Necropastoral

HT Joshua Corey. I just read some very interesting posts at Montevidayo on “necropastoral,” which does for pastoral what I think this essay of mine (that just came out) does. By putting pastoral in a larger configuration space (shall we say charnel ground?) some interesting things happen. Love of Nature is to some extent openness to death—an openness that most environmentalism tries to foreclose.

A brief quotation from the site:

The Pastoral, like the occult, has always been a fraud, a counterfeit, an invention, an anachronism. However, as with the occult, and as with Art itself, the fraudulence of the pastoral is in direct proportion to its uncanny powers. A double of the urban, but dressed in artful, nearly ceremental rags and pelts, the Pastoral is outside the temporal and geographical sureties of the court, the urbs, the imperium itself, but also, implicitly, adjacent to all of these, entailing an ambiguous degree of access, of cross-contamination.