"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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devised the concept of dasein (being in the world)? Ecopoetics is, in effect, another
form of dasein, for it is about finding a sense of belonging (or home), within both the
Earth and the world. Bate argues that humankind has to move to an imaginative sense of
home or belonging and it is through poetry, particularly ecopoetry, that this may be
possible. “The point is rather to reflect on the relationship with earthly things that is
turned into language by the poetry of dwelling” (2000: 280).
David Suzuki also explores the power of language. His thesis differs from Bate’s
in that he explicitly includes the metaphysical or what he calls “spirit”. Where Bate
argues that poetry can be used as a healing tool, Suzuki stresses the importance of stories
and myth: “Like air and water, like the love and companionship of our kind, we need
spiritual connection; we need to understand where we belong. Our stories tell us where
we come from and why we are here” (184, my italics). The italicised section can be read
as an ecopoetic statement. He traces our alienation or what he calls “fall from grace”
(191) as far back as Plato and Aristotle who “began a powerful process of separating the
world-as-abstract-principle from the world-as-experience” (191), and discusses Cartesian
dualism which has shaped the modern view of the world where things are seen as divided
into subject and object, mind and body:
Descartes’s famous definition of existence (‘I think therefore I am’) completes a
new myth about our relationship to the world: human beings are the things that
think (the only things, and that is all they are), and the rest of the world is made
up of things that can be measured (or ‘thought about’). Subject or object, mind or
body, matter or spirit: this is the dual world we have inhabited ever since – where
the brain’s ability to distinguish and classify has ruled the roost. From this duality
come the ideas we live by, what William Blake called ‘mind forg’d manacles,’ the
mental abstractions that seem too obvious to question, that construct and confine
our vision of reality. (Suzuki 192)
Suzuki claims (along with Bate, Harrison, Evernden, Martin and others) that this dualistic
view of the world is the cause of our malaise and that we have “sent ourselves into exile
to abstract the meaning and the value of the world” (194-5). He posits spiritual
reconciliation as a way out of this “exile” and within this broad area, he speaks of the
power of poetry:
Since poetry began, poets and songwriters have been fighting the mind/body
dichotomy, singing their sense of the world, of the body and spirit moving
together through the world eternally. Poetry takes the fractured, mortal, longing
human creature and reshapes it into be-longing. Crafted words attempt to resolve