New Books on Ecocriticism Theory and Practice

THE CALL OF THE COPPERSMITH BARBET

Coppersmith Barbet photo by S Murali

All afternoon the Coppersmith Barbet on the fig tree beside the river had been tonking away: tonk…tonk…tonk…, his call reverberated over the steely-still waters of the Mahanadi, while like a skillful ventriloquist the bird hid behind the large green leaves far from the inquisitive eyes of humans. Only the sound floated about. From where I sit I can see miles and miles of water; little wonder this is Mahanadi, the great river, the lifeblood of Orissa! A few miles off the trees I can see the rising concrete structure of the Hirakud dam in the district of Burla. The waters are stopped by the massive structure and canalized for purposes of generating electricity and to irrigate large areas of otherwise dry terrain. Now the river flows into the evening as darkness starts to descend slowly. One by one an array of lights come alive piercing the sky and water like arrows. Only the lapping of the strange silent waters as they caress the shore. And now the sounds of night begin—the chuk…chuk…chuk…chukkoor of the nightjar announces the settling in of the night. The cicadas and frogs take it up. Suddenly all nature is once again up and alive, the transference of light into life. Of course, what we see, what we feel, and what we hear, is only a tiny, tiny slice of nature. Life around us is so abundant, so very varied. And we are immersed in its being— our being is no different. And yet we see so little, feel so little and hear far little.

Now, from over the waters I can hear bits and pieces of bhajans from some temple somewhere upstream where the devotees have gathered for puja and arathi. The voices and instruments are so soft, so very like the rise and fall of the waters of the Mahanadi. Like the deft fingers of the maestro moving over the tiny holes cut into the bamboo stem, the waters of the Mahanadi lap and lave over the sand shore. Everything blends so well. I am at peace.  I could sit for hours like this while the bhajans die out and the lamps are put out. The devotees would troupe back to their homes and their home lights would come on. Life is so perfect!

In nature all sounds have meanings. We have also learned to mean much through our own production of sounds; in fact we have created a parallel acoustic world through our sounds and voices. There are hardly any human communities without speech or music. Of course, we have come so far away from the primitive noise making process and our super technologies have helped us constitute complex structures of the likes of Hirakud in terms of sounds and voices. Perhaps humans have almost forfeited their ability to listen to silence. We need to recourse to voice and sound to analyze, interpret, and mean. The worst part is what technology has done to our voices: we can record and replay and resort to a thousand ways of delivering the sound through a million modes and means. We can make it sound a thousand times over. An ordinary whisper can be magnified to resound like thunder. While the Hindu displays his religion’s magnificence through the loud notes played all mornings and evenings over the temple loud-speakers, the muezzin in the Islamic tower casts out louder verses from the Koran at the very top of his voice! Of course he needs to wake up the ardent devotee and remind him of his religious duties of worship. The Christians are not far behind: they have their own ways of keeping the spirit of religion alive and sparkling through the loudest of notes. Religion in the present depends so very much on the world of sight and sound. Sing aloud and thou shalt be heard! The Christians were missionaries before anybody else; they carried the word of god to all and sundry.  Now the television has afforded them another way of televangelism! Indeed all religions have their own special channels for dispensing their version of truth! After all we need to tell the other how to live better and reach god faster, whether we need it ourselves or not! All sounds and notes of religions apparently are meant only for the other. One does not pause to consider whether the other needs it or not ever. Songs and sermons are blasted from over a million loudspeakers everyday and every minute, from all corners of India, tearing any remaining silence into shreds of disconnected dots and dashes. Religions are so loud these days, and they get louder by the minute. The word of god is to be treasured and meditated up on in our silent hearts and never to be violated like this.  But who cares!

There are rules and regulations in our civil societies about personal space and private space.  There are rules that one cannot hurt the other; neither should one trespass on what is termed private property. However there is almost nothing to stop one from screaming aloud one’s religion right into the other’s delicate apparatus of hearing!  What violence, what aggression, when one considers the songs and slogans renting the sacred air of morning and evening in our towns and villages! This is sheer desecration of human acoustic space; no one seems to care!  The genuine searchers of religious and spiritual truths have always left the marketplaces of the world to seek for silence elsewhere. Nietzsche wrote: solitude ends where the market place begins. The entire civilized world has become a market place of meaningless sounds and screeches. And yet the Mahanadi flows with majestic peace and silence.  There is a genuine silence in the heart of any river, provided one can sense the same. This cannot be dislocated by the aural-oral discourses of the vociferous culture of our religions. All rivers are compassionate and they proffer their hearts to the listening ear.

Somehow we have come to believe that it is through a culture of sound we reach the other shore of communication and meaning. Bhartrhari, the Sanskrit linguist of ancient India, speaks of the Nada Brahmam, the Sound Absolute of the Eternal Spirit.  Tyagaraja, the Saint Singer, writes of Nada Brahma as well, to where the song eternal would lead the singer ultimately.  There is also the Sabda Brahmam, the articulate universe of sound. Between Nada and Sabda there is a world of difference. Sabda is definitely of the lower order in the scale, where the presence of articulated meaning and interpretation dwells. Sabdartha sahitam kavyam, says Bhamaha one of the Sanskrit aestheticians— poetry is the perfect union of sound and sense. But sound and sense do not often go together. Most of our everyday life is replete with the former devoid of any sense. And many people mistake mere sound as meaning.

Sound is so often a corruption of silence. Sound can also be seen as defiance and disturbance. Perhaps sound is one way man defies god in the face of the absurdity of his existence. It could be that sound issues forth from his disordered mind or brain. Often enough mere sound could also substitute the sense and spirit. However, the louder we make out sounds the farther we move from the logic of meaning; the maha satta, or the ultimate meaning remains seated so far deep in silence, one cannot wean it through the disturbances in the acoustic space, neither can one defy the might of the silent spirit that is both immanent and transcendental at the same time. Those who know this, move away from the cacophonic conglomeration of our absurd world of sounds, the repertoire of our weak minds, the noise of our perturbed souls. The Mahanadi moves and yet moves so still in time.

All sounds in nature apart from those made by us humans sometimes have an intrinsic balance. We too can sing, we too can whistle, we too can make a million other ways of expressing delight and pain. However, the moment we resort to the complex technological modes of delivery and broadcasting, we begin the de-sacralization of nature and spirit.  The human ear has a fine delicate sensibility to sounds and voices to noises and notes. We have the great ability to distinguish the slapdash from the harmonious—or at least some of us have.

The human ear can receive and respond to sounds of a certain decibel range, below or beyond which the audibility ceases to be. Many animals and bats have inbuilt sensitivity to sound waves of amazingly lower and higher range.  The vibrations our sounds make in the air can either be sensed as audible or even inaudible. Even if a large tree falls in a deep jungle where no human ear is available to receive it as audible sound, the vibrations it causes ranges through the entire cosmos.  Even the closing and unclosing of butterfly wings can travel miles and miles of apparently silent space. There is a sense of sound as we humans  make it out and there is a sound of sense which we often times ignore. The Mahanadi’s lapping waters speak to me of the age old wisdom of the saints and seers, in a language of silence, where the gaps and crests hold equal sense, an uncanny balance.

The calls of the Coppersmith Barbet has left this shore so long ago and yet they will be traveling for all eternity.

AN EVENING OF DELIGHT

Late last evening we were driving over one of the long seemingly unending dykes of the huge Hirakud dam spanning across the Mahanadi (literally, the Great River) in the Burla district of Orissa state, in eastern India. The night was very quiet and the moon was so very full hanging just above the horizon as a silvery orange balloon and painting the slow moving ripples below in all casualness. Everything was so very beautiful. Only sound of the tyres ripping over the asphalt floors. We were there due to the courtesy of the Department of Forests and Wildlife of the Orissa state, and we had on board a fully trained tracker and forest ranger with us to guide us. And we were on our way back after a long day in the reserve forests of Debrigarh. The headlights of the Jeep picked up occasional nightjars perched so closely in the middle of the road. They would sit there apparently blinded by the headlights of the vehicle until we are almost over their tiny bodies and then take off on their spread wings in a tangent of fright and indignation. Comfortably perched on the passenger seat next to the driver with eager open eyes, I could count nearly thirty odd birds like that all along the dyke. Each one had a different flight plan. And they were spaced almost equally, perhaps having a special personal-distance chart of their own. The Mahanadi was full and silent below, compassionate to the birds and also to us mortals who had attempted to strangulate her free flow and diverted her energies for other purposes. Earlier in the evening we had been fortunate enough to have close sightings of many wild animals and birds, including a full grown specimen of a Sambhar deer, an exquisite male, who jumped across our road and turning a mighty glance of defiance at us sprinted away.

The day had very nearly come to a close and I was heading back to my guest house in the Sambalpur University, where I had come as a short-term Visiting Professor. The visit was so nearly over, and it had been sufficiently fruitful in terms of experiences. The dyke still stretched unending before us under the moon. The nightjars took off one by one on their padded wings, their dark and light patterns clearly visible against the headlights. How very peaceful and how very majestic the coming night!

Life has a habit of becoming terribly habitual. It becomes repetitive and monotonous. But such rare opportunities like this tear it apart into moments of sheer amazement and delight. I think of the million others in their homes and offices now, leading a humdrum existence and engaging with the trivialities of everyday life! How very different and indefinite it all appears to be! This is not to state that a mere stroll in a wildlife park has made me a great, exceptional, superhuman being, or anything, but only that it gives me a space for beginning to think like myself—perhaps all over again!  And that’s what usually matters.

The Mahanadi has been straddled and caught under the huge span of the Hirakud dam. The free run of the river to the sea has been diverted to produce electricity, run machines and maneuver many things, irrigate a thousand acres through controlled channels and several thousand villages and forested land have also been inundated in the bargain—many people made homeless. We do not yet fully know the damage we would have caused to the environment while we were doing it—the amount of wildlife, insects, amphibians, reptiles, crustaceans, and a host of innumerable unseen creatures, we have wiped out in the process. Just like the casual plastic covers we fling out of our moving vehicles, we simply did not care! After all it is only a small act, an insignificant one for us. Consider the great results. Did we ever consider the million tiny forces of energy that were at work so deep under the dam, the profundity of the force of thousands of kilolitres of waters, that were even now slowly edging their way in and out? Perhaps one day the river would finally free itself from the clutches of the mortar and cement and steel girders! We would then call it calamitous and blame it all on the river. But then these are inevitable facts. As the poet writes: all things fall and are built again! We humans are great builders. We build structures visible and tangible, as well as invisible like our social norms, our culture, and our history. We cannot cease from exploration and perhaps the end of all our exploration would be to arrive where we started from and see the place for the first time! Every act requires a distance in time and space to reveal its significance. Every nano-second requires its own inevitable other to comprehend its being! The human mind reflecting on itself is replete with amazing moments like these. As we slip on over the dyke in the Hirakud dam across the Mahanadi, there is this vast expansion of seconds and nano-seconds into eons and eras, into history and ultimate timelessness! Into the awful space of the cosmos! The nightjars are there to remind us of our own mortality, spaced so very well among themselves. The headlights of the moving vehicle are our reflective ego, the dyke the point of awareness, the night our infinite being, the moon our destiny, and the water our conscience. The night and the moon are never merely given. The uniqueness of the moment is in its slow unwinding. Everything is so good. Even the human atrocities in building the dam and extinguishing life is forgiven, for a great compassion spreads over the earth! One by one the nightjars swing free of the circle of light. The moon moves behind a clump of trees. The tyres move. We are heading toward the other shore.

A Touch of Snow

Ritual disciplines attention and encourages people to develop their powers of discernment and discrimination. Yi-Fu Tuan, Passing Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics, Nature, and Culture. P.51.

Last evening while visiting some friends in Reno, Nevada, we were taken to see their newly acquired land—a lovely expanse of sprawling high country stretching mostly into the California side, for around 40 odd acres. There were many craggy hills, rocks overhanging wild forests, and to top it all a beautiful stream gushing from the high lands cutting right across the land, running down to join the Truckee river. And because it was early December the stream had frozen over in many places and in the several pools and lakes the water lay glistening silver under the exquisite blue of the sky, icy cold to the touch. Many trees stood as sentinels and frightened deer crossed our path at many places dashing from amidst the bushes and then melting off into the shadows that were already creeping up on us as the sun went reluctantly over the mountaintops. We walked in one file–all five of us, mostly meditative, silent, as if held spellbound with awe at the bounteous mountain land. Occasionally our host would say something about the land and share his delight at having managed to take possession of such a great place, and discuss the great plans he had in mind about how to maintain it wild and beautiful. All of us marveled at the pristine wildness and beauty of the land. For some of us it was a miraculous experience walking in the high mountains sharing the silence of the bitter cold and snow—especially for my Chinese friend – visiting scholar and eco critic–and myself. I whispered occasional bits of poetry that floated across my mind. Above all, the experience was indeed poetic. At one point Scott Slovic, Professor of English and Environment at UNR turned to me and said: I am sure this experience of snow has altered your perception a great deal. Earlier, perhaps you had looked upon snow with the simple amazement and wonder of a scholar from the tropics, and snow had basically been a romantic experience, something to be thrilled about. But now, I am sure you will look upon it as a different order of reality—something that calls for a great deal of struggle and resistance!     I did not reply immediately, but simply shrugged my shoulders helplessly lost in my own thoughts almost frozen over. The cold was immense and immediate—it crept in through the layers and layers of clothing that I had on me. My hands were cold inside my warm mittens. My earlobes had lost any semblance to being attached at all to a sentient creature. When I tried to run my fingers over the most exposed part of my anatomy—my nose—I could hardly feel it—what was perhaps left there was a mere bundle of cold sense—a blob of icy being!  I kept pace along with the others—I knew that I needed to keep moving in order to be warm inside. Once or twice I couldn’t resist stopping to admire a deep precipice or the distant vision of the rosy hued alpine glow of the mountain’s spine. The experience was remarkable and something that passed all powers of verbal expression. And I could not think and verbalise my thoughts. Nevertheless I knew and felt deep within me that the experience of snow in the Alpine mountains or even in the Arctic could not have been quite much different from this one. I said to Scott: Perhaps, the experience of snow is like the experience of age: it is often what you feel inside that matters. Some people feel cold easily; for others even the Arctic or the Antarctic or the Alaskan cold would mean nothing. It is how you internalize the sensations that count. Mountains, the sea and the desert are all what one has within! They are the extensions of our inner being.

We came back into the pleasurable and most welcome warmth of our friends’ fireplace and peeled off our warm clothing one by one. Usha was already perched near the blazing hearth beaming and brimming over in happiness and beside herself in all joy. She had opted to come off half way through the walk finding the cold and snow combined with the altitude of the place much too much for her—she had hitch-hiked her way back earlier. It was altogether an evening of tremendous beauty.

What is cold? What is the touch of snow? Cold and warmth are the touch of the elements that awaken you to your own senses. Do we forget ourselves? Don’t we awaken in the middle of a deep night’s sleep all of a sudden only to realize that the fire had died out and the blistering cold had nudged us awake? We shiver and sit up. We are awake and alert and alive even if our physical body might be tired and drowsy. The same is true of a warm tropical summer night when the aftermath of the sun’s rays refuse to part from the surface of the earth and don’t allow us to seek the comfort of sleep. In the woods, said Emerson, we return to reason and faith. Yes, the touch of snow too awakens in us reason and faith. Reason tells us to pull our heavy woollens a little closer to our bodies in order to retain the body heat within, and faith lets us realize the touch of the elemental being! Robert Frost has written of fire and ice, relating them to an eschatological vision of either being burned up in passion or shriveled in the coldness of hate. Either way, the extremes of heat or cold could lead us to realize the fragility and evanescence of our human’s being. However, there remains another interesting aspect of such an elemental experience that could be traced in a deeper sense of culture and history. Human beings have responded to extreme heat and extreme cold in their own various ways in different places on earth. There is not only individual variance but also cultural and historical differences in confronting extremes of weather. Snow and cold need not always bespeak of a harsh and antagonistic nature over which the artful individual exerts his or her will and brain in an ultimate struggle for existence; neither does the extreme weather of the desert induce such a human-nature contest. It could also be seen as a coming to grips with one’s own nescience a sort of journey into self-hood. The human being clothed adequately to ward off the extreme weather has come to understand the earth a little better: it is not that he/she has overcome the external element! The touch of snow actually bespeaks of the artful space within and without. Perhaps this is the essential meaning of ritual in the east. Ritual disciplines attention and encourages people to develop their powers of discernment and discrimination, writes Yi-Fu Tuan. How true! A sense of Ritual is a sense of space and a sense of time– a sense of authentic being. Perhaps the origin of ritual can be in a touch of snow or under the extreme heat of the sun in the tropics. Fire and ice are the elemental cornerstones of inner understanding– antaschamatkara (or inner expansion) as the Sanskrit aestheticians have put it.  Ritual is the authentic human experience of inner awareness, and ritual in the broadest sense is the outcome of the elemental touch of the artful universe. One could experience the anguish and trauma of the man struggling to build a fire in Jack London’s story of that name, or one could also wander lost in the Himalayan wilderness in search of the elusive Snow Leopard that Peter Mattheissen writes about. One the one hand it is the struggle to survive and overcome the harshness of the environment, while on the other it is the slow awakening of a clearer understanding of the self. Or is it that the experience of heat and cold are like the experience of one’s age. Some feel it some don’t. Either way a touch of snow tells us a lot—about the self and culture and history.