by Lynn Keller
Not all her mentions of current environmental problems are directly tied to biblical references. For instance, she observes that her canine partner is suffering “dermatological troubles / probably resulting from long-term exposure / to environmental chemicals” (A 95), and the only tie to apocalyptic discourse in the passage is that these are designated “tense issues,” a reminder of the strange verb tenses inherent to apocalyptic writing. Yet with or without evident allusions, analogies and modifications to the tribulations prophesied in the Bible are everywhere. Mention of clock hands in the poem suggests the Atomic Energy Commission’s Doomsday Clock, here adapted from its initial function of registering nuclear threat to signal multiple forms of environmental disaster, like those often cataloged in Revelation. In Revelation these disturbances of nature serve to eliminate the wicked; Reilly instead notes that they are inequitably suffered most by the impoverished and disempowered:
But we are getting rather out of order
still holding the bomb in our clock hands
I mean the tsunami I mean the flood
I mean the hurricane that pummels
the poor and the weak (A 97)
Where Revelation prophesies the destruction of the “merchants of the earth” who were made rich from jewels, precious woods, marble, agricultural products, and other materials gleaned from the earth, Reilly gestures toward current political, legal, and financial corruption. Her spirited speaker is one who (alluding to Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around”) is “kicking against the pricks / of wholesale legislative / abandonment” (A 85), and she sometimes sketches examples of that abandonment. For instance, that passage about the disasters pummeling the poor and the weak continues:
as a voice
in the midst of chapter six verse
eight is speaking building codes
deficient regulatory powers international
aid diversions and the darkest rider
(in both legal and equestrian senses)
flails its financial instrument vehicle
with fiscal irresponsibility reins
And a third of the waters
became wormwood
and many died
because they were made bitter (A 97)
(Rev. 6:8, to which the passage refers, speaks of the pale horse ridden by Death and followed by Hades and proclaims the destructive power given them over a fourth part of the earth.) The italicized biblical passage that Reilly includes, a nearly exact quotation from Revelation 8:11, seems not so much a threat of supernatural punishment that will come to those who fail to impose protective regulations or who divert aid from where it is needed as a description of what people through their economic and governmental institutions are tragically doing to themselves.
As was the case in Graham’s work, Reilly’s sense of present degradation and ongoing crisis does not preclude her also experiencing apocalyptic threat in “these cataclysmic lyrics” any more than her awareness of the sometimes ridiculous qualities of apocalyptic rhetoric and its failure to date to predict an actual end of the world precludes her from employing it. Near the work’s close Reilly confesses,
This is how
what would will have been
being a diversion
merged instead
into a vision
of preliminary descent
while sleeping on your carbon cushion
Flight 267
New York from Kiev (A 110)
Presenting the poem’s contents as a dream vision experienced in a traveler’s fitful sleep, she admits not only to an all-too-comfortable recourse to airplane travel despite its terrible carbon footprint, but also to feeling increasingly pessimistic about the future; “preliminary descent” is the early stage of a downward course soon to become more precipitous.
If people for millennia have found in visions of postapocalyptic transcendence or of pastoral retreat inherited conceptual structures that can mitigate—for better or worse, in terms of worldly reform—the fearful aspects of threatening catastrophe, Reilly’s “Apocalypso” exposes the digital realm as currently proffering another equally ambivalent alternative to focusing on the threatened biosphere. As “Dreamquest Malware” demonstrates, the substitutions for destroyed nature enabled by digital technology are in Reilly’s view thoroughly inadequate, and her work suggests that the digital environment that so many Americans regularly inhabit can be as much an escape as the sublime wilderness or the pastoral garden has ever been. Indeed, the digital is probably more dangerously seductive now than the pastoral precisely because digital reality is not disappearing, and because while we hide there, we can avoid seeing all that is being lost.
Reilly depicts people, including her speaker/persona, as too much shut into the digital realm, in the “usual enclosures [of] (Word, Facebook, Linked-in, Google,)” (A 93). Yet, recognizing humans as technology-using animals, Reilly doesn’t condemn digital technology, and this helps her avoid pastoral’s temptation to focus nostalgically on the past. The poems in her preceding volume, Styrofoam, discussed in both the introduction and chapter 2, are unapologetically full of information lifted from the Internet. She probably means it when she exclaims “(how I love my Apple)” after speaking of “passing through security / carrying as much fruit of the tree / of knowledge as possible” (A 87). (The page containing those lines plays more extensively with Rev. 2:7: “To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life.”) But she offers no visions of techno-engineering as a means of salvation from environmental disaster. Rather, recognizing that the not-here of the digital realm offers its own version of escape, and that it, like the pastoral, is more readily available to those with social and economic privilege, she admits to being “Disturbed just a bit today / by my own privilege screen / comfort mechanisms” (A 84). Wanting to make a change, she determines to find her “home page”—figuratively, her fundamental orientation—in a perspective that connects her to even the most disparaged of animal species such as cockroaches. It’s a perspective, moreover, that draws on the pleasures of embodiment—that is, on coming to one’s senses—and on what she calls “the joy of the aesthetic impulse.”53 That section of the poem ends, compellingly:
singing loving my vermin
singing sunniest day
dancing my aptest app-dance
under these apo-calypso rays (A 84)
The passage brings together much that “Apocalypso” values in this moment of environmental crisis and incipient apocalypse: concern for the well-being of nonhuman life; embrace of technology as an aid, though not a sole solution; recognition of the needs of the weak and oppressed, in recalling the Afro-Caribbeans who invented calypso; and appreciation of the very real pleasures of inhabiting a body on this planet—of singing and dancing and enjoying the sunshine.
At one point in her apocalyptic comedy, Reilly contemplates the section of Bruegel’s Fall of the Rebel Angels that appears on her book’s cover and remarks, “So many pretty revels / in these devastation pictures” (A 76). There’s a critique of aestheticization there—and a reflexive acknowledgment that artists like herself may be tempted to play with apocalypse just because it offers such an amazing array of powerful images: “A big artistic impetus this endtime vision” (A 95). Reilly is wary of the “prettiness” that is Graham’s forte, just as her sharp irony contrasts with the earnest self-examination Graham offers. By staying with the Book of Revelation throughout “Apocalypso: A Comedy,” Reilly remains more consistently focused on apocalyptic discourse than Graham does in any of the poems of Sea Change. Yet Reilly’s poetry also acknowledges, as Graham’s demonstrates, the psychological difficulties of dwelling unrelentingly in pre-apocalyptic crisis. Their poetics differ significantly, yet both poets’ work highlights the precarious dynamics and unsteady purposes of apocalyptic writing in the context of ongoing environmental crisis, particularly given the instability of their own relations to a sense like Roberson’s that it’s already after the end of the world.
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p; All three poets combine an awareness of living in crisis like that theorized by Frederick Buell, with a belief that we are either poised on the cusp of environmental apocalypse or already tipped into it. Rather than following Buell’s advice to leave aside apocalyptic prediction, then, they have brought such warning together with an ecologically grounded vision that recognizes dwelling in crisis. Their poetry concurs with Buell’s sense that acknowledging “one dwells in a body and in ecosystems” initiates the most environmentally and socially responsible stance available. But in order to bear their double awareness of crisis and apocalypse, the poets, unlike Buell, have brought into focus the pleasures available within that awareness. All three poets regard narratives of unmitigated sadness or unmitigated doom as unproductive. Roberson turns to the rewards of attention to one’s surroundings, knowing that what we have to attend to is in part unfolding doom. Reilly and Graham, who have not entirely abandoned the hope that apocalyptic warning might produce meaningful action as well as attention, seem to believe that eco-apocalyptic art must offer some kind of revelry or pleasure if it is to help people immersed in ongoing crisis muster the will to avert devastation.
CHAPTER 4
Understanding Nonhumans
Interspecies Communication in Poetry
Evelyn Reilly is far from being the only contemporary North American poet who is “down with the animals” and whose writing reflects a desire to establish more ethically and environmentally responsible relations with earth others. Chapter 3’s discussion of her critique of Judeo-Christian anthropocentrism in Apocalypso lays groundwork for this chapter’s examination of animal-focused work by Angela Rawlings, a Canadian poet and performance artist who publishes as a.rawlings; Jody Gladding, an American translator, poet, and installation artist; and Jonathan Skinner, a U.S. poet, birder, and editor of the field-altering journal ecopoetics. Representing one strand of environmentally invested contemporary poetry concerned with animals, these three experiment with formal strategies for representing other-than-human animals in ways that respect both their difference from humans and the richness of their lifeworlds, a richness registered as comparable to that enjoyed by humans. Even as these poets attempt in some ways to translate nonhuman languages into a human tongue, they at the same time use animal signs to modify the English language, pushing its syntax and sounds away from the human/nonhuman divide on which human exceptionalism depends and toward greater recognition of animal agency and of varied forms of communication in the biosphere.1 Seeking better understanding of nonhuman species as well as more respectful relations with them, in their scientifically informed representations of animals or animal messages they approach as best they can the elusive anti-anthropocentric ideal that Joan Retallack calls “reciprocal alterity.”2 Employing what I will present as varied grammars of animacy, their visually and aurally inventive work encourages appreciation of nonhuman species and their modes of communication; in so doing, it fosters compassionate attention to the plight of nonhuman animals in the self-conscious Anthropocene.
THE CONTESTED POSSIBILITY OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY BETWEEN HUMANS AND NONHUMANS
In his widely cited lecture “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” delivered in 1997 and published in English in 2002, Jacques Derrida points to an alarming acceleration during the past two centuries in the anthropogenic transformation of the experience of those beings we call animals:
traditional forms of treatment of the animal have been turned upside down by the joint developments of zoological, ethological, biological and genetic forms of knowledge and the always inseparable techniques of intervention with respect to their object, the transformation of the actual object, its milieu, its world, namely the living animal. This has occurred by means of farming and regimentalization at a demographic level unknown in the past, by means of genetic experimentation, the industrialization of what can be called the production for consumption of animal meat, artificial insemination on a massive scale, more and more audacious manipulations of the genome, the reduction of the animal not only to production and overactive reproduction (hormones, genetic crossbreeding, cloning, and so on) of meat for consumption but also of all sorts of other end products, and all of that in the service of a certain being and the so-called human well-being of man.3
To this impassioned list of deliberate manipulations of other-than-human beings we might add the less intentional destruction of habitats that has accompanied the explosion in the world’s human population and its increasing industrialization, including the poisoning of land and rivers by herbicides, “pesticides,” and other pollutants; the degradation of marine environments resulting from ocean acidification, heavy fishing, oceanic noise pollution; the threats to various animal populations posed by global warming; along with such inadvertent developments as the deadly transmission of animal pathogens through globalized trade and travel. In addition to noting “the unprecedented proportions of this subjection of the animal” that’s being practiced for the purported protection of humans, Derrida observes that we are now living through a turning point.4 That sense of a turning point for the planet’s animals has only intensified in the self-conscious Anthropocene with the growing recognition that we have entered a period of mass extinction on a scale unmatched since the last mass extinction 65 million years ago, the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction of an estimated 75 percent of the earth’s species, including all the non-avian dinosaurs. The currently unfolding biotic crisis is referred to as the Sixth Great Extinction or the Holocene Extinction.5
Donna Haraway, whose earlier championing of the cyborg has developed into advocacy of an ethical otherness-in-relation involving a capaciously understood “companion species,” is among those who have acknowledged the importance of Derrida’s essay. Haraway commends Derrida—who devotes much of the essay to contemplating his cat looking at him naked—for recognizing that his cat is someone (not some thing) able to look back at him and for “not fall[ing] into the trap of making the subaltern speak.” Nonetheless, she points critically to the philosopher’s failure to “become curious about what the cat might actually be doing, feeling, thinking, or perhaps making available to him in looking back at him that morning.” By being insufficiently curious, Derrida stopped short of full respect for the animal. Pondering the contrasting example of noted scientists who have not “refused the risk of an intersecting gaze” and who thereby seem to be gaining “positive knowledge of and with animals,” Haraway asks: “Why did Derrida leave unexamined the practices of communication outside the writing technologies he did know how to talk about?”6 In answer, she proposes that the philosophical tradition in which he writes did not provide the tools to practice the sort of curiosity she advocates and which is for her the basis of an ethical “alertness to otherness-in-relation.”7
In line with this aspect of Haraway’s thought, the poets whose work I will examine in this chapter are immensely curious about both inter- and intraspecies communication by animals. They experiment boldly with poetry—with the materiality of its language and with its visual and aural resources along with extra-poetic visual and aural material to supplement those resources—to gain knowledge “from, about, and with” other-than-human animals.8 Determined to attend to both animal expression and the limitations of their human language and human sensory apparatus, they imaginatively transcribe, translate, and transmute verbal and nonverbal signs made by animals. While such efforts could be dismissed as presumptuous, appropriative, or just silly, I see their explorations as serious and respectful efforts to expand human listening and attending to earth others.
The motivation for their curiosity is partly but not exclusively environmentalist. Here’s Jonathan Skinner, contemplating “slow listening,” which in his practice involves literally slowing down recordings of birdsong as well as producing spectrograms in order to make available to human ears and eyes more of that song’s intricacy. Metaphorically, however, the phrase points more generally to deliberately focused modes of attention to animal sign
systems:
Our limited overlap with the way our other-than-human neighbors see and hear the world, which includes our ability to take in what they might be telling us, constrains our appreciation of their brilliance and impacts our understanding of their needs. As the noisiest, neediest (and nosiest) residents on the block, it may be our job to stop and listen. . . . Just as translation makes opportunities of the constraints our language encounters in another’s hearing, slow listening can turn our lumbering ears into instruments for unwinding the musical microcosm inside a sparrow’s ear. We at least begin to hear what we aren’t hearing. Our algorithmic manipulations of space and time [as in the slowed recordings] might offer a probe into the seismic channel of perceptual distance between us and those we share the planet with. Finding ways to see what we hear [as with the spectrograms] offers a purchase into translations that become ways of performing other than human being. We will listen differently after a journey into the sparrow’s ear and we might act differently if we can become sparrows, speaking or singing into what we hear, even briefly.9