The influence of language alone can hardly explain the shift from a participatory to a non-participatory world. If human discourse is experienced by indigenous, oral peoples to be participant with the speech of birds, of wolves, and even of the wind, how could it ever have become severed from the vaster life? How could we ever have become so deaf to these other voices that nonhuman nature now seems to stand mute and dumb, devoid of any meaning besides that which we choose to give it?
If our own language is truly dependent upon the existence of others, nonhuman voices, why do we now experience language as an exclusively human property or possession? These two questions are in fact the same query asked from two different angles. Nonhuman nature seems to have withdrawn from both our speaking and our senses. What event could have precipitated this double withdrawal, constricting our ways of speaking even as it muffled our ears and set a veil before our eyes?
In a few centuries of European settlement, much of the native abundance of this continent has been lost – its broad animal populations decimated, its many voiced forests overcoat and its prairies overgrazed, Irish rich soils depleted, its tumble clear waters now undrinkable.
Some historians and philosophers have concluded that the Jewish and Christian traditions, with their other worldly God are primarily responsible for civilization’s negligent attitude toward the environing earthy. Each of these two ancient cultures seems to have sown the seeds of our contemporary estrangement – one seeming to establish the spiritual or religious ascendancy of humankind over nature, the other effecting a more philosophical or rational dissociation of the human intellect from the organic world.
Writing, like human language, is engendered not only within the human community but between the human community and the animate landscape, born of the interplay and contact between the human and the more than human world. Archaeological evidence suggests that for more than a million years the subsistence of humankind has depended upon the acuity of such hunters, upon their ability to read the traces a bit of scat here, a broken twig there of these animal Others. These letters I print across the page, the scratches and scrawls you now focus upon trailing off across the white surface, are hardly different from the footprints of prey left in the snow.