https://orionmagazine.org/article/speaking-of-nature/
"A CEMETERY SEEMED AN ODD PLACE to contemplate the boundaries of being.
Sandwiched between the campus and the interstate, this old burial ground is our
cherished slice of nearby nature where the long dead are silent companions to
college students wandering the hilly paths beneath rewilding oaks. The engraved
names on overgrown headstones are upholstered in moss and crows congregate in
the bare branches of an old beech, which is also carved with names. Reading the
messages of a graveyard you understand the deep human longing for the enduring
respect that comes with personhood. Names, names, names: the stones seem to
say, “I am. You are. He was.” Grammar, especially our use of pronouns, is the
way we chart relationships in language and, as it happens, how we relate to
each other and to the natural world.
Tiptoeing in her mud boots, Caroline skirts around a crumbling family plot to
veer into the barberry hedge where a plastic bag is caught in the thorns.
“Isn’t it funny,” she says, “that we think it’s disrespectful to walk over the
dead, but it’s perfectly okay to disrespect the other species who actually live
here?”
We have a special grammar for personhood. We would never say of our late
neighbor, “
It is buried in Oakwood Cemetery.” Such language would be deeply
disrespectful and would rob him of his humanity. We use instead a special
grammar for humans: we distinguish them with the use of
he or
she, a
grammar of personhood for both living and dead
Homo sapiens. Yet we say of
the oriole warbling comfort to mourners from the treetops or the oak tree
herself beneath whom we stand, “
It lives in Oakwood Cemetery.” In the English
language, a human alone has distinction while all other living beings are
lumped with the nonliving “its.”
As a botany professor, I am as interested in the pale-green lichens slowly
dissolving the words on the gravestones as in the almost-forgotten names, and
the students, too, look past the stones for inky cap mushrooms in the grass or
a glimpse of an urban fox. The students out for a walk on this late fall day
are freshmen in Janine DeBaise’s environmental writing class at the SUNY
College of Environmental Science and Forestry where we both teach. I’ve invited
them on a mission to experiment with the nature of language and the language of
personhood. Janine would correct me: she would not refer to her students as
“freshmen” since they are neither
fresh nor all men. We call them “first-year
students.” Words matter. She has collected their assignment, a written
reflection on a cemetery walk last week, as baseline data. Now we revisit the
same place, but with new ideas about grammar bouncing around in the students’
heads. New to them, perhaps, but in fact ancient—the grammar of animacy."
Via
Fix the News, who wrote “The incredible Robyn Kimmerer on the ‘ancient
grammar of animacy’—the attempt to find language to affirm kinship with the
natural world. This essay is seven years old, but the wisdom is timeless.”
<
https://fixthenews.com/good-news-democracy-india-reproductive-rights-ozone/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
