Nagualli: Deborah Wendy Rose, from Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction

Saturday, February 1, 2014

Deborah Wendy Rose, from Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction

Animals haunt the Western imagination, a haunting entailed by and sustained through our long-standing, but now crumbling, dualisms. Dualistic thought, pervading the ancient world of the West and continuing to this day, requires two intellectual moves: separation and hierarchy. The great eco-feminist philosopher Val Plumwood uses the term 'hyperseparation' to describe this kind of divide. Hyperseparation not only says that things are different, it says that the difference is oppositional and extreme. Thus, for example, where men are taken to be rational, women must be emotional; if men are active, women must be passive; if men are hard, women must be soft. The hyperseparated dualisms link up: if humans are rational, nature must be mindless; if humans are active, nature must be passive. If humans think and speak, animals must be dumb brutes. Mind is imagined to be over and above matter, cosmos or heaven is deemed to be over and above earth, eternity and certainty are valued over and above transience, mutability, and uncertainty, and so on. The hierarchy of superiority is also a hierarchy of control: culture over nature, mind over matter, and so on and on in the most familiar and oppressive fashion.

A major dualism is that between 'culture' and 'nature.' Culture refers to human beings, and nature refers to all the rest of the living world that is not human. Nature/culture is a divide between humans and the rest that sets the human over and above all else. Within this binary, the separation between humans and animals is crucial, since animals are those parts of nature closest to us in face, form, and function. Questions arise: If we are like them, do we lose our sense of having a unique origin and destiny? If we are not like them, are we isolated? If we do not belong with them, with whom do we belong? To whom are we accountable? Where are the boundaries of our ethics? Where are the boundaries of life, death, thought, experience, knowledge, empathy, concern, intelligence, communication, love? Who are we when we are with them, and then again, who are we without them?

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about | co-curators

Here uncoils a collective psychogeography of the Americas—a personal exploration of indigenous poetics and epistemes. With a specific focus on Nagualism, the native American practice of self-splitting and metamorphosis, this collective project (executed as a continuous exchange between its collaborators) confirms that metamorphosis is a rapid, ongoing process without beginning or end, an antinomous exchange of excess in limitless operation. So while we post here, a chattering seed grows suddenly to a green stalk while a stone or mountain teems with personhood and animacy; and we match that overflow with overflow. Thus do we redistribute cosmic energy. Its first transfer long preceded our arrival; but we continue the exchange, the extension which is likewise our rootedness. To a great extent, this is simply a record of the personal reading habits of its co-curators, Jose-Luis Moctezuma and Edgar Garcia.

Jose-Luis Moctezuma is a californiano and a current doctoral student at the University of Chicago. His studies focus on technologies of the image in poetry, cinema, and literature. His work has been/will be published by Berkeley Poetry Review, PALABRA, Cerise Press, and MAKE Magazine. He is an editor and writer at Hydra Magazine.

Edgar Garcia's poetry, translations, and essays have appeared in a number of publications, including Antioch Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Big Bridge, Damn the Caesars, Exit 9, Jacket2, Los Angeles Review of Books, MAKE Magazine, Mandorla, Sous les Pavés, and Those That This: Arts Journal. Author of Mayan Texts: A Galactic Birth Canal (Burnt Water Booklets, 2010) and Boundary Loot (Punch Press, 2012), he was also formerly a writer and editor at Hydra Magazine. An anthology that he has co-edited titled American Literature in the World is forthcoming from Columbia UP. In 2015 he completed a Ph.D. in American Literature at Yale University and began as Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar and Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago.