ESSAY - AN ELEGY

Roel Meijvis works as a philosopher and dramaturg for Studio Vacuüm / Mees Vervuurt. For each performance he writes an accompanying essay in which he shares the questions, thoughts and inspirations from the creative process. These words serve as a bridge, guiding you to explore your own feelings and uncover new depths of meaning within the work, and the world we live in.


An elegy is a (melancholic) poem or song. Nowadays it is best known as a lament, but earlier elegies celebrated love — lost or unattainable — or served as battle songs or political speeches. An Elegy for a Landscape is an elegy in all those senses. Ten human (and many more non-human) performers create a musical, and visual poem about listening. Together they explore the relationship with our surroundings. How do we relate to our environment? How can we experience ourselves as part of the earth (again)? And are there other ways of relating?

8 ways to dissolve into the landscape:

Standing still for a very long time.
Taking on the colour of the landscape.
Taking on the shape of the landscape.
Burying yourself (going underground, rising up).
Imitating an inconspicuous animal.
Disappear into it (for instance by walking far enough away or dying).
Awaiting your metamorphosis.
Ensuring that the landscape one day joins you,
for instance by cultivating the land.

​- Eva Meijer, Vuurduin (2021)

/ §1.

Today we speak of “nature” as something outside us. It is where the animals are; a place you can go, for recreation or relaxation, or to extract raw materials. We are here, nature is there. We own it, celebrate it, paint and protect it, we destroy it and try to save it. The current climate disaster is a direct consequence of this way of thinking. We believed we could dominate earth, set it to our purposes without limit or disruption, and consume her children. But this division (and its attendant hierarchy) in our speech and thinking now turns out to be literally life-threatening.

​In The World We Once Lived In, the Kenyan politician, activist, writer, Nobel Prize laureate and founder of the Green Belt Movement, Wangari Maathai, describes the attitude underlying the destruction of the earth, and what might help. Her story begins in Congo, where she is taken a tour in a forest. Her guide explains how the demand for timber has created a great deal of employment and how the forest is being felled with extraordinary efficiency. In her guide's story, Maathai hears the worldview that is now widespread: that there are always more trees to cut, more fish to catch, more minerals to mine.

​Maathai describes this attitude with the word craving — longing in its most extreme sense, as desire or hunger. In Dutch there is the term bodemdrift (roughly: drive to the bottom, the soil), which in turn translates back into nature. It must be consumed, down to the very bottom, and beyond even that. Underlying the destruction of nature is this insatiable hunger for more — more than one can take in. 'If all the trees were felled and processed, would the craving then be satisfied?' Maathai asks rhetorically. This very insatiability makes clear, in her view, 'the psychological despair and spiritual weakness' of humanity.

​The values that prevail in the boardrooms where decisions are made about felling forests in Congo, for instance, are economic ones, not spiritual ones. But by seeing trees merely as planks for floors and saunas, they are regarded as dead, whereas as living entities they make possible an ecosystem that is, paradoxically, truly priceless. If spiritual values were also taken into account in such decision-making, these boards would make different choices. That, at least, is Maathai's argument.

​Maathai therefore advocates for greater awareness of our dependence on nature and our role in the ecosystem — a shift of perspective in which we embrace all living things in their diversity, beauty and wonder. Could theatre and music, art in general, function as a ritual, as a practice, and as such contribute to this shift of perspective and play a role in the spiritual revolution needed to protect all current life on earth?

/ §2.

Characteristic of this division between humanity and nature is the concept of landscape. For this performance, landscape forms the starting point of our research. What is a landscape? What do we mean by landscape? And what does this word reveal about our ways of thinking? Our thinking of landscape has its origins in Flemish painting of the 15th century. Landscape is an image, something visual. It is flat, a surface. We look at it, might say it’s beautiful, but we are not part of it.

​How we think and speak about landscape is characteristic of our relationship to nature. In Western thinking about landscape (and nature), the emphasis lies heavily on the visual aspect. We speak of a landscape as of a painting that we either find beautiful or do not. But landscape is so much more than that. The French philosopher and sinologist François Julien examines an alternative for this through classical Chinese sources in his book Living Through the Landscape.

​Julien compares the Western concept of landscape with that of the classical Chinese painters, poets and thinkers of the Jin and Tang dynasties. In this tradition, landscape is not seen as a picture that is or is not beautiful, but as a gathering of natural phenomena that act upon one another so that something is happening. Classical Chinese therefore does not speak of landscape but of ‘mountain(s)/water(s)’ and ‘wind-light’. It is that which is evoked by tension and contrast. Key for this is the (more musical) term tension, tonos, rather than beauty, kallos. And within that tension, space arises for vitality, for life. Landscape is not merely something to behold — it is live(d).

​In Western thinking, the emphasis lies mostly on visual perception. First and foremost, we look at the world. We are subjects facing a world of objects. But this very visual relationship always implies a distance. In his lecture on music (Where Are We When We Listen to Music?), the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk points out how 'intimate listening dissolves the space between subject and object that exists in visual perception. Hearing occurs without distance. When we truly and attentively listen, listener and sound 'float together through the same acoustic event'.

​The 'new engagement with our surroundings' for which Julien advocates, closely resembles the way in which we listen to music. To speak of a beautiful landscape places me outside it and at a distance. In a more auditory approach to landscape, I am part of it. Can we experience the landscape by listening? Can learning to listen better, more deeply, more attentively, make us once again more part of nature? And can this help us in the face of the climate disaster?

​So says the German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han. The salvation of the earth depends, he argues, on 'whether we will be capable of listening to the earth.' Intimate listening thus becomes an act of the greatest urgency; attention perhaps the single most important thing in the preservation of the world we love.

/ §3.

 Just as Julien examines our relationship to nature through the concept of landscape, the Canadian researcher Heather Davis does so through the lens of plastic. In her book Plastic Matter, she shows how plastic is the defining material of modern humanity. It is manufactured and fossil; in the way we dump it in other countries it expresses a colonialist worldview; it leads to monoculture at the expense of local and indigenous cultures (the plastic we eat our takeaway meal from is the same everywhere in the world); and it displays the hubris of modern humanity: plastic barely degrades, so death and decay (seemed to) have been overcome — as though we were gods.

​Our addiction to plastic has ensured that plastic is now everywhere in the world: ‘It is in the air we breathe and the water we drink. Plastic microparticles circulate through our bodies; nanoplastics penetrate our cell walls. Its chemical byproducts have been found in everyone who has been tested. The world is now plastic.’

​Our thinking about plastic already takes place from within a world and even a body full of plastic. To break out of our current ideas about nature, other ideas are needed — a different imagination. But plastic itself can be an inspiration in this: it is a part of our existence that we are malleable, that we can change and transform things, like plastic. Davis therefore argues for a queer ecology. Queer ecology challenges heteronormative assumptions surrounding biology and nature and attempts to construct new representations of evolutionary processes, ecological exchanges and environmental politics — with different ideas about cohabitation, eroticism and care for more-than-human life.

​The world will probably never again be as it once was, says Davis (and that is not bad news for everyone), but this changeability is simultaneously inherent to existence itself. We will therefore need to explore, with curiosity, other kinds of ways of relating and living together:

Regardless of their form, of their gender, or even of their species, to imagine the generations to come, of humans and many other creatures, with a notion of collective responsibility refuses the easy individualist turn toward nihilism. To be responsible for an unimaginable futurity means to understand the deeply relational fact of being, of being in a place and a time, of being alive.

/ §4.

Our disconnection from any particular place and time makes us less at home in the world. We work remotely and, through our phones, we are simultaneously present in many other places — or truly nowhere at all. But if we are rooted nowhere, if we are genuinely connected to no place and no one, we all merely wander around, being lost.

​This experience of displacement is called the unheimlich (literally: un-home) experience, and occurs frequently in the context of climate change. It names the experience that the devastation of the planet calls forth — in the sense that we are destroying our own home. At the same time, this very destruction is also a consequence of the distance we feel from the earth; we do not care for our environment the way we would care for our own home. Is it possible to be heimlich on earth again? And was it ever our home in the first place?

​A lot of ‘environmental thinkers’ take our being-at-home not as a goal but as a starting point. We are already part of the world, of this specific ecosystem. According to Maathai, that is precisely what we must become aware of. The American ecologist Aldo Leopold puts it thus in Thinking Like a Mountain: 'We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.'

​This is also what the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe advocates in The Earthly Community. A livable future is only possible if we leave behind Western, instrumental and colonialist thinking. He points for this towards African ways of thinking, animistic worldviews and spiritual traditions in which humans and non-humans — plants, animals, things, ancestors — exist in mutual interconnection.

​Mbembe presents our relationship with the earth as that of the passer-by: ‘The Earth receives us and shelters us as passers-by. I t also maintains the traces of our passage as passers-by.’ We are not gods ruling over the earth, but walkers taking a stroll. And that applies to all of us: duck, human, blossom and mountain.

​Mbembe too uses remarkably many musical metaphors to express a different relationship to nature — one preceding industrialised colonial capitalism: Every ecological environment was above all a universe in which beings of all kinds learned how to move. This way of making the world through moving and resonating with the other forces of the living gave prominence to a diversity of forms of know-how. These forms aimed at understanding what was hidden and at bringing the invisible within the reach of humans. Forms of know-how and objects were considered to be a guarantee of life. Further, learning consisted above all in listening to the landscapes and their surroundings, to topography (relief) and sacred places, to lines and fringes, to the cycle of the seasons, to myriad sounds and images, and to the glebe.’ 

​Harmony itself is here presented by Mbembe as a home — our home. Not a place, but the community that embraces everyone, precisely because we are all guests in a house that belongs to no one and excludes no one: ‘It is our common participation in energies and forces with which alliances are forged, but which exceed each of us taken separately. The relationship between humans and the rest of the living world is therefore not based on a thirst for conquest and appropriation, but on the contrary on an ethic of disappropriation. Itsfundamental aim is the multiplication of the reserves of life, the sharing of the primordial breath that unites and animates the community insofar as it is composed of the dead, the living and ancestors, of beings and things, of animals, plants, objects and spirits.’ 

​In An Elegy, the performers are constantly coming and going, appearing and disappearing. Casually, mumbling, without a clear centre, without a clear direction. But though they come and go as separate individuals, they sometimes do come together. In those moments they are no longer isolated figures, but a collective entity, a chorus. This connection, this harmony, arises through listening — through tuning in — which also entails a kind of detaching. Individual voices and different languages come together in resonance, with one another, with the surroundings. And we spectators, no longer merely observers, float within that same acoustic event, immerse ourselves, dissolve into the sounding landscape that comes into being — for a moment — before it fades again in the distance, like an echo, like a memory, of where we briefly were.

/ §5.

How do we learn to listen more deeply again? How do we come to see ourselves once more as part of all life, rather than its centre? How do we disappear into the landscape — in the sense of detaching (part of) ourselves? An inspiring example of this we found in the book by the Potawatomi (Native American) botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, who in Braiding Sweetgrass weaves together Western scientific knowledge and Indigenous knowledge.

​Kimmerer knows both traditions well, though she only learned Potawatomi (the language) later in life. Learning the language at a later age allowed her to clearly see what the differences are and what worldview Potawatomi expresses — a worldview in which everything lives and is animated, and therefore requires a different language, a different grammar. Kimmerer calls this ‘the grammar of animacy'. Natural phenomena in this language are not nouns but verbs. Water is something living that, for example, behaves like a bay — has decided to be a bay. To name and define something as a bay (this is it) makes water into a dead object, but:

‘To be a bay’ holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of babymergansers. Because it could do otherwise—­ become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be aSaturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive. Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms.

​

​Just as the Western worldview finds expression in language (and conversely: our language also shapes how we see the world), so too does this animistic worldview — in which life and soul are attributed to everything (and not only to humans). But by animating everything around you, your attitude towards everything around you changes too. Everything suddenly becomes an exchange, a dialogue. Kimmerer explores at length this reciprocity between humanity and nature (mishkos kenomagwen), which we express through our rituals. She describes a coffee ritual of her parents, who had turned the daily act of discarding coffee grounds into a ceremony in which the grounds were carefully and attentively offered to the earth: ‘What else can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself? A homemade ceremony, a ceremony that makes a home.’

​In The Disappearance of Rituals, Byung-Chul Han writes that we can define rituals as ‘symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transform being-in-the-world into a being-at-home. They turn the world into a reliable place.’ Elsewhere Han writes: 'The romanticisation of the world restores to it its enchantment, its magic, its mystery, indeed its dignity. It produces intensities. Romanticisation reveals the soul, the mysterious interiority of the outer world, from which we have become estranged.' Through this romanticisation we make landscape more than the beautiful picture it is; we give, we live, its inner life.

​Our modern data and algorithm driven life barely knows romance any more, and fewer and fewer rituals and ceremonies. And though is is probably not the first thing we think of when considering what might help the world in our times, Kimmerer makes concrete and tangible what Han writes about rituals: 'Rituals and ceremonies are the truly human actions that give life a festive and enchanted appearance. Their disappearance desacralises, profanes life into mere survival. Hence from a re-enchantment of the world we may expect a healing force, one that resists collective narcissism.'

​To re-enchant the world. To romanticise nature. To furnish life with depth, with intensities. Perhaps art can be a practice in this necessary new way of engaging with the world around us. Attention. Listening. Beauty. Stepping outside ourselves. Looking beyond our ego, as the Irish writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch puts it. In The Sovereignty of Good, she calls beauty the ‘the convenient and traditional name of something that art and nature share.’ She describes how she is looking out of her window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, when suddenly she sees a kestrel hovering:

In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important (…). A self-directed enjoyment of nature seems to me to be something forced. More naturally, as well as more properly, we take a self-forgetful pleasure in the sheer alien pointless independent existence of animals, birds, stones and trees. ‘Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystical.’

​

​Being open to that mystery, to that wonder, requires above all a listening. Listening is a form of detachment. It is attention directed towards something outside us, but which can — strangely — bring us closer to ourselves at the same time. If we listen in that way, we mighthear something that surpasses all our forms of knowledge, and what might have been there all along. Kimmerer:

In a field of tall grass, with only the wind for company, there is a language that transcends the differences between scientific and traditional understandings, the data or the prayer. The wind moves through and carries the grass song. It sounds to me like mishhhhkos, over and over again on ripples of moving grass.