Thinking Like a Plant

Course Description

Summary

Clarice Lispector, in her genre-defying masterwork Agua Viva—originally titled Beyond Thought— describes her aspiration to become, in writing, “life seen by life.” She writes: “I may not have meaning but I have the same lack of meaning that the pulsing vein [of a leaf] has.” And again, “Far beyond thought[…] is the beating heart. Therefore the most profound thought is a beating heart.” What does it mean to think like a plant, a pulsing vein, a cloud, or a beating heart?  How might this be directly related to our deepest human aspiration to self-knowledge? And how is poetry especially capable of answering, in embodied form, such a question? We will read ecopoetic works by Hildegard von Bingen, Clarice Lispector, Nicanor Parra, Francis Ponge, Goethe, Helen Keller, Eihei Dogen, Hilma af Klint and Mei-Mei Berssunbrugge, among others, and consider their writing as a form of transhuman communication, supported by speculative fiction about “therolinguistics” by Ursula Le Guin, and by intuitive communications between Anna Breytenbach and wild and captive animals.