unbreachable chasm dug by history. But watching the spectacle of this
whale in its death throes, even with the intervening several million years
of evolution separating us into two creatures inhabiting two vastly dif-
ferent environments, the moment of death finds us back where we
started—together. Gazing across the distance like this, it also seems as if
the whale is right before my eyes, its fate somehow connected to my
own. (Liu 2003: 122–123)Watching birds and humans gather about a beached whale, to
scavenge or save it, the author slips into a dreamlike associative state.
Stark documentary reality is condensed with emotive cinematic imagery
and, as he peers through binocular lenses, his imagination gives rise to
an enigmatic yet deep empathy with the suicidal whale. Here, aesthetic
perception makes some unlikely and novel associations that lead to a
moving conclusion: modern visual technologies (TV, cinema, binocu-
lars), rather than encouraging specular, voyeuristic distancing, can
help breach the historical, evolutionary, and geographical distances
between man and other species, creating an uncanny and disturbing
proximity, producing dramatic images that call for ethical understanding
and behavior.
Our task, once confronted with such images, is to “arrest” them as
they “flare up at a moment of crisis and attempt to internalize and
articulate their significance before they disappear, perhaps irretrievably,
in the predictable rush toward [discursive] ideological reaffirmations”
(Davis 2003: 128).
These works by Liu Kexiang demonstrate that, although nature writ-
ing is a form of cultural production, an albeit reductive but necessary
discourseof nature, it has nonetheless become a vital contributing factor
in the struggle to preserve and restore natural and wild creatures and
spaces, tiny and vast. Such works embody a concern for and connection
to something that once existed in an independent, self- sustaining form,
wholly outsidethe realm of human-industrial civilization and cultural
production. But today the coexistence of nature with developed spaces
depends in part on the ability of discourses such as nature writing
to represent and uphold nature’s precarious sovereignty, even while
instantiating the impossibility of its exhaustive distillation into words.
This burden of being both steward of ineffable nature and producer
of the public discourse of nature infuses much of Liu Kexiang’s nature
writing with the “anxiety-reflex” mentioned earlier, clearly evident in
the excerpts above. In other pieces, Liu borrows from extant genres to
precipitate a kind of regression in the adult reader, conflating (or
sublimating) the anxiety from our childhood encounters with
94 Nick Kaldis