William Stobb

             What I’ve been trying to suggest in the last two blog posts is that both “narrative” and “the environment” are limited paradigms in important ways.   “Narrative” is often considered to be humans’ “natural” way of knowing the world—we perceive and process our lives as stories—but I suggest that stories isolate their protagonists (often ourselves), and don’t successfully honor what we’ve come to know about the interconnectedness of all things.   I also suggest that narrative, while it may be underpinned by neurological structures, always exists in relationship to culture, so that our well-established narrative mode may not be inevitable .   Our ways of knowing might evolve to reflect new knowledge, new values, new imperatives.   “The Environment” is similarly limiting, in that it positions humans at the center of the natural world, construed as our “surroundings.”   In fact, our lives are fully intertwined with the w...

If we tend to perceive and understand our lives in terms of narratives, and if narratives have values like beginnings, middles, and ends, points-of-view, protagonists, and themes—values which are not necessarily inherent in the raw material of reality, but which are imprinted on the world by our principle way of knowing—then perhaps we can speculate about the consequences of our cognition by looking at how an important issue, “The Environment,” is framed within a manageably sized narrative, William Stafford’s “Traveling Through the Dark.” To begin: “environment” itself is a concept like narrative.  If we consult the OED, we find that the word environment basically originates as “the circumstances or conditions that surround us.”  “ Our environment.”  How often do we hear that phrase?  Not only do conditions surround us in a way that leaves us unconnected, isolated at the center, but we own those conditions.  In my teaching of writing, I often raise ...