Linda Hogan's Dwellings - Knowledge - Essay Example

For example, industries dealing with oil continue to be developed, and the remaining land continues diminishing so as to make room for the industrial establishment in the modern world. People have forgotten about the beauty that nature creates, and hence the Mother Nature continues to die day by day. She talks about the relevance of human beings seeking a terrestrial knowledge with the natural world. She melds phenomenal descriptions of the environment with crucial reflections on human’s place in their relationship with nature.

A crucial discussion topic in the novel is knowledge. The westernized culture encourages people to gather knowledge through science, and other concrete ways of thinking that are logical. On the other hand, native people gain knowledge through experience and they accept abstract ideas as real ones. Hogan disputes the western definition of knowledge and believes that it is evident through the results, and knowledge of the natural world and cycles. Through her words, it is evident that science has also contributed to evil among humans and also brought isolation of knowledge.

Human have developed and are unwilling to accept the things that are superior to them in the natural world. Western culture influence creates a perception that human beings have dominance over nature (Hogan 25). In relation to knowledge, Linda Hogan is a well learned person with a complete knowledge and focuses on the various ways that nature relates with human beings. For example, she had a wider knowledge about terrestrial intelligence. She looks at the various perspectives in the world and has developed philosophies regarding nature.

In Dwellings, her focus lies on the terrestrial intelligence of dwelling places and living creatures reinforce the notion of earth as a vital place for all living organisms. Her questioning of Western meanings based on components of the natural world makes us understand the anthropocentric constructions of nature as an ideology with many fixed meanings. Dwellings are like a challenge to the places and meanings of people’s perceptive. Dwellings guide us on how to nurture a spiritual connection with everything in the world.

Hogan’s approaches are nothing less than magical, mystical, and mythical, which are mostly on the American Indian mythology. She argues that myth is usually false, but after examining myths, they are a form of truth. Animals and places symbolise within the natural world used to dismantle the existing western notion which comes from these myths and shapes her worldview (Hogan 28). In the chapter, “The Bats”, Hogan describes the bats which associate with blood sucking terrors of Dracula, as sacred creatures that live in two worlds, crediting them with considerable insight and wisdom.

There are two animals merged into one as they are milk producing rodents that bear live young and a flying bird. For Hogan, bats have a spiritual relevance in that they act as guardians in the passage into a spiritual state and are intermediaries. According to her, bat people live in between two worlds, and hence referred to as intermediaries between the world and the next. As intermediaries, western culture stigmas have associated them with fear and evil. The bats, therefore, are guidelines to a spiritual existence as opposed to being creatures associated with horrifying darkness (Hogan 42).

Another Hogan’s take is on snakes and is similar to that of the bat. She views this in association