More Fun and Philosophy in Andrews Forest
In my last story posted here, “Explorations in Oregon’s Andrews Experimental Forest,” I described some adventures during a two-week residency in October, 2019. My opportunity to be there was thanks to the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word, a collaboration between Oregon State University and the US Forest Service. I was a “visiting scholar” and writer-in-residence, with my only commitment being to contribute a “reflection” to The Forest Log, a record of the impressions of artists, poets, writers, and philosophers meant to be a parallel to the rich record of scientific observations at the Andrews. I was tasked, as it were, with trying my best to bridge the often-imagined “divide” between science and the arts and humanities. In my previous story I argued that is a false dichotomy, but also an urgent challenge. I vented my views on all that in that posting, so won’t recap them here.
In trying to bring together both science and poetry, to “walk the high ridge,” between what have been described as the “two cultures,” I decided to approach my contribution to The Forest Log as a series of questions, taking as my model a poetic form invented by the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda (1904-1973). His El libro de las preguntas, The Book of Questions, was his last work, finished only months before his death. It is a series of imaginative and often fanciful questions – preguntas in Spanish – that are mostly poetic rather than scientific. Here is an example from Neruda:
¿Cuál es el pájaro amarillo que llena el nido de limones?
Which is the yellow bird that fills its nest with lemons?
I have found his poetic model to be a natural jumping-off point for “ecopoetics” or “ecopoetry”: We can take a real observation (data, science), formulate a question about it, state that in a poetic and imaginative way (following Neruda), and leap to another level of emotional and/or philosophical inquiry. To me, Neruda’s preguntas are akin to Japanese haiku poetry, which has its philosophical roots in Zen koan – the answerless riddles that nevertheless point the way to deep psychological and spiritual insights. Each of the Neruda-inspired questions from the Andrews Forest I posed was a launching pad – an opening image or excuse – for an eco-philosophical exploration.
Continue reading Byers’ “More Fun and Philosophy in the Andrews Experimental Forest.“
