Poetry, Primordialism, & Post-Apocalypse [Sara Eliza Johnson]

Ascending eruption cloud from Redoubt Volcano. Photograph by R. Clucas.

Emily Dickinson wrote to T.W. Higginson in 1862:

I cannot rule myself, and when I try to organize—my little Force explodes—and leaves me bare and charred.

This expression is quite violent, and erotically so, the burnt-raw and vulnerable body becoming a figure for the Self destroyed by sublimity. Therefore hath the curse devoured the earth, and they that dwell therein are desolate: therefore the inhabitants of the earth are burned. The image of the body spontaneously combusting—gorgeously apocalyptic—is perhaps a product of its historical moment. As Beth Doriani notes in her book Emily Dickinson: Daughter of Prophecy, a “rhetoric of apocalypse infused” the United States during the Civil War; the national atmosphere in which Dickinson wrote carried the threat of apocalypse, and perhaps her work arises as much from this surreal threat—this fear—as it does from faith and hope (that fragile “thing with feathers”). Dickinson in fact has a poem titled “Apocalypse,” but in my mind 1247 is the poem that most potently demonstrates the expanse of her apocalyptic imagination:

To pile like Thunder to its close Then crumble grand away While Everything created hid
This — would be Poetry —

 

Or Love — the two coeval come —
We both and neither prove —
Experience either and consume —
For None see God and live —

What has always struck me most acutely about 1247 is the way by which it becomes the demonstration of its own words: the poetry itself “piles like thunder” and then “crumbles grand away” in the aftermath the last line, which sounds like thunder at its loudest and deepestcrack! through the air, knocking me to my figurative knees with its force. For me the power of the last line has nothing to do with meeting God but with meeting annihilation. The “God” in the last line of this poem invokes in my mind any supremely annihilating (yet generative) force: the pyroclastic flow, the risen sea, the nuclear explosion, the supernova, the black hole at the galactic core—whatever might leave me literally bare and charred if I were to meet it. This poem leaves me wanting to be bare and charred, to face the Thing—the “god”—the would destroy me.

But also notable about 1247 is the conspicuous lack of discernible speaker or addressee. The human being is not situated at the forefront of the world of the poem, or separated from any other class or species of life. The human presence instead hides with and within—and thus disappears into—“Everything created,” and so fear of annihilation becomes an equalizer, while both poetry and love, despite being “human” endeavors and concepts, become somehow inhuman or distanced from the human creator; they become earthen forces beyond human control. In what is perhaps his most famous series of lines, Rilke says that “beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are barely able to endure, and are awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.” Denn das Schöne ist nichts/ als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen,/ und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmäht,/ uns zu zerstören. Much poetry laments Death, and much meditates on Nature, but, given our current dire environmental circumstances, remarkably little poetry concerns itself with human extinction or non-existence: with either the primordial or post-Anthropocene Earth. It seems most ecopoetical poetry—even apocalyptic ecopoetical poetry—features a human speaker, a human figure, or humanity as an all-powerful entity operating at the center the landscape. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” becomes “Look on the vastness of our destruction, and despair!”

Still from Terrence Malick's Tree of Life

But what about ecopoetry in which humans do not “exist,” or where only traces of them—of their damage, their ruin—linger in the landscape rendered? Do we need an ecopoetry that not only diminishes but erases the human, since our collective narcissistic myopia is perhaps our species’ most destructive disease? We can barely see beyond ourselves, yet the “biggest problem we face,” as Roy Scranton writes in the New York Times, “is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead.” If evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley is correct to say that the human is the universe “becoming conscious of itself,” perhaps we can say the erasure of the human from the universe will result in a loss of universal consciousness—a kind of brain-death. But perhaps our anthropocentric notion of “consciousness” is flawed; perhaps we are not the consciousness, but the nightmare that overwhelms it. Consider that The Exclusion Zone surrounding Chernobyl is a thriving wildlife refuge (and one that has successfully revived an endangered species!) only because humans cannot—refuse to—live in their own radioactive ruin. Consider that the same species of butterfly that experienced stunted growth, mutations, and higher mortality rates after the Fukushima disaster has also already begun to develop radiation resistance. Ecosystems thrive without humans; it seems that nearly everything humans touch, they destroy. Even the most strictly vegan diet renders a great deal of accumulated damage to the earth and other species. So what of the ecopoetical endeavor that de-centers the human being, in favor of the primordial or (literally) post-human planet? The poem in which the landscape becomes alien or even hostile to us, threatening or disarming in its sublime desolation? 

William Carlos Williams’s “Spring and All” has been analyzed as a poem “about”  an awakening poet-mind or poet-“perception”—or, at least, as a progressive enactment of the perception of the observer we might call The Speaker—but because there is no “I” in the poem to signify the speech act, and no human figure in the poem, I am hesitant to say the “awakening” is the poet’s awakening, or even a human awakening at all. The personification in the poem is so subtle that we might say it merely echoes the human, or ghosts the human. The phenomenon being witnessed—leaves taking their form—is comprised of a series of microscopic movements imperceptible to the human eye. What remains of the human is unpopulated infrastructure: (figuratively) the road to the “contagious hospital” and (literally) poetic language itself, a human invention that arrives as if spoken by No One. The process of seeing comes passively, and builds a poetic experience that refuses the imperialism of the human eye: the “objects are defined,” and soon there is “clarity, the outline of a leaf,” but by what and for whom? Must we say the presence of language itself implies the presence of a speaker? There is no one here:

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken

The consciousness that awakens at the poem’s end is arguably inhuman; the poem asks of its readers’ imaginations to be there without “being there,” to see not as an “I” but as the light itself, or perhaps even as the temporal process that awakens the leaves into the shapes they take. Even if one imaginatively inserts oneself into the “scene,” as a witness to the awakening landscape, the experience is lonely and isolating; as a reader I feel as if I’m the last human on the planet, the lone survivor of the contagion. The earth is new. The leaves bloom strangely out of time.

The “contagious hospital” that looms within Williams’s panoramic desolation seems precursor to Joyelle McSweeney’s necropastoral, which she defines as “a political-aesthetic zone in which the fact of mankind’s depredations cannot be separated from an experience of ‘nature’ which is poisoned, mutated, aberrant, spectacular, full of ill effects and affects.” Humanity is not the death of Earth; as Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone suggests, life will likely survive without us, despite us, and relatively soon (in planetary time) after our extinction our residual effects will likely be insignificant (or, at least, absorbed into ecosystems in various ways, some harmful, but some neutral or even productive). But humanity is a contagion. We infect ecosystems. We destroy them, as we destroy our own cities with airstrikes and chemical agents.

Genesis. Image courtesy of www.ekac.org. Click to enlarge.

One fascinating and brilliant project, Eduardo Kac’s Genesis (1999), both critiques and compromises The Human and the Biblical notion that humanity is superior to other lifeforms by translating Genesis 1:26—Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth—into Morse Code, and then “converting” that code into DNA base pairs. The site explains,

Genesis is a transgenic artwork that explores the intricate relationship between biology, belief systems, information technology, dialogical interaction, ethics, and the Internet. . .[The sentence] was chosen for what it implies about the dubious notion--divinely sanctioned--of humanity's supremacy over nature. Morse code was chosen because, as the first example of the use of radiotelegraphy, it represents the dawn of the information age—the genesis of global communication. The Genesis gene was incorporated into bacteria, which were shown in the gallery. Participants on the Web could turn on an ultraviolet light in the gallery, causing real, biological mutations in the bacteria. This changed the biblical sentence in the bacteria. After the show, the DNA of the bacteria was translated back into Morse code, and then back into English. The mutation that took place in the DNA had changed the original sentence from the Bible. The mutated sentence was posted on the Genesis web site. In the context of the work, the ability to change the sentence is a symbolic gesture: it means that we do not accept its meaning in the form we inherited it, and that new meanings emerge as we seek to change it.

The artwork diminishes the human’s significance while simultaneously accentuating the human capacity to both alter and be altered. As Mitchell, Burgess, and Thurtle note at their multimedia project Biofutures,

the medium acts as if it is alive. Not only does the medium allow for the amplification or growth and reproduction of an organism, but in addition the complexity of the interaction between organism and medium allows for unforeseen consequences in the production of the work of art.

Though it challenges notions of human dominion, this work nonetheless treats the human as living participant and agent in his or her own evolutionary destiny. Work that instead treats the human as residue (the residue, in some cases, being the language with which the poem is written)—that engages the human reader through his or her absence, rather than through his or her presence and ability to participate in the artwork—is rarer; one obscure example might be Tyrus Miller’s Earthworks (1994), which features earthen poems that arrive either devoid of human contact or from a questionably human “speaker."

 

 

Image courtesy of Eclipse (http://eclipsearchive.org/). Click to enlarge.

 The language within breeds. Words bond together into imagistically precise portmanteaus—“eyeborne” and "pincermouth" and “windcrept”—as if into new molecules or linguistic “species” in and of themselves. Miller’s landscape is an afterworld; whenever “the human” enters here it is buried—a “me,” as in “Debris,” that is “a single head among the seifs, sixpointed star dunes”—as if irrecoverable, the language surrounding it lush, mutated, and overgrown, like the area surrounding Chernobyl, or the “bare and charred” post-apocalyptic field finally rooting, gripping down, and awakening. (You can read more of Earthworks at the Eclipse archive here.)

Or perhaps a better word than “afterworld” for Miller’s landscape is “extraterrestrial.” The work alienates its human readers from the earth it portrays, a planet that seems in the state of a new primordialism—not engaged in a “healing” of the wounds, but in a regathering of material, a transformation of substance into forms only barely recognizable to us. This is the kind of artwork through which we as “readers” meet the fruit of our annihilation: absent from the poem, erased from the landscape but for our residue, we become, in a sense, the hole in which a strange and alien seed is planted. McSweeney says the necropastoral “is not an ‘alternative’ version of reality but it is a place where the farcical and outrageous horrors of Anthropocenic ‘life’ are made visible as Death,” where Apocalypse (the “obscene event”) bubbles up like sulphuric acid, eroding the systemic infrastructures that organize (and justify) our existences. Perhaps this is the kind of artwork, conversely, through which our Death is made visible as Life.

Comments

[Jessica Piazza]

Thanks for this, Sara. I'm really interested in the idea of "our Death...made visible as Life." I think poetry tries to do that in a variety of ways; through subject, of course, but even just through existing as a record of things after the fact.

Anyway, this was great. Looking forward to more.

[Tyrus Miller]

Wow, obscure example indeed. I appreciate your insightful words about Earthworks (and the whole post as well!), and it's very interesting to see how you've contextualized it among the work and thematics of your essay.

[Sara Eliza Johnson]

Thanks, Jessica. And thank you, Tyrus--very happy to know you found my take interesting/insightful.