deviant strategy: eco-weird
Elvia Wilk's book Death by Landscape arrived in the mail today. It made me realise how much of my work over the last decade or so has orbited around the ideas collected in her essays.
I don't think those ideas, about the essential weirdness of landscapes, would be possible without the earlier work of a writer who has been deeply influential to me, Joyelle McSweeney. I will talk much more about her concept of the Necropastoral in a future post. Today, I am thinking about what examining these strange landscapes can tell us about writing.
Weird landscapes tell us so much about making the hidden aspects of life visible, and, about our interconnectedness with the natural world. But, I think there is another aspect that can be important to all writers: they can help us to create BIG MOOD.
Writing is all about creating a mood that the reader can inhabit. You are creating an illusion, or a psychedelic experience, for them to fall into for a brief spell, and, if you do it just right, they might take that mood with them beyond the page.
If you have taken a class with me over the past few years on plant-thinking, the new weird, queer ecology, or uncanny landscapes you will probably have heard me mention Elvia Wilk's essay 'Toward a Theory of the New Weird'. The works she discusses in the essay all create big mood. The mood is often the sublime terror of an alien encounter, or the mystery of the divine, but these moods are created from natural ingredients: plants, ancient rocks, clipped suburban lawns, city skies.
One of the works discussed is Rachel Rose's Enclosure, a film that traces the historical privatisation of common land, and what Victoria Uren describes as a “shift in human consciousness from collectivism and animism to capitalist logic.” But the most memorable, or weird, aspect of the film is the dark sun that looms over the landscape.
Marley Marius writes that “[o]ne of the film’s most striking visual flourishes a large, dark orb seen hovering amid the clouds deals in another kind of magical thinking. During the editing process, as Rose worked on color-correcting the sky. The sublime, for many people, was literally located up above, so why not give it shape there? Inspired by the selections from Yale, the painted works that Rose created for the Gladstone show go on to imagine how that orb would alter the colors and textures of the landscape.”
This explanation of how the addition of something strange, unsettling, or sublime to an otherwise ordinary scene can shift everything is why I love to share weird landscapes with writers.
The vicarious thrill of big mood is the reason why we engage with artworks, and creating it in our own work is the most generous and thrilling thing we can do.