Language is not always fossil poetry, no matter what Ralph Waldo Emerson says. Sometimes a word is just a catchall for what we cannot better express; "a place-holder," as they say in drama.
For example: "environmental." This is a word I think even more hated within the movement than without.
So it's worth noting when a poet comes along and rethinks the word "environmental" and what it means.
From this month's Poetry, take a look at a compelling selection from a diary by a Polish poet named Anna Kamienska, translated by the great Clare Cavanagh:
Emmanuel Mounier describes the notion of environment poetically. The
environment is not everything that surrounds us. It is only that which
may become our experience and possesses the power of incarnation.“Precisely
that winding road transforming proximity into incarnation turns the
whole human environment, from bodily fluids and blood to the starry
heavens above our heads, into the living body of our life. Anything that
has not been experienced this way has not yet become a human
environment.”So things, stars, people must become my body in order to exist for
me.
Maybe this idea is not abstract, not intellectual. In yesterday's paper was a fascinating story about the dangers of Botox. Not because the injections could go wrong, but because the dampening of emotional expression on a woman's face also dampens her internal recognition of those feelings.
In a recent study of women undergoing cosmetic treatment with Botox,
researchers found that the treatment, which blocks facial nerve
impulses, seemed to slow the ability to comprehend emotional language."We know that language moves us emotionally," said the lead author,
David Havas, a psychology graduate student at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. "What this study shows is that that's partly because
it moves us physically."
In other words, until we take a fact — the environment, an emotion — into ourselves, it is little to us.
Here's one Dutch planner's response to this conundrum: a Sky Moon Mirror Environment installation:
Perhaps we overrate our mind's ability to think, and underrate our body's ability to feel.
Kit Stolz 