After (questionably) helping a friend to move his couch into my Fernwood basement suite for active summer storage by opening the door just quickly enough to permit standing in the way, I was offered a ride down to the lab. Protesting politely against infringing on the driver—friend of my friend and still practically a stranger—was to no avail whatsoever. Instead, I managed to hopelessly confuse the poor girl and render myself entirely inarticulate, mumbling incoherent syllables of uncommunicable self-recrimination. Her look of mute concern at my tongue-twisted flailing served only to finally silence me as, practically fuscia, I climbed into the backseat and buckled my belt. So far, I was off to a good start.
After arriving at the lab, I was quickly prepared for my test and then sent to sit in the waiting room for half an hour. Having been warned about the wait the first two times I attempted to take this test, I brought Slovic with me to delve into his notions of bioregionalism, smugly imagining my composed inner monologue as evidence of staying home to think.
Slovic addresses bioregionalism, discussing the apparently inherent contradiction of ecocritics preaching ecological sustainability and the importance of the local by travelling all around the continent to present on these issues. He describes the ecocritical scholar's relationship to literary and inspirational "home" in response to Wendell Berry's admonition to stay there, claiming physical regionalism as "the quandary, the anxiety, of the place-conscious scholar. Should we wish to sustain our species on this planet, we must learn to live more lightly—to use fewer resources and trample less aggressively on this surprisingly delicate globe" (15). Slovic claims that "Berry pricks my conscience and leads me to consider the virtues of my travelling life and the possible virtues of a more sedentary, home-rooted life." But what is more interesting to me is how Slovic chooses to deal with this ethical confrontation, deciding
to take the poem as a prompt and point of departure for such meditations, not as an absolute statement of prohibition....The point is not to push everyone into a sudden immobility, but to nudge those of us who travel frequently to do so more mindfully, with more awareness of the costs of such a life to ourselves and to the planet.
This observation of the importance of mindfulness, too, strikes a chord with my own interpretation of the role of ecocriticism more broadly. In a world necessarily concerned with and impacted by the concrete, physical realities of uneven population and resource distribution; air, water, land, sound, and aesthetic pollution; and in- and out-fighting between those working to suggest alternative actions and modes of consumption, it seems essential that we take the time to sit and think, think about what imaginings and their side effects brought us to where we are and are continuing to propel us where we seem to be going, think about how some of these imaginings might be ir- and reconciliable, and to think about how they might together reimagine sustainability that works and lasts, is dynamic and fluidly evolves to transcend confrontation in favour of interdisciplinary approaches that incorporate every aspect of our societal imagination.
Whew. An eyeful, certainly. This hopelessly overwhelming series of phrases and clauses is of course a selectively reduced and incomplete assessment—it only just barely begins to olfactorially graze the edge of a single lupine on an immense mountainside shrouded in the potential of its nigh-spherical resting place—but we've got to start somewhere. Why not here, reading Slovic in the LifeLabs waiting room?
My technician, who was moving to Nanaimo and whom I had seen weekly in the fall for INR tests, directed me to room three.
"I've never been in this room before!" I said brightly, hoping to mitigate some of the unhappy patients she had received before me.
"Oh, my, I'm going to miss you, too!" she rejoined, much to my confusion. Baffled, I struggled to sort out how her answer applied. "But maybe you'll come and see me in Nanaimo, someday," she consoled me, and I gave up trying to think of a reconciling or self-explanatory response and smiled.
Well, one missed connection at a time, I suppose. Craigslist has it figured out; we need to start facilitating conversations, any way we can. And any time I start to feel like home has become too predictable, it kindly offers non-sequiturs to remind me that communication gets scrambled as soon as I step outside my door. Plus, I went all the way from the familiar waiting room to room three, unfamiliar in its own right, and then to an unintentionally alienated Nanaimo. There's plenty of work to do, literary studies, in reading, writing, re-reading, and re-writing our societies, one neighbourhood at a time.
