Machado de Assis, The Alienist

I read this excerpt in The Quarterly Conversation on the alienist (researching mental illness).

A passage that struck me:

The alienist proceeded to a sweeping classification of his patients. He divided them first into two principal orders, the angry and the meek; then he moved on to the various subclasses, obsessions, deliriums, and hallucinations. With the taxonomy complete, he began his thorough and endless research. 

Research only begins after taxonomy.  Put differently, it's not really what his research does.  Research obstructs and confounds the categories.  Taking seriously cultural production and art objects is very much the same thing--not that we don't need taxonomic touchstones but they really falter as a means to interpret and gauge the scope of what culture does.

Caro Baroja on The Window of the Soul

"La ventana del alma, la vía principal mediante la que el sentido común puede considerar ampliamente las obras infinitas de la Naturaleza."

I do think that JCB has a more subtle approach to thinking about humans and nonhumans but this bit is part of the problem!

On fragility in Manuel Rivas, "Historia del arte"

Tal vez por eso lo primero que reparó
fue las cuerdas  de los violines
de la serie inconclusa de las Naturalezas vivas
donde había también abedules, caballos, garzas,
postes telefónicos, máquinas de coser,
el par de botas del padre
que andaba por los caminos del lobo
para sanar electrodomésticos
y orientar las antenas
de los primeros televisores.
--"Historia del arte"

This poem begins after the flooding of the river "Pequeno."  Its title gives way to a commentary about a running theme throughout Rivas's Desaparición de la nieve (2009): an almost dangerous fluidity between real objects (of all kinds) and impetus towards artistic expression (something like Harman's "sensual objects").  The small river's liquidity leaves its own topographical situation and enters into a painter's study, "looking for landscapes / all of that awake and oneiric material."  The artist, and custodian of all vanguards, attempts to salvage the drenched paintings, converting his studio into a painting hospital, trying to extract water from the drowned, filth from the muddied and rearrange the "amputated" images of the broken.  Rivas writes that he "wanted his pieces to be happy...or full of dispossessed sadness [saudade de tristeza]".  According to the text above, the painter first fixed his series entitled "unstill lives" (naturalezas vivas), which are comprised of random collections of objects: birches, horses, herons, telephone posts, sewing machines, a pair of boots....

Artistic expression is about a rearrangement after the disappearance of the originals, about the restoration towards a strange happiness that ultimately remains a "saudade desposeída de tristeza".  The artist, as the "custodian of all the vanguards," becomes "volcánico, plutónico, anátido, obsidiánico, astrográfico, ginkgófito, anfibio," each ascribing an attribute of geological, astronomical or biological origin.  These adjectives also point to the painting, or the poem, as a composite of different things, each interacting (or not) within the medium.  Perhaps most telling on this point is the adjective "ginkgófito" from the peculiar tree Gingo Biloba, itself a living fossil.

For me, this poem offers a compelling glimpse at what art looks like as an expression effected by the phenomenon of the flood.  The paintings material fragility draws it into the liquidity of floods, fires, oil spills and explosions.  This also seems to be why it is able to say something about a crisis--because it is there.  As a "living fossil," it's solidified but also fragile and alive.  The rescued and repaired paintings will still appear mutated, amputated and all mixed up.  The same might be said of the humans that read, view or make art objects.      

Joaquín Araújo thinking between living and nonliving beings

"No es pequeña, en éste último sentido, la entrañable amistad entre lo inanimado

y lo palpitante. Nos referimos a que aires, soles, aguas y rocas, sin estar vivos, sean soporte esencial de la vida."

Yes.  And we should say culture works in very similar ways.

Landscape painting in Garrotxa

I'm re-reading an essay by Joan Nogué that has become integral to an argument in the first chapter of my dissertation.  Nogué examines what he calls "a phenomenology of landscape" in a case study of human experiences in Garrotxa (Catalonia).  His essay explores the different approaches to a given terrain through interviews with farmers and painters.  These two vocations tend to edit out nonproductive elements in the geography.  While a farmer's experience is more corporeal, the painter's reflections seem more "holistic".  It's also interesting when he discusses what painters include and exclude in their vision of the "whole" landscape.  Among the things excluded: agricultural buildings, areas of deforestation, television antennas and plastic and metal structures.  These exclusions do not only happen spatially but also temporally (as they edit out evidence of so-called economic improvement).  So they are kind of like painterly jump cuts.

At the same time one painter reflects on painting in Garrotxa (which in Catalan means difficult or entangled terrain): "The sky is difficult to paint because it is not a smooth or uniform layer. The sky is living, filled with shades colors and vibrations."

I'm interested in asking what these exclusions mean as a point of contact between ecology and art (or a lack of contact).  What do these edits imply for the nonhuman and nonliving elements out there in an apparently desecrated agricultural space?

Joan Brossa on [not] writing

"If I could not write, in my moments of euphoria I would be a guerrilla, and in my moments of passivity, a conjuror.  Being a poet includes the two things."

This is a mixture that equates to some kind of expressionism--even the passive moments have a fair amount of activity.

Action as an ecocritical object of study

Ecocriticism, since its origins in the late 1980s, has tried to distinguish itself from other veins of criticism through its central emphasis on action, becoming known as "an activist criticism".  As a student of Iberian Studies, I find this claim to distinction fascinating and problematic.  Language departments (among others) have long maintained allegiances to various political causes.  In Hispanic and Lusophone studies, many scholars have notably followed and disseminated developments (and emergencies) of human rights, feminist movements, civil rights and, most recently, environmentalist movements.

Due to its relatively late transformation from North American environmentalism as an academic trend (as opposed to feminism and race studies from feminist and civil rights movements), its institutionalization in academia is relatively new and in many ways still in process.  This late arrival to university discourses is interesting because environmentalism itself has fractured, splintered and mutated into different modes of thinking throughout different regions of the world.  Ecocriticism, then, often appears to lack a central methodology or critical tendency.  Except perhaps the two related tendencies of action and place-based criticism.

First, ecocritics place an importance on reading specific texts in conjunction with their site of origin.  Reading becomes an action that re-introduces us to a place.  Ecocriticism has been jokingly referred to as "a backpacker's criticism," one that desires to blend together the classroom atmosphere with the out-of-doors.  Cultural production becomes a mechanism to access a world ("Nature") previously severed from the reader's viewpoint.  Ecological texts, then, perform the action of regaining this lost space.  In my view, this sort of approach severely limits the kinds of texts one would examine as "ecofriendly" texts.

In particular, there is a disdain and borderline dismissal of arte por el arte, art (supposedly) working only for its own sake (whether it be Modernist, vanguard, neovanguard etc. etc.).  I'm less interested in texts that should take us back to some lost origin and more fascinated by those that take us forward into a haunted, weirder future.  This requires a certain amount of (problematic) autonomy for experimentation and a critical openness towards this process.  That is to say, though experimentation may not overtly contain a social purpose or message, its end goal is precisely to alter (human) consciousness in some form or fashion.

Following poet Jorge Riechmann's homage to Martin Buber in Cántico de la erosión:

La dolorosa tarea inaplazable de recomponer el mundo a partir de
estos añicos cada vez más indóciles, tan menudos e hirientes
como vidrio molido.

Y de repente, la fuerte mano extenta que con lumbre escribe en el
aire: «el objeto de estudio es hacer».

Enunciación exacta de nuestra verdad.  Pero ni por soñación
conoceremos a uno de los treinta y seis tzadikim ocultos que
sustenan el mundo.

Buber writes "el objeto del estudio es hacer" with fire and light, delivering a clear point of enunciation.  But for Riechmann (and I follow him here), despite the exactitude of this statement, it does not follow that we are given some special access point to "indocile fragments" that compose the world.  Not even in dreams (ni por soñación i.e. experimentation) can we exhaust (in Graham Harman's words overmine) these surroundings.

What needs to be elaborated on is the action itself, to weave together heterogenous elements into a single artistic event.  (Artist Perejaume also refers to una acción as a nuclear fusion between alien objects, which means to question our disavowal of other beings.)  I would suggest, then, that ecocriticism needs experimentation and supposedly "disavowing" works of art in order to diagnose their (lack of) attention to ecological crises unfolding all around and inside us.