How about an elemental summer, an ode to earth, air, water and fire? Outdoor concerts, dips, bonfires, fireflies… A time to consciously savor the flavors of this season, through the elements of nature interacting with each other more than any other time of the year, radiating splendor and creating unique and inexhaustible. A summer to know that one is part of this continuous process of birth and destruction from which nothing escapes, as Heraclitus defended. A return to the origins. Living the summer in this way becomes a means of perceiving and breaking away from the routines of the rest of the year in order to triumph over oneself. It is also a way of escaping without it being a matter of abandonment or betrayal.
In his four books on the Elements, French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962) explored primitive, archetypal, elemental themes. There the poetic imagination worked, free from the bonds of the rational, “to study the determinism of the imagination”. According to Bachelard, the imaginative elements have “idealistic laws as certain as experimental laws”. He speaks of “the hormones of imagination” because “they perform the great syntheses that give the imagination a little regularity.” In particular, “the imaginative air is the hormone that makes us grow psychologically.” He assumes that it is about transferring one’s own erotic experience to external life. In his Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938) he speculates that the images of fire that we might invent refer us to the primitive eroticism that led to the discovery and subsequent mastery of fire: when man realized the friction between two bodies generates heat — and that rubbing two flints together that led to such a lucky find wasn’t necessarily at leisure or by chance. The images of fire bring us closer to this eroticism and we discover fire for the first time. But the poetic representations Bachelard examines are individual sublimations of collective archetypes and depend on the dreamer’s subjectivity: ‘It is this personal contribution that gives life to the archetypes; Every dreamer recreates old dreams in a personal situation.” This explains why in psychoanalysis a symbol cannot acquire a single meaning. When Jean Cocteau was asked what he would take with him if his house were on fire and there was only one thing he could save, he immediately replied: “Fire!”
We are made up of air, water and earth molecules. Canadian ecologist of Japanese origin David Suzuki (Vancouver, 87 years old) emphasizes it in his book The Sacred Balance (1997): “We are the air, we are the water, we are the earth, we are the sun, there is .” No environment out there, separate from us. This simple truth powerfully conveys our relationship with the earth. Suzuki emphasizes that in this interconnected world, every action has consequences and that as an integral part of that, we have a responsibility to act in moderation to uphold world order.
It is only through a Western mindset that we are convinced that we live within an interior bounded by our own skin, where everything else is exterior. Where we spend most of our lives shapes our priorities and the way we perceive our surroundings: a man-made habitat of concrete and glass reinforces the belief that we are outside and above nature. From an ecopsychological perspective, Anita Barrows (Brooklyn, 76 years old) asserts: “The locus at which transitional phenomena occur (…) could (…) be understood as the permeable membrane that suggests or delineates, but does not divide. “Environment in which we live”. And from this came his concept of the “ecological self”.
Where would we leave a reality like climate change? We might try to look at the more positive side of our life experience and remind ourselves that we have elementary interactions that don’t cause disaster. This exercise would serve to make us aware that it is possible to live an enriching and rewarding life without undermining the very elements that make it possible for us. We are deeply rooted in nature and dependent on it. The Amazonian philosopher Ailton Krenak (Itabirinha de Mantena, Brazil, 69 years old) makes it clear in his book Ideas to Postpone the End of the World (2019) that there is no environment and no surrounding life, but a continuous flow , of which we are the product. We live the same existence as all the elements that surround us, and the same life is that which animates the planet – we are terrestrial matter attempting to live in a different form from all of our numerous previous existences. What better time than this summer to get used to our “green selves”?
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