by Lynn Keller
This language, she recognizes, is “a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things.” Potawatomi extends the grammar of animacy not only to humans, nonhuman animals, and plants, but also to rocks and “mountains and water and fire and places.” In every sentence, its speakers are reminded of their kinship with all that the language establishes as the animate world. Consequently, in teaching her ecology students, Kimmerer takes a bilingual approach, using both “the lexicon of science and the grammar of animacy.”26 She explains: “Although they still have to learn [the plants’] scientific roles and Latin names, I hope I am also teaching them to know the world as a neighborhood of nonhuman residents, to know that, as ecotheologian Thomas Berry has written, ‘we must say of the universe that it is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.’ ” Kimmerer makes clear she’s not advocating that we all learn Native American languages, but she does urge a transformation in conception and attitude that would allow us all to speak the grammar of animacy from our hearts. Internalizing that grammar, she suggests, “could well be a restraint on our mindless exploitation of land.” By enabling us to walk “through a richly inhabited world of Birch people, Bear people, Rock people, beings we think of and therefore speak of as persons worthy of our respect, of inclusion in a peopled world,” it would give us access to other perspectives and sources of wisdom.27
Western languages such as English do attribute animacy to animals, but not in the fulsome way that Potawatomi’s grammar of animacy does; inherent in that grammar is a fundamental equality and respect granted to all the parts of the natural world that possess linguistic animacy, and this nonhierarchical orientation is key to what I wish to convey when I use Kimmerer’s phrase “grammar of animacy.” The idea implicit in Kimmerer’s essay that because language shapes perception and thought, changes in language might generate as well as reflect changes in perception is congenial to many contemporary North American poets with experimentalist leanings; they have derived from constructivism and poststructuralist theory a belief that disruption of linguistic conventions might open the way for fundamental ideological change. Those with environmental concerns seem very like Kimmerer in using the powers of language to initiate what Forrest Gander calls “a reorientation from objectivity to intersubjectivity.”28 It is in this sense that they are engaged in what I am calling—adapting Kimmerer’s usage—a grammar of animacy. Joan Retallack, for instance, in “What Is Experimental Poetry & Why Do We Need It?” positions the experimental poet as “radical epistemologist” and language as an “instrument of investigative engagement” that “takes part in the recomposing of contemporary consciousness, contemporary sensibilities.” She observes that “the human imagination has always done a brilliant job of occupying the ‘empty spaces’ of alterity” and proposes that, having inherited “a monodirectional dynamic of voluble us and silent them,” poets need to find “a reciprocal alterity” by engaging in the “hard work of acquiring accurate [scientific] knowledge” and combining that with an experimental stance that may free us from our anthropocentric preconceptions. “The very word ecopoetics,” Retallack suggests, “may be seen as an experimental instrument that creates a new order of attention to the possibility of a poetics of precise observations and conversational interspecies relations with all contributing to the nature of the form.”29 We might question whether such conversational reciprocity can be achieved, but approaches to language that foster the kind of attitudes Kimmerer locates in a “grammar of animacy” may expand our listening skills and bring us closer to the respectful nonhierarchical connection Retallack (along with such explorers of “indistinction” as Plumwood and Haraway) envisions.
A.RAWLINGS’S WIDE SLUMBER FOR LEPIDOPTERISTS
Angela Rawlings is one of those seeking, in Retallack’s words, “correctives to ‘nature’ narratives of segregation, dominance and nostalgia” that fail “to acknowledge ‘them’ as inextricably intertwined with ‘us.’ ” Her 2006 volume Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists enhances its readers’ sense of kinship and interdependence with other life forms through, in particular, extraordinary attention to and representations of embodied sensation. There is a relevant passage in Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello in which the title character, objecting to the implication in Descartes’s assertion “Cogito, ergo sum” that “a living being that does not do what we call thinking is somehow second-class,” announces: “To thinking, cogitation, I oppose fullness, embodiedness, the sensation of being—not a consciousness of yourself as a kind of ghostly reasoning machine thinking thoughts, but on the contrary the sensation—a heavily affective sensation—of being a body with limbs that have extension in space, of being alive to the world.”30 Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists works to create just that kind of sensation for a body that may be human and/or may be lepidopteral, as the lines between these species often blur. A.rawlings’s text approaches a biocentric perspective not just through what it suggests about common somatic experiences shared by humans and nonhumans but in what it does to language itself: by highlighting the physicality of both sounding and reading words, and by making language evidently participate in the processes of the biosphere—processes of predation and consumption, of metamorphosis and decay, of reproduction, development, and evolution. The respectful and reciprocal engagement with other life forms based in, or taking place through, our bodily senses that Costello proposes—and which harmonizes with Kimmerer’s, Plumwood’s, and Retallack’s senses of how we may move forward in addressing the current ecological crisis—is central to a.rawlings’s exploration of interspecies identifications.
As I will demonstrate, in Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists, a.rawlings does generate species blurrings and “mutual transformations” between Homo sapiens sapiens and Lepidoptera, yet she also maintains her readers’ respect for the differences between butterflies or moths and humans. As suggested earlier, respect for difference is made easier by her not having chosen to “think with” one of the charismatic megafauna,31 by not choosing a species that is large-brained, readily imagined as neotenic, frequently linked to a particular human trait (as with the “sly fox,” say), or even associated with aspects of animality recognized—and often deplored—in the human. With the exception of the monarch butterfly, the order Lepidoptera hasn’t much caught the popular environmental imagination, and this, along with the marked differences between insect and mammalian anatomy, makes the creatures’ alterity easier to respect than might otherwise have been the case. Conversely, generating a sense of kinship may be correspondingly difficult, yet through an intense collaging that prevents clear separation of human from lepidopteral experience, a.rawlings manages it. By revealing correspondences and overlaps between human experience and admittedly imagined butterfly experience, a.rawlings challenges some of the ways in which we Western humans set ourselves apart from other animal life. Through its densely disjunctive, highly sensory techniques, her work fosters the appreciation of connectedness and commonalities among life forms that a grammar of animacy conveys.
Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists is a dazzlingly metamorphic volume that manipulates visual images and text to explore embodiment and various forms of eroticism; the life cycle of Lepidoptera; the practices of lepidopterists (particularly the collection and mounting of specimens); the stages of sleep; the study of sleep and sleep disorders; and the analysis of literary texts. According to an interview, it was prompted by a.rawlings wondering: “If a poet writes poems during sleep, how might a lepidopterist work while she sleeps? What effect does intimate examination of insects have on long-term information processing and subconscious behaviour?”32 It originated, then, from speculations on human consciousness, but more specifically on the human as it may be affected by intimacy with the nonhuman.
A readily visible textual instability is key to this book’s challenging version of animacy; this strategy, which asks us to see and experience both human language and butterflies and moths in unfamiliar ways, is fundamental to the po
em’s attempt to reposition humans and human epistemology in relation to the beings humans have categorized as Lepidoptera. Reliance on visual forms of communication contributes importantly to the book’s foregrounding of sensory experience, an emphasis that suggests how much human consciousness, at least in sleep, is a somatic phenomenon.33 Visual elements are one means by which the work calls upon not just cogitation but, in Elizabeth Costello’s phrase, the sensation of being.
On the cover appears what I have identified as a northern pearly-eye butterfly (Enodia anthedon) whose body aligns with the spine of the book so that one set of wings folds over each cover. This is the first of more than a dozen images by Matt Ceolin that appear in the book. Many of these images represent butterflies or moths either dead or in various life stages, inviting attention to lepidopteral bodies. Additionally, there are three images of jars and bottles that would be part of the lepidopterist’s equipment, including a stoppered bottle containing a butterfly specimen; one of a book opened to a schematized image of a butterfly with labeled parts; and another that presents a similar schematized drawing without representing a book. These constitute visual reminders that Western humans have typically sought knowledge of Lepidoptera by killing them so that they can be collected, categorized, and either dissected or preserved.
More experimentally, the text is placed in remarkably varied eyecatching visual arrangements. Sometimes these provide a scoring of the breath in the projectivist tradition; sometimes spatial arrangement coupled with variation in font highlights the juxtaposition of different kinds of discourse. But much of this visual variety turns pages into objects of visual art whose meaning—beyond a refusal of standard arrangement—is difficult to discern. Some page designs suggest concrete poetry, as when facing pages resemble open butterfly wings. Thus, on four pages associated with “bruxism,” “a parasomnia where the sleeper grinds or clenches her teeth,”34 near mirrorings of text create a winglike design made of boldface words, and of clusters of letters with isolated consonants scattered at the edges (fig. 3). It’s appropriate to “bruxism” that these are mostly the “dental” consonants t, d, n, l, made with the tongue against the teeth. The words on the left-hand pages are fragments of English, mostly nouns and adjectives; on the right are disjunct parts of Latin names for species of moths or butterflies.
Figure 3. Text in butterfly pattern from a.rawlings, Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists, 68–69. (By Angela Rawlings; courtesy of Angela Rawlings and Coach House Books)
Figure 4. Curled text from a.rawlings, Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists, 25. (By Angela Rawlings; courtesy of Angela Rawlings and Coach House Books)
Figure 5. Text uncurling from a.rawlings, Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists, 27. (By Angela Rawlings; courtesy of Angela Rawlings and Coach House Books)
These winglike textual designs might be considered a crude example of a.rawlings using language as bioform, making pages into butterflies—though we might equally well read this as highlighting the textually mediated character of our knowledge of butterflies, the distance between representation and the living animal. In a more compelling instance of displaying language as part of the biosphere, a tightly curled caterpillar of text gradually uncurls and moves to the right over a few pages (figs. 4 and 5). In the process its letters modulate from reading “count by slumber” to “faint bystander” to “pant by number” to “cunt by umber” (that last term evoking the umber moths) to—when the text is flat—“ti ur tor foknur” (where “tor” as anagrammatic “rot” seems potentially significant) so that this textual creature doesn’t just crawl, it develops in the process of its own motion through space and time. Elsewhere, letters progressively vanish from the text, as if eaten out, leaving tattered remnants of words, again giving material language a kind of organic life as it participates in processual change. Retallack in her essay adapts John Cage’s thinking to propose “adopting nature’s manner of operations” as one experimental ecopoetic strategy, and the practices I have just described can be understood as linguistic versions of doing just that.35 Even when analogs to biological processes are less clear, as when recognizable words are replaced by illegible clusters of letters that may or may not be anagrammatically decipherable, language in this book tends to be an unstable, rapidly evolving material—and the visual qualities of this text contribute crucially to that animation.
Like the visual elements, sounds also enrich the sensory quality of Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists. For instance, in sounding those dental consonants just mentioned, the reader is forced to be more aware of tongue and teeth than in usual reading experiences. A.rawlings often employs conventional techniques like alliteration and assonance in ways that heighten readers’ consciousness of their own embodiment. In her hands, even such traditional poetic devices serve to defamiliarize human somatic experience and to blur it with that of the moth or butterfly. A brief example of such aural density appears in the largely monosyllabic lines: “wood nymphs spin and hang crude cocoons // we hold our slow high flight” (WS 15). Here’s a more extended example, the lower half of an unbroken page:
our wings our breath
heavy as wails, our wet
soul, sail, th gall of th ‘th,’ th ‘of ’ of th ‘of ’ or th ‘th,’ th
ways lips hug proboscis th vulva, yes, th vulva
water is fire protrusion velour
penetration vellum
chrysalistalization dark valium
row of fine- lipped, of
up tubular, a
thin (WS 65)
Clearly, the echoing and modulating sounds—for instance, of proboscis, protrusion, and penetration (which could be read downward in immediate succession), or of vulva, velour, vellum, and valium—give these lines a sensual richness on the tongue. But beyond that, partly through the progression and dissolution of sound patterns as well as through its visual design, the passage enacts a shift from what seems a clear distinction between species—“our wings” (which belong to butterflies and not humans) on the left-hand side of the page, “our breath” (produced by humans and not butterflies) on the right-hand side—to a confusion of bodies. Either breath or wings could be heavy and wet, and both have associations with the soul (as the soul passes, or flies, from the mortal body with its last breath)—although a term like “wails” designates sounds not, to our knowledge, made by insects. The line of “of ”s and “th”s could sound like either panting breath or the movement of air with a fluttering of wings. The insect’s alliteratively stressed protruding proboscis penetrates flowers, but the human vulva might also be the entryway of penetration, while the lips here seem human as well, whether associated with the mouth or with female genitalia. Perhaps these lines suggest an analogy between the butterfly’s pleasure in feeding and the human male’s pleasure in sexual penetration. Perhaps they point to commonalities between the objectified position of the female in a patriarchal order and that of the butterfly in an anthropocentric one. Going further in their imagining, perhaps these lines attempt to bring alive for us the experience of an insect feeding, sticking that thin proboscis up the velvety softness of a tubular flower.36 A.rawlings creates a first-person plural that is not appropriative but inclusive, to borrow Retallack’s useful distinction; this “we” acknowledges a commonality of embodiment, hunger, and desire but within a context of also recognizing mutual alterity. Flying remains fundamentally different from breathing, and vice versa.
The important role sound plays in this poem’s blurring of the bodies and bodily experiences of butterflies or moths and humans is evident from the book’s opening pages. The first four pages of verbal text (that is, the pages that follow immediately after the dedication “To Northern Ontario,” a page of translucent vellum, and one with a small drawing of a northern pearly-eye), contain only the phrase “a hoosh a ha,” which is repeated different numbers of times and arranged differently on each page to map varying rhythms and increasing speeds with which the phrase is articulated. Calling those syllables a “phrase” is misleading,
since they seem closer to a sounded breath or breaths, inhalations and exhalations. A.rawlings’s 2007 performance of those pages (designated “Prologue”) on the PennSound website is eerily ambiguous in its combination of human and inhuman elements.37 While her voice dominates, one hears multiple voices, male as well as female, and the sounds, including some squeaks, don’t register as necessarily human.38 “A hoosh a ha” might well mimic the sounds butterfly or moth wings make as they move through the air, as perceived by hearing organs finely tuned enough to register their being raised and lowered. (As hearing organs, Lepidoptera have tympanal membranes on their wings or abdomens. They are sensitive to sounds produced by predators—birds in the case of butterflies, which are active in the day, and bats in the case of moths, which tend to be nocturnal. They are also sensitive to vibrations in the plant substrate and may communicate with one another or with other species through such vibrations.) In a.rawlings’s recorded reading, those pages assume an eroticized character, as if the being “hoosh”ing were approaching and then reaching orgasm before subsiding into stillness. Perhaps, though, one could imagine the sounds to register the gathering of more and more butterflies, who, once assembled, then come to rest. The northern pearly-eye does gather in large groups, particularly in the cooler, northwestern-most portion of its range.
We have seen that the visual and aural elements of Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists require a degree of sensual and somatic involvement unusual even in poetry, the literary genre in which the material qualities of language are usually thought to play the largest part. This emphasis on embodied experience draws readers toward aspects of our being we most evidently share with nonhuman animals (or sometimes plants, suggested, for instance, by reference to the scent of honeysuckles as “honeysuckle sweat”) and away from the rational cognitive functions traditionally thought to distinguish the human. We have seen, too, that the insistently metamorphic character a.rawlings gives to both sounded words or letters and their visual arrangement contributes to her unsettling of conventional distinctions between human and nonhuman species and perhaps even—in giving an unusual life to letters—between the biotic and nonbiotic realms.