instances of ecological destruction are myriad, none can deny the
importance of written records of our vanishing experiences with what
lies outside human-industrial civilization. Such works convey experi-
ences that may inspire readers to care about and cultivate their own
encounters with nature. But there is much to complicate this under-
standing of the correspondence between environmental literature and
the environment. Most vexing is the medium through which we
document and share our encounters with nature—language.
The moment one sets out to share an encounter with nature one must
symbolize it, frame it within discourse, and convert it into language. (At
yet another further remove comes the scholarly interpretation of this
discursive representation of the original encounter with nature—more
on this below). First of all, there is the issue of moving from direct
experiences in nature to literary reformulations of those experiences. As
one converts an experience of nature into language—poetic, prosaic,
imagistic, or otherwise—everything from the original experience that
cannot be reduced or translated into language vanishes.^5 Even the most
compassionate and ecologically sensitive soul is changing the structure
of her/his experience with nature the moment s/he filters the experience
through the ordering logic of language and its fealty to the ideological
imperatives of given narrative forms. During this process of transcrip-
tion, the person’s original experience of the irreducible and always to
some degree impenetrable othernessof nature^6 is at risk of being colo-
nized by the writing process that records and preserves the moment in a
familiar narrative structure. For the essential otherness of nature can
never be fully manifested in written form, and literary attempts to
convey that otherness and/or one’s immersion in it risk reducing nature
to a unified and knowable concept within a rational-discursive lin-
guistic format.^7 Furthermore, this linguistic conceptualization is usually
processed through documentation technologies hostile to nature, such
as papermaking, printmaking, computers, and the like.
On the other hand, we must acknowledge that, as socialized beings,
rational thought and language are, to use a hackneyed phrase, “always
already” present in our experiences of nature—at work in our sensory
perceptions and unconscious cognitive processes—influencing the
form, feeling, and meaning of everything that finds its way into our
awareness. This process is compounded when we consciously attempt
to represent the original experience of nature to others. Any effort to
describe, verbalize, vocalize, represent, and share an experience of the
outdoors cannot avoid using the structure and tools for communica-
tion with which our minds—and souls perhaps—have been colonized
during the inexorable course of our socialization.
“Anxiety-Reflex” and Liu Kexiang 87