Convivial Possibility and Failure I would like to reflect on Jason Burlage’s documentary, Mi chacra/My Land (2009), which saw relative success in film festivals, garnering several awards and recognitions. I was lucky to introduce it at its first two showings at an international film festival in Denver and to lead the question-and-answer session in a full room afterwards. Along with his young son, Burlage spent a year filming with a peasant family in the Urubamba Valley. He chose the family after a long process of interviewing Inca trail porters. Feliciano, Locrecia, and little Royer gave their permission to be filmed during their daily routines in the field. The documentary is a beautifully framed portrait of the seasons and Royer’s parents’ dilemma: whether or not to send their son to the city to seek a different future from the one offered by the rural community. The documentary shows the peasant community to be one of mutual support in the difficult tasks of caring for, planting, harvesting, and selling potatoes, corn and other agricultural products. According to the director, these very same farmers were positive and enthusiastic in their reception of the documentary, even though the two protagonists did not attend the two shows that Burlage organized. After such a reaction from some of the subjects of his film, Burlage was probably unable to overcome his frustration and false expectations when the film was not well received in Lima. In the blog that he created for Mi chacra/My Land, he expressed these frustrations and attempted to explain to his audience in Lima the

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difficulties that Feliciano, Locrecia, and Royer confronted on a daily basis. It seems to me that the documentary is an extraordinary testimony, able to capture in poetic and picturesque detail the harsh reality of life in the fields and the irreparable hopelessness of the Quechua-speaking people that often find no other recourse than to yield to the city’s seductive call. The characters in Mi chacra are perceived as defeated, alcoholics, without direction, surviving on their allotted communal work and their contracts as tourist porters, lured by false hopes and dreams of that urban modernity that will give their children the opportunity to lead better lives. One wonders whether or not the cinematic tool lent itself to convivial use? I firmly believe that Burlage did everything he possibly could and that at all times he exercised his own will. But he needed to let go of the medium’s control—or, to put it in Illich’s terms, conviviality was not combined in terms of being, the social relation never managed to be anything more than a mere contract in which there were possibly moments of effective autonomy and creativity. Jason used the convivial cinematic tool, but could not convey it as I would have liked him to. On the flipside of the coin, we can consider Meet My World (2014), a collection of twelve funny, hopeful stories about Andean children produced by the Amantani association, in conjunction with an Andean cooking school whose headquarters is in London (available on YouTube). These stories present positive aspects that any organizer or activist would find useful to benefit their own communities, in the event that the communities in question have the means to view the videos. But the stories also reveal non-sustainable aspects that deserve greater attention and a decisive discussion and clarification. For example, the majority of the protagonists do not stop smiling and framing their future desires in the context of a professional urban life: some want to be engineers, chefs, and/or to pursue university studies. But the fact that the film does not discuss these aspects and presents them as goal of social success, already shows that the videos serve different purposes from those that apparently could be deduced from the traditional practices that they attempt to show: how to trap a fish bare handed, how to prepare different local foods and drinks, or how to dye clothes with plants. The discussion seems to me a challenge as difficult as discussing the oft-cited idea of ecological balance with the indigenous movement and with the very same authors of these videos. Alonso Vázquez’s five-minute documentary, Feel Like a Mountain, one of the five winners of the 2013 short film contest “Forest for People,” is an excellent example of how to track the transformation process —a becoming or metamorphosis—of an urban youth who is sensitized and

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discovers a connection with natural cycles and indigenous struggles in defense of their lands and their way of life. This documentary covers particular events that occurred in Bagua in 2009, when then President of Peru, Alan García, explicitly justified police violence against the indigenous Awajun and Wampis, among others, who organized road blockades and other forms of protest at the imminent arrival of extractive industries in vital indigenous Amazon regions. Although the process of consciousness-raising and increased awareness is an excellent example of the convivial use of audiovisual media, the idealistic inspiration (on behalf of a universal and cosmic harmony, citing the founder of the profound ecology, Arnes Naess, that inspired the film’s title) needs to be discussed. In particular, I am thinking about the convivial relations between the Peruvian student in Norway and the indigenous communities that are but a distant thought. Although it is far from being a Wayki-Ally, I do not want to discount its convivial potential. On the other hand, on the website Puka Q’ shu’aytu (Red Wool Thread) which Renee Le Saint and Jean-Louis Descroix created, there are authentic stories about everyday life in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. The YouTube video about the work of the Chakictaccla explicitly explores its communal aspects, and could be considered a dynamic and fair picture of an ayllu, in its guise of convivial action and relation. However, the very idea of harmony, or ecological balance, finds no support in the same natural complex reality. This criterion for harmony does not serve to evaluate the sustainability of any convivial project, since sustainability rests on its integration with biodiversity in the long-term context much more that on its goal of achieving harmony or on its market value. Considering biodiversity is a much more re-integrating criterion that not only refers to the ecological dimension, but also includes sociocultural aspects. For this reason, invoking ecological balance or universal harmony can resemble the hypocritical and empty discourse of the ruling elite when they justify their repressive and violent actions. The key is to build sustainability upon the time of diversity, which implies practicing subsistence strategies and social life without damaging family, community, and environmental integrity. Unfortunately, this concept is not included in the videos that comprise Meet My World. The fact that some Andean products were served in little boxes to the spectators during its London premiere, however, says a great deal about the complexity of relationships that can be woven into different times, including distant communities. At the London reception of Meet My World, a time of diversity was also forged, which is not found in any magical formula or in a book such

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as Evaluación de la Sustentabilidad [Assessing the Sustainability of Small Farmer Natural Resource Management Systems]. This concept of time is something I learned from my experience growing potatoes, lettuces, onions, zucchini, and quinoa in my neighborhood’s communal garden in northeast Denver. I experienced the transient nature of the seed that germinated into a polyculture, in the urban garden, in a space apparently foreign to Andean culture. This garden is where I pile the compost that I recycle and where, together with my wife and some neighbors, I sowed and tended the produce that we subsequently brought to our table. I say apparently foreign space, because some of the grains that we sowed are Andean and the mountains that are seen on Denver’s horizon are considered twin sisters to the Andes Mountains. To the subjective experience of eating these grains, I would add the knot of experience steeped in history, love, and the connections from the various trips that I made to Arequipa, Puno, and Cusco in the past three decades. In other words, a convergence of times that were cyclically repeated, and that sustain my own idea of diversity, which is based on convivial relationships and the need to frame it in a long-term perspective. I do not want to anger experts in Andean cinema, in particular Emilio Bustamante, who is quite aware of what one can produce and present at the level of regional non-commercial cinema. I only want to engage in a critical exercise of tying together the elusive personal essay with the possibility of thinking about what academic discourse purports to study, and the on-site defends: the articulation of visual art with Andean culture, without separating it from its complex and tense relationship with the globalized world. Let me point out that such an articulation could be achieved, without hypocrisy or ideological manipulation, through the sustainability principle, in the very systems of the logic of the ayllu, since it cannot be done so under the law of the market. It lies within the limits of the ecological, thinking about future generations and about what is now tactically constructed as Buen Vivir, or Suma Kawsay. Eduardo Gudynas, among other social researchers like Alberto Acosta, is right in emphasizing Buen Vivir as an unfinished process in Bolivia’s and Ecuador’s political and constitutional discourse, with broad sociocultural resonances that go beyond national legal borders and frameworks as an alternative to the neoliberal model of development. If the means does not become a dominating factor, it is preserved as a means and does not become an end. Therefore, what service can eco-cinema offer, if this concept is understood as a means, a convivial tool? What does the time of the seed give us through this complex, multi-faceted means that is within local organizations’ reach? I was looking for another formulation of what

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Enrique Leff employs throughout his prolific ecocritical or ecophilosophical work, with its concepts of environmental rationality, dialogues of savoirs, and alternative epistemologies as pillars of times of sustainability. But it is not just a question of semantics. It is a question of time and the presence in time. It is the time that we no longer have or we think we have not displaced due to massive industrial habits. It is the time that is confused with the times of dominance and historical repression, the time of the monocropped seed, which reduces the complex time of life to the point of desperation, which is simultaneously simple. It is not a question of denying modern or postmodern knowledge, but rather of weaving geological, biological, economic, technological, and cultural processes into natural cycles. In other words, it is time to pay attention to the seasons, to the processes of pollination and germination, of not only seeds as hardy as quinoa or kaniwa, but also seeds of hope, solidarity, empathy, and intergenerational and intercultural collaboration. Ecocinema offers a special opportunity to draw closer to the Andean world and its cultural-historic dimensions, from an egalitarian position, which realizes the profound ecological value of life experience. Truth be told, film as a cultural institution of the nation-state has continued excluding Andean identity, devaluing it, and ignoring it, which has generated cultural skepticism towards the medium. One cannot compare the enormous expressive wealth of Andean music and dance with the scant amount of media and cinematic productions. There are no movie theaters, there are no media, and there is no public for this type of cinema. And if there is, it is too small to move a piece on the official national checkerboard. Beyond these divisions and borders, however, the possibility of fortifying and expanding a digital Andean archive has arisen and continues to grow; it is a visual repository that somehow effectively preserves Andean collective memory. We cannot dismiss using YouTube to find authentic convivial projects, like Rodrigo Otero’s short film, La voz de las semillas (The seeds’ voice). The complex realm of ideas about genetically modified seeds is framed in the visualization of conviviality between the farmers and seeds. It is what caught my attention in Otero’s short film. The farmers talk about seeds with emotion and affection, as if seeds were human beings. Perhaps it might be advisable to discuss the possibilities of improving expressive techniques and procedures, but it is undeniable that the possibilities of conviviality’s tools confirm its ecological and sociopolitical relevance for Andean cultures. I do not know if we are at the height of Andean ecoart or an alternative media that exceeds the closed system of cultural industry. Nor do I know if the various attempts by local

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and international organizations are directed towards a dynamic of open systems of globalized participatory culture. But much progress has been made in creating possible bridges from the experience of struggling for land rights in the face of numerous persistent assaults by the extractive industry, such as those I have already discussed when I was commenting on documentaries like Choropampa: The Price of Oil (2006) or Land in Revolt: Impure Gold (2009), both available on YouTube. And also from documentaries presenting the wonderful and binding aspects of natural elements, such as Yaku Patsa (2010), four stories about the Andean world’s relation with water, available on the Culture Unplugged website.

Opening the Borders to Biodiverse Communities’ Media Productions Understanding the ecological imagination is a crucial step in seeing the natural world’s connections and systems. Due to the predominant custom of separating humans from nature, it might help the reader to know how I use the term ecological imagination. It is not just an ancient practice of artists that have celebrated the most vital basic connections. Belonging to an Andean community that is biodiverse implies becoming a part of the living fabric of that ecological imagination, which I attempt to integrate into my intellectual work. I hope to assemble a varied response to the ecological crisis of our era—immediately and almost without thinking, I see images of farmers preoccupied with the future of their farming because of the shrinking glaciers. And thus the reasons for my habit of seeking out poetic projects and narratives, of exploring new environments, film and other arts from Latin American. I maintain this persistent dream thanks to friendship, rather than to institutional support that is sometimes only a class privilege and a convivial tool that can become a salute to the flag and remain as a list for the dissemination of indigenous videos that no one is going to use. 4 Here I wonder if it is possible to know who uses the list of movies from “Cine Andino,” Katell Chatreau and Fabrice Véronneau’s webpage that covers 241 films that were compiled from various Andean cities in 2004. Chantreua and Veronneau also organize an Andean section in 4

Speaking of lists that no one is going to use, I lament the removal of a list of ecofilms in the edition of my article about ecocinema in the monographic section of Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 79 (2014), “Ecocriticism in Latin America.” It was a list of ecofilms that I think was useful in encouraging encounters and overcoming ignorance; it was a list of convivial tools suitable for enriching itself and updating itself in a community context of critic-participant.

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film festivals in France (http://los.andes.free.fr/v1/index.php?choix=peli). The Latin American Council of Indigenous Peoples’ Film and Communication (www.clapcpi.org) also offers separate lists of videos and movies, links about experiences of dissemination, festivals, financing, training material, indigenous organizations, contacts, and debates. To what extent is it valid to think of friendship as a starting point or a point of cooperation? To what extent does the person who disseminates a video, by say, uploading it to YouTube or by showing it at a traveling film festival, connect with the spectator’s experiences? Is this a passive spectator? Do we project the idea of the active viewer in that participant or do we really manage it in order to make the experience a true convivial tool? I am thoroughly interested in considering these questions in my role as an academic who wants to see his institution as an egalitarian place possessed of a common knowledge that does not tolerate Western knowledge’s epistemological contempt. How can it welcome the other, respect it, and be open to an authentic dialogue of savoirs? This extreme skepticism towards the value and utility of knowledge outside of modernity is almost taken for granted in the customary academic practices, and in general that false attitude of cordial recognition is usually hidden, sometimes disguised. But efforts to forge dialogues of savoirs, that is to say, to construct a place where there is respect for the vitality of every position in the dialogue, have been gradually multiplying, and there are encouraging signs that things are heading in the right direction. It is what Antonio López called “Organic Media Ethics,” whose key principles are common place for green cultural citizenship: all life is sacred; we are all interconnected; we depend on functional communities; communities require healthy communication to function well; for healthy communication to work we need trust; trust requires credibility and reciprocity (López, 2012 34-36). This calls to mind Marisol de la Cadena’s shift in perspective while reflecting on the indigenous archivists who, in spite of being illiterate, are able to successfully manage the documents that they themselves compile and file. De la Cadena noticed the register of abuses committed by the state by means of several lawsuits. I must admit that the questions she poses transformed the idea that I had of the ayllu. First, I had never thought that the ayllu, the central notion of Andean culture and history, could be associated with the idea of a “fractal person,” that entity that is always in integrally implicated relations. Second, all my categories of thought did not register that cosmopolitical dimension that problematized notions of the earth, property, and evidence as a basis for deciding politics and laws for territories. The research into this incredibly complex archive

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to explain lawsuits between farmers and the Peruvian State sheds light on the question of film’s limits, as an institution, and this relationship is poorly studied within the Andean culture. I suspect that new medias’ visual technology has a statute similar to the documents of the indigenous archivists. They cannot be removed from the here-and-now of the spectators’ ayllu. We cannot fully understand the relationship with film, if we do not consider the tensions and connections between the ayllu and the environmental organizations we call film. Apart from the multiplexes of Arequipa, I could not find a single theater in Puno or in Cusco, only places selling pirated DVDs and the non-governmental, indigenous organization venues. Does it make sense to talk about film in this context? I guess that I draw closer to the abyss that is rarely discussed by our intellectuals in the wake of Mariátegui’s lucid interpretation of Land’s problem, which cannot be comprehended without considering the indigenous problem. I still think that it is difficult to draw the idea of film into the indigenous cultural reality without committing epistemic violence. Perhaps I am wrong about everything, especially if I think about the numerous organisms and organizations that provide media training. Those audiovisual files, available on various web sites, will not form part of the Andean ecology narrative as long as they do not relate in any way to the ayllu, nor to its complex ontology that challenges the epistemic power of homogeneous world history (de la Cadena, 68). Perhaps I naively idealize ecocinema’s spectator to think of her as if she were a creative reader, capable of producing and embodying her own meanings. But I also insist on thinking of ecocinema as a convivial tool because it depends upon its creators’ free will. Therefore, I firmly believe in the idea that has been vigorously growing in my thoughts in recent years of the “creative” possibilities of active viewers-readers. I have confirmed this idea in the production of alternative films and videos by artists and indigenous groups, although it may be evident that at a public level it is too precarious to talk about film, much less about “Andean film.” Audiovisual archives—I include the fairly arbitrary and incomplete list in the “Ecocinema” section—should integrate themselves into the logic of the ayllu, and continue expanding and opening up. An extraordinary model of film that Andean ecocinema should take into account is Belisario Franca’s documentary about new sustainable community experiences in the Brazilian Amazon, such as the successful management of reforestation efforts, the use of agro-ecological techniques, sustainable fishing, distance education, and wooden crafts, among other exemplary practices (Eternal Amazon, 2012). At a very rudimentary level, I can include my several attempts to assemble ecological videos of the

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birds that I observed in the sanctuaries on Stone Harbor’s beaches in southern New Jersey, as well as on Paracas’s coast and in Machu Picchu’s ruins in southern Peru. I do not know if I could evaluate to what extent the scattered and ludicrous efforts of local and intercultural organizations could put together an Andean audiovisual archive and, less so, an ecocinema archive. But the idea of searching for a relational and integrated statute in the Andean ethos forms part of the process of casting off colonial knowledge. It is a collective, transdisciplinary effort that needs to unlearn the industrial and instrumentalist habits of dominant knowledge, in order to learn and know the possibilities for opening our borders to make room for convivial practice. It is ecocinema’s anti-colonial aspect that provocatively and rebelliously extends the appreciation of environmental concerns and pleasures. Old and new stories that promote a planetary consciousness and that activate those positive and convivial qualities, which form part of our cultural heritage and our current agenda.

TINKUY FOR THE DIGITAL AGE

Media phenomenon that I like to call “Tinkuy for the Digital Age” because I admire the use and appropriation of communication technologies that indigenous activists, leaders, and organizations have made in the name of their own cause and also in the name of environmental causes. The term is not completely arbitrary given that I use a Quechua concept that incarnates Arguedas’s work and that will not seem foreign to the most active web of community groups. I had contemplated using another term— ecomedia—which, because of its association with advertising companies and corporate media, lost its affinity with the complex process of media appropriation with an anticolonial bent. Furthermore, I don’t want to refer only to one alternative communication medium or one simple media appropriation. There is also a coordination, communication, and exchange of experiences in community spaces that take advantage of the most diverse formats: itinerant festivals, worldwide webs, regional and international film and video festivals and conferences, street or rural theater performances, media workshops, preservationist uses of the Internet, interactive ecoart installations, and many more. Nevertheless, it is a shame that this media diversity does not manage to impact seriously traditional media. In television programming and in the press, there is very little trace of the complex process of alternative use of media. Perhaps the radio as ostensibly shown in the documentary, The War by Other Media (2010), is in the avant-garde of this media tendency and quest to gain new audiences and to impact traditional dominance. The blog based on this documentary on other media that is written and maintained by the students in the School of Journalism and Social Communication at the National University of La Plata (UNLP) offers a far-reaching perspective on these media “bridges” (http://invisiblesquequierenservistos.blogspot.com/). Internet sites such as InsightShare, ISUMATV, Culture Unplugged or TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) offer access to audiovisual materials that were prepared with the direct and significant participation of indigenous groups or of artists that project an alternative vision to that of the stereotypical Indian—normally depicted as weak, lazy, uncivilized, sad, and primitive. Yet the most important thing to remember is that these alternative media promote what Nicholas Rombes has singled out as the spectator’s primary behavior in this digital age: “to impose herself onto the

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film, redirecting its flow and in time, perhaps, re-editing its content” (140141). Digital products in and of themselves do not possess the media value that the practice of manipulation and recreation generates. Therefore, we have to rethink the means of distribution and exhibition of these eco-films. Upon reviewing the programs from environmental and indigenous film festivals, I came across some short films, such as Hananpacha by the Vallejo brothers or Carlo Brescia’s Yaku Patsa, that can be viewed with their English subtitles on Culture Unplugged. We should include in this list of ecofilms those sites that come from indigenous organizations and those similar to Comunidad Zoom, which also provides free access to films and experimental and community-generated shorts, such as Fernando Nogueira and Maria Cabrejas’ documentary Tekoa Arandú: Community of Wisdom (2006), which focuses on the values and ways of life of the minority group, Myba Guaraní. The bilingual site EcoTipping Points Project aims to serve as the mechanism that “restores sustainability to our threatened environment.” In fact, it is a source of stories about sustainability that surpasses Jay Walljasper’s book, which, despite being an excellent guide toward the common good and a communal and community sphere, has the limitation of being intended for an Anglo-Saxon readership. Thanks to the emergence of participatory culture, YouTube stands out as the meeting place of diverse social movements involved in the production and distribution of alternative media. In that space, subcultures, fans, and communities of all sorts share techniques and practices. According to Henry Jenkins, the most powerful content on YouTube comes from the specific practicing communities and in this sense it is a form of cultural collaboration. This participatory use, along with the diffusion of community networks, has done away with the predominance of media experts. Among these new media ventures, I want to highlight the different parodies of a Coke commercial that unmasked the company’s anti-ecological practices and also this new culture’s support of other campaigns such as the Chilean students’ movement in favor of public education. It is clear, then, that such creative and participatory practices are key in the transformation of communication among families, communities, and cultures in the sense that they generate a greater capacity for reversing unsustainable development and the habits that only serve to aggravate ecological crises.

UTOPIA

Thomas Moore’s idea of utopia as a perfect, just, fraternal, and classless society enjoys widespread diffusion despite its antiquity and the way in which it is in dissonance with the conflicting and depressing realities of the twentieth first century. A critique of this type of utopia has already been undertaken by Cioran, who insisted brilliantly on the infantile rationalism and secularized Angelism inherent in Moore’s concept of the perfect city (87). According to Cioran, utopian narratives lack perspicacity and psychological instinct. Miguel Gutiérrez’s (b. 1940) novel, Babel, Paradise, refutes this imputation with its Babelic fable without ever falling into a lyrical tone that would be intolerable according to the famous Romanian master’s perspective. Nevertheless, the utopia of contact with nature that Juan L. Ortiz (1896-1978) formulates by means of his thin, patient verses are characterized by an Angelic, lyrical tone that ought to be reread for its nimble use of the literary desideratum of “lightness,” which Italo Calvino described as one of the hallmarks of twenty-first century literature. Ortiz’s poems open a dialogic space with the social agents that have at their disposal “the fruits of heaven and earth” and that are simultaneously able to open themselves up to the “most ethereal signs from the day, the night or the seasons. . . .” That space is an expansion of the ecological consciousness, which, in spite of falling into the myth of “ecological equilibrium” or the balance of nature, defines the utopian state as the energy of a being that yearns for integration with its natural surroundings, growing ever stronger upon contact with that environment: We will find, certainly, the primary, but lighter, harmony. We will continue calling, of course, but from the free, stable branches, although always in spite of vertigo, to the continuously purer day, with our faces continuously closer to that of an angel (“The Thrush Calls to the Mountains,” The Poplar and the Wind, 313).

From the ecological perspective, the utopian vision is the correspondence between nature and a sensibility that is not alien to vulnerability, to that permanent exposure to “vertigo.” The poetic subject possesses an “intense perception of all that is exterior to himself and that leads to the loss of himself in the phantasmal flow of matter” (Muschietti, 81). Utopia, then, is

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that “light” spiritual activity that establishes an alert consciousness, which intensifies upon opening up the senses through the logic of contact and the agile movement of that search. To be in tune with the intonation of Ortiz’s poem-as-contact supposes a radical wager on the vulnerability of acquired certainties and an unprecedented spiritual opening constructed in consonance and dialogue with a life that is perceived as natural. The poetry of the most influential Andean anthropologist and narrator, José María Arguedas (Peru, 1911-1969), is tied to that spiritual awakening insofar as it incorporates local ancestral voices as well as global realities precipitated by modernization. Wouldn’t utopia, then, be found in a responsiveness to those ancient voices along with a recognition of their importance for the planet? German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk sees the traditional idea of utopia as a mental, literary, and rhetorical device that stems from a certain imaginary Western colonialism: “it has served us at the same time to project the exterior reality of our society on our imaginary and to exteriorize our interior dreams onto far-away places.” This does not mean that the idea of utopia has died or lost its importance, but rather that the means of constructing collective utopias has changed: instead of stemming from personal dreams that are brought into the realm of the real, it is a matter of allowing utopias to rise up from below, from concrete social tensions. Thinkers in the tradition of Ernest Bloch define utopia as what is extracted forcibly from what already exists. Babel, Paradise condenses in a very atypical fashion for the Latin American reader this new focus in utopian thinking: to accept being whoever we may be by following not some recipe for fixed heroic values, but instead our own dynamic reality. In the novel, the traveler establishes this vision of utopia through the stories that shape his dreams as well as his memory: “the reign of utopia was a victorious, exemplary and possible reality to make the sordid nature of everyday life tolerable” (Gutiérrez, 216). As Humberto Maturana states, “Utopias have to do with experience, with what we have already lived, and in that sense reveal either a personal or a cultural history.” Maturana goes on to explain that utopias inspire a nostalgic spirit in the reader, a longing for a peaceful human existence characterized by respect, fairness, dignity, and an aesthetic harmony with the natural world. It is literature that serves this utopian function, which ought to be understood as a revelation of our cultural biological being “in what we are indeed in our most fundamental humanness” (Maturana, 89). Following Maturana’s reasoning, utopias reveal aspects and dimensions of human existence that, having been founded on the basic modes of daily life, have been lost, or hidden beneath others, in the cultural transformation

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of humanity, but that have not vanished because they are fundamental to our makeup. The cultural and biological past is not understood from the experience of struggle, competition, abuse, and aggression, but rather from a coexistence based on respect, cooperation, sharing, and sensuality within the perspective of the fundamental emotion of love (Ibid). It is not a matter of an idealization of the past, but rather a formulation of the collective potential of the human race. Bloch called this unreality that brought about reality a “tendency,” by which the antithesis between the real and the unreal is overcome in order to adumbrate what may happen. The utopia of the twenty-first century is the utopia of the dialogues among various wisdoms. More than a political dream of a happy future, it is a utopia of survival and of the cultivation of environmental wisdom.

WASTE PICKERS

Those who pick through garbage dumps and landfills to find items that are recovered, remade or recycled in other forms or for other ends. The “garbage divers,” characters in Fernando Contreras Castro’s Única Gazing at the Sea: The non-people, those who live off of waste, off of residue, off of oversight and neglect, the damages, the errors, the squandering…those unfortunate souls with whom don Mondolfo Moya Garro, under his extraordinary pseudonym, had joined efforts to make it seem as if life was worth it after all, even when you lived in the midst of so much inequality (2010, 47).

These waste pickers go by many names, depending on the place. In the suburbs of the first world United States they are called “freegans” or “hobos.” In the San José landfill in Contreras Castro’s novel they are called “divers.” In the streets of Lima, I recall that they were “bottle collectors.” In an excellent short story from The Mute’s Word, Ribeyro dubbed them “vultures without wings,” but they are also called cutreros, moscas, buceadores, segregadores, cachineros. In Argentina, they began by calling them cirujas, but now they also call them cartoneros—from the Spanish word for “cardboard”—and, at times, “garbage recuperators.” In Uruguay they call them clasificadores and more derogatorily hurgadores and requecheros. In Chile, cartoneros, cachureros or recolectores informales. In Paraguay, gancheros or segregadores. In Ecuador, minadores or chamberos. In Colombia, basuriegos, costaleros, chatarreros, botelleros, recicladores, zorreros, cachivacheros. In Venezuela, excavadores or zamuros. In Brazil, catadores or chapeiros. In Panamá and up into México, they are called pepenadores, although they go by other names too: metaleros or changos in Panamá; guajeros in Guatemala; churequeros in Nicaragua; buscabotes, cartoneros or traperos in México; and buzos en Costa Rica, Cuba, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic. These groups have rich histories and there have been numerous documentaries and novels about them. With respect to this topic, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the notable French documentary The Gleaners and I (Les Glaneurs et la

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Glaneuse) (2000) and its sequel The Gleaners and I. Two Years Later (2002), both of which are by now classics on this issue. In these documentaries Varda investigates the lives of waste pickers who exist in the margins of society, with all its consumerism and secular ideas concerning work, money, private property, and power. The fact that these people have the same anarchist spirit as piqueteros, hackers, anticorporationists, and eco-guerrillas makes one think that they are among those who best advocate for generosity, for cooperation, for largesse, and for a strong sense of community. For Vivian Abenshushan, waste pickers have recuperated being after having become fed up with having. Contrary to the protestant work ethic, they have replaced competitiveness with cooperation; wealth accumulation with exchange/bartering; the yoke of inhumane work hours with play, pleasure, and the possibility of giving oneself over to a more sensitive perception of reality. Nevertheless, documentaries like Cartoneros (2006), by Ernesto Livon-Grosman, and The Recyclers of Río Azul (2007), by Felipe CalvoMontero, show the basically precarious and oppressive reality of being the last link in the recycling chain. These films also show how the wealthy fight the waste pickers over property rights to the trash and how difficult it is to view these recyclers as promoters of the environment, given that the general public views those who engage in this practice as “featherless vultures.” We also see that many of these waste pickers are former professionals who have been forced into this type of labor after losing their jobs. Definitively, those who recover garbage for the most part attempt to change occupations—some even manage this longed-for change but nevertheless persist in their environmental management. Yet while unemployment is an undeniable and growing reality, exacerbated by domestic migrations from the country to the cities, work like waste picking carries with it a certain attraction that at times is taken to the next level as the waste pickers become empowered and create grass-roots organizations that defend the environment, such as those seen in Cartoneros: the ecological cooperative Bajo Flores, the El Ceibo cooperative and the school of recycled art. Painter and sculptor Antonio Berni’s artwork, which uses recycled materials, already outlined the roots of the “arte con descarte” movements that some artists continue creating. The most well known are Alejandro Marmo, a scrap metal sculptor who promotes art from recycled materials in public spaces in Livon-Grosman’s documentary; Vik Muniz, who popularized this type of art at the international level (Waste Land is a documentary about Muniz’s monumental art made from materials that were scavenged and segregated by the waste pickers at the largest landfill in Latin America, Jardim

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Gramacho, in the outskirts of Rio De Janeiro). Muniz is successful in selling his photographic compositions in New York and he shares his earnings with the waste pickers, thus supporting the collective efforts of these marginal communities to establish youth art schools that teach the use of recyclables, as well as other constructive community initiatives. Fernando Contreras Castro wrote a novel about these garbage pickers that has since become required reading in Costa Rican secondary schools and at some of the country’s universities. In the novel, Única Gazing at the Sea (1993; revised edition 2010), when a night watchman at a library uncovers the illicit sale of books to a toilet paper factory, he loses his job, and, desperate, decides to commit suicide by throwing himself into a garbage truck. The suicide attempt is unsuccessful, however, and the character winds up at the Río Azul facility in San José, where he begins life anew by becoming a “landfill diver.” This novel, although fiction, imbricates with the utopian profile of all the plastic artists and garbage pickers in Latin America in order to deliver a profound critique of consumer society. The figure of the protagonist, Única Oconitrillo, former teacher and organizer of life in the Río Azul landfill, not only incarnates the archetype of the selfless mother and liberated woman, but also of the environmental thinking that consumer society discredits and eliminates in order to carry out its own agenda. The characters in Contreras’s novel exist to remind us to resist the “garbagification” of these waste pickers; in other words, those whose work is trash are humans, too. Jerry Hoeg, rather than emphasizing this radical aspect in his study of the novel as a landscape of consumer society, saw the humanization of the scavengers as a proposal for educative reform that explains why the Ministry of Education promotes the reading of the novel in the country’s schools (2009). In the revised version of Única Gazing at the Sea, Contreras insists on heightening the nonconformist spirit of the protagonists-cum-waste pickers. Viewing the novel through the lens of environmental justice, the story of Mondolfo Moya Garro’s conversion and that of Única’s rise and fall can be understood as caustic and parodic emblems of a situation that transcends the local setting of Costa Rica. Thus, just as we all carry within us the master/slave dialectic—what the Arguedian sociologist Gonzalo Portocarrero would deem “the pongo in me”—I believe that Contreras has an ecological reason for conceiving of all of us as scavengers: The entire country wound up like all other nations who don’t know what to do with their trash; it had been transformed into an enormous dump, and there was not a single inhabitant left who could brag about not harboring at least a little bit of the scavenger somewhere deep inside, because for years

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The humor in the portrayal of the primary and secondary characters, such as Carmuco the Bear and el Bacan reminds me of the co(s)mic connections of the inhabitants of Luis Hernández’s poetic worlds. The scavengers’ story is in reality the story of the waste that the socioeconomic system wishes to ignore through its racism and lack of environmental responsibility. A story that makes a comeback like the novel itself in its revised form, with symbolic strength and bearing the seeds of change. I view the rewriting of Contreras’s novel as an ecological reconsideration that recognizes its own limits—it doesn’t know what to do with the trash that isn’t recycled or reused. The open ending, rounder and more polished in the revised edition, seems to give me reason to think about a more radical possibility for change.

WETLANDS

Lake, estuary, marshland, marsh, swamp, bog, puddle, peat bog, stream, watercourse, flood plain, lagoon, flood valley, river. Wetlands are a landscape of multivalent and changing dimensions that store water, filter toxic waste, prevent the flooding of nearby villages, and provide a habitat for innumerable animals and plants. In fact, there is not one single tidy image of a wetland that can make the term more familiar. The distinction between wetlands’ wild state and their limits with towns and cities proves to be somewhat unclear. In the Amazon jungle, there are numerous protected wetlands that also welcome ecotourism, such as the wetland complex in Pastaza and the Pacaya Samiria National Reserve, relatively near Iquitos, the capital of the Peruvian jungle. In the Andes, the most well-known wetland area is Lake Titicaca, which has a founding importance for the Quechua and Aymara cultures, as well as for the economy and ecology of the region, despite the inexcusably polluted state of its waters. Some wetlands along the coast also show signs of pollution’s impact due to uncontrolled urbanization. Wetlands, thus conceived, are not a habitual setting in Latin American literature, which tends to prefer the desert, islands, the jungle or mountainous regions. This is not to say that Latin American poets and fiction writers are indifferent to wetlands. There is no doubt that some authors do write about them, but it is easier to observe the predilection for open spaces, solid and stable, although this is not as true with regard to the sub-genre of what we might call literature of the jungle. The most evocative examples of wetlands literature in the case of twentieth-century Latin America can be found in Juan L. Ortiz’s river poetry. Ortiz’s rivers are those of Entre Ríos, Argentina: the Paraná and the Gualeguay, both of which, according to local environmentalists, are considered coastal waterways. For Juan José Saer, the hills of Entre Ríos province are traversed by rivers and streams, and are composed of the Western plains of Paraná, the alluvial islands of the Paraná Delta, the limitless estuary. Ortiz unfurls his poems on the page through his use of thin, serpentine lines. Some of his poems are extensive, with more than 900 lines, in which the lyrical “I” is not differentiated from fishermen, domestic animals, birds, trees, flowers, and minute weather changes in a variety of states of perception and emotion. This makes it virtually

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impossible to maintain the separation between the verbal of the earthly and the aquatic. Ortiz’s poetry captures in true form the flux of constant natural revision and reordering that is much more active and unpredictable than water’s flow, and it registers a musical dimension that stems from its intimate sensory contact with the environment. That community of mutual influence between the water and the beings in the poems is expressed by a stream of questions that the verses themselves appear to make flow along without being able to provide any answers the majority of the time: “What winged or intimate secret, breaks eternal, over the stones, that song [of the stream]?” (406). “From what nuance / already abyssal/ the still, still sweetness / of dusk?” (410). The poems abound with pauses, which stem not only from the questions, but also from the use of commas, quotation marks, and dashes, all of which introduce voices that are never definitively identifiable. Nevertheless, many of Ortiz’s poems are structured as a conversation. In the poem “You Told Me,” from the collection entitled The Plunging Shoreline and reprinted in the edition of his complete works, a series of questions formulates this expansion of horizons and transformations that are made to feel reconnected in some form in the poem: “the tiny beads / from the rosary of some solitudes / unstrung/and innumerable” (812). Does the same current that carries the voices of the poem to and fro sweep the reader along? In what scale, then, the ear for the little bell of that feeling that often forgets itself in a type of eternity that doubts. (809).

As these lines about the effort to synthesize our sense of hearing with nature indicate, Ortiz’s work can be read as a great book founded by desire, a desire to transform human isolation and separation from the rest of the natural world. That isolation, considered as affectation, will free itself “to desire with all of life, to the limit, / that it be something else with its alert creature arisen / tied to the others under different skies, in a new air of cycles” (“The Sweetness of the Country,” The Profound Breeze, 1954, 435). No poem in the collection In the Willow’s Aura fails to address— without any noticeable traces of dominant discourses—the tie to that founding desire for connection; even the structure of the poems, incomplete and fragmentary as they are, eschews that dominant discourse. In one poem that reflects upon support for the revolutionary cause, Ortiz

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explicitly declares that what he can contribute is “simple, awkward, animistic or magical reflections” (“With Perfection…” The Dawn Rises, 1933-1936, 203). We invite the reader to reread the following poem before following along with our analysis. A Cricket in the Night… What indistinct grasses awake, from over there and from a profound place that I don’t know? What fluid is it that makes the grasses almost celestial in a hollow that trembles? Oh, ancient voice, humble voice, that finds the hidden dream of some pale blades and of an even paler path, next to a river… While the dark air is the old throbbing of the shadows… Oh, ancient voice, humble voice, from the half-lost limits, Just or lost, ah, in the breeze of a star, The same as eagerness, that one… What soul, eternal, sweet, kneels atop the song, one with it, in faith, toward that dew that approaches? What soul, eternal, sweet, will be the same as that of the earth that will call out in the dawn, among the blades of grass, with its purist chorus, to stand tall in the new light, as light as the light? (The Profound Breeze, 1954, 447)

The poem displays a cluster of questions that encapsulate the connection between beings and the wetland environment through an ethereal state that illuminates and makes the fluid and overarching focus of the poetic voice visible. We listen to the cricket but that does not mean that we fail to feel the vibrations of that tiny presence that grows ever larger with the music and that manages to transform itself into an awakening of an unknown profound space. A dynamic metamorphosis occurs, a transformative process by which the becoming-insect transforms into the becoming-voice, which in turn becomes the becoming-blade. Instead of the typical lyrical “I,” in this poem there is a perceptive music that flows through a process of changes that definitely are not controlled by the poetic composer; rather they constitute a composition of place that is constructed by a community of Others. In the poem, the flow of

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transformations erases the boundaries between the subject and those others (for example, the cricket that sings, the voice that absorbs everything, the breeze of a star) because it is a question of very unstable states of sensibility that the concept of becoming articulates rather efficaciously. It is more of a map of states of perception and tenderness that multiply without limits or boundaries. The questions, pauses, and flows suggest directions in movement, not units of well-established thought, nor beings of distinct identity and predictable behavior. The questions travel aimlessly through that musical flow announced in the poem’s title. If there is an “I,” it is given over to the object of interrogation and barely reveals itself in the two exclamations of surprise: “oh” and the small cry of “ah” in the middle of the poem. We are not dealing with the typical pastoral composition that emphasizes the harmony of the landscape according to a codified literary genre. “A Cricket in the Night” is a composition of subtle nuances, of different directions that establish themselves as vague and imprecise from the very first line. Do these nuances strive to deepen our sense of wonder about the music of the environment? Is it truly a visible terrain or more like an interior state of questioning? With the last two questions of “A Cricket in the Night” are we experiencing a spiritual meditation on place? I am thinking about Susan Griffin’s poetic meditation on the connection between the human and the natural worlds (Women and Nature). While Ortiz achieves an expansion of the subjective consciousness through his serpentine style of thin, unexpected lines that capture different and linked processes of becoming-animal, -vegetation, -vibration, Griffin gives life to a feminine voice that is incarnated in multiple natural becomings through a poetic prose that assigns the third-person singular to descriptions of the separation between the human and the natural, but the first-person plural to the creative task of opening up new fields of perception and affectivity. Rómulo Acurio’s City Garden (2007) is a collection of 28 short poems that, unlike those from In the Willow’s Aura, play with its urban components in an itinerant and less connective way. Nevertheless, these poems are capable of creating new avenues of feeling and perception. There is no specific identity in the places that make up the series of poems, which, according to their titles, can be situated both in and beyond Lima’s city walls. Similarly, the poetic “I” refuses the imposition of stock identities and values molded by the social imaginary. The poetic “I” does not correspond to the author’s identity, which could be identified as an Andean immigrant in the Peruvian capital. It is a poetic subject who wanders aimlessly through the city, thereby expressing perhaps a process notably less developed and less perfected than Ortiz’s. What strikes the

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reader is Acurio’s attempt in this collection to do away with commonplaces and to insert itself as a state of readjustments and small changes. Is this but another instance of the well-worn theme of contemporary solitude in the urban labyrinth? It seems that Acurio proposes a transpersonal method of writing informed by a principle of affinity, a method which unfortunately fails, but in doing so, marks the incompleteness of that itinerant poetic “I” who expresses a yearning to become Other in order to feel more life. Curiously, that nomadic poetic subject passes by some wetlands: “Pantanos de Villa” There is no happiness that, barely named does not retreat like a strange bird to the far side of the swamp by contrast the herons, slow and white, chew the scruple of life at the foot of the lookout nothing of mine flowers in the new water no love that curves the reed or descends to the sea I am touching you, life, while I write you already invisible, longed for upon the mirror of the wetlands

In the poem, the wetlands give rise to imagining the erratic and the irrational, as if it were possible to become a bird. The poem also allows for the development of an ironic look at Lima, at one time called the “City of Kings,” since the book’s title contrasts with the poetic description as well as with the poem’s title, which is a clear reference to a place that is threatened by the Luchetti corporation, whose company buildings and pasta factory were near Pantanos de Villa. After a complicated and controversial history of corruption and environmental legislation called “the Luchetti Case,” the company finally abandoned its installations. Acurio shows the poetic subject’s skin, a neighbor unknown to himself, in a soft tone. He is clearly distanced from the history of the wetlands, longing for a connection that he cannot achieve with his natural neighbors

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or that simply changes into a process of becoming the figure of the animal, which embodies freedom. The involuntary observation is instinctive and therefore is embodied by the heron that approaches the experience of life in a visceral manner. The observation will continue in other spaces; it will be a decision then and not just instinct, but also a passion that will be perceived as a search for a vital connection in the intervals of City Garden. Traditionally the wetlands have been associated with all things insidious, excremental, monstrous, horrible, sick, and depressing—some of that is in “Pantanos de Villa.” There is a slightly sad tone that frames the lack of generative vitality (“nothing of mine flowers”) and that also expresses a reflection on the poetic task as a mirror of that poet-observer who, upon writing about his reflection, becomes an imperceptible entity. The wetlands-mirror teaches the reader to raise his eyes from the page of life and to look, through the image, the source of the idea, to navigate toward one of the origins, marks that are about to leave the margins of the page—but does he manage to escape urban constrictions? Does he seek a refuge from urban neurosis? In other periods, other wetlands have served as places of refuge for fugitives from justice and slaves in search of liberty. In “Pantanos de Villa,” the wetland makes manifest the emotional states and perceptions of an “I” who knows himself to be incomplete and disconnected. This is not an “I” in search of relief, but rather a process of seeking that is barely able to be formulated in a poetic form that is more ephemeral and condensed than Ortiz’s work. Another more playful and humoristic approach to the wetlands can be found in the work of Amazonian poet Juan Carlos Galeano (b. 1958), who gives us an affable, generous image of the wetlands. In his poem, “A Lake Does What It Can,” from his brief collection About Things (2010), we view the wetlands with tenderness due to the humorous personification of the lake: Lakes are not as adventurous as rivers. At any age they live the laidback life which only those who are retired can achieve. As a matter of fact, “Meditation” is the name of a lake in the outskirts of a city. Five hundred years ago, Suetoni Hanno, the philosopher, wrote in his Life of the Lakes about the diminutive spirits that dwell in the lakes with their whispers and giggles. He was much talked about in his day. As places so desirable for living, the dream of many a city slicker

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is to retire to a lake. There are those who use a peaceful lake to fatten up fish and export them. Afterwards, they build mansions on another lake. Lakes who want true rest hire giants to defend them. A lake is a loner who doesn’t want any trouble. Disguised philosopher or a body that submits to capitalist ogres, a lake does what it can. How would a lake like to be something other than itself, for example a mountain or a river, or to reach the sea? “To tell the truth, not at all. I like being a lake,” declares the lake.

Bowels of the earth, kidney of the environment, placenta of Pachamama, peaceful landscape. The wetlands are also a region where there is a whiff of decay, where things disintegrate, where the firm lines of logic soften, where everything mixes together, slips, and gets muddied. In Latin American cinema, there are two finely crafted films that also delve into the processes of emotional incarnation in relation to wetlands. The Swamp (2001), Lucrecia Martel’s first feature-length film that is set at a rural country house in the marshy area around Salta, proves itself to be an x-ray of the decadence of the middle class’s social structure from the corporeal sensation of its characters as they interact with the woodland setting and each other. The second, Alamar (2009), Pedro GonzálezRubio’s docudrama about Mayan fishermen, focuses on the relationship between a father and son as they interact with sea and coastal wetland creatures near the coral zone of Banco Chinchorro in the extreme southeastern portion of the Yucatan Peninsula. Martel’s film masterfully uses natural elements as a support for the characters’ imaginations in order to be able to question our perceptual habits and to show connections with the emotional realm. These are sounds, noises that emanate from far off, part of the scene that is offcamera. Their insistent presence throughout the film stimulates the spectator’s imaginative power, and often also that of the characters who likewise cannot see what is making the background noise. Thus, we do not depend so much on what we can see, but rather continue constructing emotional states from our imagination. The wetlands are more than the background landscape; they are part of the young protagonists themselves

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as they immerse themselves in the mud and submerge themselves in the dark and dirty pool water in “the swamp;” or as they travel through the mountain underbrush hunting their prey. The wetlands also form part of the adults as they drag chairs around the pool, submerged in a state of bewilderment and loss. Seemingly marginal, the swamp does not speak—it is in the shadows, slipping away from the Romantic idea of nature as bountiful and beautiful—but rather makes noise, providing background music, a symbiosis that is difficult to conceive, but that is the mobile point of observation, the condition by which one learns to see obliquely: to observe attentively the margin where the lines between the visible and the invisible, dreams and wakefulness, earth and water, empty space and those noises full of beings disappear. It is a vast margin like a mirror that challenges those who are accustomed to seeing from one fixed point—a lookout, if you will. A place that destabilizes prejudices, contexts learned by tradition and serves to have us walk about with intention, always focusing on the detail. It is also the occasion for being more malleable, flexible, and light, to hold fast to what is within our reach via our five senses, in other words, our present. In Martel’s film, what is off camera piques the spectator’s imagination. Does the character from the moving image absorb the spectator? González-Rubio’s film also pushes its characters into new and unknown zones: the child protagonist who adapts to life in the open air of the Caribbean and his father who helps him to fish, snorkel, recognize flowers and animals, cook, scale fish, and feed the birds and the alligator with the unusable parts of the fish and lobsters they catch. Does the absence of women in the movie help us understand the tenderness that the father learns to give to his son as a process of becoming? The father teaches the child with a calm, attentive discipline. The characters are transformed by their interaction with nature. Although the movie barely covers a few weeks that the child, who spends the majority of the year with his mother in Rome, visits his father, the film succeeds in showing the process of changes, albeit incomplete, captured patiently by the accumulation of scenes of daily life—scenes of them fishing, walking through the wetlands, eating breakfast or lunch in the house by the sea. The cockroaches that nourish Blanca, the heron that visits the father and son, are an imperfect becoming-insect that turns into the food of friendship. This relation goes beyond a mere end to the human/animal opposition; it occasions a transpersonal expansion. The boy calls the heron not a pet, but a friend, a sister in the large family that surrounds them with the sea and the breeze. The images of birds that feed on the chum left behind by the fishermen are powerful signs of suspended flight that also

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blur into the sea and the breeze. It is clear we are not seeing a unity of people and animals with their surroundings, but rather processes of connection, exchanges of position that make it difficult to specify what one is and when something is happening. Can Alamar be compared to Ortiz’s poetry? The bodies of the characters in Alamar move with a great deal of flexibility and they make these fluid movements on a daily basis; just as Ortiz’s poetry shows an agility of movement as it searches for “the greatest amplitude of meaning, without reducing, of course, the necessary rhythm and the lightness” (Ortiz, “Biographical Notes,” Messages: 1102). Isn’t this, after all, what the film’s characters seek? Isn’t the experience of difference, of being another in the process of a becoming, also captured by film? And as Juan L Ortiz wonders, “Is the landscape also a relationship?”

WILL TO LIVE

The seeds, which I caress and use to meditate as well as to irrigate, somehow will flower in my spirit, and, despite the awareness of my age, I will feel young again, possessed of a spirit that is open to moving forward. I will grow into a “we.” I want these seeds to be active images that disarm the powerful myth flowing through the human bloodstream that everything has a price. May these seeds produce intervals, renew bodies, nurture changes, and encourage absorption. May this will to live incite the vibration of plants and skins, which is also my skin, my dance, my offering to this Earth which suffers. It’s a matter of making the leap to the third-person plural in language as well as in deed, in the very heart of those leaps and cycles.

WRITING LIKE THE SEA

If reading could be compared to writing, I would like to attempt a base equivalency for recovering and contrasting what Jack Kerouac did at the end of his novel, Big Sur. The poem he included as an addendum to the novel, “Sea: Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur,” gave me the idea to read poems as though they were written as exercises of ecological sensitivity and awareness. So I wrote these notes on ecopoems on the Southern Shores of the Earth.

The Sea Is My Brother Kerouac wrote Big Sur in a demystifying tone, belying his aura of a beat writer at the beginning of the Sixties. Perhaps because of that, because it was not a sequel to On the Road, because it did not possess the rhythm of a road adventure, the novel did not meet wide acclaim. Pablo Gianera’s translation into Spanish four decades later only tells me that in today’s world Big Sur speaks of the need to know how to listen to the sea. I see it as a sign that some poets since then had already articulated in a poetry that should be re-read and not set aside given the current environmental crisis. It is not my intent to establish a comparison of literary merit, but rather I want to reflect about what writing means and what it means to write like the sea, or at least to have the sea as an expressive model. My central idea is that Kerouac and some Latin American poets write ecopoems that incarnate a praxis for combating the tyranny of the mind that maintains men and women separate from nature. One of Kerouac’s mottos of holy poetic madness was “writing whatever comes into your head as it comes” (Good Blonde & Others, 74). I do not want to discuss here what was misunderstood by certain groups of critics of the time, and that today still persists in the cliché immortalized by Truman Capote: “that’s not writing, that’s typing.” Rather it interests me to point out the connection that Kerouac’s writing created with natural forces, as George Dardess notes in his stirring reappraisal of Kerouac’s method of spontaneous prose. For Dardess, Kerouac was the first to demonstrate how the common rhythmic pattern of writing manifested itself as a spontaneous, expansive, climatic, and exhaustive pattern (734). As we will

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see, Blanca Varela, a Peruvian poet, will speak of “slow circles” to express the theme of writing as the halfway point in a wave’s circular expansion. The circular wave of writing—“the structure of the work” Kerouac might have written— is, then, a powerful metaphor that will serve to draw me closer to the shores of certain ecopoems. I hope that they join the voices that seek to reestablish a biodiverse community of beings that work together and respect one another.1 Rereading Kerouac’s notes, poems, haikus, outlines, personal essays, meditations, diaries, thoughts about writing, letter fragments, narrations, and other writings, I thought about his great sense of rhythm that, in the words of Dardess, guides the writer in the expansion of the perceived environment towards liberation and exhaustion (736). I also think about how it will be difficult or impossible to read him within the parameters of commercial narrative. And that the comparison between Kerouac’s poetry and the poetry of some South American poets from that perspective of writing like the sea in reality speaks to us of a literary affinity, which fits in almost perfectly with ecological values of degrowth: in other words, the principles that guide environmental rationality and a sustainable future based on dialogues among cultures that openly support and defend planetary biodiversity. I am only going to propose comparing diverse and distinctive poets as models of writing like the sea. They all write as if the sea’s voice could be articulated. At least a few poems by Jorge Eduardo Eielson (1924-2006), Blanca Varela (1926-2009), Nicanor Parra (b. 1914), and Alfonso Cisneros Cox (1953-2011) interpret the sea’s voice. I read in them the sea’s song, as if they listened to what the waves were saying. The continuity between the words in these ecopoems and the sounds of the sea interests me. I base my readings and the writing of this essay as if I could erase the differences between the sea’s reality and the words’ wind. 1

There are innumerable actions that defend the sea, like the group Movimiento por la defensa del mar (Movement for the Defense of the Sea) in Mehuein Cove, in southern Chile. They have a manifesto against the Celco-Mehuein pipeline that will dump residual industrial water in the sea. October 25, 2008. Accessed July 26, 2014. http://movimientoporladefensadelmar.wordpress.com/2008/10/25/de-unanegativa-una-afirmacion-manifiesto-por-un-mar-sin-ducto-y-un-movimiento-porla-defensa-del-mar/. There is an episode of the series Chile se moviliza [Chile is mobilizing]— Accessed September 4, 2014. www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJmm6CepfcQ that investigates this conflict. Furthermore, as part of its political mission, the Ecocentro-Mar Patagonia Foundation helped publish Manifiesto por la vida del mar [Manifesto on behalf of Sea Life), text by Santiago Kovadloff and Alfredo Lichter, illustrations by Liniers. The text can be downloaded from the Ecocentro Foundation’s website http://www.ecocentro.org.ar/espaniol/manifiesto.htm.

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In this new confusing world open in all directions WE write to survive the constant imbalance to which we are subjected. We write to begin anew, to mobilize an open attitude, to strip the mind of its prescriptive and functional armor. In 1950, a poem was written that imitated the sounds of the sea, before Kerouac tried to do it with the neologisms of Big Sur that, following Allen Ginsberg, were not dark philological precisions but audible meaningful inventions. The poet is Jorge Eduardo Eielson, an ecoartist who crossed deserts and seas throughout his life, in an attempt to make his life a work of art. He made installations on these trips, he painted, and he explored many possibilities in his knots and texts; he even asked NASA to disperse his ashes into the cosmos. In his book Tema y variaciones [Theme and Variations] (1950) Eielson simply expressed the capture of the rhythm of the seas’ waves, and its presence as a sea of feelings of loving communion: Poem in A Major Stupendous love Adoring the seA And living for love Alone And the SeA And wAtching evermore the SeA With love mAgnificent dying At the foot of the seA of love At the foot of the seA of love dying But gAzing forever at the seA With love As if dying Were only not gAzing at the seA or fAiling to Adore. (1976, 155)

Seemingly, and by the immediate context of this poem, the reader would be left with an iconoclastic and resistant attitude to simplifying definitions. But it is much more than this. In the poem, we explore, like other poems that we are going to see later, paths of compassion and expressions of the soul. We write to capture or catch sparks, flashes of life, vital traces, and the seeds of what matters most. We write or recite poetry to live more. The sea also interprets, especially the routes of desire that displays all its mobility in the sea. A natural compass? In this poem I note that the focus moves from the extensive world of love and the sea toward an internal direction that does not point to exaltation and certainly not to a

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state of depression. Rather the swaying of the words points to a well-being within oneself. But never separate from the sea. Another aspect that strikes me about this writing is that it can be taken as a persuasive lesson in humility, and as a call to the species that depends on the sea and on love. Facing the sea, the poetic voice knows itself to be insignificant, and chooses to feel part of the sea. With respect to rhythmic sensations, the ecopoem is a form of immersion in life’s current. Another example of the sea as a model of poetic writing is Nicanor Parra’s narrative poem, “Se canta al mar” (“One Sings to the Ocean”) (Complete Works, 23), in which he tells the personal story of his first encounter with the sea while holding his father’s hand. The final lines of the poem are more explicit about this model of poetic writing: restlessness was born in my mind and the anguish of creating in verse what in waves and waves God created in my sight without ceasing. The fervent scorching thirst That captivates me dates back to that day. It’s that, it’s true, since the world existed the voice of the sea was in my being.

All the poet’s work, and especially his most recent ecopoetic production, follows that momentum of the waves with a strong dose of humor and ecological criticism. Even in a Twitter post from March 29, 2011, the poet responded to the question “Tell us please about the you that is close to the sea, tell us what you hear.” Parra answered with his ear to the sea, converting his Tweet into a brief eco-poem: “The sea with its infinite dialects and sickly stuttering says: Since the beginning I’m the ‘Big water.’ Please stop diarrhea!” The discourse of political ecology aims to bring to light cases of large scale pollution, acidification of our waters, the ever-growing islets of plastic, over-fishing, and poor marine resource management. Parra succeeds, with a comical effect that in the current context is pure sarcasm, in revealing human deafness through his mock distress call in the language of telegrams—currently more popular and widespread because of Twitter. He also expresses the urgent need to listen to the planet’s stories. “The voice of the sea,” in the words of Jacques Cousteau’s granddaughter, is the marker of sustainability. With these waves to which Parra listens and with which other poets impregnate their verses, with “the voice of the sea,” with what water tells us in its stormy lament, thawing and boiling over, finally human beings will be able to feel the effects of climate change:

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“Water will be the vehicle through which we will feel Climate Change” (Cousteau, “Water is Life,” 286).

Pure Song of the Sea Parra writes his ecopoem to surprise the reader and get to the very core of his essence, which winds up being the author’s essence as well. Perhaps the ecopoem is a river of voices, a current that is also Earth’s voice, which is nothing more than the voice of the root. Does well-being have nothing to do with this? In her poem Concierto animal (Animal Concert) (1999), Blanca Varela uses an endless Chinese box not to tell stories, but rather to delve into listening and describing this inner well-being upon capturing the symbolic resonances of the animal condition: my head like a large basket carries its prey my head lets water seep through my head within another head and deeper still it is not my head my head filled with water of rumors and ruins dries its black crevices under a half-alive sun my head in the harshest winter within another head sprouts again (2005, 96)

The poetic voice presents the body as a plural experience that is able to be reborn, to reproduce, and also to demonstrate its potential. But it is not just the poet that writes. Or that writes what he writes. The sea also writes. The immediacy of the presence of the waves, swells, breezes, and sea foam, questions the ecopoem’s sounds. Are they simple annotations that fail to be heard in the universe? Who will be able to listen to and heed the rhythm of what is written? Even inaudible, even invisible, the sea’s writing is also a register of the cellular perspective that searches for an echo of the vastness of the universe. It is certain that the changing scale of the point of view has very serious repercussions in the effort to come to a common understanding. “Animal Concert” encourages this type of adjustment in

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such a way that individual borders are erased in favor of the larger scale: the marine horizon and the winds that affect the sea’s movement: the pure song of the sea awaken the soul the body still sleeps the only tone water against water cutting instrument wind the moment throbs now they are one sea and wind there is no rest only the war-like loving duo of faltering life of closed eyelids and agitated veins preparing themselves (2005, 101)

Perhaps poetic writing possesses better than other literary discourses the need to embrace a long-term perspective because it is written to be read over and over again in a process that opens itself up to the contingencies of life’s currents and tides. The reader of an ecopoem is in a continuous state of permutation. When she reads ecopoetry she becomes disorientated only to find another route and, newly reoriented, she moves on to a new reading. That cycle of recommencing does not end. A shortterm perspective cannot be applied to find meaning. This coincides with how environmentalism wants us to think about water. Water, as Jorge Recharte will say, opens the doors to long-term visions that are more inclusive, which means being part of the same planet (“Los Páramos de Ayabaca,” [“The Plains of Ayabaca”] 218). Scientist Curt Stager in his book Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth (2011) even goes as far as Kerouac in thinking in terms of millions of years. Stager connects the history of the atmosphere with present climate change. The sixth chapter about the acidification of the sea impresses me because it explains in a language comprehensible to the general public the decalcification produced by carbon emissions that are converted into carbonic acid upon entering into contact with the water.

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The irreversible environmental impact of the loss of marine species will therefore bring about a string of extinctions. In truth, it will be an unimaginable future without conches, fish, and many other species that will be unable to return. The tenth chapter addresses tropical climates and made me think about the need to save and protect the water that comes from ice in the Andes, because the shrinking glaciers are not only the disappearance of snow from the peaks, but also a future of droughts that will spread into the coastal valleys that recently have had a spectacular agricultural revival. But I want to clarify that to comprehend the urgency of adopting a long-term perspective it is not necessary to study biologists, paleontologists, and geologists, like Curt Stager has. In Varela’s poem, the sea “awakens the soul” through a feeling that closes the eyes and moves the living inner matter that forms part of this mix of “sea and wind.” The movement occurs on a large scale: the reader’s soul is projected to a sea that beats to the rhythm of an amorous union of life and death. The poetic self takes on the dimension of the sea and the wind. Life and death will then once again engage in their dance with a hurricane storm or a flooding wave. The twentieth century mind trapped in technological advances and economic rationality will never be able to leave behind its logic of growth. It will never appreciate the sea as a key setting to share human history that demands a more long-term perspective. The model of writing, “pure song of the sea,” invites human consciousness to join a larger current, a flow of challenges and weaknesses whose language refers to the ancient rhythm of the waves, to a multiple textuality: the words of the poem want to take an account of modal, multisensory complexity. This perspective of the sea and wind permits thinking of the self as a process in transformation. It may be an apt metaphor for the oppositions set in currents or flows that are going in opposite directions. It is necessary to have an extraordinary capacity to spot a current, and to opt to take it and navigate it. Drifting can occur, or one could also go along without much conviction to explore a subtle difference that arises from a delicacy of approximation or a surprise element that opens another direction in the water. How does one read a poem as a model of writing? I know that it is very difficult to risk an interpretation that transcends the impression we have from the moment of reading, but Varela’s poetic work certainly conveys a spiritual discipline that harbours wonderful moments, currents, breezes, dreams, fatigue, a sore body, rocks, sufferings, desolation, joys, anxieties, and fears. Spiritual discipline renews and prepares the alert mind to its own resistance. Writing from the sea?

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Water as a deep voice that escapes from a crack We write close to dreams, far still from the vigilant, rational consciousness. We write from the first thing that occurs to us as a technique of approaching the unconscious, a primitive and instinctive infancy, to what we drink from the depth of expanded boundaries that continue modifying imposed limits and that, finally, reveal a to-and-fro motion like waves, their islands, their currents, and the flora and fauna of ourselves. We write because we thought of something important before falling asleep, in the act of infiltrating the unconscious to stimulate a dialogue. We write, thus, as a submarine capable of exploring the deepest part of the ocean. We write because of the crack, from what we feel cannot be simplified in consumer society’s prescriptions. The sea enters dreams, enters caves, holes, and shadows. The third poem in Blanca Varela’s Concierto animal announces the importance of the body for the affective operation of a life: Incorporeal stroll from the sun to the shade water music in the living shadow I cross the sharp vagina that leads me from blindness to light under the high sonorous copula in this colossal simulation of a nest I touch the belly of the sea with my belly I meticulously record it with my body I delve into my feelings I am alive (2005, 104)

I dare to navigate this feminine writing about the sea because I learn from the maternal feeling of the poetic voice how to navigate through borderless, continuous zones. The unconscious has listened to the indications of the dominant codes that have already separated the human from nature, and currently converses with the seas, “water music” that distracts the manipulative indications of these codes to produce a multisensory immersion connected to the memory of the womb as the origin of life. This symbolic immersion is projected to a vast scale: that of the entire sea. The inklings of the unconscious are complex and have to deal with what the water writes, that is human destiny. I will write something that floods, something that sustains the food chain, that reveals with its profound voice. Whatever happens with the water, whether we irrigate with it, waste it, contaminate it, or care for it, it will define our

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collective destiny. And we are not talking about an aquatic millenarianism, but one of the key challenges of the twenty-first century.

I am motionlessly waiting for my body to take on springs’ flow Alfonso Cisneros Cox’s poems, collected in the 2008 anthology, El agua en la ciénaga [Water in the Swamp] seem to me to be a delicate and concentrated effort to enlarge our internal and expansive ear to heed the call to express the complex flow of life. n the introduction, Oscar Quezada Macchiavello notes that the poet uses “the seascape as a window to his fluctuating interiority” (10). We write to fish the fishes that swim in dreams, and when they are caught and counted and they need to produce a pre-conscious activity of several days of fishing for recurrent dream characters, unthinkable seas and mixes of disparate cities. We write when our eyes are closed. We write when nets of words are tossed. The ecopoem turns out to also be a method for collecting what was left in memory of a series of worries, both recent and long-standing. In the words of Timothy Morton “ecological thinking has no center or edge” (2010, 33) and “consists of intimacy with the strange stranger” (46). Things from the beach and sea collect affection, possess auras, nuances, ghosts, and the strangest things that cooperate among themselves. The copious sea writes on a planetary scale not only with excitement and strong winds, but also with care. Thus, the floating dead fish speak to the poet (poem 9 of El pez muerto [The Dead Fish], 63): A detained body it endures although the voice does not reach it I turn and I am another articulated by uninhabited places a brightness beats in my chest ancient resonance touched by your breath my body changes the tide pulls back breeze floating on the water like a clean mirror that does not reflect (2008, 63)

I understand that if the voice does not reach the dead fish, there is an effort to overcome this impasse, and the key is to know to listen to the body’s music. Of course not being able to visualize this body is a problem

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since the mirror does not reflect. This knowing how to listen implies changing the body and trapping the rhythm with which one wants to communicate. It implies expanding the traditional coordinates of the body and thus expanding the reach of the body’s communicative capabilities. It does not improve vision, but changes the way we feel, use our senses, the way we perceive. Although the commentary on the back cover by Carlos López Degregori sums up the matter very well, this practice of experiencing the resonances of the sea’s movements through the interconnection of the body to multiple textualities is an ecopoetic aspect that unfortunately seems to me to be lost in the sea of poems that demand even more from their readers. López Degregori says the following about this collection of Cisneros Cox’s poems: In each poem in this book the mud of reality and existence settles to the bottom to release the clear water that is life, light and wisdom.

Cisneros Cox dilutes the borders of species and contemplation. Through several poetry collections and with the same images, he succeeds in articulating an ecopoetic writing of the body with the complex, living reality of the sea. Of the twenty-one poems from his collection Despoblado cielo (Deserted Sky) (2005) I have chosen one to illustrate this expressive community (123): The captive spine of the fish in the tide Transparent water of whispers moving in the calm A well of poison. The sun punishes with its red dye the inexistent turn of its immobility Dead voices like sheets that expire at dawn Of a strong storm surge. The waves toss and turn me and I’m asleep Fish and moon looking me in the eye. (2008, 23)

What I most admire in the poem is its ability to capture the rhythm of images, which, in turn, captures the profound voice of the sea. It is not a typical example of knowing how to navigate and letting oneself go with the flow. The poetic voice also expresses the skill of slowing the rhythm and making a time and space for meditation, the reflection of the flow that is life. Blanca Varela also wrote poems in which the power of slowing down opens up a space for introspection to develop an essential reflection in relation to the sea in El libro de barro [The Book of Mud] (1993-1994). I prefer to allow the poems themselves to add their own echoes.

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WHAT does the immobile body say in its movement? It is alone. The other is air around a dancing island. I say island and think about the sea. I say sea and think about the island. Are they the same? A continuous emptiness and a nameless plentitude follow one another (2005, 75) SLOW circles, infinite islands in an interior sea that turns without loss or gains. Coming to this. To the inexplicable balcony over the night silent and sleepless. Going back to the light is returning to death. The clock marks the lost hours. (76) ENOUGH anecdotes, pedestrian. The sea has stopped. Until now your life, it has said. And the too mature sky has flooded walls and windows With great strides it has paused arriving everywhere and it has repeated the same thing. Until now—dark silk and its ragged voice—your life, it has said. That was its song. (89)

We write to access those areas of life in which the human being perceives and feels he owns, and they are enormous, complex and encompass a community of beings in which what counts are not things but relationships. We write to examine these relationships, to open a door to the feelings that we forge in these relational zones. We write to trace the possibilities that the perceptive habits have of expanding the self into the environment and to disarm the internalized habits that do not permit them to even appear on the screens of planetary radar. Once those habits are broken or eliminated, we write about a different gaze that includes the other senses without subordinating them to a different view. We write the cycles in which conventionalisms and assurances are destroyed and the ruins are repaired anew with reconstruction and creativity, with renewals and repetitions, with the reuse of water as a complex echo chamber. We write facing the sea. We face the sea. We are the sea.

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We Are the Sea Both Varela’s and Cisneros Cox’s poems speak of containing movement, as a kind of parenthesis that writing stimulates: a pause that one learns to make amid a sea of books, especially in the midst of astonishment and curiosity. Perhaps we write because we want to dig deep, to slip through the opacity and changeable borders. But it is necessary to pause, to stop in the middle of a movement in order to process those thoughts that come from that notion of people that includes the cosmos and fauna and flora. And in La ensenada [Cove], Cisneros Cox’s most recent collection of twenty-six poems, each accompanied by a haiku, we note an exceptional articulation of a temporal consciousness of the experience of life. In the poem “Escondido en el peñon” [“Hidden on the Crag”], the sea and writing are juxtaposed in this process of slowing down that allows us to feel and express his use of the temporal element. The poem concludes: I felt the breeze like voices that once touched your skin and washed your body. ideas speed by but my writing is slow: reflections on the water (155).

The haiku in particular contrasts the ideas’ speed as an obvious twentieth century mentality with something that the water reflects, which is a “slow” writing that makes me think of the time of writing, the process of creation. What Cisneros Cox’s poetic text does is a complex operation in the time of large scales that go beyond the relatively short limits of human life. Some poems are overshadowed by the brilliance of the final haiku, like in “Resposo del océano,” [“The Ocean’s Repose”] (157): Toward the ocean’s mystery, the boobies break away

It is admirable to be able to capture the magic of migratory birds’ flight in a few lines, especially since even today we know so little of their complex orientation system that includes natural magnetic sensors and other systems of sensory perception. I do not know if I see anything in

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these verses of what Alan Pauls understands as ancient features of the beach— liberty, tolerance, egalitarian sociability (51)—but I understand it better if I think of these maritime traits while admiring the boobies’ natural compass. This adds a capacity to create images as we do in dreams to the homogenous neutral texture of the seaside landscape. That is why I am captivated by the most successful repetitions in Cisneros Cox’s poems: images of the sea that slowly fade like ink on paper. Again the metaphor of writing, the writing of the sea. In the poem “Detenido” (“At a standstill”) (161), images of the sea resound; in other poems, these same images highlight various sensory aspects such as aromas, footprints, rhythms, and dream textures. The stillness allows us to practice ecopoetic contemplation and to reactivate the multiple body’s memory: At a standstill, next to waves that awaken, I corner the passing of the years and those words that wound the sounds and the sea that grows bigger in the waves that pass and pass resounding below the skin, while the stones hit the breeze and the memory of the names tires the body of mist that awakens among the rocks when I gaze at the sea among the years, at a standstill. In the midst of fog a wave that nobody sees goes traveling.

I know that the subtleties are not easy to perceive when we write or read, but again we are facing the temporal theme in a change of perspective. Can this change be considered training for whoever is adopting the long-term perspective and displays a patient attitude of stillness to contemplate the present, but also the past’s footprints in “the sea that grows bigger,” which implies innumerable echoes of memories, of imaginary appropriations, and feelings of nostalgia and loss? We may pay attention to the sea, but it is not enough to see it. The wave travels, the currents occur, life passes, but it is not easy to see it. Words come together to resonate as the cliffs do with the sea. There is a concert of voices that ecopoems capture with suggestions, trapping with their dream texture and haiku.

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You write your presence We write to travel with the waves, to go places, connect dots, and move vantage points. We write sensitive roots that break free from their orbits and are like seeds that germinate in a web of knots of vast endings. We write filaments that swim and change the entire edifice and get off track, are filtered in fears and frustrations like water-salve. We write like the sea to free the soul from the plateaus that weaken and extinguish the living flame. It is a great paradox that it is water that stokes the flame of life. But that is why we write on the plunging shoreline. We write to leave behind the stagnation that paralyzes and wastes time. We write with the rhythm of the waves, its waves that repeat journeys, that build a sense of return in the middle of exhaustion, to later expand, and to reach a plentitude that is stillness, but that later becomes diluted, and again is a traveling wave. We write to avoid mental laziness and the bewilderment of the intelligent and supportive spirit. We write to resist the separation from the more-than-human world. We revise on the expanding wave. We write to feel the depth of currents that are there—through imagination, dreams, touch or good hearing—willing to circumvent controls in order to not change course or freshness. The only way to write is by noting, and yet again the sea that notices better than anyone rhythms, scales, colors, deaths, changes, and stillness. We use the sea’s pure song to embark on an energetic search for the currents of a playful, creative, egalitarian, and pluralistic life, free from abuse and based on the communication and collaboration of waves, both large and small. We write to take care of the waves. We write to inquire about the incessant cooperation between strange strangers. We write to disarm the tyrannies of the mind. We read what we write as in a spreading wave. And again what we write. A spiral of galaxies that is trapped in foam and shell. We rewrite the contours of the beach, of clouds and conches on the fish that escapes and perhaps in the rhythm of a verse. Perhaps in a poem by Jack, Jorge Eduardo, Blanca, Nicanor, Alfonsina or Alfonso. Deep down, the strangest strange, uncertainty, instability. We write from movement. We integrate what is separate: intelligence, hands, filaments, pieces of stars, living mass, coral beat, and live sponges. —The poets listen carefully to the pure song of the sea—

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Do we annotate? Do we imitate? Do we think? Who says that those are not a poet’s duties? Writing like the sea.

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