by Lynn Keller
Melville, often a dark thinker among the Romantics, here steps away from the dominant philosophical model of his era that views nature as “deified” and enters the perspective of the “infidel.” That’s the perspective Reilly would have her readers adopt, one without colored glasses (as worn by the complacent speaker who announces late in the poem, “Gee, this.station-aryparticulatecloud actually improves the sunset”) and without the inherited consolations of a sacralized Nature.
In Melville’s time, the sea was a realm of seemingly inexhaustible abundance. Today, after the introduction of more and more thermoplastics, “What the sea brought [is]: poly.flotsam.faux.foam / &Floam®” (S 12). Unlike Melville’s sailors, people in the twenty-first century are “barely able to see sea,” presumably because of the soup of plastic trash that achieves its greatest density in massive garbage patches in the North Pacific and Atlantic oceans. The pollution levels of today’s oceans would have been unimaginable to Melville and his contemporaries; yet the whaling industry’s ruthless profiteering, of which Melville was clearly cognizant, anticipated attitudes typical of today’s multinational corporations, to which so much of that pollution and other environmental destruction can be traced. Reilly’s frequent allusions to Moby-Dick suggest that the understanding prevalent in Melville’s time of Nature as the realm not only for human spiritual and physical quest but also as resource to be exploited for market profit undergirds the despoiling evident in the sea’s current “poly.flotsam.faux.foam.”
After emphasizing the environmental damage caused by the accumulation of plastic in the oceans and suggesting the connections between that damage and specific strands of our intellectual inheritance that artworks often help sustain but sometimes critique, the poem in its closing lines returns to contemporary art’s entanglement in industry irresponsibility and deception:
What the sea brought: poly.flotsam.faux.foam
&Floam®
a kind of slime with polystyrene beads in it that can be used to transform almost any object into a unique work of art (S 12)
The context undercuts the advertiser’s claim that what Floam does is to radically expand the production of unique works of art, when its real transformative effect seems to be environmental degradation. Recognizing plastic foam as “cousin to.thingsartistic,” Reilly’s collage poetry indicates that art in the contemporary mesh is thoroughly interwoven with the marketing and consumption of products that threaten environmental health.
Reilly further explores plastic’s relation to contemporary art through several of the volume’s visual images that depict artworks made with Styrofoam. One displays a work by environmentally concerned New Zealand artist Andrea Gardner that, like Kristen J’s key chain ornaments, takes as its material Styrofoam meat trays. Titled Garden, and made from prefabricated roses as well as dozens of meat trays painted black, this geometrical piece presents what looks like a row of seven stylized and identical vertical plants, perhaps analogous in their regulated homogeneity to a row of Monsanto corn. The work seems intended as commentary on what is happening to gardens and our biosphere more generally, on how proliferating products like Styrofoam create what another poem calls “the inverse.garden,” the antithesis of Eden. By including this artwork along with that of Kristen J, however, Reilly also raises cautionary questions about the existence of clear distinctions between art and kitsch, between beauty and ugliness, between environmentally conscious reuse of excess or waste (attempted, presumably, by her own poetry in this collection where much of the text is online detritus) and use that is environmentally and politically suspect. That is, she suggests their interconnection.
Figure 1. Boot prints in Styrofoam. Rudolf Stingel, Untitled, 2000. Styrofoam, 4 panels; in Evelyn Reilly, Styrofoam, 18. (Courtesy of James Sherry and Roof Books)
With more complexity, Styrofoam art appears in a reproduction of Rudolf Stingel’s Untitled, 2000, made from four thick Styrofoam panels on which Stingel apparently walked in boots dipped in lacquer thinner, which melts Styrofoam (fig. 1). Reilly has credited the series from which this piece comes, which she saw in a Stingel retrospective exhibit at the Whitney Museum, with prompting the book’s project. Striking her as “incredibly beautiful and joyous,” their combination of “problematic materials” and “beauty” caught her imagination.35 On the facing page she places a grainy photo taken from the Internet of a line of bear paw prints on a crust of snow, which she has playfully titled Ursus Anonymous, 2008 (fig. 2). This pair of images immediately precedes a poem punningly titled “Bear.mea(e)t. polystyrene.” Reilly’s positioning of the images accompanied by the title insists that readers consider these two “interlaced // figures”—the wild animal and the man-made substance whose production is contributing to the melting of that animal’s habitat—in the fullness of their complicated interrelations, their “meeting” in our world. The poem conveys the imagined joy of Stingel’s act of creation and the ecstasy that humans and bears alike may feel in their brief lives, while it also calls attention to the enduring toxic pollution generated by human scientific and artistic creativity.
Figure 2. A polar bear’s tracks. Ursus Anonymous, 2008, in Evelyn Reilly, Styrofoam, 19. (Courtesy of James Sherry and Roof Books)
The poem’s opening page emphasizes the pleasure of sensory contact with the material world, particularly the exhilaration of “impact on material” made, as the paired images establish, by both humans and bears. Yet, by referencing plastic products, the passage also hints of humankind’s larger, problematic impact on the planet:
Standing
in the foreshortened
space of
impact on material
amid immortality of plastic (the ex-
of exhilaration (the ex-
of anonymity
ex(of nihil exhil
dawn . foam . dusk
bear . moon . musk touch
the ankle bracelets of the birds
(a pvc resin cut from extruded sheets)
the multiplicity of foam and foam’s conditions
(a lightweight closed-cell polystyrene)
the ecstasy
of being
containers temporary or not (S 20)
In Styrofoam’s poetics of interconnection, the play with multiple meanings of “ex” connects to “Wing/Span/Screw/Cluster (Aves)” and its critique of Saint Teresa’s transcendent ecstasy. That contrasts here with the ecstasy simply “of being,” which also entails “being / containers” for whatever substances our trans-corporeal selves take in from our surroundings.
Problems associated with human making come into sharper focus shortly thereafter:
[enter: pseudo-kindness good night bear
[enter: faux para-snowfoam goodnight styrene
[enter: keeps food warm for the elderly
as per www.americanchemistry.com (S 21)
We treat, or make a show of treating, our manufactured stuffed bears (as in Goodnight Moon) with more care than live ones;36 we blanket the planet in toxic materials, imitating and substituting for natural ones; and we tell ourselves or allow industry to tell us that those toxic materials are not dangerous. (The American Chemistry Council is an industry trade association for American chemical companies.) The inventions of artists (Bernini as well as Stingel) and scientists (“Ester among corn / Ethyl among ethylene”) become “fuel // for the way things happen”; that “way” currently produces trash and terrible environmental toxicity:
the smell of fumes
& a yellow strip
of smoked.brilliance
orange pylons discarded
nickel cadmium batteries
and.sleet
like small rounded plastic
units that frost
the.terrain
of polished visitation.ecstasy (S 22–23)
After displaying the harmful environmental impact of human creativity (and of transcendental aspiration—“visitation.ecstasy”), the poem closes, more than a page later, in elegiac tones. Reilly s
uggests there a grievous historical arc, perhaps a deterministic sequence, traced as “thoughts caught” in artistic representation. It moves from Bernini’s Saint Teresa, whose focus on the next world Reilly sees as fostering the degradation of this one, to Stingel, working from a degraded environment full of potentially beautiful but deadly manufactured materials, to Reilly herself, writing a kind of a requiem mass necessitated by global warming and associated mass extinctions consequent partly on products like styrene (an endocrine-disrupting petroleum byproduct that mimics estrogen, found in, among other plastic products, Styrofoam):
the caught
thoughts
of.transport . then styrene . then ex-inner sanctum
then
requiem eternal
Imposing Solitary Quadruped!
ex ex (S 24)
The penultimate line is another allusion to Melville’s meditation on whiteness and connects in the netting of this volume to the image that precedes the final poem, “The Whiteness of the Foam,” where a solitary polar bear swims in open ocean ominously free of icebergs. Reilly’s “Bear.Mea(e)t” poem implies no negative judgment of Stingel, who makes genuinely “unique works of art” from the manufactured materials filling the space in which he’s “standing.” But she uses the existence of his Styrofoam creations to register the impact of our energy consumption and toxic manufacture on another realm of whiteness, the dwindling habitat of polar bears.
I understand “ex-inner sanctum” as a reference to the loss of separation between inside and outside made evident, for instance, by the absorption of endocrine-disrupting chemicals from our surroundings; the phrase acknowledges trans-corporeality, a recurrent preoccupation in this volume, prompting Reilly’s critical examination of modern science. (At one point, she says it directly: “no important distinction between inside and outside” [S 35].) While valuing scientific knowledge and respecting the often elegant order evident in scientific understanding, she underscores the failure of science in our risk society to live up to its ethical obligations that follow from science’s own revelations of our interconnection with what surrounds us. The second poem in this richly woven volume is titled “Permeable Mutual Diagram”; both permeability and mutuality as ecological realities seem too little integrated into modern science including medical science, which Reilly represents as aligned with economic rather than humanitarian interests. These powerful entities cover over the “polysmell / of the inverse.garden” we inhabit:
O doctors, brokers & other parfumists of
current operating procedures
offering several different formulae
of eau de brutal and normal
as convulsions throughout (petit mal . grand mal) (S 14)
Ordinary people, finding themselves in an increasingly hazardous world where their health is more and more threatened, are left searching the Internet, unsuccessfully, for “a place to go next.” At this point Reilly introduces a multivalent term: “enter: the ether.” In addition to being a class of chemical compounds and a term that functions variously in different Nintendo games, ether is something that Newtonian scientists posited as the space-filling medium for the transmission of light and heat through space. Having asked about “whose vehicles” might bring “a place to go next,” Reilly introduces through this term a cautionary reminder of science having offered a subsequently discredited vehicle. Yet she also indicates the positive potential in science as she then presents a drawing representing two molecules of the solvent diisopropyl ether. By commenting on the appealing symmetry of this molecular model, she suggests that scientists’ creation of new compounds is partly an artistic act, responding to or revealing
the symmetries
of our anesthetic aesthetic inter aether-ial
net net of nodes noded net of netted nodes
as per some sutra or is it the reflection
of Indra’s jewels that forms the setting (S 15)
Indra’s net, a metaphor for the endless interconnection of all phenomena taken from Hindu and Buddhist teachings, has attracted interest as an image for ecological interconnection. This net is a wondrous structure that extends infinitely in all directions. In each juncture of the net hangs a single glittering jewel, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. The polished surface of any one of these jewels reflects all the other jewels in the net, so an infinite reflecting process is occurring as well. As I argued in the introduction, Reilly’s radically disjunctive poetic forms cohere precisely because of the multiple underlying connections among their parts, making the figure of such a net particularly apt for her poetics. In this passage, she suggests the closeness of scientific experiment or inquiry to her own artistic explorations. What she seeks is “some kind of permeable mutual // diagram in which the edge of one center / becomes the center of the next.edgeof,” and in which nature and culture or manufacture are thoroughly entwined: “this intimate.multitude mixed with authentic.faux. art.products” (S 16).
How far scientific procedures have fallen short of respecting such interconnection and its ethical implications is registered in the volume’s most polemical poem, “Plastic Plenitude Supernatant,” which brings together science’s failure to protect people from food-contact polystyrene and its failure to respect personal rights in taking cells from the cancerous cervix of an African American woman for research use without authorization or payment. (The line of cells stolen from Henrietta Lacks, who died of cervical cancer at age thirty-one in 1951, has been used along with prepubertal female rats to test the effects of polystyrene packaging on the female reproductive system. The two are further linked in the poem by a kind of immortality: the lasting of plastic and its effects, and the ability of Henrietta Lacks’ cervical cells—HeLa cells—to keep reproducing endlessly in the laboratory.) These violations by scientists of respect and sensible precaution bring to mind Dickinson’s sense of our living in a huge unprincipled experiment, which in turn recalls the unintended consequences of industrial innovation fundamental to Beck’s notion of a risk society, depicted by Reilly as follows:
The modern world being filled with untold substances
(in our infinite plasticity prosperity plenitude
that serve to make life better
(x-s to ex ex, Henrietta
as long as we carry out HI, “Hazard Identification”
(s-o-s, Henrietta (S 42–43; for “x-s” read excess)
The poem’s opening treats the use of polystyrene packages for instant noodles as itself an experiment perpetrated on unaware girls around the age of puberty, enabled by an ideology that subordinates other concerns to technological progress (what supposedly “make[s] life better”) and that idealizes the supposed objectivity of science conveyed by its impersonal language:
r e : Identification of unknown ingredient in food contact polystyrene
e g : noodle eating by pre, post, and presently pubescent
i e : sorry about that girls (er er, as per
Central Research Institute Nissin Food Products Co.
Ohyama having reported effects of certain oligomers in E-screen tests of estrogen receptors
examining subjects as described in Materials and Methods
& performing immature rat uterus assays
as well as standard protocols using transfected HeLa cells
(the mother of us all, Henrietta
constructing expression plasmids (ethereal replicant, Henrietta
and reporter plasmids (unearthly circlet, Henrietta (S 42)
The poem’s italicized language has been adapted from an article published in 2003 in the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology in which Japanese researchers within Nissin Food Products Company countered some earlier studies by ascertaining that styrene oligomers have no endocrine-disrupting effects. (When a little estrogenic activity occurs with high concentrations of the test compounds, these instances are deemed “false positives.”) By drawing from this article the language she implicitly c
ritiques, Reilly calls into question the objectivity of science now, when studies like this one are carried out by the very corporation that sells the product under investigation. The speaker whose non-italicized lines are juxtaposed against but also interwoven, in a formal enactment of painful interconnection, with those of the scientific authorities speaks with tender sympathy of the rats who (with allusion to Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”) “go gentle in the crook of the arm.” Her companion calls attention to the anaphylactic shock experienced by these experimental subjects (who are ultimately killed so that their uteruses can be measured after a series of chemical injections) and either that person or the speaker expresses regret as she pictures herself “at the gates of heaven . . . unconscious rat in sorry hand.” She would seem to be at least complicit in the animal’s death. At the same time, she is aligned with other victimized females in the poem—Henrietta, whose life in a “segregated community” as well as the medical abuse to which she was subject speaks to racial oppression, the Japanese girls whose possible reproductive problems are breezily dismissed with a “sorry about that,” and the sacrificed rats; all are victims of the patriarchal order in which a reductive version of scientific truth is valued far more than imaginative truth like that of Indra’s net.
“A Key to the Families of Thermoplastics,” which translates abbreviations used in science and industry for readers of poetry, explores the fascination both art and science share with plastic materials, while also suggesting a critique of science’s unethical pursuit of infinite plasticity in the material rather than the spiritual realm. Reilly’s deployment of visual elements in this poem exemplifies her use of images in Styrofoam to emphasize the materiality and plentitude of the human-fabricated world in ways that expose often problematic commonalities among scientific discovery, technological invention, and artistic creativity. All are products of the human drive to manipulate and remake the world. By taking her images from the Internet and reproducing them in black and white she also renders varied and incommensurate things visually commensurate in the same way that the astonishingly diverse uses of thermoplastics ultimately homogenize the planetary environment they poison, litter, and degrade.