by Lynn Keller
The first section of the opening sequence, “Dreamquest Malware,” for instance, presents a series of epistles sent from variously numbered “build sites” at various time stamps (e.g., ZMT 96927) reporting on the circumstances and difficulties an engineer encounters in a future world where technology is used to try to replace and mimic what nature once provided. (Reilly may be playing on the epistles concerning the future that are directed to different cities early in Revelation.) In an unusual moment of celebrating successful technological improvements, the speaker reports:
Brighter dimmers replaced the blighted meters
and the blinded windows
were given decorative grills
Even the situation drive restarted
which had exhausted us for weeks
So today the sun is ambulatory! the planet ambulatory!
The surplus bark in spite of snow
peels in permeable tentacles of façade plu! (A 16)
That the speaker is ecstatically grateful for a functioning mechanical “situation drive” that gives the illusion of the sun’s normal movement across the sky makes clear the desperate deprivations of this engineer’s future circumstances. “Plu” suggests not only the French for rain and past participle of being pleased but also the current Internet slang abbreviation for “people like us.” It seems that at least two of the three meanings—pleasure and community—have to be artificially generated in “this sober landscape // littered with so much / dreamware wreckage” (A 18) where the speaker is “so lonely / [s/he’s] been talking to [his/her] software / for three years” (A 14).
The darkness of this dystopian series arises in part from the way in which technical vocabularies are interposed on emotional ones, conveying half-successful attempts to repress emotion, particularly a nearly disabling grief. Here, for instance, is a report sent from one of the original build sites:
The signal is so sticky with procedure dreck
we grow desperate
for dislocation lubricant
Yet today we completed
2 fulfillment interstices
and 6 perfusion upsinks
after which it took hours to adjust
the nose cone of rampant grief
We have now pried countless tender chordate features
from the slab encasement
105 translation blockages
79 embedded snares
kneeling
yrs (A 11)
Talk of “dislocation lubricant” and “fulfillment interstices” may suggest technological management of dislocation and unfulfillment, but ultimately neither the jargon nor the inventions it denotes can keep the speaker from assuming a position of supplication or defeat.
“Chordate” refers to the phylum chordata, which encompasses a range of animals possessing a notochord, a flexible rodlike cord of cells that provides longitudinal structure; the phylum includes all vertebrates (as well as tunicates and cephalochordates), so it contains everything from humans to blue whales to peregrine falcons, with about half the living species being bony fish. The collective term may function in the poem as a euphemism, enabling the speaker to avoid naming the species whose remains she or he has been handling. Whatever the species involved, confronting the horror of mass die-off seems part of what brings the speaker to his or her knees. This mention of “chordate features” is one of many references in Apocalypso to nonhuman species, which often are referred to via scientific taxonomies of phylum, genus, and species, for animals and animality figure importantly in Reilly’s thinking about ecopoetics. She positions her ecopoetic work within “the far larger project—which transcends all genres—of radically reforming language as part of coming to understand ourselves as animals, and as such, revisiting the notion of the human subject within a trans-species context. In many ways, this is a search for language that ‘coheres’ with evolution, in other words with our destiny as animals among other animals and living things.”42 Using the term chordate, which lumps the human together with ostensibly dissimilar creatures, points toward that sense of Homo sapiens as an animal among other animals and also toward Frederick Buell’s recommended awareness of ecological embeddedness. Both Buell and Reilly seek recognition that the fate of humankind is inseparable from that of other life forms, with clear implications for our planetary stewardship.
That Reilly values thinking in terms of embodiedness as Buell does is evident in the essay from which I just quoted, “The Grief of Ecopoetics,” as she elaborates on the language she seeks: “Another aspect of this project is the exploration of a language that is deeply imbedded in materiality, not just in the sense of being an artistic or plastic medium, but as an action of our material being. . . . I see ecopoetics as search for a poetry that is firmly attached to earthly being.”43 While Graham conveys the preciousness of sensuous earthly being through catalogs and descriptions of what we can still enjoy, Reilly frequently communicates the preciousness of embodied experience through its deeply disturbing erasure. Key to the horror of the dystopic realm of “Dreamquest Malware” is its reliance on virtual and false versions of material phenomena in the context of the ruins of the material world familiar to us; what remains after some kind of apocalyptic transformation includes dust composed of “so many kinds of pulverized materials,” “blown fragments” of animal bodies, and itemized things of dubious materiality such as “dreamware wreckage,” “ceaseless moral deficiency showers,” “veiled impediment confluences,” “blog storage device[s],” “vision replacement apparition[s],” “large containers rigid with organic grief,” and finally, to close the work, “fields // of unintended / result flowers.”
Yet, like Graham, Reilly counters her grim future vision with present pleasures that the reader can savor, including bodily pleasures that remain available now even if largely vanished from the imagined future and, notably, the pleasures of humor. Here is Reilly’s description, from “The Grief of Ecopoetics,” of how she found a way to relieve her gloom while working on this volume or its title poem. The Western notion of apocalypse, she notes, is
linked to revelation—the vision of an escape from history into ahistorical bliss, prefaced however by an era of extreme violence and devastation. And it’s the descriptions of devastation that tend to dominate the literature of apocalypse. . . . Thus, the more I worked on this project, the more I began to be subsumed by despair.
I was struggling with this for quite a while and getting gloomier and gloomier until one day I changed my working title from Apocalypse to Apocalypso, on one level just a tinkering with language, but on another level thinking of [Wallace] Stevens’ “It must give pleasure,” and needing to dig myself out of an emotional and creative hole. And then I started reading about calypso, . . . the Afro-Caribbean music with roots in both underground communication systems used by slaves and French troubadour poetry. . . . Putting these two ideas together—apocalypse and calypso—began to solve something for me about the role of poetry and the joy of the aesthetic impulse, about how to bring that back into our notion of ourselves as animals, and perhaps how to love ourselves again as animals, and maybe find a base of action and of language in that love.44
As will be evident shortly, “Apocalypso” focuses on loving animals while it also exposes cultural deterrents to doing so. Much of the joy to be found not just in that poem but in all five sequences in Apocalypso, each of which reflects an apocalyptic or dystopic vision of the future, comes from Reilly’s engagement in some form of play or humorous wit that counters gloom. Such play seems crucial to her sense of the aesthetic impulse. Think, for instance, of the wordplay already observed in “Chilled Harold.” As another example, the “time stamps” for “Dreamquest Malware” make an allusive joke since ZMP, with which they all begin, is a drug for migraines. Drawing sometimes upon the linguistic inventiveness of the French architect François Blanciak, who in his book Siteless has drawn 1,001 imagined site-less “building forms” to which he gives names (A 111), Reilly produces some grimly hilarious d
ocuments.45 Here’s the beginning of one, from “Dreamquest Malware,” addressed to a Ms. T, where the speaker’s righteous tone in the context of the faux-techno vocabulary produces a comic effect:
It was a shock that you would send
this ignition system
instead of the slogan-infestation compress
we had so explicitly requested
What exactly was your intent? (A 10)
The irritated entitlement communicated in the manner of a formal business letter collides amusingly with the speaker’s degraded circumstances and with the absurd idea of a bandage that would alleviate an infestation of slogans. The circumstances remain bleak, but the reader enjoys a chuckle nonetheless.
Having shown how Reilly’s representation of embodied embeddedness involves environments severely damaged by industrial and digital technology where human and nonhuman species remain nonetheless interdependent, and having identified the pleasures that enable her apocalyptic rhetoric to produce responses other than paralysis and despair, I turn now to the volume’s longest sequence to see these traits in action within a work that self-consciously scrutinizes the apocalyptic imagination as both an historical and a present phenomenon. “Apocalypso: A Comedy” enacts what Lawrence Buell notes Douglas Robinson has identified as “one of the hallmarks of American literary apocalypticism”: metanarrative irony. Buell adds, “In the era of Cat’s Cradle, Doctor Strangelove, and Star Wars it is hard for apocalypticism to keep a straight face.” In line with that tradition’s “self-reflexivity about the possible fanaticism of one’s discourse,” Reilly’s “Apocalypso” offers a critical and partly mocking, reflexive treatment of the apocalyptic writing of Revelation, even while she employs the devices of apocalyptic rhetoric to warn of oncoming doom.46
The disjunctive poem “Apocalypso: A Comedy” is a quest journey through the Book of Revelation, filled with quotations from the “revised standard / sedition edition” of that text, as the speaker, equipped with a glue gun and accompanied by the one animal humans claim unabashedly to love, her dog, measures the apocalyptic vision of John of Patmos against what is happening in her own apparently doomed world and critiques his underlying values. “Come,” the work begins, calling attention to the tortuous temporality of apocalyptic discourse that we saw Graham engaging, “and I’ll show you what once / shall have taken place after this” (A 75). Far from being awed by John, the spunky speaker is angry and defiant; John’s having “abandoned the love / he had at first” (in Rev. 2:4; A 77)—which the speaker seems to understand to be love for life forms other than humans—has “unleashed the dog / of [her] darkest humor / to devour the chapters / that verseth” (A 77). Here, while playing with puns on leashes, Reilly announces her most fundamental critique of Christian apocalyptic traditions (and perhaps of Christianity itself): their anthropocentrism.47 At every opportunity, Reilly’s speaker, who is in several senses “down with the animals,” gestures lovingly toward them. She lists in her “sting-ray version / of the beatitudes” (A 90) species often disparaged in Western cultures: sea slugs, bottom dwellers, predators, and “those who stridulate” (crickets and grasshoppers) (A 102)—expanding her appreciation well beyond the charismatic megafauna championed by conservation organizations and implicitly highlighting the different functions enacted by different species within ecosystems. Playing on the anagrammatic presence of the word “rats” within “stars,” she declares, “and I mean to vindicate the innocent / and address vermin love words // to the seven rats of the seven stars” (A 81). The biotic egalitarianism that Lawrence Buell has identified as one of the central traits of environmental apocalyptic writing is clearly central to Reilly’s version of that discourse.48
Ironically, however, Reilly’s speaker is at the same time complicit in her culture’s pervasive disparaging of animals. She admits, in connection with rats, to having hired an exterminator. Calling attention to our language’s conventionalized denigration of animals and animality, she apologizes to canis familiaris for that phrase about the dog of her darkest humor. At another point, she takes back a derogatory usage of the word “cockroach,” using the opportunity to educate her readers about the diversity of cockroaches through scientific terminology free of negative connotations:
But delete this derogation
of Phylum Arthropod
Order Blattaria
with so many genera
including the oriental roach
(Blatta orientalis) and the American
(Periplaneta americana)
and some, especially in the genus Ectobius,
which are “small temperate species that live outdoors” (A 84)
The speaker’s amusingly presented inconsistency of caring about nonhuman animals yet also insulting them highlights “how much our notion of our ‘species position’ is embedded in our language.”49 The unfortunate durability in our culture of both the human/animal dichotomy and the ideology of animal inferiority is suggested in the passage where the speaker’s invitation to her beloved companion animal echoes the children’s game in which those on one team shout a challenge to their opponents, “red rover, red rover, let [a named member of the other team] come over,” and that person tries to break through the callers’ line. “Come over lover rover,” Reilly pleads, conveying devotion but also an edge of enmity. The invitation, poignantly, is to participate jointly in magical environmental restoration: “help spread some phoenix ashes / in this bit of ravaged woods” (A 78). These lines suggest a hope that awareness of our interdependence with other species, while hard to achieve fully, might yield better environmental stewardship and even some forms of environmental recovery.
In addition to criticizing the focus of traditional apocalyptic discourse on exclusively human salvation—an ethical and ecological error—Reilly also challenges what she conveys as the irresponsibility of its absurd temporality. By definition, the future apocalypse can, presently, only be imagined, even though apocalyptic writing depicts what is believed to be already determined, and even though the apocalyptic chain of events will, if realized, have proved unstoppable. As one of the poem’s epigraphs puts it, “strange verb tenses must be enacted: these are those things that will have had to have been, that will have had to yet occur” (A 71). This produces lines like the following in Reilly’s poem, “For we have stepped into the sacred areas / and wept over our waste procedures // which is will have been being our transcendence” (A 82). Here we tumble from present perfect, designating an action that has happened, to the present tense “is,” to the future perfect, used for an action that will have been completed in the future, and back to the continuousness of the present participle, “being,” entwined in the future perfect as “will have been being.” The lines’ landing on “transcendence” points to the aspect of apocalyptic temporality that is most problematic for Reilly: its “escape from history into ahistorical bliss,” which she fears allows people to look beyond this world and detach themselves from the challenges of problem solving within the conditions of historical time—here, the environmental problems caused by humans’ waste.50 Reilly’s speaker directly challenges John the Revelator on this score in a passage that humorously rewrites Robert Creeley’s “I Know a Man”—a minimalistic masterpiece capturing first the tendency to stew anxiously and self-consciously in a crisis situation, and then an emphatic rejoinder that urges taking immediate preventive action when disaster threatens:
As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,—John, I
sd, which was not his
name, the darkness
surrounds us, what
can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,
drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.51
Here’s Reilly’s speaker, who addresses John of Patmos, “as we are just about to cross / the George Washington Bridge”:
Excuse me,
a question while we are driving
I sd., John, I sd
what do you have anyway
against historical time? (A 83)
Even as the lack of apparent urgency in her question with its stalling “anyway” resonates comically against Creeley’s hard-hitting conclusion, the question nonetheless carries considerable force. For while Reilly invites an awareness of human insignificance in geological time, historical time is what matters immediately to her—and, she implies, should be what matters to us all. If historical time is only something to be transcended en route to a blessed eternity where all is made new, then we’ve little reason to look out where we’re going.52
For all its light-hearted mockery of its ethically inconsistent protagonist and its playful invocations of the absurd temporality of apocalyptic writing, “Apocalypso: A Comedy” keeps readers aware of the grim realities of the present. Where we’re going—indeed, where we already are in Reilly’s representation—matches all too closely John’s prophesies in the Book of Revelation, in which seas fill with blood, multitudes of creatures die, and waters become lethally bitter. These connections are evident through Reilly’s extensive quotation (or, misquotation—hers is the sedition edition, after all) and paraphrase of the Bible, which make clear that she is serious about the possibility of looming apocalypse, however apocalyptic traditions may be ironized in her text. Dwelling in crisis, the speaker is aware of constantly increasing environmental degradation—“Every morning reveals another crevice / of this denatured nature canvas” (A 90)—and she uses language that echoes the Book of Revelation to convey this accumulating damage. Where Graham focused primarily on global warming, Reilly introduces a variety of issues. For instance, evoking Rev. 6:14, “every mountain and island were moved out of their places,” she points to mountaintop removal mining: “the mountains were removed from their places” (A 99); where John of Patmos was shown the pure river of the water of life flowing from the throne of God, she is shown “the river / of the waste water of life” (A 106), with its suggestions of deadly pollution. She combines, compresses, and modifies biblical images in ways that make the envisioned cataclysmic future difficult to distinguish from the present, as she refers to “tainted soil” (A 98), “the sea thick with apo-oceanic scum” (A 100), or “the flowers / of the apocalypse—// stalky ashen broken caked / with coral reef skeletal remnants / and the dust of lichen,” which are particularly vulnerable to air pollution (A 103).