Ecology and Elegy

Melancholy dwelling with/as objects. My essay about it here and it's worth pointing out some strange things about it.

For instance, elegies automate grief: they are like professional mourners at Roman funerals. They kill the lost or dead object symbolically, so you don't have to. They are kickstarters of the mourning process.

But the small print of mourning is melancholia. If you go too fast into mourning, you are probably in denial. So the best elegies are paradoxical elegies that don't perform the automation very well!

How does this apply to ecology. Let me count the ways! Elegies traditionally use all kinds of environmental tropes, the most infamous of which was called the pathetic fallacy in the Victorian period: mountains and trees echoing the woe of Orpheus weeping for Eurydice.

With the rise and rise of panpsychism and OOO, this pathos is no longer necessarily fallacious. Interesting, yes?

But what do you do about an elegy for a dying environment? You are talking about trees dying and you are using a form that has living trees echoing human grief. Ecological elegy switches things around.