D IANNE C HISHOLM

The Art of Ecological Thinking:

Literary Ecology

Introduction: Ecological Thinking and/as Art

When Canadian philosopher Lorraine Code proposes an “alterna-
tive epistemology” for a world plagued by what she calls “epistemol-
ogies of mastery,” she has “ecological thinking” in mind:

Ecological thinking points toward ways of developing a

conceptual framework for a theory of knowledge—an
epistemology—sensitive to human and historical–
geographical diversity and well equipped to interrogate
and unsettle the instrumental rationality, abstract indi-
vidualism, reductionism, and exploitation of people
and places that the epistemologies of mastery have
helped to legitimate. (21)

Drawing on ecological science and ecologically oriented philosophy,

Code abstracts a conceptual model for reconfiguring thinking itself.
In the first place, she draws on Gilles Deleuze who in turn draws on
Spinoza to invent a post-Cartesian subject, a subject at once corpo-
real, animal, and ethical, and capable of affecting and being affected
by other animal bodies with which it enters into mutually empower-
ing alliances and combinations. In Deleuze's ethology (the study of
ethics combined with the study of animal behavior), Code finds “the
commitment implicit in ecological thinking to imagining, crafting,
articulating, working to enact principles of ideal cohabitation” (28).1
She develops this etho-ecological “commitment” by widening her
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 18.3 (Summer 2011)
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570 I S L E

conceptual framework to include Deleuze and Guattari's idea of

“milieu”2 in conjunction with Pierre Bourdieu's idea of habitus,3 and
by outlining how we might cultivate an alternative mental habitus for
becoming ecologically minded instead of being epistemologically
regimented (28–29). To model the critical and creative habits of eco-
logical thinking that she would have us cultivate, Code turns to
Rachel Carson's environmentalist classic Silent Spring. Her analysis
shows how Carson's “subversive and transformative” prose instructs
readers to regard themselves less as DDT-armed pest-combatants
than as affected and affecting cohabitants of overlapping human and
nonhuman milieus.
Like Code, I envision a future where ecological thinking becomes
not just an “alternative epistemology” but a reconfiguration of episte-
mology altogether (45), and I find in Deleuze concepts and frame-
works for rethinking ecology philosophically. I laud Code's choice of
Silent Spring as an exemplary articulation of ecological thinking. But
Code underscores Carson's subversion and transformation of main-
stream science and the scientific implications for epistemic modeling,
whereas I seek an exemplary artistic mobilization of ecological
thinking—if not in Carson's writing, then elsewhere. For Code, the
shift to ecology literally “looks to state of the art ecological science,”
while practicing ecology metaphorically in a way that “draws the
conclusions of situated inquiries together, maps their interrelations
… from a commitment to generating a creatively interrogative, insti-
tuting social imaginary to denaturalize the instituted imaginary of
mastery” (51). Code reduces the literary component of Carson's
ecology to “bioregional narrative,” that is, to a mode and genre of sci-
entific writing that artfully critiques scientific doxa while demonstrat-
ing superior scientific rigor and responsibility (59). Such artfulness
adheres to the science of ecological thinking and does not constitute
an art of ecological thinking, as such. While I admire Code's explica-
tion of Carson's text as a maverick or minor articulation of science
with which to model an alternative epistemology, I wonder what dif-
ferent ecological thinking might be constituted by art.
This essay explores the proposition that there is an art of ecologi-
cal thinking which is distinct from ecological science. Science may
recognize ecology as a discipline but it does not therefore follow that
ecological thinking is properly scientific. Inasmuch as literature
thinks and that it thinks ecology, ecology may be thought as a mode
of literature and as literary ecology. Moreover, literary ecology is a
literal form of ecological thinking, and not just a metaphorical or
rhetorical elaboration of scientific ecology. Art and philosophy create
and enact ecological thinking, albeit with forms and methods specific
 The Art of Ecological Thinking 571

to art and philosophy, just as science creates and enacts ecological

thinking with forms and methods specific to science.
I base my argument, in part, on the premise put forward by
Deleuze, in collaboration with Félix Guattari, that art and science are
distinct forms of thinking. Art, science, and philosophy, they venture,
make different sense of chaos. Each form of thinking critiques doxa
that stifles creative thinking, and welcomes a degree of chaos to
unsettle opinion and open new horizons of thought. Thus, art is one
of the three “Chaoids” (What Is Philosophy? 208).4 Art makes sense of
chaos by thinking in “sensations” and “figures,” whereas science
thinks in “functions” and philosophy in “concepts,” and aesthetic
sense emerges on a “plane of composition” instead of a scientific
“plane of reference” or a philosophical “plane of immanence” (216).
For Deleuze and Guattari, the primary activity of philosophy is to
create new philosophy which entails thinking non-philosophically
(i.e., against disciplinary constraints) and outside philosophy with art
and science.5 Their own philosophy abstracts concepts from myriad
sources in art and science to evolve their thinking. The
extra-philosophical example functions as a philosophical concept in
the making: it does not illustrate or translate a philosophical idea;
rather, it constitutes new philosophical thinking through a process of
conceptual abstraction. Deleuze and Guattari use examples to enact
“transversality”—a making-philosophy across disciplines in an evolu-
tionary symbiosis of thought.
Code looks outside philosophy to Carson's ecological science to
abstract its ecological thinking for a new epistemology. Conversely, I
look outside literary criticism to philosophy, and to Deleuze's philos-
ophy in particular, to abstract a conceptual framework for a new way
of reading environmental literature. To model my approach, I seek an
exemplary articulation of literary ecology, where ecological science
and ideas are matters of literary art and where literary art does not
merely embellish science with humor, wit, and humanity or recast
scientific discourse in satirical or parodying rhetoric but constitutes a
substantially different form of ecological thinking. Like Code, I bring
Deleuze's ethology and milieu into my selection and analysis of a
model text, though I also bring other Deleuzian concepts into play
such as that of art itself. My purpose is not to illustrate Deleuze's phi-
losophy but to read between Deleuze's philosophy and literary
ecology to illuminate the art of ecological thinking.
Literary ecology poses many exemplary possibilities for illuminat-
ing the art of ecological thinking, but what I want to showcase is The
Last Cheater's Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest by
acclaimed artist-naturalist Ellen Meloy. 6 My reasons for selecting this
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text are several, the most prominent being the fortuitous and sugges-
tive interconnectedness between Meloy's artistic treatment of terres-
trial chaos and Deleuze and Guattari's geophilosophical concept of
“chaosmos” as elaborated in What Is Philosophy?, A Thousand Plateaus,
The Three Ecologies, and Chaosmosis. A didactic reason for choosing
Meloy's text is that, like Carson's Silent Spring, it targets ecocidal
State-sanctioned science for radical rethinking but, unlike Carson's
text, it deploys affect and sensation in expressive refrains to enact a
transvaluation of values. The difference is instructive. In Carson's
opening “Fable,” a beautiful wood in the American heartland
becomes puzzlingly desertified, whereas in Meloy's “Prologue,” a
beautiful homeland in the American desert becomes uncannily disaf-
fecting. Carson's “Fable” alerts patriots who cherish the former
version of their country to nostalgic attention, and to scourge with
her the source that so undermines it. In chapters to follow, Carson
piques her readers' desire to know with a suspenseful unfolding of
cross-related environmental maladies caused by pesticide use,
together with an incremental divulging of ecologically associated
facts. Readers embark on a pragmatic, hermeneutic trajectory from
“what happened here?” to “what is to be done?” with a willingness
to follow her knowledgeable lead. Meloy likewise prompts readers to
ask “what happened here?” and to follow her interrogation of what
derails her sense of homeland. But instead of solving with knowl-
edge, she treats with affect. More precisely, she treats ecological
upheaval as inexplicably affective, not as positive, measurable,
factual, and fixable. Affect is key to Meloy's art of composing a vision
of what is otherwise imperceptible and unthinkable.
It is not the not knowing of what has happened to this
much-loved, familiar place that so troubles Meloy but the inability to
feel. A disaffection with place unnerves this avowed desert lover ever
more intensely as she gains knowledge of the desert's atomic history.
Carson absents herself from the scene of investigation to present her
case of ecocide with scrupulous objectivity, whereas Meloy projects
herself into the landscape as a subject of discomposure whose brain
cannot synthesize the incongruencies of geography (Meloy 100, 212). For
example, where the State sees the sense of zoning a wildlife refuge in
a missile range and presents for public sanction what it thinks to be a
rationally balanced military-managed environment, she sees the eco-
logical illogic of “shrapnel in the greasewood, antelope in the WITs
[Warhead Impact Targets], toads above the plutonium” (50) with psy-
chotic irony. Meloy's subjective narratives of crossing and re-crossing
this landscape expose us hyperbolically to the State's “insensate logic
of preserving the world by devising the tool with which to destroy
 The Art of Ecological Thinking 573

it” (76). Lest we mistake her disease for encephalitis, she declares that
“my derailment was not neurological but aesthetic” (5). Her discom-
posed subject evokes the desertion of sense and sensation that over-
comes sensibility when the desert's extreme beauty radiates with the
violence of a nuclear landscape. Instead of probing the pesticidal
landscape for scientific understanding, she mines the nuclear land-
scape for a sensible vision of the “Psychozoic Age” that surfaces
erratically on geological deep time (69).

Geophilosophy and Literary Ecology, or Deleuze/Guattari

and Ellen Meloy: Ecocritical Connections
If Deleuze's “ethology” and “milieu” suggest to Code the concep-
tual basis for transforming epistemic regime into ecological habitus,
what might Deleuze and Guattari's overtly earth-oriented “geophilo-
sophy” suggest to ecocriticism? Geophilosophy calls for a collaboration
of art and philosophy to replace traditional, progressivist, and idealist
“European” thinking with a thinking of the earth, territory, and geog-
raphy. What felicitous connections might ecocriticism make between
such a philosophy and the art of literary ecology? This is not to
imply that ecocriticism apply geophilosophy to its reading of literary
ecology as if geophilosophy were an interpretative method. Thinking
with Deleuze and Guattari, I propose, entails reading between geophi-
losophy and literary ecology in a creative process of elaborating the
ecological thinking immanent to both.
Then again, why should ecocriticism consider geophilosophy
beyond considerations of geography which it has already made? Let
me explain. Geophilosophy abstracts an idea of geography from its
specialized disciplinary discourse and methods to reorient the ontol-
ogy of thinking in an earthly direction. More precisely, to spur the
creative evolution of philosophy as a species of mutant thinking,
Deleuze and Guattari bring philosophy down to earth from its airy
heights in metaphysical idealism to undergo an ontological sea
change. They abstract, assemble, and rethink concepts from sources
in life- and earth-sciences, including geology, biology, physics, as well
Spinoza's ethology and Gregory Bateson's ecology of mind. Their
express intent is to align philosophy with “geography,” broadly con-
ceived as a thinking immanent to the dynamics of earth and territory
in place of “history,” broadly conceived as an exhausted onto-
theology of progress. In place of empires of transcendental idealism
and their top-down administering of divine rule and civilized order
over terrestrial chaos, Deleuze and Guattari construct a conceptual
“plane of immanence” that, like/with nature, weaves chaos and
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cosmos together across horizons of germinal thought. For ecocriti-

cism, such an earth-turn implies a breakthrough into new fields of
inquiry well beyond the disciplinary boundaries of geography.7
To put it another way, Deleuze and Guattari compose an ontologi-
cal ecosystem of generative concepts that are immanent to the system,
a system that neither reproduces nor endorses the instrumental,
imperial, or progressivist ideologies to which modern science has
been harnessed and assimilated. Their magnum opus A Thousand
Plateaus constructs a most elaborate plane of immanence, using philo-
sophical artistry to link and map different “plateaus” of germinal
thought. It is, as they say, a “rhizome book” of growing and inter-
weaving concepts that spread their thinking in new directions and
dimensions without laying down roots just as plant rhizomes gener-
ate and evolve symbiotic alliances across ever decomposing ground.
Thinking with A Thousand Plateaus foregrounds the composition of
ecological thinking in literary ecology.
My quest for felicitous connections between literary ecology and
geophilosophy may have the singular aim of forming a new approach
to ecocriticism. But its transdisciplinary character is neither precious
nor unique. Deleuze scholarship has always been disposed to making
connections between Deleuze's philosophy and an infinite array of
disciplinary subjects (e.g., Deleuze and literature, Deleuze and art,
Deleuze and politics, Deleuze and space, and so on).8 More to the
point, the past few years have seen a bourgeoning movement in the
scholarly making of new connections between Deleuze and Guattari
and ecology, both within and beyond Deleuze studies, culminating in
the publication of two essay collections on precisely that conjunction
(Herzogenrath; Chisholm). To my mind, thinking with Deleuze and
Guattari does not merely supplement ecocritical practice. Rather, it
helps conceptualize the connection between literature and ecology in
the first place and thus constitutes new practice. My reasoning is not
circular but instigative: literary ecology becomes what it might be
when read with philosophical concepts that show the way.
Reading literary ecology with Deleuze and Guattari also shows a
way out of a theoretical conundrum that has been riddling ecocriti-
cism for some time. Since publication in 1996 of Cheryll Glotfelty and
Harold Fromm's Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, the
attempt by ecocritics to theorize the concept and practice of literary
ecology/ecocriticism has polarized into tendencies to valorize either
the literary or the scientific “side” of the conjunction between litera-
ture and ecology. (The two terms “literary ecology” and “ecocriti-
cism” are often used interchangeably, whereas I use “literary
ecology” to signify literary articulations of ecological thinking and
 The Art of Ecological Thinking 575

“ecocriticism” to signify the study of literary ecology). One tendency

assumes that literary ecology is best understood as the rhetorical and/
or discursive analysis of any literature that recasts ecological science
in literary rhetoric (ironic, parodic, satiric, or dialogical) as a strategy
of cultural provocation (Garrard 1–15). In this case, ecological science
supplies the thinking or knowledge that literature reiterates with
varying and implicit critical emphasis which the ecocritic then makes
explicit. A counter tendency assumes that literary ecology/ecocriti-
cism is the study of the aesthetic properties of nature-oriented litera-
ture, the fundamental task of the critic being to abstract for formal
and critical analyses a specifically literary taxonomy of modes and
functions (Murphy 1–12). In this case, literary formalism and aes-
thetics take precedence over scientific content and knowledge as the
focus of inquiry.
Counter to both of these tendencies is a less pronounced move by
ecocritics to promote a generalized “ecological literacy” by integrating
cutting-edge “green” scholarship in environmental and ecological
science, economics, politics, linguistics, and philosophy. But the most
systematic lead in this direction omits literature from its compendium
of sources (Orr). A related and, to my mind, more convincing step in
this “integrative” direction has been spearheaded by ethnobiologist
Gary Paul Nabhan who advocates the cross-pollination of science and
poetry with fertile results for ecological thinking and environmental
activism. Nabhan, like Deleuze and Guattari, stresses the differences
between art and science that, when cross-pollinated, create new and
different ecological sense. He stresses not the merging of art and
science nor the mere translation of science into art (and vice versa)
but the difference in ecological thinking that art makes and with
which it complements the thinking of ecological science (and vice
versa).9 I focus on the difference that art makes in ecological thinking
not to exclude the consideration of science in particular works of liter-
ary ecology but to consider a different cross-pollination—that
between art and geophilosophy—for the purpose of theorizing the
concept and practice of literary ecology, and to thereby frame a new
ecocritical approach to environmental literature.
How do art and philosophy think ecology without deferring to
scientific authority in this science-dominated world? How do art and
philosophy incorporate and rearticulate scientific knowledge in their
collaborative rethinking of ecology? How do they challenge instru-
mental science whose mandate is to satisfy projected outcomes set by
the State and the profiteering expediencies of political economy?
What new interrogation and composition of ecological matters can
art and philosophy launch outside the disciplinary frameworks and
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utilitarian outcomes established by scientific technocracy? These are

some of the questions that a cross-pollination of art and philosophy
might prompt the ecocritic to pursue in her reading of literary
ecology. Many of these questions have already been posed by literary
ecologist Ellen Meloy, who, while plotting her interrogation and
indoctrination in nuclear physics and atomic history, struggles to
make sense of their deployment at ground zero—a ground zero that
also happens to lie in intense proximity to her homeland/heartland in
the desert southwest.
The Last Cheater's Waltz expresses profound disaffection with a
beloved desert landscape that does not make sense even as its narra-
tive persona—a naturalist—acquires “ecological literacy” (Meloy 188)
and strives to come to terms with State science. Meloy's landscapes
deploy a figurative logic of sense and sensation that eludes science
but invokes Deleuze and Guattari's conceptual vocabulary. Even a
surface glance at Meloy's book alerts readers to writerly concerns
with such geophilosophical themes as “earth” and “territory.” The
titular phrase “The Last Cheater's Waltz,” for example, alludes to the
title and refrain of an eponymous and popular country and western
tune. Meloy's “Prologue” figures the desert southwest as (un)becom-
ing home territory and as atomic history's (un)earthly geography.
Meloy narrates her waltz across this geography in repetitive and self-
reflective attempts to map artistically the affective vectors that so dis-
consolately repel and attract her. She pays overt attention to how dif-
ferent species invade and/or adapt to the landscape in compositions
of less than ideal but ever-evolving cohabitation. Even more overtly,
she dramatizes her interrogation of the wisdom of zoning wilderness
ecologies within military ecologies in comical episodes of
schizophrenic frustration. Such figurative foregrounding elicits dia-
logue with Deleuze and Guattari's intertwining conceptualization of
“affect,” “art,” “composition,” “sensation,” and “the refrain,”
together with “earth,” “territory,” “milieu,” and “ethology.” That
Meloy's figures should so resonate with Deleuze and Guattari's
concepts is not surprising given their common sources in chaos and
complexity theory, atomic physics, cognitive theory, and neo-
evolutionary theory. Meloy, like Deleuze and Guattari, references
these sources throughout her writing, evidencing the extent to
which the artist was—as were the philosophers—engaged in an
ecology of mind.
The Last Cheater's Waltz deploys figures of cutting-edge science
specifically to interrogate the nuclear age mentality and to make
audible its “silent chemistry” of atomic contamination (Meloy 8). It
thereby takes up where Silent Spring left off. Carson's book appeared
 The Art of Ecological Thinking 577

in 1962 just as the U.S. Department of Energy's “Operation

Plowshare” got underway and the atomic bombing of the desert
southwest went underground as a promising new form of gas
mining with virtually no understanding or concern for radioactive
effects. If Carson was able to deploy a minor science to instruct main-
stream science to rethink pesticide use with ecological accountability,
the occasion for a latter-day Carson to do the same with respect to
this atomic campaign passed before she appeared. Operation
Plowshare shut down in 1977 and large-scale bombing of the desert
became history. Yet, the effects of radioactivity live on as ecological
affects—as virtual geochemical and geophysical forces of impercepti-
ble change and consequence in the minds and bodies of desert cohab-
itants. It is these affects that Meloy sets out to compose in landscapes
of disaffection.

Making Ecological Sense in a “Psychozoic Age”

Meloy's comic figure of the artist as visionary of the Psychozoic
Age resonates with Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the artist as
“schizoid” physician and seer.10 Likewise, her image of her “brain”
(3–8, 46–8) thinking art-wise to restore sense in view of
State-rationalized ecological insanity resonates with Deleuze and
Guattari's “brain as art” that composes sensation to overcome estab-
lished doxa (What Is Philosophy? 210–11). Moreover, like Deleuze,
writing on T. E. Lawrence's landscape compositions, Meloy abstracts
from Lawrence's “Arabia” a vision of “a people to come”: a minor,
defeated, people who live more closely with desert geography than
with the history that claims to colonize it, and who move with and
are moved by the immanent folds and flows of desert becoming
(Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical 121; Meloy, Anthropology of
Turquoise 247–48). There are other resonating ideas but the two I want
to stress are the idea that art composes sensations which make per-
ceptible things not actually seen or felt, and otherwise unthinkable;
and the idea that art frames chaos in territorial refrains of contrapun-
tal habitats and melodious landscapes, while simultaneously opening
territory to infinite, cosmic possibility.
According to Deleuze and Guattari, art composes with sensations
that are themselves composites of “percepts and affects,” and
“visions and auditions.”11 Through a process of “fabulation” the
artist extracts percepts and affects from actual landscape perceptions
and affections, and she projects these percepts and affects back onto
the landscape so that it radiates with new, impersonal, and nonhu-
man sensation (What Is Philosophy? 167–69). Visions and auditions
578 I S L E

emerge on the plane of composition at the limit of language; these

are “asignifying” sensations that are “not outside of language but the
outside of language” (Essays Critical and Clinical 5). A literary land-
scape is a real landscape that shimmers with a vision of the possible.
It is not that the artist sees but that literally “the landscape sees”
(What Is Philosophy? 169). As they succinctly put it, “the novel has
often given rise to the percept—not the perception of the moor in
Hardy but the moor as percept” (168). Such projection involves
neither memory nor fantasy. It is not ego that the artist projects onto
the artistic landscape. The artist's ego, including her perceptions and
self-perceptions, undergo a becoming-imperceptible so that what the
artist sees is not herself but herself absorbed in what a landscape
composition sees, a seeing that affects and changes her “self.” Thus,
the artist is “a seer, a becomer” and “affects are precisely these nonhu-
man becomings of man, just as percepts […] are the nonhuman landscapes
of nature” (169, italics theirs).12
Meloy composes landscape sensations with a figure she calls the
“desert's skin,” an artificial body that makes the desert's otherwise
imperceptible toxicity become perceptible in writing. Across this skin
“she,” a comic projection of her disaffected self, journeys with aes-
thetic discomposure. A sensation of landscape and a landscape of
sensation converge and emerge on this skin, and with this skin
Meloy touches readers with the incongruencies of geography. The
problem that Meloy vaguely describes as a “malaise” (4) in her
Prologue begins to take shape only when she transposes personal
foreboding onto the desert's figurative and impersonal skin. This
occurs when she recounts how she inadvertently scorches to death a
side-blotched lizard nestling unseen at the bottom of her coffee cup
into which she pours freshly boiled French roast. As she composes it,
this event is sufficiently ananaesthetizing to stir aesthetic reaction.
A desert percept arises at the image interface of the human, the
animal, and the nuclear landscape. It is not the lizard's actual skin
that senses lethal exposure: after all, a dead animal cannot feel. Nor
is it her own skin that is scorched but an aesthetic scorching torches
her ethological conscience and fires her art-brain to further action.
What this skin feels is not phenomenological but monumental, not
live and fleshly but dead and arty. The desert's skin is the artist's, or
more precisely, art's “organ of perception” (144). To use another
Deleuzian concept, it is a “body without organs”: an inorganic com-
position with which the artist cum skinwalker can sense, treat, and
overcome the anesthesia that afflicts her desert affections.13
To reiterate: Meloy creates an aesthetic body to make sense of her
anesthetizing realization that the land whose beauty has lured her to
 The Art of Ecological Thinking 579

wander for twenty years and hundreds of miles is toxic. Why now?
Because now that she has eight acres of desert and is constructing her
dream home, she feels she must own all that comes with the territory,
including its violent history of uranium mining and atomic bombing,
an ethical imperative that she viscerally resists. Other settlers of this
remote desert region, mostly ranchers, retired uranium miners, small
town entrepreneurs, and urban refugees, seem fit to live with the
past; whereas she alone feels unfit. How can she reconcile desert
history to the desert geography her body knows? Such a history ali-
enates her body through which the desert had become sensually
familiar. “To reinhabit my own body,” she attests, “I had to traverse,
again and again, the desert's cruel and beautiful skin” (8). She would
“traverse” this other, aesthetic, body repeatedly until she can bring
its sublimely colliding sensations—cruelty and beauty—into harmo-
nious habitability.14 As Deleuze might put it, she must reterritorialize
the desert in a new refrain.
To this end, Meloy composes an artist's map of the Four Corners
area of the Colorado Plateau. “The Map of the Known Universe” (8)
as she calls it, is a cartographic figure that coincides with the figure
of the desert's skin. She first draws a small circle on a topographical
map to mark the immediate vicinity around her house and, around
that, with sand trickled through her fingers, she traces a two hundred
square mile perimeter as her extended horizon of familiarity. She
places the lizard's corpse on the sand on the map, and transcribes the
colored contours within the perimeter onto the pages of an artist's
sketchbook. The circles reclaim land mapped by the square of the
imperial grid, and the transcription of colored contours underlying
the dead lizard outlines an abstract and sensational territoriality. Map
and skin compose the rough draft of a territory across which the
artist-skinwalker will chart her multiple trajectories in search of
home. What emerges is readily conceptualized as Deleuze and
Guattari's “intensive cartography” and “territorial refrain.”

The Last Cheater's Waltz and/as Territorial Refrain

To briefly unfold a very complex concept, “the refrain” entails the
art of composing territory with and against a chaos of dynamically
abutting, colliding, overlapping, and intertwining molecular assemb-
lages of heterogeneous (physical, organic, inorganic, semiotic, linguis-
tic, etc.) materials into a singularly evolving territorial assemblage
that, simultaneously, lends itself to a cosmic deterritorializing
movement toward new ecological horizons that Deleuze and Guattari
sometimes invoke as “a new earth and a new people.”15 The
580 I S L E

movements between chaos and territory, and territory and cosmos,

are multiple, repetitive, variable, and irreversible but neither
successive nor teleological. There is no movement as a whole; terri-
tory is forever assembling and disassembling with greater or lesser
complexity and intensity. “This is not a teleological conception but a
melodic one in which we no longer know what is art and what
nature” (What Is Philosophy? 185). Territorialization involves processes
of reterritorialization and deterritorialization that occur in intervals of
infra-, intra-, and inter-territorial assemblage: from drawing a circle to
designate interior and exterior, to sketching rhythmic characters,
contrapuntal milieus, and melodic landscapes, to tracking a line of
flight from any one territory into the cosmos of all possible territories,
respectively.16 The territorial animal is a “complete artist”17; or so
Deleuze and Guattari exemplify by pointing to the Australian stage-
maker bird whose theatricality clearly evidences how the primary
function of territorialization is autopoietic expression (and not aggres-
sion or other territorialized functions).18 Territorial animals do not
survive the brute elements of terrestrial existence; they orchestrate
myriad features of habitation where they thrive in rhythmic and col-
orful interaction with other species, as well as other members of their
own species.19 Territorialization frames a patch of earth and draws an
interior ensemble of earth forces—animal sexuality, migratory activity,
prey and predator interplay, energy creation and consumption, etc.—
into animate, expressive, and co-adaptive resonance. Territory is both
threatened and revitalized by chaos from without and, if it does not
open to greater cosmic possibility, collapses from entropic pressures
immanent to its own structuration.20
As a territorial animal herself and as a human haunted by the ter-
ritorial animal that she parboiled in French roast, Meloy plots multi-
ple relays across the desert within, outside, and off the Map of the
Known Universe. These relays and the complex landscapes and habi-
tats they bring into view are readily conceptualized as intervals of a
territorial refrain. As the title, an allusion to a popular country and
western song about betrayed love, suggests The Last Cheater's Waltz
assembles a refrain of expressive qualities immanent to the desert
southwest that most challenge cohabitation.21 These include physio-
graphical extremes of heat and cold, light and dark, dryness and
wetness, storm and calm, fecundity and dormancy that Meloy the
artist-naturalist capably composes in rhythmic characters and contra-
puntal motifs into a style of territorial expressionism.22 But the
desert's toxic geochemistry presents a further and more extreme
deterrent of cohabitation, one that military science extracts, refines,
and explodes in “wargasms” that, in retrospect, terrorize her efforts
 The Art of Ecological Thinking 581

at composing melodic landscapes (155). Once her vision makes per-

ceptible the degree and dimension of atomic contamination, she fails
to recompose the nuclear landscape with familiar beauty. Prospects
of rehabilitating the landscape with geographical enlightenment and
“ecological literacy” fade before a “frontier” of ecological chaos (188).
To cohabit the desert with its legacy of atomic warfare, she must
abandon the impulse to reterritorialize home and open her “Map of
the Known Universe” to the deterritorializing motifs of a cosmic
refrain.
How, then, does The Last Cheater's Waltz assemble a territorial
refrain? To summarize the plot of composition: Meloy's nomadic
persona first strikes out on a relay of “involuntary tropism” (199) to a
familiar reach of homeland she calls “Tsé Valley” (12)23 in search of
synaesthetically scintillating claret-cup cacti she knows she will find
in seasonal bloom, only to stumble upon the leaching pond of a
poorly reclaimed uranium mine that blossoms grotesquely on the
desert's skin. Sensing this affliction as a territorial artist/animal, she
strikes out again, across the perimeter of the “Known Universe” to
seek what has become of the “alien pebbles” of Tsé Valley's
Shinarump strata (19–21). She goes to Trinity test site, where the U.S.
Army dropped the first atomic bomb. At ground zero, she envisions
uranium ore from home irradiating the neighboring Chihuahuan
desert and Japanese cityscapes. On her Map she draws radial lines
that connect Trinity to Tsé Valley, and Tsé Valley to Hiroshima–
Nagasaki, intensifying her range of disaffection (84). When she traver-
ses the overlapping habitats of the White Sands Missile Range and
the San Andrea's Wildlife Refuge, the desert's skin opens onto visions
of radical ecological discord. Her cacophony of territorial
motifs—“shrapnel in the greasewood, antelope in the WITs, toads
above the plutonium” (50)—deconstructs the U.S. Army's “balanced”
view of environmental management with which it hopes to win over
“adversarial postmodern peoples” (51). “Its environmental policies,
the Army will tell you, present a kind of balance sheet: losses of
habitat from military activities against gains made by restricting
public access” (61). What the State zones for “environmental manage-
ment,” the artist maps as territorial absurdity. “I pull out the Map of
the Known Universe and sketch in ground zero, monkeys in space,
pupfish, toads, a Russian suitcase, and generals in safari shirts and
little white booties, shooting trinitite bullets at African oryx” (84–85).
No harmony arises from this discordant and coercive fit of military
and wilderness ecologies. Instead, the first movement in Meloy's
refrain “haunts” the psyche with “a collision of dispassion and vul-
nerability” (84). Devastated, she retreats from ground zero to home's
582 I S L E

inner circle where she recomposes herself and she sets out to reterrito-
rialize from within.
Meloy's territorial assemblage of wild species that cohabit her
property includes side-blotched and spiny lizards, black-widow
spiders, and hummingbirds, which, with varying degrees of
harmony and anarchy, create niche-habitats in pockets of her screen
house. She welcomes unruly species of invasive grasses to grow wild
inside her boundary line to reclaim over-grazed rangeland.24 But
landscape reclamation on the home front becomes uncannily
unhomely when she accidentally unearths a chunk of carnotite, or
raw uranium ore (145). Intended for use as a boundary marker, the
unearthly chunk instead destroys the fragile line dividing territory
from chaos. She is impelled once again to approach home from
outside in, and she heads to Gasbuggy National Monument at the
furthest reach of her perimeter of familiarity where, superficially at
least, the landscape assumes ecological consistency with her neck of
the Colorado Plateau. There she aims to bury the carnotite at the site
of the atomic explosion that took place underground in 1967 as one
of the Plowshare experiments in nuclear gas mining. But at 4,227 feet
the depth of nuclear entombment makes burial impossible. Instead of
burying the ore where its contaminant radioactivity could be sealed
with eco-poetic justice, she composes a monumental vision of the
“silent chemistry” taking malevolent shape in hidden and unfathom-
able dimensions underground. Her vision of Gasbuggy peels away
the desert's skin to reveal beneath the State's peaceful arrangement of
industrial parks and National Forest a subcutaneous minefield of gas
wells, pipelines, and sewers, along with Gasbuggy's massive radioac-
tive puddle (169–82).
From here the territorial artist/animal has nowhere to go. Having
been deterritorialized by the desert's own geochemistry in complicity
with cold warriors and atomic engineers, she “run[s] away from
home” to the edge of an abyssal maze of canyons beyond the Map
and in the deterriorializing heart of the Known Universe (188). From
a premonitory on a high mesa she composes a vista. But in the dis-
composing distance against blood red strata, there shimmers the blue
limestone cap of a newly excavated tailings mine. In aesthetic exas-
peration she starts to hurl the Map at the mine but on the edge of the
abyss vertigo overcomes her. Before she regains her composure, a
storm suddenly blows over the mountains, tears the Map from her
hands and shreds it beyond repair. An act of de-composition rubs out
all territorial figures and trajectories, and blurs perspective. But in the
wake of aesthetic catastrophe, a landscape of different senses, forces,
distances, and times comes into view:
 The Art of Ecological Thinking 583

River-polished stones, broken cliffs, skirts of talus clad

in ricegrass and claret cup. Red dune fields marching to
Colorado, weeds invading from Arizona. A river of
inestimable grace, devout in its persistence to reach the
sea. Sinuous red-rock canyons, sweet emerald jewels of
springs, arroyos flowing with nothing. A sawed rib of
uplifted sandstone, mountains packed together on the
horizon like islands of prayer. Clay pots and wrist
shells and the jumbled bones of wild geese and tender
infants. The unimagined nearness of Pleistocene rain,
lifting itself from subterranean bedrock to our lips.
Tales of umimpeachable blessings, the path of a single
life made visible. A coyote trodden lowland with
anxious rabbits and a small ditch that would soon over-
flow with the rain from this storm and, for the first time
in recent memory, with the lusty songs of hundreds of
toads emerged from the dry desert dust, cued by the
transient fury of a monsoon. (216–17)

It is not that she in her dishevelment sees a landscape in chaos but

that the landscape alters her perception of the desert with a vision of
becoming. The landscape sees the desert becoming desert across differ-
ent geological epochs, archeological ages, and biological habitats at
all possible speeds and depth of range, striking her with an overall
sensation of “grace.” The tailings pile no longer blocks a vision of
desert habitability but is absorbed into a chaosmos of ecological
infinity. Uranium waste, Pleistocene rain, lusty toads, clay pots and
all compose the vital, inorganic becoming of the desert's singular life.
Having seen “the path of a single life made visible” from this pros-
pect of deterritorialization, she senses that “there was but a single
way to exist here … to take it into myself and rediscover it on my
own breath” (217)—in other words, to take part in the desert's becom-
ing, instead of framing it with dreams of reclamation.
If the infraterritorial assemblage draws a fragile perimeter around
home (as do the circles on the Map), and the intraterritorial assem-
blage fills out the perimeter's interior with a melodic landscape of
contrapuntal milieus (as the Map's trajectories and characters attempt
but fail to do), this last interval of her refrain disassembles all terri-
tory so as to reveal a cosmic desert, or as Deleuze and Guattari say of
exemplary art, so as to “create the finite that restores the infinite.”25
Such a vision deterritorializes the State's deterritorialization of the
desert as void or as so “empty” of natural and human resources as to
be ideal for atomic bombing without consequence (29).26 Meloy's
584 I S L E

refrain brings into view the actual, ecological and historical, conse-
quences in a vision that fails to aestheticize the history of violence but
makes infinitely visible the desert's possible self-reclamation. The
human seer is neither absented from nor absolved with this vision
but is everywhere absorbed in its composition.
The final interval of The Last Cheater's Waltz opens the refrain onto
the cosmos that had been closed by an earlier interval. To put it other-
wise, the eponymous last chapter repeats the cosmic refrain that com-
poses the first scene of the second chapter “The Terrain of Strategic
Death,” and it does so with a difference, a twist. Repetition and varia-
tion govern Meloy's entire composition. Her quest “to traverse, again
and again, the desert's cruel and beautiful skin” entails a “waltz”
across the landscape: the refrain of a territorial animal “learning to
find home” by assembling its component milieus and motifs into an
expressive multiplicity (not unity).27 Repetition follows failure to
reterritorialize the nuclear landscape and to restore the desert to its
native prelapsarian ecology which the composer sensationally yearns
to reinhabit. Every repeat trajectory across the Map exposes her to
new frontiers of ecological devastation and they prompt her to
compose radical variations of territorial assemblage with intensified
discord. The most dramatic repetition and variation is the cosmic
refrain of “The Last Cheater's Waltz,” when discord is overturned by
a deterritorializing symphony of cosmic forces. We see and hear
the difference between repeat “visions” and “auditions” of aesthetic
catastrophe.
The opening scene of “The Terrain of Strategic Death” ends in cat-
aclysmic silence after the Trinity blast nullifies the evolutionary cre-
scendo of the various cohabitants of the Chihuahuan Desert who
populate the desert's polyphonic landscape on July 16, 1945, at
5:29:45 a.m. As Meloy composes it, the desert that hosted this auspi-
cious moment is not empty but resoundingly alive with the volumi-
nous chorus of hundreds of thousands of lusty spadefoot toads,
whose vocal chords and mating patterns have, over the geological
eons, been genetically coded to the tune of seasonal thunderstorms.
Nature's symphony keys rain clouds and thunder claps as contrapun-
tal motifs in the spadefoot's expressively erotic territorial refrain.28 At
the same time, the toady lovesong compounds the soundscape into
which “sweet, unearthly notes of The Nutcracker Suite … floated …
when a distant radio station crossed wavelengths with the Trinity fre-
quency” (44). So powerful was the storm that the detonation of
the bomb was delayed, giving the atomic warriors pause to listen to
the immanent ecology of music. “Yet so intent did they seem on the
imminent mining of their long-awaited white light, the immediate
 The Art of Ecological Thinking 585

world around them offered only counterpoint” (45). They turn a deaf
ear to the landscape that, in any case, they would only have heard as
a reterritorialized motif in their own choreography of power. But the
landscape hears what they do not. “The soundtrack for the ultimate
evolutionary moment of this century to which nothing on Earth
would be immune, could not have been stranger: a Tchaikovsky
waltz and small pockets of air pushed through hundreds of balloon-
ing throats” (45).
The last scene of “The Last Cheater's Waltz” repeats this refrain
with a perceptible difference. Many of the earlier motifs are reas-
sembled here. A Tchaikovsky waltz drifts from the composer's truck
stereo “into the ethos of a hundred-mile view deep into the Known
Universe” (211), followed by a thunderstorm of cosmic proportions
and the amazing prospect of a toad symphony to follow. The void
that the atomic warriors mistook for the desert and which they reac-
tively voided when they detonated their bomb has been displaced
by the chaosmic abyss that Meloy gazes into when the storm blows
her Map to smithereens. In the wake of the storm she awakes to a
resounding new world symphony, a polyphonic landscape of
diverse ecological motifs and a coda/vision of the earth and the
people to come.

Conclusion
How does art mobilize ecological thinking? How does literary
ecology mobilize ecology to think in ways that differ from scientific
ecology? Art mobilizes ecological thinking with sensations and com-
positions—artistic bodies—that affect our sense of being and becom-
ing as cohabitants of affected territories. Literary ecology composes
landscapes that impact our seeing by seeing how the territories we
cohabit are themselves compositions of nature in which we humans
participate both beneficially and egregiously, as well as how, with
greater attunement to ecological arrangement, we can style our habi-
tation in counterpoint to nature's symphonic plane of composition.
Art mobilizes our ecological sense by acting on it with “percepts”
and “affects,” and “visions” and “auditions” that are more emotion-
ally, mentally, and ethically moving than the functions and variables
of science, even when science refers directly to landscapes of conspic-
uous environmental damage. Moreover, art mobilizes our ecological
sense by making visible real connections between cohabitants and
habitats that are not otherwise perceptible and/or not (yet) actualized.
Literary ecology composes becoming landscapes and territories that
literally see what we cannot see even with the prosthetics of
586 I S L E

ecological science, namely: the big picture of ecological change that

takes shape at dynamic atomic levels of the ecosystem and that
embodies the immanent and immeasurable forces of chaos, cosmos,
and earth.
How do the becoming landscapes of Ellen Meloy mobilize ecolog-
ical thinking? They walk readers through a postnatural wilderness
with visions and auditions of what happened here that “may bear more
veracity about our [twentieth] century's troublesome relationship to
the western deserts than the most sublime nature photograph”
(Meloy 84). Sublime photographs of mushroom clouds exploding
over the desert southwest on display in the Los Alamos Museum
record only what can be seen by the naked human eye, whereas
Meloy's landscapes make perceptible the disturbance of ecological
complexity at levels of atomistic invisibility. At the same time, her
landscapes draw connections of consequence that make our attach-
ment to place less innocent of holocausts detonated on foreign soil.
We are affected by the juxtaposition of beauty and violence that she
intimately, if discordantly, refrains, so that our love of the land
becomes complexly textured with territorial ethics. Once the land-
scape takes on the dimensions of ecological infinity, Meloy can relax
her quest of reclamation. But to live at home in a postnuclear land-
scape, she realizes, is not to jettison care:
I fret less about a malaise of soul, rely more on simple
motion and instinct as ways to tend the territory, and I
end up carrying the sun-drenched land on my face, as
most Colorado women do. I look into my coffee cup
before I pour, and I try to live here as if there is no other
place and it must last forever. It is the best we can do.
Everyone's home is the heartland of consequence. (224)
To “try to live here as if there is no other place and it must last
forever” is the proclamation of the territorial artist/animal who learns
to find home by leaving and returning with repetition and variation
until the western frontier gives way to a landscape of ideal
cohabitation.

NOTES

1. “Ethology refers to ‘the capacities for affecting and being affected that
characterize each thing’; it studies ‘the compositions of relations or capacities
between different things.’ … Its social–political–ethical potential is both
remarkable and subtle. Deleuze asks, for example, ‘How can a being take
 The Art of Ecological Thinking 587

another being into its world, but while preserving or respecting the other's
own relations and world?’ He resists simplistic taxonomies that issue in
reductive, mechanistic understandings of individual capacities and powers; a
body, he says, ‘can be anything … a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collec-
tivity.’ Understanding practices through which such possibilities could be
realized is a principal concern for ecological thinking” (Deleuze, qtd. in Code
26–27).
2. “A milieu is ‘the site, habitat, or medium of ecological interaction and
encounter,’ where ecology aims to understand the ‘interrelationships of living
things and their environments.’ This emphasis on the continuities of human
and nonhuman life acknowledges the complexity of interrelationships in any
milieu, while positing connections among ‘the physical, biological and chem-
ical and the social, ethical and political’ and, most significantly, seeking to
determine which ‘concepts, practices and values best promote the collective
life and interests of the diverse modes of existence inhabiting the planet,’
where so many already-instituted concepts, practices and values are saturated
with contempt for the earth and the well-being of its inhabitants” (Deleuze
and Guattari, qtd. in Code 27).
3. “Habitus captures the notion of an ‘embodied history, internalized as a
second nature and so forgotten as history’; yet it is also an ‘active presence’
evident in lived ‘systems of durable, transposable dispositions … which gen-
erate and organize practices that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes
without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of
the operations necessary … to attain them’” (Bourdieu, qtd. in Code 28).
4. “The three disciplines advance by crises or shocks in different ways,
and in each case it is their succession that makes it possible to speak of ‘prog-
ress.’ It is as if the struggle against chaos does not take place without an affinity
with the enemy, because another struggle develops and takes on more impor-
tance—the struggle against opinion, which claims to protect us from chaos
itself. … In short, chaos has three daughters, depending on the plane that
cuts through it: these are the Chaoids—art, science, and philosophy—as forms
of thought or creation. We call Chaoids the realities produced on the planes
that cut through the chaos in different ways” (Deleuze and Guattari, What Is
Philosophy? 204, 208).
5. “Philosophy needs a nonphilosophy that comprehends it; it needs a nonphilo-
sophical comprehension just as art needs nonart and science needs nonscience”
(Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 218). Moreover, if art, science, and
philosophy are “irreducible” planes of thinking, there are “analogous prob-
lems posed for each plane” that “join up in the brain” where cross-plane
“interferences” can arise. Such interference appears “when a philosopher
attempts to create the concept of a sensation or a function … or when a scien-
tist tries to create functions of sensations … or when an artist creates pure
sensations of concepts or functions. … In all these cases the rule is that the
interfering discipline must proceed with its own methods” (216–17).
6. Ellen Meloy (1947–2005) is a nationally and internationally acclaimed
author of four books on the American desert southwest, including Pulitzer
Prize finalist Anthropology of Turquoise and National Book Critic's Circle
588 I S L E

Award finalist Eating Stone. The Last Cheater's Waltz forms part of a literary
protest against the bombing of the American desert launched late last
century by other desert writers, notably women writers who, in tribute to
Rachel Carson, composed “unnatural” landscapes of ecocide and genocide.
(See, for example, the exemplary works by Solnit and Williams.)
7. For a lexicon of Deleuze and Guattari's geophilosophical vocabulary,
see Bonta and Protevi.
8. See e.g., the “Deleuze Connections” series edited by Ian Buchanan and
published by Edinburgh University Press, http://www.euppublishing.com/
series/DELCO.
9. After hosting one particularly successful exchange between poets and
scientists, Nabhan observes that the “poets handled biological facts well in
their writing, but they did more than that: They offered an altogether differ-
ent way of making sense of the world, one perhaps complementary to that of
the conservation ecologist” (68).
10. Deleuze and Guattari analyze the “schizoid” characters of various
philosopher-artists (e.g., Artaud, Beckett, Nietzsche) whose writing, they
contend, throws a wrench into capitalism's ideological and oedipal appara-
tuses (see Anti-Oedipus). They champion these philosopher-artists as modern
culture's most astute and acute physicians. Deleuze further develops the idea
of the writer as “physician” and “seer” in his essays “Literature and Life”
and “The Shame and the Glory: T.E. Lawrence” (Essays Critical and Clinical).
11. Deleuze and Guattari elaborate their concept of art in What Is
Philosophy?, especially the chapter on “Percept, Affect, Concept.” Deleuze
further develops this concept with reference to literary “vision” and “audi-
tion” in Essays Critical and Clinical. For an exposition of these concepts, see
Bogue (151–86).
12. “By means of the material, the aim of art is to wrest the percept from
perceptions of objects and the states of a perceiving subject, to wrest the
affect from affections. … The writer's specific materials are words and syntax,
the created syntax that ascends irresistibly into his work and passes into sen-
sation. … We attain to the percept and the affect only as to autonomous and
sufficient beings that no longer owe anything to those who experience or
have experienced them: [Proust's] Combray like it never was, is, or will be
lived; Combray as cathedral or monument. … Creative fabulation has nothing
to do with a memory, however exaggerated, or with a fantasy. In fact, the
artist, including the novelist, goes beyond the perceptual states and affective
transitions of the lived. The artist is a seer, a becomer. … The affect goes
beyond affections no less than the percept goes beyond perceptions. The
affect is not the passage from one lived state to another but man's nonhuman
becoming” (Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 167–73).
13. Deleuze and Guattari introduce and elaborate their concept of the
“body without organs” in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. The concept
has enjoyed wide usage in philosophical and literary studies, and I do not
review it here. Suffice it to say that I think it is useful to regard Meloy's
figure of “the desert's skin” as a body without organs that conjoins language
 The Art of Ecological Thinking 589

+ brain + landscape + sensation in an inorganic coupling that produces desert

percepts.
14. Goodman interprets The Last Cheater's Waltz as an iconographic
“memoir” (69) of the postapocalyptic desert and, thus, presents a very differ-
ent reading from my own. Goodman argues that Meloy traces, au pied and on
the page, ritual and repeat crossings of the nuclear landscape whereby the
landscape's “external” toxicity is absorbed into the “female body's interior-
ity.” The “body's potential to link sacred and profane places” performs spiri-
tual absolution and reclamation (78–79). But is it a memoir that Meloy
composes? In her “Prologue,” Meloy writes that “memory purifies experi-
ence, a map distills place, but neither memory nor map is blood. The silent
chemistry of this desert lay deep within me. To reinhabit my own body I had
to traverse, again and again, the desert's cruel and beautiful skin” (7–8). This
“silent chemistry,” like the pesticidal chemistry of Silent Spring, virtually
poisons Meloy's body as it circulates between land and blood. Instead of a
boundary between interior and exterior, there is a porosity of toxicity that her
skin and the desert's skin share. Her book is a monument of shared affect.
15. See Deleuze and Guattari's Plateau 11 “The Refrain” (A Thousand
Plateaus 310–49) and “Art, Percept, Concept” (What Is Philosophy? 163–200).
For further exposition of the concept in conjunction with land art and land-
scape aesthetics, see Abrioux.
16. “Sometimes one goes from chaos to the threshold of a territorial
assemblage: directional components, infra-assemblage. Sometimes one organ-
izes the assemblage: dimensional components, intra-assemblage. Sometimes
one leaves the territorial assemblage for other assemblages, or for somewhere
else entirely: interassemblage, components of passage or even escape. And
all three at once. Forces of chaos, terrestrial forces, cosmic forces: all of these
confront and converge in the territorial refrain” (Deleuze and Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus 312). Accordingly, attempts by State engineers to stratify,
capture, harness, and channel earth forces in territorial grids of power only
intensifies their line of escape and/or opening to the outside. “Territory does
not merely isolate and join but opens onto cosmic forces that arise from
within or come from outside, and renders their effect on the inhabitant
perceptible” (What Is Philosophy? 185–86).
17. “Every morning the Scenopoetes dentirostris, a bird of the Australian
rain forests, cuts leaves, makes them fall to the ground, and turns them over
so that the paler, internal side contrasts with the earth. In this way, it con-
structs a stage for itself like a ready-made; and directly above, on a creeper or
a branch, while fluffing out the feathers beneath its beak to reveal their
yellow roots, it sings a complex song made up from its own notes and, at
intervals, those of other birds that it imitates: it is a complete artist” (Deleuze
and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 184). Deleuze and Guattari underscore both
the animality of artistry and the artistry of territory, arguing that in either
case nature and art cannot be differentiated. If biology directs us to think that
the sensational song and dance of territorial birds are functions of sexual
reproduction, they redirect our thinking: “This is not synesthesia in the flesh
but blocs of sensations in the territory—colors, postures, and sounds that
590 I S L E

sketch out a total work of art. These sonorous blocs are refrains; but there are
also refrains of posture and color, and postures and color as are always being
introduced into refrains: bowing low, straightening up, dancing in a circle
and lines of colors. The whole of the refrain is a being of sensation.
Monuments are refrains. In this respect art is haunted by the animal” (184).
18. “Territory is constituted at the same time as expressive qualities are
selected or produced. The brown stagemaker (Scenopeetes dentirostris) lays
down landmarks each morning by dropping leaves it picks from its tree, and
then turning them upside down so the paler underside stands out in the dirt:
inversion produces a matter of expression. … The stagemaker practices art
brut. Artists are stagemakers” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
315–16). Deleuze and Guattari adamantly claim that territory is primarily
expressive and that becoming-expressive is an autonomous and natural
“autopoietic” process. Territorial functions such as aggression do not explain
territory but rather presuppose it (315). The becoming-expressive of territory
and the territorializing of expression form the double movement of territory's
autopoiesis. “The refrain is rhythm and melody that have been territorialized
because they have become expressive—and have become expressive because
they have become territorializing. … There is a self-movement to expressive
qualities” (316–17). For an illuminating discussion of these terms, see Grosz.
19. Deleuze and Guattari echo and elaborate theoretical biologist Jakob
von Uexküll's conceptualization of “Nature as music.” As they see it, a “terri-
torial refrain” comprises various movements in ontogenesis that compose,
with increasing complexity, “milieus” and “rhythms,” “motifs” and “counter-
points,” “melodic landscapes” and “rhythmic characters.” “[Territory] not
only ensures and regulates the coexistence of members of the same species by
keeping them apart, but makes possible the coexistence of a maximum
number of different species in the same milieu by specializing them.
Members of the same species enter into rhythmic characters at the same time
as different species enter into melodic landscapes; for the landscapes are
peopled by characters and the characters belong to landscapes” (A Thousand
Plateaus 318–20). They later evolve a “melodic, polyphonic, and contrapuntal
conception of Nature,” where “every territory, every habitat, joins up not
only its spatiotemporal but its qualitative planes or sections: a posture and a
song for example, a song and a color, percepts and affects. And every terri-
tory encompasses or cuts across the territories of other species, or intercepts
the trajectories of animals without territories, forming interspecies junction
points. … There is counterpoint whenever a melody arises as a ‘motif’ within
another melody, as in the marriage of bumblebee and snapdragon. These
relationships of counterpoint join planes together, form compounds of sensa-
tions and blocs, and determine becomings. But it is not just these determinate
melodic compounds, however generalized, that constitute nature; another
aspect, an infinite symphonic plane of composition, is also required—” (What Is
Philosophy? 185, italics original).
20. Deleuze and Guattari differentiate between relative and absolute
deterritorialization, the latter being virtually synonymous with “the plane of
composition” of art/nature. They call for a radical reorientation of philosophy
 The Art of Ecological Thinking 591

toward geography away from history since history conceives of territory in

merely relative terms (that is, as a sedimented, stratified, codified, bureaucra-
tized, homogenized, vertically hierarchized totality that may extend to and
incorporate God as a primary anthropogenic agent of relative deterritorializa-
tion in the vanquishing and conquering of “savage” lands), whereas geogra-
phy conceives of an infinite dance between earth and territory that assembles
chaos and cosmos in refrains of creative, ever-evolving, and absolutely deter-
ritorializing heterogenesis. Entropy occurs when territory undergoes absolute
deterritorialization—as when a State (the Roman Empire) disintegrates or a
People (the Anasazi) disperse and make way for a new earth and people to
arise from disassembled and minoritarian materials.
21. Meloy alludes to the title and refrain of a song “The Last Cheater's
Waltz” made popular by singer Emmy Lou Harris and she weaves its theme
of betrayed love into her composition as an expressive regional motif to
which rural westerners will especially be attuned. But The Last Cheater's Waltz
is not your usual musical refrain, since it is not for hearing with the actual
ear so much as to be thought with the virtual ear—the mind's ear or the fabu-
lated ear—that assembles the song's citation and meaning into a sensation of
ecological and geographical disaffection.
22. Deleuze and Guattari regard “style” as the “autodevelopment” of ter-
ritorial expression “wherein Nature appears as a rhythmic character with
infinite transformations” (A Thousand Plateaus 319).
23. In Navajo “Tsé” means “rocks” and “Tsé k'aan” means “upright
rocks,” words that Meloy turns into place-names (like “Tsé Valley) in place of
“Comb Ridge,” the actual English place-name for the actual sandstone spine
to which she alludes. “Tsé Valley” is a composition of affects and percepts
not a geographical representation, as well as a decolonization of aboriginal
cartography.
24. Meloy's reterritorialization on the home front includes a “reclamation
of sorts” (102) that “harbored no delusion that this land could be restored to
a purist's notion of pre-Columbian wilderness” (103). Her property boundary
separates the “chewed” from the “unchewed” and recovering rangeland, and
it demarcates a territory within which “tumbleweed, cheat grass, and snake-
weed” and other “vigorous invaders” (111) can begin an immanent process
of desert self-reclamation—or dedesertification.
25. “Art wants to create the finite that restores the infinite: it lays out a
plane of composition that, in turn, through the action of aesthetic figures,
bears monuments or composite sensations” (Deleuze and Guattari, What Is
Philosophy? 197).
26. “It is said that history gave meaning to this desolate New Mexico
basin, as if, until 1945, it was innocent of its own. The sterilization of land-
scape allows its reinvention; only at zero can there be a beginning, a blank
slate to fill, even if the story that fills it—an apocalypse—itself becomes
nothing again, in an instant. Land considered barren and empty cannot be
stripped of life” (Meloy 29).
27. Abrioux explains that Deleuze and Guattari's la ritournelle loses some-
thing in translation to “the refrain” in English. “There is first of all, the sheer
592 I S L E

repetitiveness of the ‘ritournelle,’ which idiomatically is not a refrain coming

between verses or musical passage but a form of repetition and variation gov-
erning an entire composition” (254). La ritournelle may be likened to the waltz,
a musical form that is essentially governed by repetition and variation. The
Last Cheater's Waltz does more than allude to this musical form. Meloy's nar-
rator repeatedly turns away from home territory and re-turns in a waltz across
a turned over and over turned (or de- and re-composing) landscape. As
Stephen Tatum contends, “the key word for Meloy in this figural transfigura-
tion and recuperation of a degraded or profane landscape is turned, a word
that relates etymologically to the key word waltz in the memoir's title” (139).
28. “For thousands of years, since the early Oligocene, these amphibians
had used seasonal moisture patterns routinely and successfully. Rain lay at
the center of their biology; they had folded storm into their genetic code”
(Meloy, Last Cheater's Waltz 44).

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