6.1 Suturing the Wounds of Humanism
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights forms part of a genealogy of writing that moves towards a counter-narrative of invoked but not taken-for-granted communicative intra-actions between humans and other animals. Heaven, as Cathy’s dream suggests, might be found on earth, but that earth does not exist for the human species alone. Nor does it exist if humans are a species alone. The afterings I read here echo Cathy’s resistance to the idea of humankind as divinely charged with dominion over all other creatures and their habitat, making it clear that there is no logical or moral imperative to privilege one species over another. I read these works devotedly, aware of the need for humans to redress what has been done to make this heavenly world hellish for so many human and nonhuman animals.
During the time in which Brontë’s novel was written, scientists and philosophers were increasingly describing the world as more complex than the simplistic causal structure drawn up from dominant streams of Enlightenment thinking. Brontë’s openness to the affective beings of all animals can be attributed, in part, to her immersion in the Romantic poetry and literature that resisted mechanistic thinking that separated humans from other creatures, by venerating the contingent messiness of human interactions with the larger world. In Brontë’s work, this thinking extends to seeing humans as one of many species in an expansive world full of individuals of other species, each with their own personhood and worth. In these depictions, Brontë’s Wuthering Heights problematises anthropo-theological assumptions that all creatures serve under a dominion of human hierarchy, sometimes known as Father God, increasingly personified as the Romantic Imagination. Brontë’s novel positions humans as neither more, nor less, deserving than other animals in the world. This subverts the anthropocentric Romanticism, articulated by a number of speakers in William Wordsworth’s poetry who describe Nature as a servile female muse that functions to uplift manly worth. The textual responses to Brontë’s Wuthering Heights extend her work into more explicit posthumanist positions that also refuse to privilege the human species over other species.
After I have walked for some time I am stopped by a small bird hovering close for a long moment, against the rain-crusted sky. There is no sound at all. Then the evening breeze sweeps in from the east and cools the wetness of my cheeks and I say, out loud, ‘Hello Emily’. (2011, 7)
Admitting that I have addressed a Yorkshire bird as a long-dead author holds no suggestion that this creature manifested for the benefit of my fancies. But this interchange did take place, during a purple twilight evening, creating an affect I still remember. Perhaps my small voice and my stilled steps also impacted on the bird that glided above me. To think critically in such directions need not involve childish egocentricism or animism. Talking to a bird as a person, anthropomorphic as this might be, can resist discursive practices that preach the secular decorum of rationalism and reveal the ongoing physical intra-actions between the crossings of phenomena over time and space. Like spectres, interchanges between the past, present and future will not be contained by words or skin. Affective words, like affected skin, can escape morbid humanist repetitions, creating natalist responses that become-with a world in process.
There is something not quite human about the afterlife of Emily Brontë, that can also be seen in the closely related and equally revenant Cathy ghost. This disruptive intra-active being, this ‘I’ that is Heathcliff, Cathy and the moor, is both appeased and maintained by her habitat. She is an ambiguous ghost, neither fixed to reality, nor to the imaginative realm. She might or might not be real, either materially or psychologically. The destabilisation created by this uncertainty leaves space for a resounding banshee wail for change. There are echoes of this insistence in the stare of William Wyler’s Lockwood, the silence of Peter Kosminsky’s Cathy and the circling dance steps of Kate Bush’s Cathy. The radical peri-hysteria in these resistances disturb oppressive anthropo-theological divisions between humans and other animals.
This haunting radical protest resists the dualistic orderings of a rational human world, forming part of a back-chatting ecolect of moor love that renders new posthumanist potentialities into being. Brontë’s characterisation of Joseph the pious farm worker, instructively reveals the strictures of masterful ideas of a divinely appointed human gardener, who nurtures nonhuman environments on terms that suit human needs. Joseph’s tragi-comic efforts at control, like those of Lockwood, contrast brilliantly with the attentive and responsive Cathy, who is also Heathcliff and the moor.
The fluid being-in-formation that is Cathy, Heathcliff and the moor, is reformulated in the psychological growth of Carson’s speaker as she inhabits a Canadian moor and visions herself into new modes of being that move her from self-centred pain. By reading the Canadian moors through Brontë’s depiction of the Yorkshire moors, the speaker is readied for change and for healing. Carson’s poem engages with the ideas of nonhuman sentience suggested in Brontë’s text, its communicative mud, trees, ice and air echoing Brontë’s depiction of the moors as a living body that includes Cathy and Heathcliff. Devoted readers of such texts join other animals spoken to by this co-affective moor. As readers immerse themselves in this poem, becoming speaker, mother, father, moor and Carson’s emplaced speaker who ‘lives on a moor in the north’, ready for seasons to shift ‘like a blade’, they may feel the incursions of their habitat shifting them with small sharp openings (1997, 3 and 4). Re-energised, readers might add the open and communicating moor of Canada to the places they inhabit, and, at the same time, enfold more closely with the Yorkshire moor that breathes through Brontë’s text.
Other afterings also enact this posthumanist sensitivity, according to their own polyrhythms, paying attention to Brontë’s beat while creating a new direction that suits their spaces and times. The risk of devotional intra-action is productively faced by Urquhart’s Ann, who, primed by Brontë’s novel, meets the Yorkshire wind as protagonist and accepts the icy needling of its beastly interventions. The moor love that rids Carson’s speaker of her obsession with Law, and frees Ann from the sovereignty of Arthur, takes Acker’s Kathy (Cathy), at least for a time, into the liberating darkness of animal languages. Kathy (Cathy) opens herself to her urban surrounds with courage, before she succumbs to the self-contained ‘I’ of morbid repetitions. Bush’s Cathy becomes-tree, wailing, flailing, playfully acting out. These protagonists’ attention to the backchat of their habitations allows them to resist the triangulations of mimetic desire, where destructive humans subjugate the self and the other to a hierarchy of oppression built on privilege. In contrast, Sylvia Plath’s protagonist, acutely aware of the wind-driven emergence of night, glimpses the dark potential of moor love and runs.
As philosopher Gianni Vattimo details, in his response to René Girard’s analysis of mimetic desire, the violent oppressions in the concept of a Father God power the self-inflation of narcissistic love. Yet, even knowing this, it is still, Vattimo shows with grace, possible to ‘to believe in belief’ (1999, 93). Turning from love, these protagonists discover a respectful trusting attention to nonhuman backchat, bringing dream readers along with them. Their faith in this moor love, a love that involves a co-affective allure nurtured by response, moves these protagonists beyond the confines of mimetic desire that demands adherence to one or the other. Co-affective allure involves a one and the other, where beingness crosses from individual human skins to include others from all kinds of species with all sorts of hearts.
These depictions of moor love create space for relations between other species through their ‘whach’ for the backchat of animals and their habitats. The textual performance of affect shows cross-species communications need not be constrained by human animal significations. Brontë’s Wuthering Heights keeps animals present in Cathy’s mind and body, re-turning and re-tuning readers to her creaturely self, and thus to the creatures that share her habitation. Cathy and Heathcliff, moor creatures that they are, are shaped by their surroundings, including seasonal winds, be they wuthering or breezy, and mercurial becks that gurgle, then bellow wild with rain. These animal impacts are highlighted in the crossings between these two characters, not only through Heathcliff as dog and colt but also through Cathy, whose flits through her precarious life, as light and sharp-beaked as a lapwing, leaving feathery traces of the tragedy entailed in being snatched from the moor. These animalistic aspects of Brontë’s dream writing reverberate through the literary responses to her novel. Acker’s Kathy (Cathy), with Heathcliff, enjoys an early freedom in being more than human, until this is disturbed by violent urban repetitions. This calamity of mechanistic annihilation drives Acker’s Kathy (Cathy)’s nightmarish containment as an ‘I’ ready, in the end, to thieve and murder. This painful default to human singularity is also seen, in a subtler way, in the spaced-out sheep that attract Plath’s speaker, before impeding darkness scares her into a human retreat. In the audio-visual responses to Brontë’s novel, audiences are offered unmitigated perspectives of people from different species. As Heathcliff is herded by the nudge of the horse in Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights, audiences may feel a nudge to their own torpor. As the younger Heathcliff bends to the beat of rain, pressing against sodden tussocks while birds fly above him, readers too might sense their own feet sinking into a new groundedness. Luis Buñuel’s film scales human body spaces down to size, against an ancient tree, showing Heathcliff and Cathy to be as vulnerable as a soon-to-be-stuck pig. Viewers too may feel their own puny existence and the fragility of their own lives.
Responses to the moor love of Brontë’s novel, that inspire reconnections to animals of different species, can be disturbing and illuminating. Acker’s poem turns filth to compost, when her Heathcliff refuses to privilege the organic needs of one species over another. Buñuel and Arnold follow Brontë’s refusal of species divisions by filming animals of all species suffering, feeling pleasure, reacting and responding. All species, as Barad argues, have ‘material-discursive practices by which their differential constitutions are marked’ (2007, 128). Conceptualising humans as phenomena that discursively and materially intra-act with other phenomena requires the posthumanist grace Anat Pick describes as the ‘ethical encounter’, a grace mobilised through attention and action (2012, 72). In this ‘creaturely approach’ there is no hierarchy, ‘everything counts’ (76, Pick’s emphasis). Posthumanist dream writing evokes this regard without judgment, accepting, with humility, human dependencies on other species for survival. The self no longer comes first. There is no first, no second, no hierarchy at all.
When rights to oppress are no longer tenable, or even relevant, the dynamic topology of the moor becomes political, and transcorporeal transmutations become personal. These radicalising texts make and take opportunities to thread their weft towards unfixed ways of being in connected, yet singular ways. Through the uncanny hypnotism of their natalistic and interconnected dream writing, Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and its textual responses, subvert the boundaries of mimetic desire shaped for the benefit of privileged humans. In encountering the novels, poetry, pop song and films I have discussed here, readers and audiences may be allured towards lifeways that hospitably extend to other creatures of this shared world. As an assembling coalition, these texts create a shared affect that invites readers to make different sense of what is read through their bodies. Like a dream, a text evokes real physical responses, including tears, fright and laughter, and such responses imprint memories on a reader’s or a viewer’s body, that is already shaped by past experiences. Co-affectivity begins with unique references that create meanings specific to such attentive bodies. If readers and viewers are suitably positioned, these creative performances of sentience might open them to an unfixed space of wonder, where their life-to-come can open more freely into new relationships with the always forming world. Listening to place, inspired by Brontë’s posthumanist dream writing, and textual responses to this work, can deepen a sense of being-with, engendering body-felt responses that involve ears, eyes, hands, feet, hearts and minds.
As human bodies actively listen and move to these posthumanist dream texts, it may seem they are still held tight in the linguistically guarded factory of the sensible described by Jacques Rancière. Yet affects and perceptions are not dependent on words, and excessive texts can free as much as they contain. These depictions of animals, humans and other species alike, are specific and localised, in settings that will interact with the experiences of the reader. Each textual encounter links to other textual encounters: they are part of the lived experience of the reader. The evocation of a shared borderspace beyond the signifier bridges the habitations that humans share with individuals from other species, highlighting already-there intimate relations. These efforts are most likely to be felt by those who are ready to respect and trust the creaturely allure that exists beyond the bounds of the human self. Experiential affect is distanced from (but close to) signification, and it is this combination of affect and language in posthumanist dream texts that may open readers to perceive multispecies dialogues differently.
These dialogues of attunement and invocation may result in new lines of natalistic thinking that flow readers into more fitting ways of being in the world, beyond the morbidity of anthropo-theological thought that assumes a teleological end, written to a human plot. When writing communicates affect by depicting emergent encounters with other species, readers might hear the song of an inclusive world that seeks a healing for all. This refrain, that emphasises that respectful trusting kindness, is not an exclusively human possibility. Dream writing, when it is powerful, specific and posthumanist, can retune devoted readers towards this graceful mutual attentiveness between species. It takes sensing patient bodies to discern the backchat of different species, and it takes even greater application to accept the silence of disengagement. Literature can help develop human patterns of this attentive acceptance.
Attentiveness to posthumanist dream writing requires a meditative mind that is open to ideas of encounter, emergence and intent. This mindset influences how backchat can be heard. Letting go of anthropo-theological thinking is to let the nonhuman world be what it is in its own way. As Bruce Foltz makes clear, all beings are ‘rich with significance’ (1995, 89). Humans will best hear the significance of other species’ communications if they, like Acker’s younger Kathy (Cathy), set their own species-specific language aside and sit and listen for different languages that they may share. Such re-cognitions can encourage and nurture human attempts to live with the rest of the world’s animal species in less harmful ways. Dream writing may seem an ineffective offering in the end-game described by climate change science, but the texts considered here show how humans might become more aware of communications, through an attentive responsive listening that is open to the shared possibilities of grace. When the world is understood as communicating, constantly, living differently within it becomes imperative.
Readerly affect will vary with people and their lives. However, the textual responses I have spent time with here, in company with Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, demonstrate that when dream writing is not anthropo-theological, readers might begin to count the cost to others when they make life choices that put their own self first. Repositioned, humans may become likely to nurture, rather than use, their habitations, aware these places also meet the needs of other species. Brontë’s novel questions human dominion, and the afterings of this novel restate her query, opening readers to see other creatures as a co-affective ‘us’. Trusting and respecting other animals, in ways that move human lifeways away from anthropo-theology’s conceptual restraints, involves no longer reinforcing species divisions as a first principle. These more productive cross-species relations understand the human self as transductive individuating matter, gathered as co-affective intensities that manifest as one animal amongst the kin of the world.
Thinking as kin requires an expansive view of the world, unblinkered by a false and unfair sense of privilege. Such shifts in perspective are needed to deal with the scale of habitat destruction faced by all animal species. Human-caused changes to the world’s cyclic patterns are of a magnitude that science is struggling to estimate with any degree of certainty. Humans need to find ways to live beyond divisive and outmoded ideas of development, if their next generations, and the accompanying generations of the earth’s other creatures, are to come into existence. Posthumanist lifeways require dreaming a vision that sees animals all, in places everywhere, finding better ways of getting on. Rather than assuming dictatorial rights about where certain animals might live, humans would be better to respect and trust their fellow-creatures as the kin they are, extending the pure gift of hospitality that welcomes the need of all beings for food and shelter, even if that means having less food and shelter for their own species. Posthumanist dream writing can generate new ways of seeing the human as one of many unranked species in a hospitable world of co-subjectivity.
In the productive space between the writer, the text, and the reader, an opportunity exists to feel, newly, the possibility of emancipated relations between humans and other animal species. In the texts I discuss here, refusals of human mastery open a space for the gift of care, unconstrained by gender or species or obligation. Brontë, Carson and Acker make powerful efforts to unveil the potential of such lifeways. Brontë depicts Cathy’s awareness of her intra-actions with Heathcliff and the moor through affect. Responding to this affect, Carson’s speaker walks the moors in both her dreaming and awakened states, envisioning herself into a more inclusive way of being. Similarly inspired, Acker’s Kathy (Cathy) spends time in the darkness to learn other animal languages, and begins to see, that to be only human is a limit not an end. Animals in these works have their own characteristics, and some of these traits are shared across species. The intra-actions these authors depict between their human protagonists, other animals and the moor suggest alternative lifeways that make room for new forms of excellences between humans and other creatures.
Practical challenges come with such change. Embodied attentiveness activates the grace of non-hierarchical cross-species animal relations. These traces of responsive allure are present in the encounters between Brontë’s Cathy and the lapwings of the moor and in the intent invocation of Carson’s speaker as she walks into a new body that is an us, not an I. It is shocking, shattering, when the animal languages that are present in the early stages of Acker’s poem are trammelled by dense urban machinery. Urquhart’s Ann and Plath’s speaker also face hurdles as they intra-act with their habitats. Cut anew by the wind, Ann manages to change. Plath’s speaker pauses, then runs. The cinematic ‘I’ of other species, gazing from the works of Buñuel and Arnold, inspired by Brontë’s dream writing beyond anthropocentricity, reinforce new cognitions, further hosting audiences into different relational positions with other animals. These encounters are open to the ‘active capacity for response and change’ that Chris Cuomo evokes in her seductive concept of ‘dynamic charm’ (1998, 71–72). This processual flow, that can lead to a productive communicative grace, is as vital and elusive as a dreamy vision. Such caring co-affective allure has unfolded, is unfolding, and will continue to unfold, with and without the human species.
Human lifeways most likely to emerge from attending to this co-affective hospitality will be oriented towards earthly generation, not degeneration. Attending to the mutuality between the self and other phenomena through intra-active diffractions requires a respectful and trusting process of invocation. This sense-making shrinks from damage, even when it involves painful stretches. Responding to dream written posthumanist texts is an exercise that prepares the body for change. The alterity of such discursive encounters shifts the rhythm of human lifeways through the push of their affect. The body (as both reader and creature) responds. In this response, new relational connections might be created, if humans recognise, in this shift, that they are no more exceptional than other animals.
The assemblage of posthumanist dream writing I describe here occurs in a shared grace of trusting respectful kindness that is oriented to caring for the world beyond the self. This direction offers a shared potential for devoted readers and dream writers to work positively with their shared and wounded earthly home. Posthumanist dream writing, that is open to the sentience of all animals, has the potential to reorient human understandings towards new cross-species relations marked by hospitable attention. Such understandings lead to the more generative lifeways needed to decrease human resource use and increase human connections with the rest of the world.
Such changes are nothing short of urgent. The ecolect of the world now speaks with wilder fires, more extensive floods and longer droughts. Humans able to listen are beginning to account for the externalities that come with the cost of ignoring the needs of earth others, and can see that the people of their species, together with people of other species, are facing extinction as the liveability of their habitats are compromised. Despite the influential work of the Brundtland Commission in 1987, the Kyoto Protocol implemented ten years later, and the Paris Agreement, declared effective in 2016, these global efforts at policy are flawed by the assumption that the world is best governed by humans looking after the world for humans. This is beginning to change. Some chimpanzees have legal personhood through the efforts of the United States Nonhuman Rights Project, In New Zealand rivers now have rights, and Bolivia’s Law of the Rights of Mother Earth is significant, despite the questionable gendering of this legislation. Formulating and implementing posthumanist policies is not easy, but without efforts such as these, it is likely equality both within and beyond the human species will remain as distant as it ever has been.
Arguments for inclusive citizenship, as outlined by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, do important work to further efforts to make space for multispecies representation in decisions that impact on habitat and freedom. There is no doubt that humans need to adopt a ‘richer and more relational set of moral concepts’ (2011, 11). It is not easy, however, to imagine what this more ‘relational theory of justice’ might look like (32). For example, I am trying to ‘strengthen my affinity’ with snakes but progress is slow (2017, 223). Just as I am trying to step aside to make room for all the creatures that share my habitat, it makes sense for my species more generally to step aside and make space for other species to define their terms without paternalistic control. As I approach this thinking in my own life, I remember, with Derrida, that at times I am sovereign, above the law, and at times I am a beast, under the law, and at times lawlessness seems exactly what is needed.
To enact different codes of citizenship, or even to undo what citizenship means, involves acknowledging and responding to the universal rights of all species. Other species do not hide their requirements from humans. Rather, humans look away, blocking their ears and their hearts to this backchat. To turn away from other creatures is counter to human sense, for all but the most privileged humans in this world. One effective way to be newly human, amongst other species, might be to ‘enact a space of peace’ as Dinesh Wadiwel suggests (2015, 276). Oppression can only lift with systemic change at the structural point of ideological formation and maintenance. Understanding this reality brings marginalised humans into solidarity with other species who are resisting the constraints that harm them.
Emerging applications of rights to extended citizenship show the practical advantages of posthumanist inclusivity, in the race to halt the exponential extinction rates caused by habitat damage. I take the baton, encouraged by multispecies crossings that are helping creatures move from one terrain to another without having to cross highways thrashing with killer-machinery. I appreciate that multispecies building design is making room for nesting birds and doing away with deadly reflective window panes. I am trying to let the snakes and mice that share my habitations work things out themselves, without murderous interventions, and am treading more heavily on our shared parts of the earth so they may also take me into account as a co-inhabitant rather than a threat.
Posthumanist inclusivity requires these kinds of reorientations as humans do away with the anthropo-theological separations between humans and other animals. Pick makes the point that contemporary philosophical traditions involve a necessary and inevitable breaking down of the boundaries between animal species, pointing particularly to ‘biopolitics and poststructuralist ethics’ as ways of thinking that ‘have disrupted our anthropocentric view of human and nonhuman life’ (2012, 70). The works I read here gesture towards what such responses might look like, once human thinking becomes posthumanist. It is not enough to loosen the humanist foundations that put humans first at the cost of all other creatures. To achieve the more just and kind world the early humanists envisaged, respect and trust in the personhood of all animal species is required.
Posthumanist dream writing turns such possibilities in this generative direction, offering a practical contribution to the necessary sharing of the world’s resources by showing what it is to leave human centrality behind. Brontë’s Cathy, and the speakers in Carson’s and Acker’s poems, can help readers better understand the matter that seems beyond the human self is, in fact, part of that self. Such understandings make nonsense of limiting ideas of ‘our’ country and ‘our’ home. The world becomes more than a diminishing resource when humans are understood as part of, rather than distinct from, other intra-acting species, equally dependent on the health of shared earth, water and air.
The posthumanist ontology I suggest here is not regressively animistic. Such dismissals are part of the reductionist rationality that sees stasis in the song lines of Australia’s first peoples, instead of attending to the reality that they sing of constantly evolving relations between humans and the rest of Country. This is poignantly described in Alexis Wright’s speculative fiction, The Swan Book. In Wright’s powerful depiction of black swans’ responses to human induced climate change, the narrator reminds readers that these creatures, like all others, ‘had Law too’ (2013, 67). In this multispecies law-full world, song lines are not contained to human understandings. Humans and other species dream together and apart, shaping the laws that allow species co-existence without the inequities caused by sovereigns, beasts and outlaws.
Creative texts, as demonstrated in the responses to Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, can orient readers towards the possibilities suggested through Wright’s story-telling. Literary works do not constitute a posthumanist practice in and of themselves, and they do face the boundary maintenance of the signifier, where the text can only call to a reader or spectator through the limits of congruence. However, posthumanist dream writing forms part of a larger project of unframing the unjust relations between humans and other animal species so they may be reconstituted into something new. The spaces for change negotiated by Brontë’s novel and its afterings do not reach beyond human signification, but they do, like a dream, perform the insurgent suggestion that nonhuman languages can be felt (if not be fully understood) by humans. Just as Brontë’s departure from Wordsworth was a significant step for her time, the textual responses considered here represent important shifts towards an openness to the concerns of all species. Such perspectives leave room for more radical responses to the damages wrought upon the earth, damages largely caused by the disrespecting untrusting actions of humans.
I am not suggesting systemic change can or will happen immediately through the act of writing and reading. Such a shift will take time and sustained attention. However, with Carson’s speaker and Urquhart’s Ann, readers might learn to open to the blade of the seasons; with Acker’s Kathy (Cathy), readers might listen, in the dark, to the languages of other animals. The co-affective flow of wind and water might pass from these works, and those of Bush, Buñuel and Arnold, into the co-affective memory traces of reader and viewers of these works, helping these humans pay more sustained attention to how their lifeways help or hinder these flows. Movements generated through textual production and consumption cannot be dictated or predicted, but even the most minor gesture will have an impact.
The material shifts required to begin, maintain and grow an awareness of the sentiences and cognitions of nonhuman animals depend upon the individual grace of those creatures who intra-act with humans. Such communications can never be signified in ways humans can fully understand. All the same, it may be possible to devotedly read oneself into lifeways that are increasingly emplaced so that productive dynamic multispecies intra-actions can have greater affect. As I listen to the backchat of these people, in the texts I read here, and in the other parts of the life that I lead, surprising encounters occur, often, that are specific to different times and places and bodies. Each time my sensing body responds through my skin, and sometimes, so do my words.
6.2 Dream-Writing into the to-Come
The allure of posthumanist dream writing has me paying others greater attention. The lyrical emplacement of these works, the very smell and feel of the respective moors in these texts, filled as they are with all kinds of animals, my species included, has reshaped my understanding of the world that surrounds me and is part of me. As I spend time with these textual openings towards animal sentiences and cognitions, modes of being that I partially recognise with unsure regard, my lifeways shift, unsettled by unexpected affect. I wake from these texts, pondering on the gift of such dreams.
I remain aware that that I am bound to anthropo-theological language and culture. Art, says Rancière, like politics, might be able to reconfigure the distribution of activity, but the ability to do so is historicized, always a part of, not apart from context, ‘an autonomous thing, between the idea of the artist and the sensation or comprehension’ of the reader or viewer (2004, 14). My work does not aim to resolve this difficulty. I reveal my methodology with the vulnerability of the other thinkers, of all species, who I have invoked in my work. I am acutely aware that the words that I use are part of the power wrought by the He-Bible Hélène Cixous describes, even as I seek other ways of writing and understanding that ‘takes life and language by the roots’ (1993, 56). I dream of the provision of a new code, a We-Bible that refuses exclusions in the way that Brontë’s Cathy dreamt herself into an existence outside heaven and hell, neither ascending nor descending, but rather, living differently, working with the scent of heather, along with other creatures, unbinding He-Bible fixations and fictions in her sleep.
There is no end point for the shift in myself that ‘I’ desire. Such a signpost would hold me to the teleology that marks anthropo-theological thinking. Instead, I read these textual responses as repeating, with an interfering difference, the refusal Brontë’s Cathy enacts when faced with the limits in Father God thinking. She turns from the rewarding heaven and punishing hell of the He-Bible not for what it is, but for all that its judgement excludes. Less a destination than a departure, posthumanist dream writing moves on from the assumption that humans signify the beginning and the end of the thinking world.
As I conclude in the confines of the signifier, I fumble for a grace beyond my human self, in the space between the creative act and its reception. It is one thing for creative practices to destabilise the boundaries of human perspectives, but my hope is that posthumanist dream writing might push these limits askew, allowing difference to flourish. My work too, is just another minor gesture, another of the ‘ongoing reconfigurings of the world’ that Barad speaks to in her research (2008, 135). Nothing is fixed, all is unfolding. Creative posthumanist inclusion is earthly, heavenly, a spacetimemattering full of unexpected depths and diffractions that are cyclic, repeated, with difference, full of senses that make nonsense of morbid linearity, moving with the life of Rosi Braidotti’s ‘zoe-egalitarian-turn’ (2013, 71). Compared to this composting natalistic generation, the obsessive maintenance of human supremacy feels like rigor mortis.
I rest, then, in the moor love that resounds from Brontë’s raw core, Carson’s lyricism and Acker’s suggestive language, respecting and trusting the alluring other that is part of dream writing’s body of creaturely darkness. It is an uneasy rest. I am aware of the backsliding risks outlined in Acker’s “Obsession”. These dream-written works have pushed my understanding of what it is to be animal to new depths and heights and breadths, but once I move, the situation that is me will change my configurations. It is uncomfortable, allowing for modes of listening and speaking beyond notions of human exclusivity, and perhaps I might move in a direction that is stultifying. Like Acker’s Heathcliff, I must be ready to stand in my composting self, not putting human regard or disregard before other responses that impact upon me. And I must continue to change, appreciating that each new stretch brings new levels of discomfort.
As I consider what it means for me to be human, the idea of a Father God-given right to master all other species seems like a factory reinforced with rivets so rusted-in, so deeply corroded, that they may infect my wounded efforts to bring them undone. Only a subversive entrainer, holding a We-Bible full of ghosts, has any chance of shifting the workings of the factory in which I read and write. I am deeply grateful for these hypnogogic haunted texts that precede me and travel on without me, and at the same time ask me to respond, to feel the affect of text, place and potential offered through the diffracted selfhood that surrounds me. I am devoted to these readings, quietened into reverence, inspired by Brontë’s Cathy’s allowances for her moor-co-inhabitants to make their impressions upon her re-membering body. The moor, a place of return as well as a place to-come, haunts her dreams and responses. She acts upon its meanings. Like a responsive prayer, Carson’s poem engages productively with Brontë’s depiction of the intra-actions between Cathy and this actant moor, continuing Brontë’s refusal to privilege humanity over other species through her speaker’s emplaced and painful movement towards the darkness of an unknowable becoming body that is partly her own. Together, Carson’s poem and Brontë’s Wuthering Heights illustrate Cixous’ ‘body-to-body journey’ of dream writing that is both questingly dreamy and incisively awake (1993, 65). As I read Carson’s Canadian moor, that speaks through Brontë’s Yorkshire moor, my responses to the animals that are of me and beyond me change. I shift in the company of such texts, haunted as they are with other texts and other places that have attracted my votary attention. They awaken me and move me to different relations with the world I inhabit. Carson’s writing particularly grounds me in an attuned materiality that expands my responses to the creatures, people all, with whom I intra-act. Dream writing offers me a form of transportation that demands my bodily involvement. As in a dream, I read, entrained and transducted, carried by the drift of texts that move me in unexpected posthumanist directions.
I am not always willing to travel towards such displacement, just as not all textual producers are interested in opening new literary territories. However, when I am prepared to move, with other writers and readers, arrival is anything but the point. As Carson’s speaker shows, dream writing frees both writers and readers to leave the self for an unknown place that is of them, and of a future-to-come. Cixous understands that this readerly readiness is difficult. ‘One must walk as far as the night. One’s own night. Walking through the self toward the dark’ (1993, 65). Stepping out into the dark with Carson’s speaker, sitting in the dark with Acker’s speaker, purring around the dark dreams of Cixous, Thea and Alethea, finding sustenance in such shadowed company, I take my steps, heading towards a grace that at best I can characterise as Luce Irigaray’s unknowable abyss. Moving to that which cannot be known, even as (or because) it terrifies me, is the challenge I face when thinking through posthumanist dream writing. I seek the courage of Brontë’s Cathy, her openness that echoes through the afterings considered here. I accept this assembled invitation to shrug off my enclosure of individuality, even though this scares me out of the senses that I know.
My response, these very words, are a rising banshee scream that trembles towards natalistic promise. My spectating self opens to individuations that emerge through the space created by these productive texts. I am both at, and a quantum ‘threshold’, to cite Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ‘a door, a becoming between two multiplicities’ (1988, 275). This is an indeterminate threshold that allows my multiplicities to stretch and seek with all the antennae I think of as my body. Barad reminds me my apparatus is shaped by the afterings I have read here. They form with and apart from me, they swarm together and around me, then disassemble to create new lines of flight that are offered, again, to my next devoted reading of these mutable texts. Writing creates this fluid context, as Rancière explains, by kick-starting ‘new passions’ that allow for different balances and imbalances between what is thought and how the body is situated in that thinking (2011, 72). Posthumanist dream writing unframes my body’s relation to the world, it knocks on the window of my readerly life, asking to be let in, rather than wrenching me open with manly violence. The more I open myself to the questions put forward by such texts, the more I see the possibilities offered by respecting and trusting the allure of species other than my own.
I pause. I wonder. Dreaming of moving in posthumanist directions outside my own significations is, as Irigaray points out, as easy and as difficult as life. Yet my shifting body need not end at the limits of what I know about being human. Animal grace enriches the psychoanalytic perspectives on borderspace affect offered by Bracha Ettinger, animal breath enlivens the philosophical liberations encouraged by Irigaray and Cixous, animal beingness creates the post-anthropocentric positionings of Donna Haraway and Braidotti, animal curiosity nudges Derrida’s questions about the gift I know as life, that includes death. It is in the company of these generous and hospitable thinkers that I read Brontë’s novel, my understandings resonating through the disruptive creative responses of Carson and Acker and the supporting interventions from Urquhart, Arnold, Buñuel and Bush, together with the helpful responses from Plath, Davies, Wyler and Kosminsky. These texts’ invocations are populated with ghosts that make me pause, and then move, with awed watchfulness, alert openness. I need these unexpected meetings as I set out upon unknown territories, refusing maps, for posthumanist movement is only possible when there is no limit to what might be thought. Re-assembling my readings I move with intensity towards a lifeway that generates more than me.
I must think my flesh differently, like Carson’s speaker, knowing I do not enter this unknowable abyss alone. It is difficult, perhaps impossible to define my direction, as I seek an always-searching posthumanist perspective, eschewing human-only language that plays deaf to the voices of animals without my physiognomy. I must stretch the constrictions of the He-Bible beyond a repudiating She-Bible into my own polyrhythmic forbidden We-Bible. To go into the abyss is as frightening as anything I can imagine, but, with respect and trust, I might make my approach in a spirit of graceful kindness, fostered by posthumanist dream writing, that fierce uncensored textual production that emerges from the hard knocks dealt out by the school of dreams that Cixous invites her readers to attend.
I look around, with a wonder that cannot be written or spoken. I feel, through a body that does not end at my skin. I stand, in my dressed-down self, as bare as Carson’s speaker, ready to travel into places my conscious self would never tread. My senses animal naked, I tune in to my co-affective body, so it may reach towards others of the species close to me that make up my dreamy self. In these assembling and dissembling well-worn bones, through the grace of texts enriched by the hospitality of all creatures, affected through the matrixial borderspace created by the literature that attracts my devotions, I trust that I will, with grace, dream along with other beings who are not in any way a them, but rather, the pulse of an us.
This posthumanist dream work, where language connects with the flesh of the world through attentive inclusive wonder, is only possible by becoming as fluid as discourse and breath, flowing into shared places with a strength beyond the self, created by care and kindness. Such is the allure of posthumanist dream writing. It helps me jam the reasonable cogs of Enlightenment, shed the skin of my Romantic imagination that maintains the limitations in my species, and drop the mask that plays not-me, so I might offer my composting and diffused self to the gathering abyssal We-Bible that holds more than humanist ideas of exclusion. Writing, dreaming, reading, I ready myself to drift, in and beyond my skin, waiting and listening, opening and forming with the allure of this co-affective world.