Rewilding Language; Dwelling Poetically

Supporting Generative Emergence toward Thriving Futures

By Nat Taggart

We dwell in language.

Increasingly, one can point to the emergence of symbolic language as a geologic event, one able to harness the power of conscious self-awareness as an evolutionary force: our symbol systems undermine the conditions for life, unravel the climate, and drive species extinct.ⁱ

We dwell in language, even as our home disintegrates.

Ecological linguists suggest inherent failings in languages, which simply do not have the words to convey certain realities.ⁱⁱ The language we speak requires regeneration, to understand the signs that the cosmos cries to us in, letting us know each aspect—from the greatest galaxy to each spinning quantum—is sign-ificant, if we but listen to and learn from her.

“Poetically, man dwells…”

Such was the declaration by phenomenologist Martin Heidegger, following the poetics of Friedrich Hölderlin.ⁱⁱⁱ That our perceptions, sensations, embodied psychic patterns might be guided by energy condensed in poetry, unleashed as language crafts the spells needed to build new worlds to dwell in.

Dwellings emerge as poiesis.

Poetry makes us laugh and sob. There is poetry that captures the sensuality and feelings of reality; and there is poetry that fails to adequately convey experience.

Language constitutes our dwelling.

Poetry is knowledge of the soul—not just our own, but the soul of others, human and otherwise. How we relate to others, poetically, generates our experience. Soul knowledge is indispensable for social cohesion.

We dwell, together. Here.

As our language changes, our dwelling is rebuilt.

Far from paint on caves, from Venus figurines, the oral storytellers, written myths wherein wisdom dances in the living lyric…screens now separate us from words—worlds—every day. Algorithms program each minute, from alarm and email to stock and survival.

Our revolutions are tweeted. Our repression encoded. How many times each hour do words move at the speed of light, through plastic tubes? Who would hear us if not for these plastic tubes?

We dwell in these tubes, the stratigraphic signal of our geologic era.

As our language fragments, broken into bytes and bits, so too does our world. This broken world stems from our linguistic failures.

We see tubes where we once saw trees. We see screens where we once saw skies. We see electricity where we once saw enchantment. We see commodities where we once saw goddesses.

What images are imaginable? What magic can we image? What spells can we speak? What language can build new foundations upon which to together dwell?

Where are the mages?

● ● ●

There are unifying principles behind how galaxies are organized, how suns make light, how lightning appears, how plants are shaped, how rivers run, how cities are arranged…behind even how language transforms.^iv

They are simple enough formulas, power-mass laws detailing how energy runs through mass as efficiently as possible over time; the intricacy of a system’s structural complexity corresponding to the increase in the free energy rate density of the system.^v

This cosmic tendency manifests fractally as branching patterns, self-similar across scale. From this equation, forests burst out of soil. Blood veins deliver life to drive forward history. Neural nets are cast. At these branch points, the past and future break into the present.

There are unifying principles behind how stars and civilizations collapse, how ecosystems and businesses are drained of life. They are simple enough formulas—complexity is sustained by energy flows. The deprivation of such flows provoke contraction, breakdown, failure, death.

Beyond this dance on the knife’s edge of life and death, between creativity and collapse, lies an eternal law. Energy structures complexity. Its absence destabilizes it.

We dwell within the language of this law.

● ● ●

Within this landscape, strange attractors induce phase changes across every aeon.

What power is there to move such a mass as the community of life, the Gaian goddess herself? What power is there to avert the collapse of destiny?

Can poetry move one so completely as to remake a world paved in concrete?

Can poetry inspire a flower to break through asphalt?

We dwell poetically, inhabiting language.

An evolutionary force.

What geological event can emerge to reinhabit this language?

This landscape?

This life?

A poem?

● ● ●

Somewhere, someone is inspired by a flower. Energy flows through her. She writes a program in a language she knows well. The program is a game. The game gives people points. People get points by completing tasks.

These tasks are tested techniques to transform the terrestrial world into something attractive. Into something tantalizing.

She provides resources: a database of information. A calendar of events. An institute to teach techniques. A network of translation centers where a thousand lexicosmions cross-pollinate.

Her game identifies 198 methods for bioregional reinhabitation.^vi Through these pathways, energy is distributed fractally. Ideas are spread and planted and new art bundles are exchanged to bloom and blossom.

Here, seeds are planted. Here, seeds are harvested.

Her program begins to run. There is praxis. There is vision. There is hope. There is joy.

There are rules to the game^vii:

Rule #1 – Natural systems must be restored and maintained.

Rule #2 – Sustainable means for satisfying basic human needs must be developed.

Rule #3 – A broad range of activities to fit better into a life-place must be created and supported.

There are players in the game.

They join bioregional gatherings. Independence groups. Watershed councils. Free republics. Continent congresses. Decentralized coordinating bodies take root; a life-place culture grows. These players coordinate around resolutions to translate the signs and significance of the ecosystem functions of the bioregion into a working political economy for the human dimension of the bioregion.^viii

So they can play. And find joy.

And get points.

There are phases to the game.

One must first play hide and seek with the sunlight, with the rain and wind, the mountains, the bodies of water, the soil, plants, and animals. The boundaries extend however far one extends them. One finds the worst things people do. One finds the best things people do.

A forty-day teach-in inaugurates the game.

Creeks are restored. Food forests are planted. Bioregional parks are linked by wildlife corridors. Empty lots turn to vibrant plots. Community farms and rooftop gardens explode. Buildings are retrofitted. Life-place celebrations abound. Vegetables are grown. Shelters are built.

New players join the game.

Not everyone knows they are in a game.

But they play anyway.

The poetic infrastructure is placed appropriately, and the forty-day teach-in launches a forty-year teach-in. Free stores hold seed banks to support neighborhoods. A living culture grows its roots deeper.

People get points.

Regions are restored.

Those with the most points are thanked, celebrated, and rewarded by grateful neighbors. Folks learn job skills for life.

In the middle of the game, a tiny girl realizes a deep truth: “If we win in the cities, we win.”

She is invited to join a team. Instead, she invites the team to join her.

Active reinhabitants dwell poetically in parallel biogeographic terrains of consciousness.

Towns tell new stories of new destinies. Online communities find each other in the land. Education is recognized for what it must become: the evolutionary adaptive inheritance of the Earth-system.

Like the eternal law of the cosmos, people refuse to allow energy to be monopolized by institutions beyond their control. Rather, they establish a direct relationship to that energy, letting it wash over them. Letting it become part of them.

Enchanting them.

Their direct experience creates new structures in place of obsolete alienating ones.

Mother Earth’s brain tumors dissipate. A new geologic era is whispered about. Some call this the ecozoic era. Some don’t call it anything. Some are happy with silence. They enjoy the wind parting the trees. The birds sing songs to them. Coyotes are free to chant their own poetry at night.

Some prefer these to words.

Breakaway wisdom ecolonomies begin to outnumber desolate wastelands. Soon, communities of life are the only memories people have any direct experience of. The rest are just stories.

The animals and plants can breathe again. Everything breathes together, sharing in the breath of a solar wind. An eternal law reiterates in each heart. In each body. Each mind. In each point.

In each soul and society.

Poetically, we dwell.

Together.

In destiny.

A digitized ecozoic vernacular programs another world to dwell poetically within, a whole lexicosmos rooted in the universal tradition of evolutionary genius. Children and adults together learn biospheric patterns. They learn the science of sustainability. They learn what it takes to make peace. They practice sharing water. They design anew, to renew their bodies. To regain their souls.

Until the screens are forgotten altogether. And each student is able to attract the ecological patterns that constellate new worlds.

The concepts, activities, problems, projects, and services they engage in are unfathomable to us today.

The

     distance

               between

                            their

                                       culture

                                                          and

                                                                              ours

                                                                                                   is

                                                                                                                           measured

                                                                                                                                                              in

                                                                                                                                                                                              points.

Dwell,

poetically.

Nathaniel Taggart is a writer, teacher, student, and philosopher who lives, works, loves, and plays in the Shasta bioregion, roughly northern California at the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers on the North Pacific Rim of the Pacific Basin. His work focuses mainly on ecology, activism, and spirituality, as well as the relationship between environmental scarcity, conflict, restoration, and peace-building. When he’s not writing or gardening, he’s usually playing with the dog, cuddling with the bunny, or climbing mountains in the Sierra Nevada. Contact him at activefolklore@gmail.com.