by Lynn Keller
While Frederick Buell urges abandonment of apocalyptic discourse in favor of writing that emphasizes an ongoing crisis in which humans are ecologically entangled sufferers, actively “dwelling in crisis” does not, from what I can see, preclude the anticipation of dramatic catastrophe on top of the already occurring creeping degradations one inhabits. Although Buell regards such active dwelling as generating a commitment to environmental care that will “help reverse society’s environmentally destructive momentum,” nonetheless, that mode of thinking and behaving does not necessarily increase one’s empowerment or ensure social change so much that the sense of impending doom disappears. This may well be more evident now than it was when his book was published more than a decade ago. Poets like Reilly and Graham, and Roberson as well, write with an awareness of inhabiting a world already in crisis even as they also anticipate or prophesy much more devastating changes to come. While observing that combination in the readings that follow, I will expose the differing ways in which Graham and Reilly convey awareness of embodiment and embeddedness in (damaged) ecosystems. In so doing, they counterbalance cataclysmic vision with kinds of perception that make it more bearable and less emotionally exhausting. Desired consequences include freeing politically and existentially useful energy and inspiring its devotion to (re)opening the search for meaningful courses of environmental action.
LOOKING BACK ON THE PASTORAL PRESENT: JORIE GRAHAM’S SEA CHANGE
The temporality of apocalyptic writing is complex, since, as Berger observes, “the narrative logic of apocalyptic writing insists that post-apocalypse precede the apocalypse”; additionally, “the writer and reader must be both places at once, imagining the post-apocalyptic world and then paradoxically ‘remembering’ the world as it was, as it is.”24 This is a part of the discursive apocalyptic tradition that we will see Graham adapts in Sea Change, one that richly complicates her representation of the present. On the one hand, she calls attention to ongoing and worsening crisis in the form of present environmental disturbance; although (as she represents it) only beginning to be registered in damage to humans, its cascading force is evident in damage to ecosystems whose intricate and fragile interrelations she details. On the other hand, rather like Roberson turning his attention to the beautiful piece of melting glacier before him, she focuses intently on the beauties of her present surroundings. She often does so from the prospective-retrospective perspective of an apocalyptic or postapocalyptic future, so as both to heighten her readers’ sensory pleasure in embeddedness in a wondrous world and also to awaken readers to the awfulness of ongoing and catastrophically impending losses. Her intensification of present appreciation alleviates the darkness of apocalyptic vision, even if it sharpens grief as well.
The poem that begins Graham’s eleventh volume, Sea Change, its title poem, emerges from a perspective of conscious dwelling within crisis that is also apocalyptic. “Sea Change” opens onto an extreme weather event perceived as part of an ongoing “unnegotiable drama” of environmental dissolution:
One day: stronger wind than anyone expected. Stronger than
ever before in the recording
of such. Un-
natural says the news. Also the body says it. Which part of the body—I look
down, can
feel it, yes, don’t know
where. Also submerging us,
making of the fields, the trees, a cast of
characters in an
unnegotiable
drama, ordained, iron-gloom of low light, everything at once undoing
itself.25
The line break between “Un” and “natural” conveys at once the wrenching, hitherto abnormal changes taking place and their production of a new normal that we now must face as “natural.” Capturing the near inconceivability of this “sea change,” Graham oxymoronically observes, “The permanent is ebbing”—neatly conveying the sense of living in dire, almost unimaginable crisis that Frederick Buell points to as the contemporary condition. The notion that permanence itself is disappearing highlights the speaker’s expectation of continuing transformation as crises inexorably unfold. Then, in a single sentence whose unspooling over two pages itself suggests the cascading consequences of current changes in our ecosystems, Graham records some of the ways global warming is affecting our ecologically interdependent biosphere. For instance,
at the very bottom of
the food
chain, sprung
from undercurrents, warming by 1 degree, the in-
dispensable
plankton is forced north now, & yet farther north,
spawning too late for the cod larvae hatch,
such
that the hatch will not survive, nor the
species in the end, in the right-now forever
un-
interruptible slowing of the
gulf
stream (SC 4–5)
Here again, the line breaks separating “in” from “dispensable” and “un” from “interruptible”—more breakages that suggest mind-boggling reversal—convey how what had seemed impossible is now not just possible but inescapably taking place. Feeling in this context the uselessness of the poems she has written, Graham moves from speaking “in this wind today, out loud in it, to no one” to speaking for the wind. This wind, which urges “consider your affliction . . . do not plead ignorance,” recalls the destructive winds mentioned in Job or Jeremiah, two touchstones of apocalyptic writing:
& quicken
me further says this new wind, &
according to thy
judgment, &
I am inclining my heart towards the end,
I cannot fail, this Saturday, early pm, hurling
myself,
wiry furies riding my many backs, against your foundations and your
best young
tree, which you have come outside to stake again, & the loose stones in the
sill. (SC 5)
That the civilization or the species may well be doomed is suggested by the word “foundations,” which denotes not just the substructure of the speaker’s home but the things fundamental to her or her society’s life, while the line break temporarily isolating “best young” speaks to the precarious position of the younger generation, whose future is in jeopardy. Using biblical phrasing that suggests its work enacts divine judgment, the voice—at once the poet’s and the wind’s—becomes the voice of an apocalyptic prophet.26
In several of the volume’s poems where the speaker’s immediate experience is shadowed by her consciousness both of present degradation and risk and also of a devastating future, Graham addresses or assumes the perspective of someone living in that future when lifestyles we in the developed world now consider ordinary will appear almost unimaginably luxurious. “Loan,” whose title indicates that we don’t own the environmental gifts we have, however we may take their loan for granted, is an example. The speaker, who has been tracing the rivulets of water after a rain, wanting “to know where everything’s / going, runnelling, & what’s / really dead here and what’s only changing,” suddenly shifts to address someone living in the future she foresees, someone who looks back on our present time:
do you remember it, the faucet flared like a glare of
open speech, a cry, you could say what you
pleased, you could turn it
off, then on again—at will—and how it fell, teeming, too much, all over your
hands, much as you please—from where
you are now
try to
feel it—what
was it, this thick/thin blurry coil
flowing into the sink (SC 25)
Later Graham’s speaker similarly comments on how we can presently “jump in the shower—just like that,” so that her readers will recognize how wondrously fortunate, and perhaps how lavishly irresponsible, we are, given that
the day which comes when there are to be no more harvests from now on,
irrig
ation returns only as history, a thing made
of text,
& yet, listen,
there was
rain (SC 25–6)
In the volume’s final poem, “No Long Way Round” (that is, no way to avoid what lies in the route ahead), the horror associated with this future perspective, from a time when the fundamental orders of civilization will have disappeared along with the familiar patterns of the natural environment, is even clearer. At the same time, the human imagination capable of giving insight into the future consequent upon present human conduct is revealed to be already in mortal danger:
You will not believe it
when the time
comes. Also how we mourned our dead—had
ample earth, took time, opened it, closed
it—“our earth, our
dead” we called
them, & lived
bereavement, & had strict understandings of defeat and victory. . . . Evening,
what are the betrayals that are left,
and whose? I ask now
as the sensation of what is coming places its shoulders on the whole horizon,
I see it
though it is headless, intent
fuzzy, possible outcomes
unimaginable. You have your imagination, says the evening. It is all you have
left, but its neck is open, the throat is
cut, you have not forgotten how to sing, or to want
to sing. (SC 55, ellipsis in original)
Circumstances are desperate; the poet must sing while she still can.
In a 2008 interview Graham explains her manipulation of temporal perspectives as a strategy she hopes might avert precisely the postapocalyptic perspective she sees us approaching:
What is the imagination supposed to do with its capacity to “imagine” the end? Is the imagination of the unimaginable possible, and, perhaps, as I have come to believe, might it be one of the most central roles the human gift of imagination is being called upon to enact? Perhaps if we use it to summon the imagination of where we are headed—what that will feel like—what it will feel like to look back at this juncture—maybe we will wake up in time? I have written [Sea Change] in order to make myself not only understand—we all seem to “understand”—but to actually “feel” (and thus physically believe) what we have and what we are losing—and furthermore what devastatingly much more of creation we are going to be losing.27
Graham’s emphasis here on “actually” feeling is evident throughout Sea Change, beginning with the very opening of “Sea Change,” where the speaker’s body conveys to her the unnaturalness of the record-setting winds. Graham’s belief that physical registration of “what we have and what we are losing” might prompt action and motivate sacrifices in what we regard as our standard of living so as to slow global warming aligns with Frederick Buell’s call for “living in one’s senses while one dwells in environmental crisis.”28
Sea Change enacts on multiple scales a tension between an impulse to focus on the terrible future and a desire to give the fullest possible sensory attention to the present and its wonders, the latter helping us feel the value not only of our immediate lives but also of what we might work to preserve. For Graham, this duality emerges even in the formal character of the verse, its combination of long and short lines with often jolting mid-phrase or mid-word enjambments, for which one of her explanations is
[by] letting the sentences move along this grid of very long and very short lines . . . I also was able to enact a sense of a “tipping point”—the feeling of falling forward, or “down” in the hyper-short lines at the same time as one feels suspended, as long as possible, in the “here and now” of the long line—so that the pull of the “future” is constrained by the desire to stay in the “now,” which is itself broken again, as a spell is, by the presence of the oncoming future. This also involves a tipping back and forth between hope and the brink of its opposite.29
In relation to present time, fullness of feeling appears to be among the poet’s primary aims. Central to her version of embodied embeddedness in ecosystems, such feeling is enacted both in the volume’s acute attention to deeply pleasurable moments of seasonal suspension and, more generally, in its emphasis on sensory experience, especially sight. “This” for instance, details the sensory character of a moonlit winter night through the observed action of “wind in trees blocking and / revealing moon” (SC 8). The tips of the trees are described as literally “scratch[ing] at” the “idea of the universal,” underscoring the material particularity of the moment. In this moonlight, the speaker’s senses awaken to the outer world—“All the light there is / playing these limbs like strings until / you can / hear the / icy offering of winter” (SC 8)—and to her inner being—“things one feels instantly / ashamed about.” Here, as elsewhere in Sea Change, language itself is described in sensuous embodied terms: “the feeling of the mother tongue in the mouth” (SC 9).
The two poems that open the volume’s second section, “Later in Life,” and “Just Before,” extend Graham’s exploration of the present moment, now focusing on times when awareness of the future seems held at bay. “Later in Life” opens on the first early morning of summer heat during a moment when two workers call to each other and their cries make a round with bird cries, a musical phenomenon richly registered via rhyme and alliteration as “a round from which sound is sturdied-up without dissipation or dilation.” In this suspended and extended present, “summer arrives, has arrived, is arriving” (SC 19). Immersed in this moment, the speaker declares, “The / future is a superfluity I do not / taste” and asserts “we have it all, now, & all / there ever was is / us, now” (SC 20). The poem almost fiercely asserts “your right to be so entertained” and savor this moment of blessedness (“there is no angel to / wrestle”), although its ending implies the ephemerality of such experience: “these words, praise be, they can for now be / said” (SC 21). For now.
In “Just Before” Graham elaborates on such a moment of temporal dilation—“a pool. Of / stillness”—as an experience of embeddedness in the earth, in planetary history and planetary life. The experience of this stilled temporal motion was, she states, “full / of earth,” while kenning-like word combinations such as “undersoil,” “earthwide,” “wood-rings,” and “fish-mouth” reinforce the asserted materiality in such stillness:
of copper mines and thick under-leaf-vein sucking in of
light, and isinglass, and dusty heat—wood-
rings
bloating their tree-cells with more
life—and grass and weed and tree intermingling in the
undersoil—& the
earth’s whole body round
filled with
uninterrupted continents of
burrowing—& earthwide miles of
tunnelling by the
mole, bark beetle, snail, spider, worm—& ants making their cross-
nationstate cloths of
soil, & planetwide the
chewing of insect upon leaf—fish-mouth
on krill,
the spinning of
coral, sponge, cocoon—this is what entered the pool of stopped thought—
(SC 22–23)
This moment of individual opening into an expansive present is also a moment of planetary awareness and awareness of multispecies interdependence. The passage may be among those Graham had in mind when she remarked in an interview about Sea Change that she was trying to awaken in herself and others “earlier, more ancient, human feelings of belonging in creation.”30 Certainly, her depiction of the moment enacts what Buell calls embeddedness in ecosystems.
Although Graham registers the changes associated with global warming through her senses (as well as through her knowledge of what is happening to other species—the plankton, for instance, or the cod), in contrast to Reilly and Dickinson in chapter 2, Graham in Sea Change does not exhibit much sense that environmental changes are a threat to her own body or t
o the bodies of other humans. She’s well aware that, however terrible the changes taking place, she “cannot / go somewhere / else than this body” (SC 6), and she attends to what her “body says.” Yet the poems reflect not so much Frederick Buell’s awareness of human bodily vulnerability within compromised ecosystems as an intense appreciation of the sensory experience of still relatively normal surroundings, along with a desire to record for the future the precious traits of what is currently taken for granted as “normal.” If, as Wallace Stevens wrote, “death is the mother of beauty,” then, going beyond awareness of her own mortality to anticipate the extinction of vast numbers of nonhuman species and perhaps of humankind as well further intensifies Graham’s appreciation of the wonders of her surroundings.31 In often synesthetic terms, she details and savors the experience of an environment that still has a progression of seasons, impressive biodiversity, and air one can inhale with pleasure. At the close of “Loan”—the poem in which she asks future readers whether they can remember when clean water was abundant—her warning about a dry, harvestless future gives way to a loving detailing of the sounds, sights, and tactile sensations of our easily taken-for-granted yet wondrous present world: