Crushed in your memories,
bruised in your agonies,
I wonder how you transcend
melancholy into melodies!
In the eerie nights of solitude,
dazed in the fury wind,
drenched in the misty rain,
you might have dreamt of a winged life!
One day, you will trust your wings,
stand on your ground,
and burst out in your spirit,
to reach the limits of the sky,
and to chat with the stars.
Thank you for being with,
and teaching us;
We journey each other home,
as we are the intertwined interbeings!
Yes, for sure,
the woodpecker is a bio-mystical relationship
between the wood and its wounds! [1]
-Wood-Pecker
To start in the middle means to be entangled in dialogue with pluriform hermeneutic possibilities, destabilizing any forms of totalitarian interpretations. Perhaps it is a spiritual/ethical practice of “always beginning in the middle,”[2] as Deleuze puts it. This new categorical imperative of eco-ethics is letting our loves be like the wasp and orchid, without beginning and end, as continually in the middle, between things, interbeing, and intermezzo! Roland Faber explicates what it means to begin in the middle.
To begin in the middle always means to follow multiplicities in their deconstructive complexity within and without, to unsettle the boundaries and clear borders of forced identities, which are always imposed measures of the One with its power-installed abstractions of unification and division. To begin in the middle is an ethical category that activates us from the middle of the happening of multiplicities and asks us to always submerge into their middle and many folds of connectivity within and beyond, which always form under the skin of powers of unification and division and only come to life within, across and beyond the boundaries of power.[3]
To embody the liminal, we must transcend the elevated realms of unity and actively engage with the intricate dynamics within and between various elements. We must acknowledge the moments of connection between different entities and the artificial barriers that isolate them. Embracing the concept of being "in-between" requires us to adopt an intermezzo mindset, contrasting the rigid abstractions that perpetuate a sense of dominance over nature, culture, and ourselves. This mindset encourages us to embrace a more humble and nuanced perspective. To embody the liminal is to challenge the notion of fixed identity and instead embrace a multidimensional existence akin to a river's flowing nature or the rhizome's interconnectedness.
Nesting Theopoetic Imagination
This note begins with theopoetic attention to a recently composed poem displayed at the outset of this article. The poem, penned two years ago, recounts the poignant tale of two "wood-pecker" birds who tragically lost their nest during a tumultuous night of merciless storms and relentless rain. My loving wife, children, and I endeavored to offer solace and sustenance to these vulnerable young woodpecker fledglings, only to witness their untimely demise a few days later. This heartrending event served as a profound catalyst, igniting a theological contemplation on the fleeting existence of woodpeckers, symbolic of Christ's ultimate sacrifice on the cross, unifying the concepts of wounds and wood. The haunting verses of the poem compelled me to reevaluate the woodpecker as a hermeneutical key enabling a deeper exploration of the divine "wood-pecker" existence embodied in Jesus Christ, who hung on a tree (Acts 5:20), suspended between the realms of heaven and earth. Thus, it unveils the divine intercarnational relationship with the entirety of the world (John 3:16). It is worth noting that the historical fact of Jesus, as a skilled carpenter working with wood, further inspired me to establish this extraordinary connection between Jesus and the woodpecker, unveiling a profound and intricate bond.
A genuine neighborliness with the more-than-human materiality will ignite in us the realization that we are inter beings, not independent beings.[4] This leads us back to nature itself. We need to find ourselves in a continuum with nature. Anyway, that sad little incident of the death of two woodpecker nestlings and the agony that brought us made me to realize that there are deep ontological roots of sharing in our very existence, which we deliberately forget in the fake hustle and bustle of life's struggle. I tried to trace an ornitheological connection between the wood, wood-pecker, wound, Christ, marginality, and liminality in the light of this event.
Wood-pecker & Subalternity
The woodpecker's existence between heaven and earth exemplifies the "liminal" life. When we translate the symbol of the "wood-pecker" as an embodiment of liminal life and interpretive device, it is better to use the hyphen in between "wood-pecker." The hyphen in the middle is a careful record of the life of critical liminality. The experiences of in-between / betwixt problematize simultaneously the social condition of being inside and outside. Such stumbling experiences mark the lives of the marginalized. The subaltern lived experiences of Dalit people in India punctuate a unique liminal location of “victim-insider (Dasyus ) and untouchable-outsider(Asprsyas )” and “visibility (prathyaksha ) and invisibility( aprathyaksha ). This existential dilemma of the “inbetweenness” of the subaltern, which I name as the “critical liminalities” referring to both avowal and disavowal of Dalit body in a caste stigmatized sociality. Along with the Critical liminalities, there is an array of under-explored and unattended Dalit subjective experiences like body-bereft ( body as debt, not as credit experience, a kind of epidermalization linguistic debt ( d[y]s-ability to engage effectively in the political negotiations), and other contextual ambiguities arising out of local social contracts. The experience of subaltern critical liminality conjures up a new mode of knowing, being, and acting in the world. This new approach is essential for addressing subaltern histories marked by disruption, displacement, and irrecoverable loss.
Ornitheological Entanglements
An ornitheological quest[5] for connecting Jesus Christ and the woodpecker inspired me to consider the ecotheopoetic method as a suitable assemblage paradigm, which combines eco-consciousness, poetics, and theology, traversing the disciplinary borders intentionally.This assemblage thinking that interconnects the metaphors woodpecker, Christ, wood, and wounds, inspired by ornitheology, helps us to re-theorize the state of exception of the people at the margin. Therefore, theopoetic Christ is reimagined here as an active interlocutor between the subalternity, and ecosensibility of the people at the fringes. In this radical imagination, critical liminality is construed as the new centrality, which calls us for a new planetary ethics. It is a subversively paradoxical planetary wisdom, marked by its rhizomatic nature, already practiced by many indigenous communities.
( An ungroomed excerpt from my recent article for the upcoming Earth Volume)
[1] Baiju Markose, The Cross and The Peacock, (Delhi: ISPCK, 2021), 20.
[2] Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. (London: Bloomsbury Revelations, 2013),17.
[3] Roland Faber and Jeremy Fackenthal, Theopoetic Folds: Philosophizing Multifariousness ( New York: Fordham University Press, 2013),232.
[4] Thich Nath Hanh, Call Me by My True Names ( Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1999)154.
[5] Ornitheology is a term coined by the great theologian and birder John Stott in his book The Birds, Our Teachers. Ornitheological field of research centers around the idea that the birds have something to say about truth, beauty, and a crazy-creative God. https://www.ornitheology.com/post/ornitheology_explained
