The Psalms and the Speaking World: Art, Anthropocene, Enchantment

Abstract: In this essay, I take up the question of the speech of the natural world in the Psalms. In dialogue with philosopher Baptiste Morizot’s account of animal tracking and Jane Bennett’s articulation of enchantment, I argue that a robust sense of the world’s liveliness is a characteristic feature of biblical poetry. Scholarly disagreement about how to account for this “speech” points to an underlying uncertainty about how we relate to the world. Morizot’s treatment of the metaphorical imagination of animal tracking helps to explain why the domains of poetry and liveliness overlap: poetic art is a site for reflecting on the world’s liveliness precisely because literary strategies such as metaphor, voice, and anthropomorphism negotiate and cultivate the uncanny sense of human enmeshment in the more-than-human world. Beginning with a personal reflection on animal tracking, and engaging thinkers working on issues of animation, vitality, and material vibrancy, I argue that a tempered sense of “enchantment” reclaims the psalms as art for the anthropocene.