Healing words and the matter of our urban and rural moor

Abstract

It may be that writing country can shift readers towards more positive relationships with the matter that surrounds and embeds them, if an awareness of the sentience of country increases the porosity of the bodies that ‘religiously’ read such topographies. Two productive revisions of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights differently offer this kind of reading. The Canadian moors of Anne Carson’s prose poem, ‘The Glass Essay’ speak with the powerfully communicative Yorkshire moors of Wuthering Heights, through the affect of the other-than-human on their protagonists. Such dialogues liberate an always-becoming eco-divine of generative change. Kathy Acker’s ‘Obsession’ starts a whole new conversation in her transposition of Brontë’s moor to the crush of New York dreamscapes. As I consider the tension and the synergies between Acker’s urban wilderness and Carson and Brontë’s rural commons, I am becoming aware of the ethical risk in privileging matter of different kinds. Is it possible to write to the pulsating moor of urban environments in ways that approach the ecodivine and can this equally move readers to new ways of nurturing country? I approach this question in my novel The Dead Country and consider it directly in my poem, ‘Pulse Sating’.