Recomposing Ecopoetics

by Lynn Keller

  Metamorphosis, particularly multistaged metamorphosis, also provides the basis for the book’s structure, and exploring this structurally embedded thematic further will allow me to more fully develop my argument about the poem’s creation of a grammar of animacy. The book has six sections, in each of which a lepidopteral life stage is explicitly linked with a stage of human sleep or a category of sleep disturbance—for instance, the first section is “EGG-INSOMNIA,” the next “EGG, LARVA - DYSSOMNIA,” the third “LARVA-NREM,” and so forth. Each page announcing a new stage also has on it a large-font typographic symbol or combination of symbols (e.g., {#} or ~ or ~}); one effect of these is to foster more inclusive thinking about languages by signaling that communicative systems need not involve words. Four of the poem’s sections contain pages where the name of a sleep stage or disorder—“sleep spindles,” say, or “somnambulism”—appears in a small capitalized font on the lower outside corner by the page number. According to the description on the book’s back cover, “sleep is read here through the life cycle of a moth.” However, that does not accord with my readerly experience: the book does not seem to me to be more about sleep than it is about moth life. The two are thoroughly intertwined so that the book is about both, and also about their construction in language and their examination by science. After I shared with Angela Rawlings an earlier reading that made these claims, she responded, “Yes, I approved the back-cover copy. However, I thought I’d mention that I am in agreement with your experience of the book. My experience writing it was that there was no intended hierarchy of one subject over another. Indeed, it could be said that sleep is read through the moth’s life cycle, but the inverse is equally valid—the moth’s life cycle can be read through sleep.”39 Sleep seems to be where humans come closest to the kind of metamorphosis butterflies undergo: when we sleep, without our choice our brains and bodies enter distinct states with different modes of experience or consciousness. The book’s structure, then, emphasizes the analogous ways in which humans and butterflies or moths undergo change through successive bodily transformations not subject to cognitive control.

  The experience of reading Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists, while certainly fascinating, is unsettling and at times disturbing as well. The back cover identifies the book as “an erotic nightmarescape.” That disturbance is provoked partly by the book’s content—horrifying evocations of moths caught in one’s throat, for instance—which is what the anonymous blurber seems to have in mind. But it is also produced by the unpredictable ways “words breed” (WS 81) suggesting uncontrolled genetic modifications. More generally, discomfort arises because the reader’s orientation is so precarious, and any sense of cognitive mastery so ephemeral.40 Beginning with the very first lines after the (ah hoosh a ha) prologue, the reader has to accept or in some way accommodate a condition like the illogic of dream narrative. Here are those opening lines:

  We descend on a field by a lake. a hoosh The lupin, sleep, the fog. a ha Fireflies, silent moths. We bury our legs in sand. Sound through the sand is dormant. We desire sleep to enter, virginal.

  We stretch our feelers toward the warm body. a a Slowly, hands fog-damp spin plants, form air-filled hollows, breath cocooned, fur soft and blurred, heavy even heavenly. hoosh Soft like quiet. ha

  Soft like we quiver. (WS 14)

  The first-personal plural speaker might well, at least initially, be lepidopteral, but the perspective seems ambiguously human as well. Perhaps the writing moves between the two species’ experiences, perhaps it joins them, but certainly any impulse in the reader to separate human neatly from Lepidoptera is thwarted. Once the reader relinquishes the quest for categorization, she or he can appreciate that whether the legs in sand or the desire for sleep belong to one species or both, the bodies with hands and/or feelers occupy the same dreamily fog-filled field and possess a similar soft vulnerability. They share not only the natural environment of this summer evening in (if the dedication locates the work) northern Ontario but also a condition of desire for a change of somatic state that involves both sleep and sexualized bodily contact.

  Similarly, the page that follows begins with the clearly human action and predominantly human perspective of “Slow light touch of hand on wing, scales brush off like butterfly kisses” (the anthropomorphizing attribution of kissing to butterflies, which imagines the act would feel like brushing one’s eye lashes against another’s skin) but shortly, when “we tongue our shell, our conch,” “we” seems to speak also for larvae eating the eggshells from which they emerge and then acquiring nutrition from plants with “tongue buried deep in the suckle the honey” (WS 15). The we subsequently becomes even more intensely indeterminate with the eroticized language that accompanies “the story’s arousal”:

  we are taut while we thrust against the inner wall. Sleep is bruised or screams or none comes but we desire, we feel the full hot flesh of our wing swipe grass, scrape sand, we push ourselves out of ourselves, into our sound our hand our sweet wet hot our path, mourn, rake, master or muster. Glisten swell come and the story’s arousal, twenty eyes unblink when the sun’s awake and even when it’s not the brain speaks, screams, swells

  and huge battened eyes of a hundred hungry mouths, no moths, wait this will move. (WS 16–17)

  As the first-person plural pronoun gathers in the reader as well, s/he is drawn into an experience that seems both the human progress toward the “sweet hot full the electricity” of orgasm and the compound-eyed moth’s effortful emergence from an earlier stage of itself, the pupa.

  If we readers cannot distinguish human from butterfly desire or human from butterfly arousal here, and if we have to acknowledge that both are present, then we can no longer take up the hierarchical, anthropocentric vantage offered by a language that devalues the nonhuman. If, prompted by this dense weave of words—the text’s grammar of animacy—we have imaginatively entered a state where human and lepidopteral experiences, equally vibrant and equally defamiliarized, interpenetrate without our losing awareness that significant differences exist between insects and mammals, we may be approaching Kimmerer’s vision of the world as a “communion of subjects.” This is a remarkable achievement and one likely to enhance readers’ sense of Lepidoptera as creatures with their own intentions and desires, keenly responsive to their environments; it is also likely to stimulate curiosity about the entanglement of human and lepidopteral lives (or extinctions).

  Of the three poets discussed in this chapter, a.rawlings goes the furthest in developing somatic commonalities between humans and nonhuman species. The sensory experiences she invokes often involve primal activities such as eating or sex or moving between involuntary stages of being, and they often assume a violent cast. Consequently, she may risk playing into some very old, derogatory thinking about animality. It’s hardly news that humans and nonhuman animals have sexual drives in common; one could even see the work, particularly through its violence, as reinforcing traditional, problematic linkages of the animal with humans’ “lower” functions. This lends special importance to the work’s treatment of language—a “higher” activity that some view as distinguishing the human—particularly its rendering of language as thoroughly metamorphic and material. A.rawlings’s reinforcement of how much we humans are our bodies even in such an “elevated” trait as our ability to invent sign systems, moreover, fosters recognition of—to recall Frederick Buell’s phrase—embodied embeddedness in ecosystems. In most of this volume, a.rawlings’s presentations are too mobile, too multifaceted and multiperspectival, to allow any sense of the human apart from the dense linguistic environments of animacy she creates—environments in which plant, human, and nonhuman animal bodies as well as alphabetic ones join, divide, caress, tear, devour, pin, penetrate, entangle, and transform.

  In its representation of the work of lepidopterists, however, the book presents a contrasting model of using language and the intellect that substitutes familiar dualisms for the inclusive grammar of animacy. Beginning in the EGG, LAR
VA - DYSSOMNIA section, a.rawlings incorporates what appear to be selections from a set of instructions for those seeking the epistemological control that is expressed in tidy taxonomies. Inserted in documentary fashion are instructions for how to “collect, kill, and mount specimen[s]” (WS 23), such as:

  Manipulate wings simultaneously to avoid twisting body.

  Pin wings to mounting board.

  . . .

  Pin wings near large veins to avoid tears.

  Place paper over wings to prevent curling while drying. (WS 26–27)

  or

  Keep mounted specimen in low-moisture condition to prevent mould.

  Avoid direct sunlight to prevent fading.

  Store in tightly closed box with insecticide to prevent dermestid beetle larvae

  and book lice from feeding on body parts. (WS 29)

  These passages associate traditional methods of scientific investigation with a fixing that is counter to the processes of life and of ecology; not only do those collecting specimens kill the creatures they study, but they deliberately remove the bodies from the cycles of decay and nourishment in which they would otherwise participate. A.rawlings gives immediacy to these implied, familiar judgments of scientific “objectivity” by implicating the reader in analogous processes. Poetry critics, the text warns us, can enact a similar destruction. Parallel to those who “Pinch thorax between thumb and forefinger. / Slide specimen into envelope; store in box with insecticide” (WS 23) are those who wish to “Collect, sort and frame text . . . Pinch meaning between morpheme and phoneme . . . Slide meaning into envelope; store in box with semanticide” (WS 42). In presenting parallel critiques of literary study and the science of lepidoptery, a.rawlings puts at least certain forms of intellectual activity—forms in which the reader may have participated—at odds with the pleasure in Costello’s “sensation of being.”

  On the facing page, which has as its sleep term in the bottom corner “restoration,” a.rawlings offers a set of italicized instructions that return us to the alternative approach taken by the bulk of her poem. Notably, though perhaps not murderous, these instructions have their own violence. They involve forcefully manipulating the text so that it becomes an active medium that does things, or they involve doing things to the text that defamiliarize and reveal it more truly:

  Force a pen through the body of the text.

  Translate texts simultaneously to twist meaning. Pen words on bed frame.

  Pen anagrams on mirror.

  Pin words near vowels to avoid tears. Place paper over words to curl while drying.

  Watch text uncurl dusk.

  Place punctuation under lamp to increase integrity. (WS 43)

  (Tears as in torn wings on the left-hand page may become wept tears on the right—an example of the text’s prevalent polysemy.) It would be reductive, then, to suggest that the experimental writer’s activities are positioned in simple opposition to those of the scientist—or literary critic—but the poet clearly is critical of taxonomic science’s insistence on fixed and distinct categories. One way to understand the late pages that list fragmented Latin names for butterflies, or the pages that turn lists of lepidopteral pupae or larvae into a kind of rhythmic chant—for example, “tiliae larva nd smerinthus ocellata larva nd hemaris fuciformis larva nd cerura vinula larva nd notodonta dromedaries larva nd ptildontella cucullina larva” (WS 86)—is to see a.rawlings forcing her pen through the body of lepidoperists’ foundational text, that of Linnaean classification according to classes, orders, genera, and species. In a similar gesture, she performs transformative twists on the line “Welcome to the Centre for Sleep and Dream Studies,” gnawing away at its words to reveal other possibilities they contain: “Welcome to th // Enter. Sleep nd ream. elcm” (WS 24). Opposing herself to the dissective activity of much science, but not denying the destructive aspects of her own practices, a.rawlings uses scientific terms as material for productive verbal and conceptual metamorphosis. This activity has a feminist dimension as well: there are clear suggestions in the text that women and their bodies are labeled, collected, violently pinned, and in several senses mounted (“does th vahlvã speak / how does th vulvaw speak” the text asks [WS 62], evoking Gayatri Spivak’s subaltern). Women are another Other whom the book challenges us to perceive more fully and more fluidly. The text’s emphasis remains nonetheless on tapping—through the altered states of dream, of sexual arousal, perhaps of drugged consciousness and also through play with several languages and bodies of knowledge—kinds of somatically based understanding that would be available, albeit somewhat differently, to both men and women. Wide Slumber models using that somatic knowledge to experience the animal other from an inevitably incomplete but still radical within-ness that also gives voice to specifics of difference.

  At the beginning of the “LARVA, PUPA - REM” section of Wide Slumber is a striking pair of facing pages that combine visual images with brief text. On the left “so we dream the same” appears above a sharp image of the left wings of a northern pearly-eye, the other half of its body dissolving in a watery wash; on the right an image of a specimen trapped in a stoppered killing bottle appears above the line “do we dream the same” (WS 50–51; fig. 6). Clearly, when human dreams are of power and domination, they differ chillingly from those of butterflies. On a later page, a similar pattern repeats: “do we have plans for them” appears above an image of a dead moth on its back, and below in bold, “no we have plans for us” (WS 79; fig. 7). The crucial replacement of “them” with “us” enacts the shift from standard English to a grammar of animacy like that offered by Potawatomi or by much of Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists. In recognizing interspecies community, we have to recognize a “we” that includes both human and nonhuman others, and face that our destruction of the world around us constitutes our own destruction as well.

  Figure 6. Pages with digitally altered photographs of a butterfly and a butterfly in a bottle from a.rawlings, Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists, 50–51. (Text by Angela Rawlings, illustrations by Matt Ceolin; courtesy of Angela Rawlings, Matt Ceolin, and Coach House Books)

  Figure 7. Page with digitally altered photograph of a moth from a.rawlings, Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists, 79. (Text by Angela Rawlings, illustration by Matt Ceolin; courtesy of Angela Rawlings, Matt Ceolin, and Coach House Books)

  Imaginative and linguistic play that defamiliarizes human experience and its representation and in the process expands our thinking to include an interspecies “we” is only that—imaginative and linguistic play. Without having to make claims of authenticity for her modeling of cross-species communication, a.rawlings in Wide Slumber gives readers valuable practice in a kind of imaginative identification that resituates the human, opening conceptual channels that may yield less destructive plans for all kinds of species, including our own. Applying such perspectives beyond the textual and imaginative realms will demand interdisciplinary collaboration; it will depend on challenging and expanding but not shutting off rational faculties. Wide Slumber suggests this will require changing our scientific aims and practices, and also changing the ways of thinking embedded in our language, which grants nonhumans only a reductive, non-egalitarian animacy.

  JODY GLADDING’S TRANSLATIONS FROM BARK BEETLE

  The beetle larvae that carve channels in the soft inner bark of trees are white grublike creatures, approximately the size of a cooked grain of rice. In Western cultures, these are barely acknowledged as life forms and, whether in larval or adult beetle form, register mainly as repulsive pests. Yet Jody Gladding approaches their carvings as poems in a language worthy of translation, thereby cultivating a grammar of animacy. No doubt some readers would dismiss this translation as nothing more than a game, an over-the-top device. But any translation involves a bold venture across conceptual and perceptual gaps. There are significant impediments to translating with full accuracy between English, a Germanic language, and French, a Romance language, and greater ones in translating between Potowatomi and English o
r French. Much is necessarily missed, changed, or lost in translation. The project of translating from an animal language into a human one might be entered into without frivolousness as an exercise presenting the same challenges in considerably exaggerated form. Gladding earns her living as a translator from French to English; her website lists thirty books she has translated, mostly for prestigious university presses such as Columbia, Yale, Princeton, and Notre Dame (including books by such noted intellectuals as Alain Badiou and Julia Kristeva), along with some for a small press that publishes on Eastern religions and alternative health practices. While her title, Translations from Bark Beetle: Poems, may allude playfully to those other books she produces—and indeed, much about the book is playful—she also appears to invest herself seriously in the figure of translating a beetle language recorded in the wood that beetles inhabit.

  The volume contains half a dozen of these bark beetle poems, each accompanied by a rubbing Gladding did of the beetle engraving she is working from, usually arranged as facing-page translations would be. (Numerous other poems in the volume share the material and visual emphasis of this work; originally written literally as well as figuratively “on” stones, feathers, eggs, a mobile, even on paper strips woven through the author’s liver scan; photos of the originals for these appear at the back of the book as “illustrations.”) The cover looks like a yellowed old leather-framed museum exhibit; in the center appears a piece of wood displaying “Larval galleries”; on the left is an adult specimen of the American elm bark beetle with its Latin name and institutional source (Ward’s Natural Science Establishment, Inc. / Rochester, N.Y.) typed below its identification in English, and on the right a specimen of the European elm bark beetle, also given its Latin as well as English name and the same source. As Gladding has commented, the cover makes the book (which, like a.rawlings’s, is printed in landscape orientation) look like a box of specimens one is opening, while the typeface on the cover and throughout the book imitates old typewriting, creating the impression of “provisional” field notes.41 I take this visual information as suggesting seriousness, but not finality or certainty, about both translation and scientific understanding, while presenting the volume as an assemblage of curiosities.