ECOSYSTEM AS COMPOSER: ECOSENSE
Is writing only a human activity?
Within the field of cultural geography, ‘reading’ a landscape or an environment has become a popular metaphor—though asserting that landscapes are passive texts waiting to be actively engaged by human readers raises ethical concerns of hierarchisation, context and consent, and identification of agency of actors.
If we hover for a moment, though, with the notion that an environment can be interpreted (read), then the implication is that the environment itself is comprised of (or, better yet, actively composing) meaning (possibly as a written text). In this case, ecosystems and their biotic and abiotic co-constituents may write.
The communicative output of more-than-human writers offers humans to develop a practice of asemic reading (where we find ourselves unable to comprehend what is composed, but assured that it holds its own inherent logic and that it is, indeed, communicative). Such an ideological shift away from the superiority of speciesist anthropocentrism allows a poethical repositioning to ecocentrism where biotic and abiotic entities are agents who communicate.
Asemic writing is a form of literary composition comprised of illegible script; in other words, the visual material of the composition identifies as letter-forms, but there is no decode process available to confirm phonemes or semantic attachment to the visual. My own interest in asemic writing is born of an asemic reading practice amongst more-than-human writers, where I situate myself amongst biotic and abiotic entities to see if I can touch that ages-old enthusiasm to interconnect with an environment by recognising the linguistic within its body. When I submit my estranged self to the power of listening and sensing within an ecosystem, I strive to stretch beyond semantics but also to witness my constant impulse to construct meaning. In these moments, I dream it’s possible that a world of signifiers explodes the dominant human language used to name and to know them. In this dream, asemic writing inscribes landscapes. I actively question what bodies (be they human, water, weather, other) are capable of or even constantly composing as well as how to ethically read, converse with, collaborate with, and/or interpret non-human entities.
While in Queensland, Australia for a poet-in-residence post, I took several photographs of environment-based texts. I did not know what they communicated, though I had a notion a communication was being offered. Certainly, there were forms, lines in repetition. Something imposed on top of another (instead of ink on paper, here we have barnacles on rocks, fungi on bark, paths forged through sand). Distinct forms linked with other forms. I shared these asemic texts within my digital poetry project Gibber (2012).
Similar to immersion in foreign human languages, immersion in foreign bioregions heightens one’s capacity to sense environments partly removed from the immediate superimposed semantics we inherit. Looking at organic litter on a beach, I know little more than cursory names like leaf, shell, seed. In Queensland’s Daintree and, later, Magnetic Island, complex patterns of little balls of sand littered beaches as tides receded. It took me two days of attunement to eventually spy heavily camouflaged crabs scuttling amidst the balls and into the holes nearby them. The sand-balls and their intricate arrangements indicated a deep logic at work, but one as yet I was not equipped to decode.
