By invoking and mimetically representing this anxious condition as
our relationship to the natural world, nature writing reminds us that
confusion and anxiety over one’s choices in the world are necessary
conditions of an authentic existence, and we cannot look for guaran-
tees that would relieve us of this knowledge. Nor can we seek solace in
representations of nature that praise man as benign steward or glorify
nature as protective mother. Nature writing today reveals the bad faith
behind any attempts to delude ourselves with the triumphant rhetoric
of developmental mastery, utopianism, idealism, romanticism, or
eremitic escape. Through artistic knowing, nature writing reestablishes
our intimate and inescapable connection to something simultaneously
vital to our existence and ineffable—something that remains per-
manently outside the social, the discursive, the objectifiable, the
symbolic.^23 Writer and reader share in an anxious and paradoxical
awareness that to not write about our relationship to and experiences
with nature is to betray one’s certainty of the importance of document-
ing and sharing such events, while writing about them instantiates a
removal from the immediacy of such relationships and experiences,
translating them into discursive shadows of the original and confining
them to the ideological parameters of narrative formulas.
The best nature writing, incarnated in the works of a writer
(naturalist, poet, essayist, activist) such as Liu Kexiang, stands as
proof that sustaining anxiety does not mean slipping away from real-
ity into a world of private emotions, but that it can crystallize and
deepen our knowledge of what it is to be. For anxiety always indicates
the presence of an existential issue that is of profound importance to
us and demands our attention. Anxiety shatters all psychological
reassurances and narrative guarantees, while grounding us in those
core issues that are essential to our being. In Taiwan and other nature
writing, this being is permanently intertwined with and inseparable
from being in nature.
Notes
- I will use this term in a somewhat general way throughout this essay, to
encompass nature-centered poetry, prose poetry, and essays. An exclu-
sionary definition serves neither nature nor academic understanding;
furthermore, this more expansive definition of nature writing is an apt
generic classification for the oeuvre of Liu Kexiang, who himself refers to
the works I will discuss as of a kind, pointing to their consistent thematic
concerns together with his preferred style of combining subjective/
imaginative expressivity with objective/observational description; hence,
“Anxiety-Reflex” and Liu Kexiang 97