in some cases, the sole access to a kind of experience that is not
reducible or translatable into other ways of knowing, into other dis-
courses. In translating, interpreting, and disseminating Taiwan nature
writing we must strive to acknowledge the unique mode of knowing
one’s natural environment found therein. Nature writing stands at the
forefront of attempts to know what has not yet been formulated about
man’s precarious yet intimate relationship to the natural world, and
we cannot begin to collectively understand this relationship until it has
been constituted in a form accessible to conscious understanding, such
as literature. As the theorist Walter A. Davis has repeatedly argued,
Forms of art are original ways of knowing, independent principles of
perception and cognition, which give us a unique and primary
apprehension of the real... providing an immediate access to experi-
ence that exceeds the limits of the concept and of socialized, rhetorical
determinations of meaning. (2001: 216–217)[T]he basic problem is to comprehend the forms of literary creation as
original modes of access to experience capable of giving us an under-
standing of the world which other ways of knowing fail to provide.
(1978: 97)Applying Davis’s argument to the genre of Taiwan nature writing, I
further argue that, outside of nature writing, we have no access to
what, for lack of a less wordy term, I call the avant-garde of the eco-
logical imagination. What I mean to describe, in the case of Taiwanese
nature writing, is its creative synthesis of the emotional perceptions
and associative thought processes that Freud associated with creativity
and grouped under the term “primary process thinking,” as opposed
to objective, rational, scientific knowledge, or “secondary process
thinking”^17 (this brings us back to the earlier citations from Thoreau).
One writer frequently associated with the birth and development of
the genre of nature writing in Taiwan is Liu Kexiang, arguably the
island’s preeminent nature writer. Liu’s prose essays, prose poems, and
lyrical poems constitute an impressive argument for an understanding
of the sovereignty of environmental literature as a primary way of
understanding our relationship to nature, proof that “[artistic] repre-
sentation is cognition” (Davis 2001: 152).^18 I must add here that, in
the case of Taiwan (and the PRC), where nature is radically embattled
and diminished, these are far from being idle theoretical concerns.^19
In Liu’s work, the reader experiences the contradictory and emo-
tionally conflicted, subjective yet thoroughly historical, awareness of
the desperate current state of ecological crisis in Taiwan, yoked to
images of the unique natural beauty of the island, communicated
“Anxiety-Reflex” and Liu Kexiang 91