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Cooper, Coleridge and Re-Imagining a Native Cosmology
Alfred Kentigern Siewers, Bucknell University
(Given at the 18th International James Fenimore Cooper Conference
July 13, 2011, SUNY Oneonta; text is keyed to accompanying linked slideshow)
The American writer James Fenimore Cooper’s notion of “gifts” in the context
of the natural world in his Leatherstocking Tales, and the contemporary English
Romantic poet Samuel Coleridge’s figure of the “polar spirit” of the sea in his Rime of
the Ancient Mariner, SLIDE 1 both suggest a common project regarding nature,
namely developing a native cosmology for the earth that is nonetheless articulated
in Christian terms and in resistance to colonialism and modernization during the
first half of the 19th century. In this they both prefigured the American Pragmatist
Charles Peirce’s SLIDE 2 radical notion of nature’s laws as situated in God,
developed later in the 19th century in Peirce’s foundational writings on
environmental semiotics. Pierce, often regarded as the founder of American
Pragmatism and godfather of today’s emerging fields of biosemiotics and
ecosemiotics , argued that nature’s laws were potentialities that come into being
and evolve, and yet ambiguously can be at once both divine and in creation. In doing
so he oddly echoed writings of the early medieval Irish philosopher, John Scottus
Eriugena SLIDE 3, an important influence on Coleridge’s theory of imagination.
Eriugena and Peirce both viewed natural laws as in a sense theophanies or
manifestations from God that constitute both the origins and purpose of creatures in
God. Eriugena’s theophanic philosophy of nature also parallels in certain respects
the postmodern ecoosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, two late-twentieth century
European writers influenced by the early 20th-century Baltic scientist Jakob von
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Uexhull, whose biosemiotics in turn overlapped with Peirce’s work. Peirce wrote
that the universe is perfused with signs, while Coleridge’s theory of imagination
echoed similar ideas of Eriugena’s that “the world [is] an indirect disclosure of God
as theophany,” in which “self-disclosure of Being is… a profoundly religious
revelation,” to quote the Coleridgian Douglas Hedley. Cooper expresses
fundamentally the same sense of nature in his Leatherstocking Tales, for reasons
that we will now explore.
Notably, all these philosophers and writers, intersecting in echoes or
influences during the Romantic era of the early 19th century, shared influences from
hybridities of indigenous philosophies and non-Scholastic Christian traditions (the
former including Native American and early Insular traditions). Both Coleridge and
Cooper were concerned with questions of how to experience a native relation to
place in a colonizing era in Western history. I propose to trace using two brief
examples how their writings both tease out a kind of imaginative native cosmology,
while influenced themselves by philosophies of nature with significant strands of
influence from native cultures. And in returning at the end to Peirce’s work I’ll try to
suggest how we might think about a kind of Anglo-American native ecopoetics
based on these two writers and cross-cultural influences from non-colonial native
and early Christian traditions. That combination of influences in my view helped to
shape a common sense of creatures living in the divine, which translated into
contemporary secular discussion best can be understood in terms of ecosemiotics,
and still bases an important counter-cultural approach to nature in the West that
arguably is an under-utilized resource for ecological restoration efforts today.
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In all this I rely on a rubric provided in a fascinating book by Scott Pratt of
the University of Oregon, Native Pragmatism, SLIDE 4 which argues that Algonquin
Indian worldviews in the Eastern United States influenced the development of
American philosophy through Ben Franklin and others in two ways: One through
the concept of wunnégin, involving a welcoming of various perspectives in a
relational context for experiencing reality, and the second a logic of place, in which
an ethos for life arrives from one’s situated experience. I’ll argue that those two
nodes constitute a practice of nature paralleled by early forms of desert Christianity
and early Irish Christianity, specifically apophatic asceticism, which sought to
engage the uncreated energies of God in nature relationally while approaching the
essence of God and creatures as unknowable, in a practice of nature opening a sense
of Paradise on earth in one’s situated place. This also had opened up in a different
anti-colonialist context, namely in the resistance of desert monasticism to imperial
Roman and state religion, and the condition of early Ireland as a borderland on the
edge of the collapsed Western Empire. From thence came the influence of Eriugena
on Coleridge as the latter adapted German Romantic philosophy to his Christian
personal Trinitarianism, in resisting industrial capitalism. Pratt unfortunately
dismisses Cooper wrongly I think as a colonialist writer not affected by native
influences. A more careful reading of Cooper’s view of nature and the influence of
native thinking on him suggests otherwise.
Now, Coleridge was an older contemporary whom Cooper visited in England.
Both were classified as ultimately conservative opponents of modernization,
although arguably not conservative in the way we commonly understand that term
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in American politics today. Both wrote works now included in the corpus of
significant texts of ecocriticism, in Coleridge’s case The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,
one of his most important poems and one to which he returned later in life, and
likewise in Cooper’s case the Leatherstocking Tales, which turned out to be a central
project throughout his adult life, in particular The Pioneers and, I would add, The
Deerslayer, the first and last written in the series, which both focus on the
headwaters of the Susquehanna SLIDE 5 where Cooper lived. Coleridge himself also
was concerned with the Susquehanna Valley, albeit at a distance. He wrote and
advocated with his friend Thomas Southey about plans for a utopian Pantisocracy
project along the Susquehanna. In this he was inspired by his then-philosophical
mentor Joseph Priestley, who had moved to the Confluence of the Susquehanna,
roughly the midpoint between Cooper’s family seat at the headwaters and the
Chesapeake Bay, under the influence of a dream of creating a quasi-utopian
community of English intellectuals along the banks of the North Branch of the
Susquehanna in the 1790s. Coleridge ultimately distanced himself from Priestley’s
revolutionary Unitarian materialism and found a refuge not on the Susquehanna but
in a mystical Christian Trinitarianism, as reflected also in his revisions of the Rime
of the Ancient Mariner. He related his theology of nature to his two-tiered systems of
reason and imagination, in which authentic imagination was on a spectrum with the
divine, s was substantive reason. In this he was in part adapting the non-Scholastic
patristic cosmology of the logoi of the Logos or theophanies, which Eriugena had
adapted in his own Hiberno-Latin writing milieu, which included analogous Insular
traditions of the Celtic Otherworld and later green worlds of English literature.
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In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, SLIDE 7 first written with help from
William Wordsworth at the start of Coleridge’s own turn in worldviews in the early
1800s and re-edited until 1834, the poet describes a polar spirit of the sea that
embodies his theory of true imagination as a spectrum emanating from the divine.
He distinguishes this Polar Spirit or daemon from the demonic, describing such
spirits in terms of intermediaries between humans and the divine, associated with
landscape or in this case seascape. Coleridge in footnotes to the 1817 version of the
poem describes his polar spirit as SLIDE 8 “one of the invisible inhabitants of this
planet, neither departed souls nor angels, concerning whom the learned Jew,
Josephus, and the Platonic Constantinopolitan, Michael Psellus, may be consulted.
They are very numerous, and there is no climate or element without one or more.”
The Mariner overhears “invisible inhabitants of the element” describing the polar
spirit thus:
The spirit who bideth by himself
in the land of mist and snow,
He loved the bird that loved the man,
Who shot him with his bow.
The spirit imparts a physical experience to the Ancient Mariner of the cost of
living without environmental empathy, which evokes the physiological emphasis in
Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime in its relation to experiences of the natural
world. Burke wrote in part from his own anti-colonialist Irish cultural background,
in contrast to the more idealistic Kantian sublime. His emphasis on physiological
effects dynamically involving both repulsion and attraction, situated corporeally in
an awareness of one’s own limitations as an individual, parallels Pratt’s description
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of Algonquin Indian emphases on relationality and logic of place as anti-colonialist,
and also one might add resistant to transcendental ideological grids.
In any case, the Mariner’s repentant response draws angelic help for him, as
well as the final curative spiritual therapy of a hermit in the woods when he returns
home to England, to a harbor near woods reminiscent of the place in Somerset , in
the countryside around Watchet near what is now Exmoor National Park, where
Coleridge supposedly originally conceived the poem, a landscape associated with
the native Welsh St. Decuman. The hermit in the woods in Somerset in the poem of
course also evokes analogies in Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, where after the
end of the Grail quest the Arthurian realm ends with knights penitentially seeking
refuge among hermits in the woods of Somerset near Glastonbury, after the grand
project of Camelot has failed. The woods also evoke the “green world” theme of
English literature reflected in the forests of Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales as a
retreat from advancing European domination, while the hermitage in the ending of
the Mariner’s tale also parallels partly Natty Bumppo’s retreat amid the remnants of
woods around Lake Glimmerglass in The Pioneers.
Coleridge in his footnotes cites both the Byzantine Psellus and Josephus (a
Jewish historian associated by Greek Christians with the origins of Christianity) as
his sources for the figure of the polar spirit. Both had associations with efforts to
relate biblical traditions and those of Hellenistic philosophy, paralleling the similar
project (supposedly stretching back to the origins of the Church) by Eriugena’s main
sources Dionysius the Areopagite and Maximus the Confessor. Coleridge’s mention
of Psellus and Josephus (whose writings do not seem to back up the poet’s gloss)
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thus evokes a symbolic overlap between the polar spirit as poetic image and the
energy doctrine of Eastern Mediterranean Christian apophatic theology , which so
influenced Eriugena in combination with native Irish cultural backgrounds. Of
Eriugena Coleridge wrote, “he expressly defines…. Creation to be manifestation—
the Epiphany of Philosophers…” SLIDE 9 His energy doctrine (related to the
spectrum of primordial causes and theophanies he described) involved a sense of
our potential participation in the divine energies in nature, while the divine essence,
and indeed the essence of Creation, lie unknown. This cosmology engaged well with
indigenous traditions in early Ireland and in Slavic lands in the Middle Ages, while
today engaging both structuralist and poststructuralist approaches to literature in
environmental contexts, linking Derrida’s apophatic tendencies with the focus on
process rather than essence in environmental phenomenology.
Indeed, the polar spirit’s movements and effects in the poem also are
reminiscent of Native American traditions of manitou and inua as the spirits of all
beings associated with the overall Creator, such as the great Manitou, SLIDE 10
which parallels the Greek Christian cosmology of the logoi of the Logos behind
Eriugena’s philosophy of nature Logos of course has a range of translations
including word, discourse, purpose, reason, speech, harmony and story, which in his
cosmology and that of his sources Maximus and Dionyius took on personal and
dialogic aspects. The parallel to Native American cosmology, whether direct or not,
suggests the anti-colonial project apparent in Coleridge’s poem as a whole, a project
different in its skepticism of utopian ideology from Coleridge’s youthful desire to
build an ideal European society on the banks of the Susquehanna. Experience of the
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polar spirit on the sea leads directly in very physically embodied ways in an
environmental context to a culminating ethos identifying prayer with personal and
experiential love for all creatures, rather than abstracting and objectifying them.
SLIDE 11 Cooper’s corpus shared with Coleridge’s poem of course a focus on
the sea in many of his works, often directly in relation to Cooper’s own sea
experiences, but also symbolically in the Leatherstocking Tales, especially in The
Pathfinder whose opening section involves a prolonged reference to the old-growth
Eastern woodlands of America as a kind of sea. The “green world” of English
literature had emerged from a Celtic Otherworld with sea associations, and the
interchange of imagery of sea and green woods reflects the archipelagic origins of
the trans-Atlantic tradition of an overlay of spiritual and physical realms, in which
neither water nor land clearly stands as primary reality.
Cooper’s Deerslayer, SLIDE 12published in 1841, includes a scene at the
headwaters of the Susquehanna in which Natty Bumppo, the deerslayer, is
described as contemplating the beauties of the break in the Eastern Woodlands at
Lake Glimmerglass or Lake Otsego, where the water and the sky seem to reflect the
forest into each other. There “he felt a portion of that soothing of the spirit which is
a common attendant of a scene so thoroughly pervaded by the holy calm of nature”
(525) Cooper writes. Here the sublime is related to a specific place and experience
of it, not transcendental primarily. Natty and his foil Hurry Harry March argue about
the nature of the place and the cultures that overlap it. In their discussion,
Deerslayer identifies a full realization of human personhood with a logic of place
when, in response to Harry’s brief diatribe against “redskins,” Natty replies, SLIDE
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13“I look upon him as the most of a man, who acts nearest the right, Hurry. But this
is a glorious spot, and my eyes never aweary looking at it.” As they continue talking,
Natty also reveals his aversion to the disturbing of nature with a name in the way
that European Americans do it in their mapping. Harry has engaged in giving it his
own private name of Glimmerglass with his friends, in private resistance to any
attempted official naming. “I’m glad it has no name,” Deerslayer says, “or, at least, no
pale face name, for their christenings always fortel waste and destruction.” Harry
notes that different Indian peoples have different names for the lake. Deerslayer
says that hunters and trappers are likely to call it by something reasonable and
resembling, and that’s when Harry tells him the name Glimmerglass, because of its
reciprocal reflection of sky and water as a kind of archipelagic opening or poetic
clearing in the sea of the primordial forest. In the discussion that follows, though, we
are told that “Hurry Harry thought more of the beauties of Judith Hutter, than of
those of the Glimmer glass, and its accompanying scenery,” unlike the intrepid Natty
Deerslayer questions why Mr. Hutter is in his words burrowing or fortifying
in seclusion on the lake. “To my eye it is such a solitude as one might open his whole
soul in, and fear no one to disarrange his thoughts or his worship.” SLIDE 14 Harry
tries to disabuse him of these sensibilities by speaking of the evils of the Indians
roaming the area. The narrator warns that while Deerslayer’s ingenuousness guards
against sophistry, he is not totally free of prejudice. But in arguing with Harry’s
notion of racial hierarchies, Natty reminds Harry that “God made all three” races,
white, black and red, described by his companion. “God made us all,” Natty argues,
“in the main, much the same in feelin’s; though I’ll not deny that he gave each race
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its gifts…. I do not pretend that all that white men do is properly Christianized and
according to the lights given them; for then they would be what they ought to be,
which we know they are not; but I will maintain that tradition, and use, and colour ,
and laws, make such a difference in races as to amount to gifts….When the colony’s
laws, or even the king’s laws, run ag’n the laws of God, they get to be onlawful, and
ought not to be obeyed. I hold to a white man’s respecting white laws, so long as
they do not cross the track of a law comin’f rom a higher authority, and for a red
man to obey his own red-skin usages, under the same privilege.”
The narrative of place at the source of the Susquehanna, from Natty’s
experience of the headwaters in Chapter 2 to this discussion of gfits in Chapter 3 of
The Deerslayer, elides place and names and gifts and laws, shaping an awareness of
the multiplicity of deep experience of landscape which ultimately in turn shapes the
place in a kind of theophanic spectrum spanning the divine and the experience of
human beings in Creation. Only through openness of the soul to that multiplicity and
its theophanic origin and purpose does a human find realization in personhood,
almost like the self-realization of deep ecology but also implying today’s more urban
project to overcome boundaries of natural and artificial in what Timothy Morton
calls dark ecology. Different overlapping names and laws as metaphors both
emanate from and merge into the ultimate metonym of the river and lake across
different dimensions of time, evoking in Cooper’s cycle a sense of them as being in
God. The place meaning in relation to a sense of experiential human identity both
constituted of and heading towards gifts from God, nonetheless related to that sense
of place in the divine, changing and adapting to that experience. All this occurs in the
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context of a Creation that is a place of worship ultimately in the divine, involving we
are told the holy calm of nature soothing the spirit, offering such as one might open
his whole soul in, and fear no one to disarrange his thoughts or worship. We see
connections in all this both to apophatic theology and Pratt’s native anti-colonialism.
Natty’s discussion of the gifts of different races, while critiquing Hurry’s
assertion of racial hierarchy, comes shortly after the narrator has warned us that
Natty has his prejudices too. The whole discussion comes right after the discussion
of the transformative power of nature at the headwaters, with its melding and
reciprocal mirroring of river, lake, sea, sky and forest. Natty’s discussion of how the
laws identified with gifts are superseded or fulfilled in the divine laws culminates in
his later comment, “different gifts, but only one nature.” In this I would argue we
see how Natty’s notion of gifts, which he describes as combination of tradition, use,
culture and laws, parallels the notion of cultural semiospheres developed by the
mid-twentieth-century Baltic semiotician Juri Lotman. SLIDE 15Lotman, following
on von Uexhull’s work, described how organisms and species have their own
Umwelt or meaningful environment, in which they engage in making meaning. But a
semiosphere could be thought of as a larger bubble of such bubbles of meanings so
to speak. A semiosphere associated with a particular eco-region could be called an
eco-semiosphere that removes a central focus from human concerns and places
them in a larger context of meaningful environment including the non-human. So
Natty’s sense of gifts depend both on place and ultimately the divine in which they
meld into nature at large, in a path that however involves the personal, the
particular, and the place-based. Thus throughout the Leatherstocking Tales, Natty as
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hero is, as he observes at times, a meld of gifts from both Indian and Euroamerican
cultures, amid the influence of the ancient forest. Such gifts can also be thought of as
environmental emanations in which we grow, which we can reflect and engage in
dialogue and personify and grow beyond, depending on our engagement or not with
the natural world, as if in a sea of divinity or in larger contexts typed as ecological.
In this sense of gifts as overlapping and morphing emanations related to
larger contexts of nature, Natty’s embodiment of them in cultural and
environmental exchange parallels the polar spirit in Coleridge’s poem. The latter as
a spirit of the seascape evokes an empathy with other beings and larger contexts
from the ancient mariner. And this ultimately seems to be the point of gifts in the
context of the forest in The Leatherstocking Tales . Of course the two works have
their differences as well. When Natty shoots an eagle no spirit of the forest takes
revenge, but his sense of his gifts arguably shapes his remorse, for the healing of
which he arguably finds solace returning to the forest and his captivity with the
Mingoes. We hear his regret at the wasteful shooting of passenger pigeons in The
Pioneers. And he together with his close Indian friends arguably themselves become
the sacrificial albatrosses of Cooper’s cycle as they all vanish with the forest.
But why the common denominator between Cooper and Coleridge, in the
former’s sense of gifts and in the latter’s polar spirit, in their sense of nature as
emanation of growth that is nonetheless in the divine? I would suggest again certain
parallels in the influence of indigenous cultures on each. In the case of Coleridge, it
was partly the influence of Eriugena and other non-Scholastic Christian writers of
the past, moving him from Unitarian back to Trinitarian theology as a reaction
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against his identification of radical Enlightenment thinking with impersonal colonial
domination. Eriugena’s philosophy, in presenting creatures swimming in a divine
sea, as I have argued elsewhere, shows forth an integration of indigenous Irish and
Christian ideas of nature detailed in Terry Eagleton’s thesis of a personally cosmic
Irish sense of the sublime articulated by the early philosopher. The “green world”
motif in English literature, which heavily influenced Romantic British literature
including Coleridge and Walter Scott and in America Cooper, derived from medieval
notions of a natural supernatural that traces back to formative influence of Irish and
derivative Welsh poetic and storytelling traditions on Middle English literature as it
sought to develop an indigenous voice for England. The reflection of woods and sky
in water at Lake Glimmerglass similarly resonates with divinity in which we swim.
The notion of a natural supernatural landscape, an overlay landscape of the
spiritual entwined with the physical, resists an impersonal colonialism or
utopianism because it does not involve the imposition of a transcendental grid on
the earth as world. Rather, the natural supernatural landscape becomes an active
mediator, a kind of remembrance for information as living energy, between the
“earth” of nature as mystery and the “world” of human culture, symbolizing analogy
that is embodied personally and dialogic between time and eternity, not merely an
analogy. This is what we see in these texts both in Cooper’s forest and Coleridge’s
archipelago. Experience of the overlay landscape in relation to Lake Otsego or the
coasts of the English West Country becomes a kind of iconography also embodying
notions of ecosemiotics, a field that examines how the biosemiotic definition of life
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as meaningful communication reflects itself in human imagination vis-à-vis the
mysterious earth. As Coleridge put it in the climax to his poem, later a hymn,
He prayeth best who lovest best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
In the case of Cooper, indigenous influences helped shape his writing and life.
His reliance on the Moravian Christian John Heckewelder’s detailed accounts of
cultural exchange between American Indians in the Northeast and Moravian
Christians in the eighteenth century is chief of these. The Moravians, a movement
that had emerged early in the late Middle Ages from a cultural zone overlapping
with the Christian east, shared a Trinitarian view similar to Eriugena, which
emphasized a perichoresis of the Trinity that the Greek and Syriac church fathers
articulated with the desert fathers in terms of apophatic essence combined with a
sense of nature as sparkling theophanies. The essences of those theophanies were
uncreated as energies of God. Thus these uncreated energies of God, these logoi or
harmonies, were both the essences of creatures and their redemption, or in other
words the divine sea in which creatures move. This was also expressed in the
asceticism of the Macarian homilies that influenced Moravian Christianity as well.
Such intermingling of theology and praxis in cosmology was also expressed in part
in Quaker doctrines of the Holy Spirit and of the inner light, in Cooper’s background
mixed with the liturgical and iconographic forms of his later Episcopalianism, in an
evolving milieu similar in some respects to Coleridge’s trajectory of faith.
But alongside such influences for Cooper, in the detailed writings of
Heckewelder that reflected the spiritual project of Moravian journaling explored in
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the work of my Bucknell colleague Katherine Faull, lay his own project of
establishing an ethos or logos of place at the headwaters of the Susquehanna. Pratt
suggests how American Indian notions of what might be termed a kind of open
emphasis on relationality and on logic of placeinfluenced American Pragmatism,
starting with Peirce. But Cooper through his encounter with Heckewelder’s writings
and his own engagement with place earlier was even closer to that influence. The
figure of Chingachgook stands for a similar type of multicultural experience of
landscape to that embodied in early Irish Christian stories reflecting upon native
traditions of Otherworld landscapes in actual geography. These in turn formed the
basis for later green-world literature of overlay landscapes, such as The Canterbury
Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory’s Le Morte, The Faerie Queene and A
Midsummer Nights Dream, and their adaptations in Romanticism. Coleridge then
took the supernatural side of Romanticism and ran with it all the way back to a
Trinitarian Christianity that nonetheless involved a sense of creatures being in the
divine, as symbolized by the liminal figures of the polar spirit, the angels, the hermit,
and ultimately the ancient mariner himself. Metonymy as a sequence of metaphoric
encounters forms landscape in which the experience of place is more than the sum
of its parts. In this sense we can compare Cooper’s lake in the forest with Coleridge’s
archipelago focusing ultimately on a Somerset harbor country—really Coleridge’s
sea, but as it is experienced in relation to both the ship and to the return to the
woods at the end of Coleridge’s poem, framed by the sea and desire for a noncolonialist home. Genesis speaks of the Spirit moving upon the waters, and in Syriac
as also commented on by early Christian Greek writings, this could be interpreted as
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the Spirit hovering on or nurturing or in effect brooding over as in hatching as it
were life from the waters. In that early metonymic sense of spirit, in which the
Greek pneuma meant at once breath, wind and spirit, we experience in reading
Cooper the spirit moving upon or brooding over the forest, as in Coleridge’s work
the spirit in the sea moves the mariner terribly to an empathy or profound agape.
The woods and village of the mariner’s return are a figure for Coleridge’s
native Somerset but also for another old Celtic region associated with his writing,
the Lake District and its pattern of integrated communities of water and land. The
Leatherstocking Tales again focus on the Susquehanna headwaters in particular
around Lake Otsego, although ranging to the Great Lakes and prairies in the far west
much like Coleridge’s Xanadu in the faraway East, all part of a nonetheless
geographically reachable natural supernatural overlay landscape. The national park
in the Lake District, entwined with the poetry of both Wordsworth and Coleridge,
and preservation of the Lake Otsego area in the Glimmerglass National Historic
District, testify in part to an environmental influence of their writings.
To close, the two principles of indigenous philosophy that Scott Pratt
attributes to the influence of Algonquin Indian worldviews on American philosophy
were an emphasis on relationality and on the logic of place. In comparing key
writings of Coleridge and Cooper with environmental associations, we can see these
principles can be defined more broadly as expressing a personal dialogue with the
other including the natural world. They also can be associated with the hybridizing
of indigenous cultures, apophatic theology, and a situated asceticism such as that of
desert Christianity or early medieval Ireland. Slide 16. Each of those two nodes of
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principles can be divided in effect into a textual or inner orientation and its
expression in an external practice of landscape or nature. Thus relational
apophaticism can involve a cultural practice of nature as an overlay landscape,
entwining spiritual and physical dimensions, and a textual dimension of metonymic
symbolism, or physically grounded metaphor. The logic of place can involve a
cultural practice of plexity of time, an experience of different time dimensions
(including perspectives of the non-human) as real in our experience of landscape,
along with an inner textual orientation toward an ethos of in-dwelling, or narratives
of place that shape an emphasis on ethics coming from groundedness and
situatedness, the original meaning of ethos as habitat. Examples from both the
Coleridge and the Cooper texts abound and overlap these categories: The overlay
landscape of Cooper’s sea of forest and Coleridge’s archipelago, including the more
historically settled and “native” English West Country in its ending; the metonymy
of Lake Glimmerglass and the albatross; the plexity of time of the “ancient” mariner
and Natty the endangered ancient frontiersman, together with the primordial forest
and the polar spirit; and the ethos of in-dwelling in Natty’s sense of gifts opening up
into nature, as well as in the cosmic empathy underlined in Coleridge’s poem.
Interestingly, these categories can relate to Martin Heidegger’s metaphor of
the fourfold as experience of place, or shaping space into place, along with the
ecosemiotic notion of the four aspects of a nature-text , as developed by the
semiotician Timo Maran. In Heidegger’s fourfold of place, earth (environment), sky
(sign), mortals (time-plexity) and immortals (ethos of in-dwelling) merge in a kind
of real symbolism of place or environment, as event rather than object. In Maran’s
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fourfold nature-text, the contexts of environment (earth), text (sky), the reader
(mortals) and author (immortals) merge to shape the experience of text as
landscape. In short all these schema suggest experience of text as landscape itself, as
an experience of place. And these aspects can be resolved also into Peirce’s
foundational ecosemiotic triad of text, environment and relational meaning, when
Peirce’s third element of meaning opens into plexity of time and ethos of indwelling. The latter together with overlay landscape provide the opening for
experience of creatures and creation as in the divine in the sense shared by Cooper,
Coleridge and Peirce. Following this schema, outlined on the final slide, the
environment is the forest or the Atlantic archipelago of the West Country; the
metonymic symbolism includes the albatross and the forest; the plexity of time
includes the ancientness of the mariner and of Natty Bumppo as a kind of proto-John
Muir Rip Van Winkle, along with the primordiality of the polar spirit and Lake
Glimmerglass and the forest themselves. Finally the aspect of an ethos of in-dwelling
manifests itself in the empathy toward the logic of place of native cultures in the
Leatherstocking Tales and toward other creatures of the sea and countryside in The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This schema provides a brief diagram of the shared
process of writing a native cosmology as attempted by both Coleridge and Cooper,
the one rejecting colonial and utopian approaches on the metropolitan periphery of
Empire, the other in a rapidly developing border of a newly emerging American
imperium, both offering ultimately counter-cultural Christian views that resisted the
industrializing West and its totalizing ideologies.