Freya Matthews (ASLEC ANZ Liveblog)

Ecological humanities lacks the will to act on its visions of ecology. Ecology as a discourse is not enough so what else is needed?

Vision itself might in part be the probem. It implies a one way specular relationship with reality. It is as if the world is spread out passively for our gaze. Whether you use old mechanistic or new relational ecological terms, it doesn't matter—both >> nihilism, solipsism. Residual unconscious solipsism. We can't be moved by the world this way.

We will only be moved when the world moves up from the passive plane of representation. Only this way can we escape solipsism (through a subject–subject relation).

To vacate the old two dimensionality of representation in favor of the three dimensionality of communicative encounter. It's not we who make sense of the world but the world that inscribes our life with pathways of its own.

Meaning conveyed through symbolic resonance of things. In language such as this the world is able to respond. Numinous legends and tales of ancient societies. Same resonance. Smitten and moved. The response of the world is unmistaken in its poetic appositeness. Like dreams. Imprinted with the strangeness of a source beyond us. A call that draws us inescapably into intimacy. A world still dripping with the dew of creation. We cannot help but surrender to it.

Invocation. Festivals, rituals. Pilgrimage. “Sing up the world.” The psycho-physical nature of reality. To feel graced or even loved by the world. Dreaming. Craig Roth, “this sweet thing.” What does it really mean? This thing that women depict in sand drawings? Reverence breaking into song. Lightly held with exquisite gravity. Perhaps the most misunderstood and exploited phenomenon in this country. (Quotation from Roth.)

Communicative encounters with the world that seems to ready to entwine its poetics with us. Simply for the joy of wrapping us in layer upon layer of narrative meaning. This is the background love. Akin to the background radiation within physics. Background desire for poetic attention of our world.

(Freya is crying while reading her talk. It's pretty awesome.)

Science may need to be oriented to larger poetic invocation.