This post was written by Jacob J. Erickson, who is an Assistant Professor of Theological Ethics at Trinity College Dublin.
i. Theological Winterkill
In the title poem of his 2016 collection Winterkill, poet Todd Davis describes meandering through a liminal scene of April in Springtime. Snow begins to melt; berries and mint begin to burst through in subtle natalities. Summer is just around the corner, and a sense of hopeful optimism in lush forms ecological life begin to burst through. It is Spring, after all, a time of new life. Davis or Davis’ narrator walks and gathers and moves in a choreographed celebration of the season of birth.
And that’s where Davis performs his characteristic magic. The poem’s lines turn with a subtle and unexpected ecological reality: the melt of snow reveals death as much as birth. Transformation in the season is simultaneously both. He writes,
And in this I find the bones of animals who starved,
or were run down by coyotes or wild dogs leaping over
the deeper snow, who also felt hunger gnawing at their bones.[i]
Winterkill is what has been exposed and killed by cold, and usually refers to plants. But Davis extends the phrase’s meaning to the animal world, living and dead. Ecological loss enables ecological transformation. The corpse of a doe comes into view, as does the flailing quills of a rotting porcupine. The scene of lush spring is haunted by hunger and unseen history.
Davis leads us to stand somewhere in the ambiguous and real palimpsest. His imaginative landscape is one where the grammar of the deaths of these animals, the scribbled transformations of their bodies, and the cursive flows of flowering plants growing in and around them tell us a story of our own ecological context as, well, complicated. The landscape is haunted both by birth and death and it’s hard to tell the difference in places. Haunting challenges the odd linear stories humans like to tell about ecological life. In other of Davis’ poems, a haunted glory meets life all around, and divinity shimmers through the creaturely, flourishing and winterkill bones, all.
There is a way in which Eric Daryl Meyer, too, is walking around and uncovering the more ominous winterkill that haunts theological anthropology. Animality is “a stowaway who (alone and silently) keeps the engine running and the whole craft moving smoothly. Animality is the scapegoat whose life outside the community—forgotten and abandoned—knits the life of the community together.”[ii] In his brilliant Inner Animalities: Theology and the End of the Human, Meyer looks to the more delicate instabilities of the loci communes of theological anthropology and sees in those commons spaces “the bones of animals who starved,” spiritually, metaphorically, really, and physically. Continue reading “Ghost Species: The Haunting of Inner Animalities (Inner Animalities Book Event)”