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Learning How Land Speaks

Over the past four years, I have with a group of colleagues been developing a practice of co-operative inquiry engaging with both human and more-than-human beings to explore questions of the kind:

What would it be like to live in a world of sentient beings rather than inert objects? How would we relate to such a world? And if we invoke such a world of sentient presence, calling to other-than-human beings as persons, might we elicit a response?

We have been drawing on a panpsychic worldview, a perspective in Western philosophy that, unlike the materialist perspective that has dominated Western civilization in the modern era, allows us to see the whole earth, and indeed the whole cosmos, as alive, with ends, meanings, agency, and intelligence of its own.

Our experience, after many cycles of inquiry over four years engaging with nearly one hundred River and human participants worldwide, is that mutual communication between humans and Rivers is entirely possible and profoundly significant. Rivers do speak – even the damaged and fragmented Rivers of the modern world. Of course, this doesn’t take place in human language: it is necessarily a poetic order, conveying meaning in image and metaphor, taking place not in words or concepts, but through material form in a language of things.

As Amitav Ghosh puts it in The Nutmeg’s Curse

… nonhumans can, do, and must speak. It is essential now, as the prospect of planetary catastrophe comes ever closer, that those nonhuman voices be restored to our stories. The fate of humans, and all our relatives, depends on it.

The posts in Learning How Land Speaks are drawn from this series of co-operative inquiries, It is evident that experiences of a sentient, responsive, communicative world are available not just to Indigenous people living in traditional cultures, but to all human persons willing to put in the time, the attention, to risk their taken-for-granted sense of self, and to open themselves to that possibility.

Objects&Lives

An Art Deco Vase; a Moroccan pottery platter; an old alarm clock. What do these things have in common?

They are all objects that carry memories from earlier times, from family and the wider culture. Objects that somehow speak to us of relationships, events, fashions, joys, and tragedies. Objects that carry narratives that might die with us if not recorded.

Objects&Lives features short writing and imagery reflecting on household and personal objects that hold value through the memories they hold and their associations with family and cultural history. They often include recollections unique to the writer. Who will know of these stories when we are gone? And does it matter?

Object&Lives draws on several lineages. One is past British Museum Director Neil Macgregor’s History of the World in One Hundred Objects, a story told exclusively through the things that humans have made. Another is what poet Robert Bly called ‘Object poems’ in which ‘the object itself… links with the human psyche’; and ‘things themselves have opinions or points of view’. A third influence was the residency of artist Ali Kazim at the Ashmolean Museum, where Kazim drew inspiration from objects in the museum’s collection from Gandhara, where he originates. He believes ‘objects can connect us, directly and viscerally, to the people who originally made and used them’. And finally, Swiss-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes ‘Things are points of stability in life… Objects stabilise human life insofar as they give it a continuity’.

This series of posts was initiated by me and many of the objects featured come from my own life experience. I have found that many any people appreciate and enjoyed my writing in this form, and several have adopted it in prose and poetry. I welcome contributions from other writers and artists. Please send short pieces (max 750 words) with appropriate images via email to peterreason@me.com.