What makes a text both environmental and a theory of the imagination?

When I first titled this post, my final piece of punctuation was a period. Upon reviewing it an instant later, I decided to change my period to a question mark. Periods denote ends, while question marks leave space for means to a better kind of truth--I certainly do not want to mislead readers into thinking that I know what the hell I am talking about, at least initially, concerning either environmental or imaginative classifications. However, my question mark is doing far more than simple butt-covering: It allows me to make an attempt at answering a question through a set of definitions that does not necessarily have to conform someone else's.

We should wonder what exactly makes a text environmental. While naturalistic imagery and a kind of processural leaning towards "pro-environmental" stances seem like obvious criteria, I submit that an "environmental" text denotes "stuff around us" in a very basic sense. I am assuming that all "stuff" is ultimately a product of the natural world, whether humans have altered it for their purposes or not. The word "stuff" should be further filtered into "physical spaces": places that humans and other "stuff" occupy. Basically, an environmental text talks about containers--the inside of a cavern, a laboratory, a wood, a plain, the world, space, and the like--even though I am proscribing that all of existence is somehow a container, and also skirting over the political implications "ism" and "ist". The "container environment" postulation will do for now, despite its obvious limitations. Identifying environmental texts that harbor a theory of imagination will be easier to frame, for me at least, without all of those other implications muddying the waters just yet.

The imagination draws from its experiences and its trajectories of experience. Things that we touch, taste, feel, hear, and smell all assist in contributing to the base materials that imagination draws from and rearranges. Senses are the initial medium of the imagination, and humans can create entirely new sensations based on projected trajectories that other senses provide. Imagine, if you will, how a peach tastes, feels, and smells like in your mouth. Now pretend those are the only sensations available to you. How many ways can those sensations be recombined to produce something else entirely different from a peach. Let's play a game!

Peach, fuzzy, cold, squishy, sweet, hard core, soft else, yellow-orange-red, earth, and soft sinews.

"The fuzzy earth and soft elsewhere felt cold and orange against my sinews."

Alright, perhaps that was an entirely alien and silly example, but my point still stands--the imagination needs some sensation. However, we also need words in order to frame those sensations. In my sad attempt to illustrate imaginative recombination, I eventually ran out of stuff: I wanted to make squishy walls, but I then remembered that the peach was the only thing allowed in my imaginative environment. On the other hand, I could have trajectorized an infinite number of complete peaches that formed a kind of wall, or even a flying saucer. The basic building block of my peach allowed my imagination to soar, but the limitations on language prevented it from being filtered the way I wished. The imagination transcends language, yet for it to occupy text, it must first filter through the medium of language.

Texts that are both environmental and a theory of imagination draw from their surroundings in ways that have something to say about how the imaginative process works. Perhaps my own text in the form of this particular post is a theory of imagination that is not quite environmental--my piece does not express itself through the filter my provenience as a writer: the environment is not interwoven into the very fabric of my text, nor is it used to explain/qualify the imaginative process. The environmental text not only hearkens linguistically unto the physical space (or the idea of such a space) pervading the writer's thoughts, but also employs, or at least considers, environmental processes in its consideration of the imagination (the imagination is like the falling of leaves from a tree--dry and brittle after a geological moment of pure understanding).

I hope that my definition and description of environmental texts is inclusive rather than exclusive, though classifications necessitate an exclusionary nature. I would rather hate to write an environmental text and then learn that my assumption was incorrect. On the other hand, classifications are often used posthumously or through some other means outside of the author's agency to classify her or his own work, and do not necessarily serve as oppression, but as a means of organizing understanding. Perhaps my essay works best as a suggestion or inspiration to a different means of classification. It's also nice that mine can be easily junked without any horrendous repercussions to wider discourse--I do not wish Linneas any ill, but there are potential alternatives!