Rothenberg presents an excerpt from Tristes Tropiques (1955) literally “Sad Tropics”, published in French and translated by John Russell, pp. 126-27. Lévi-Strauss's thinking about human relationships with the self, other selves, and nature blends philosophical explorations about the inward facing work of studying identity with prescriptive scientific thinking rooted in sociology and structuralism. Critical concepts like bricolge and the new wilderness show an overlap between thinkers like Durkheim and Rothenberg's project that promote universalizing poetics.

“Structural anthropology” according to Lévi-Strauss attempts to work outside of the [primitive / civilized] binary. This way of thinking critically considers the fundamental relationships of social and aesthetic reality and requires us to know the structure from both the standpoint of an objective social scientist and a human being and a creative mind with immense sense perception. Our ancestors, who were also preoccupied with the creation of meaningful aesthetic experiences, existed in a state of being before the break down of modernity, the breakdown of “the social bond” as Rothenberg summarizes. A restoration of this bond—a kind of joint enterprise between mind and nature—transcends the normative limits of human experience by means of passing through space and time. If humans have become disconnected from the psychic unity that underlies all bonds, connections, and transcendent experiences (like the creation and transmission of art), then the solution must find cure through “poetic wisdom”. In other words, modern humans need fundamental realignment of their minds with nature. This is the ancestral wisdom brought down by Lévi-Strauss.

Instead of smashing our inheritance, Lévi-Strauss suggests, “[w]e should do better to accept the true conditions of our human experience and realize that it is not within our power to emancipate ourselves completely from either its structure or natural rhythms. Space has values peculiar to itself, just as sounds and scents have their colours and feelings their weights” (58). Zooming into the micro structures and pulsating out to examine the macro-structure is a creative act in itself. This experiential approach to access our ancestor's wisdom through creative culture literally brings readers into an imaginative space where they can consider the orders of magnitude that structure humanity's “insect like” activity between the cosmic distances and inter-generational time.

The synesthetic qualities of binding to the worlds of space, sound, scent, and feeling offer a twentieth-century literary respite in Symbolist poetry. The unity between nature with the human, and the somatic with the cerebral, reveal an intimate connection between the internal and the external world. These fundamental structural relationships can be studied, perhaps with more intensity, in the world of the imagination. The possibility of new distinctions, previously unknown connections and associations, they carry the potential to exist because the conditions to create them were carried from the past to the present, and experienced No wonder Lévi-Strauss cites the visionary poet Rimbaud's "Sonnet des voyelles" There are many aspects to Poetry, of course, some poets inscribe symbols of national unity in verse and narrate history through epic, but the asthetic turn inward in twentieth-century symbolist poetry invites the reader to withdraw from society. For a further discussion, see how Edmond Wilson traces the Symbolist desire for experience, which they inherited from the Romantics, and later traded “the experience of the outside world for the experience of the imagination alone” (Wilson 206).

Essential Question: Do you view life through a qualitative or quantitative lens?

A line from the passage that resonates with me is the following: “It's a long time since we ceased to worship the sun, and with our Euclidean turn of mind we jib at the notion of space as qualitative” (Lévi-Strauss 58).

In primitive times people considered natural phenomena – such as sunrise, sunset, and lightening, but in this case, the sun – as central to their spiritual and social lives; as a result, they had a deeper, more symbolic connection to the natural world than we do today. Nature was appreciated for its holistic and spiritual significance, connecting to the human experience in a personal and meaningful way. Hence, people viewed nature through a qualitative lense: it was experienced through the senses and appreciated through human interaction. Humans did not question the constructs of nature beyond that of the human experience. However, with an “Euclidean turn of mind,” a shift in thinking occurred, changing how humans perceive their environment. The allusion to “Euclidean mind” refers to a form of geometry based on quantifiable, logical principles, which led to a more detached, analytical way of relating to the world. The development of Western scientific thought tends to dissect the world into discrete, measurable elements rather than understanding it as a complex, interrelated whole.

As a result of the shift in thinking, humans now question their world, searching for answers about how elements function in nature. Lévi-Strauss suggests that modern Western thought struggles to understand and appreciate the natural world as something qualitative – something subjective, emotional, and symbolic. Instead, humans tend to view the natural environment as simply a physical, geometric entity to be measured and understood in quantitative terms. Lévi-Strauss laments the loss of a deeper connection to the world's complexities and suggests that we have grown uncomfortable with ways of thinking that are not strictly logical or measurable. Humans do not have control over certain things, such as astronomy and meteorology. The weather impacts the world independently of human influence, affecting all regions globally.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “from Tristes Tropiques.”Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward and Ethnopoetics. edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Diane Rothenberg, University of California Press, 1983, pp. 57-59.

Wilson, Edmund. “Axel and Rimbaud”. Axel's Castle, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004, pp. 205-236.