Bronwyn Davies and Jane Speedy, the authors of “The Arts of Living in a More-than-human World” provide a meaningful paradigm to encounter and mobilise action in the Anthropocene. Their book affectively guides the reader through an emergent exploration of entangled encounters with/in more-than-human lives. Readers may discover and delve deeper into bringing new materialist concepts to life, to push at the edges of understanding. We are inspired to walk different pathways, be vulnerable and sympathetic, to pay attention to the unseen. To live differently by realising we are embedded and interwoven in the complexities of the world. Each chapter provides an invitational provocation to act and heal our damaged planet.
It is our first encounter. The book feels different. Intrigued, I intuitively flick through the pages. Interruptions, pauses, wonderings, connections. The images shimmer. Cutting-together-apart.
Spacetimemattering. Creational-relational ethics. Living-thinking-being-becoming. Al(l)ready in the middle. I feel connected. I am hopeful.
The ‘middle is a multi-directional event’ (p.1), a pertinent and unconventional beginning for this book. The reader is introduced to Bronwyn and Jane through encounters in motion. Memories of meeting, wondering about legacies, severed and created relational life forms, candidly documented through symbiotic creativity. Writing and images and relational conversations. Thinking-in-being, where the authors explore their response-ability, through words and arts, entwining the reader, within each chapter. Realising we are of rather than in the more-than-human world.
Bronwyn and Jane daringly practise new materialist philosophy. Thinking-creatively-theoretically-doing. They seamlessly demonstrate the artform of living otherwise, entangled in the more-than-human world. Their threads of (separate) lives weave together through spacetimematterings.
Connections through in-between stories including the Holly Oak and the Horse Chestnut. Reverberations are felt from opposite places on Earth, rejecting the notion of isolation and human ascension. Resistance to define, control, possess and identify. To be not that.
In their interwoven stories, Bronwyn and Jane expose their vulnerabilities. We become open to stop, listen and feel the vibrant matter of entanglements of their kinship, engaging in intra-species empathy. Experiencing and appreciating commonalities, understanding we are not alone. The simultaneity of stories provides encounters through and insights into thin places, deep mapping and hauntings. Jane demonstrates layered exploration of thin spaces. Translucent, special places to challenge the assumptions of space, time, matter, world. Jane deep maps her Gospel Lane wall through imagery and writing, informed by habitats and world evoked by traces of human and more-than-human. With a heightened sense, she taps into the residual haunting or place memory where the habitual presence remains in absence, discovering what is and isn’t obvious. Jane’s journey with her wall is embedded and integrated.
Bronwyn is deeply moved and is implicated in the spacetimemattering (or was she already there?) delving into her past in realising the present. Bronwyn and Jane’s vibrant encounters illustrate how lives, including the more-than-human, are ongoing, emergent, and relational. From the enfolding of mattering, possible becomings emerge. Wisdom is in the give and take of nature.
Extending the notion of learning from the past to cope with the future, Bronwyn and Jane take a turn to letter writing to encounter ecological memory. Their letters to trees are entanglements of generosity, mycorrhizal networks of care. Their knowing-in-being is impacted by the presence of ecological memory. Where embodied memories from the past, across multiple systems, are encountered to build adaptive capacity and resilience to inform the future. The co-existing memories are explored through unrelated discursive practices and art making. The movement in-between provides an opening to a new conceptual portal. Across thresholds, relational encounters provide extra-ordinary visibility and chance a flash of luminosity. They matter.
The authors are guided by a turn to creative-relational ethics. They hone response-ability for the world, through encounters with different life forms. Living-thinking-being-becoming. Where we are invited to escape entrapped versions of the world. Bronwyn and Jane seek out this creative-relational ethics, to live more vividly, threaded with and through the more-than-human world. Where pace is slowed and awareness deepens, to bring connectedness with others into being. To listen more.
Bronwyn frees herself from humans, in search of different pathways where she entangles with more-than-human as she dares to stray from the familiar. Meeting through shared spaces, human and non-human, co-emerge and trans-subjectively come to life. Enduring as durations of vibrations rather than as beings. Becoming with. Relinquishing boundaries and discursive habits of control. Jane also strays and wonders of dreams. Do the skies and oceans have dreams as we dream of them? To become one with the skies and oceans, Jane opens to alterity, other ways of being, through sympathy. Sympathy for others and for self. To pass into the interior of realities, capable of dreaming each other. Movement through and with, moments of haecceity, just-thisness. A space of freedom, to breathe, to not be afraid.
To overcome our resistance to change, Bronwyn engages with the concept of middle voice. The absence rather than presence of middle voice, entrenching binary thought through our desire for linear forms of reasoning. The middle voice is not found between binaries. It is a disruption of binaries. It is open, with multiple entries, to break free for the new to emerge. Jane playfully explores middle voice, interrupting with asides and making fissures and diffracting. An opportunity to pause. To listen with the asides, to the not-yet-known. To decentre as human by engaging in art, entangled and enfolded in space-time-matter, the continuous flow in-between. We realise self is of the world, in concert with other species. Opening to the in-between of self and other, we become absorbent and relational and creative. Emerging towards a process of healing.
To further interrupt usual ways of thinking, Jane and Bronwyn, wonder if trees and pathways remember us. What transformations are at play in their exploration? Remembering shifts from leaving traces to re-membering, joining and coming together. We are encouraged to stretch our thinking beyond the familiar, to minimise the human hurry. To turn to creative-relational ethics, valuing multi-layered stories, noticing connections and being curious of worlding. We share knowing-in-being.
Through sympathy and kindness, we experience the flow in-between. We are each, always, relational, complex, proximal and emergent. At one with each other, transcending boundaries.
Throughout each chapter, the authors nurture and guide the reader through concepts of new materialism, opening spaces. Through these spaces there is a call to action to engage with our damaged planet. To pick up our materials and document our thin places, vibrant connections, the spacetimematterings of the world. They contend it is in this worlding that ways of connecting appear, sensing kinship with ourselves and others. Not to become other but attune diffractively and vibrantly. Bronwyn and Jane invite us to join them in the artful repair of the planet through living in slow and vibrant ways. I encourage you to encounter the book. To embrace the opportunity to slow and open a portal to unseen, unfelt perspectives. Exploring the uncomfortable middle in motion. Listening.
Embedded and integrated. Taking action to connect, attune and affect. To heal. There is hope. Your journey to (e)merge awaits.
Amanda Peters is a PhD student at Deakin University. Her research focuses on realising STEM education policy in practice using arts-based methodologies. Amanda is a passionate secondary science teacher with biology, environmental education, and chemistry as her teaching methods. She has taught in secondary schools for over 20 years, holding a range of leadership positions. She currently enjoys sessional lecturing in a range of science education methods. Amanda supports science educators in her role as Vice President of the Science Teachers’ Association of Victoria.
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