Ecoportraiture

David W. Jardine

Portraying has similar etymological ancestries and suppressed memories as “education.” Drawing forth, drawing out, tracing. And, I’d add from ←xi | xii→hermeneutics, highlighting, exaggerating, even the tricky lies of tricksters like Hermes bent on telling the truth, sort of.

I’ve been spotted. Just like the kid-up-a-tree (Chapter 4) aches my heart over an old book cover (Jardine, 1998) now 23 years old, named after a paper that is itself now 30 years old (Jardine, 1990):←xii | xiii→

That very boy-of-then having just warned me of an “atrociously long sentence” in a piece I wrote in late November. I don’t feel too bad about this dribbling trail of self-citation, because it might give readers a sense of just how many trees I’ve pissed on, and for how long, and therefore how deeply and longstandingly my heart aches and leaps with joy thumbing this book.

A “critical, beautiful risk” (Datura in Chapter 6, this volume), full of “fire and clinical coldness” (Joan Miró, cited by de Grandpré, Chapter 5, this volume) – ways to do research, full of great warrant and great, longstanding, shared and contested ancestries, shared and contested voices whose share and contest is a necessary part of the portraits themselves. These matters are not singular. These stories have no moral from which one might deviate, or to which one might try to slavishly adhere. Such singularity is precisely the terrible consort of exactly the severances this book is wont to overcome. And, to be blunt, such singularity is, more often than not, precisely what so many “research methods” wittingly or unwittingly seek. So many are querulous over beauty, suggestion, ambiguity, participation, refusal, multivocity, ←xiii | xiv→repetition, fruity language, hesitancy. But here’s a methodological warrant for you, originally from Aristotle: mensuratio ad rem (cited in and discussed in Gadamer, 1989, p. 261). Good work finds its measure, not in the method of its approach, but in the object of its attention and devotion, and it shapes its own approach, its own portrait of that object in that proper measure. We can, with long practice and great care, “entrust ourselves to what we are investigating to guide us safely in the quest” (p. 378).

In the gaze of that Raven, hesitancy is a good way to speak truly of it. To let it be uncaptured by the words I use, because that is what it is. To use words that hand readers over to that uncapture.