ABSTRACT
COVID-19 has ushered in dark times. It has also fostered a multivalent discourse that frames the ecological crisis within the mythopoetic imagery of darkness. In the following chapter, I place this emergent discourse in conversation with a subtradition of apophatic mysticism by exploring two sites where darkness is linked to ecology: Theodore Roethke’s poetry and Jacob Böhme’s visionary anthropology. I argue that Böhme and Roethke combine apophaticism with a form of erotic ecopoetics that resonates with the enmeshed reality that the virus unveils. In closing, I suggest that this ecopoetics offers resources for developing new modes of countercultural perception and an ethics of affect.
