Ecopoetics--Sir Arthur Tansley, A. R. Ammons (Part 3 of 3)

            What I’ve been trying to suggest in the last two blog posts is that both “narrative” and “the environment” are limited paradigms in important ways.  “Narrative” is often considered to be humans’ “natural” way of knowing the world—we perceive and process our lives as stories—but I suggest that stories isolate their protagonists (often ourselves), and don’t successfully honor what we’ve come to know about the interconnectedness of all things.  I also suggest that narrative, while it may be underpinned by neurological structures, always exists in relationship to culture, so that our well-established narrative mode may not be inevitable.  Our ways of knowing might evolve to reflect new knowledge, new values, new imperatives.  “The Environment” is similarly limiting, in that it positions humans at the center of the natural world, construed as our “surroundings.”  In fact, our lives are fully intertwined with the world, so that thinking of air, water, weather, etc. as detached, separate entities may tend to shelter us from a deeply felt sense of the consequences of our actions.

            While I’m not arguing that we can simply switch something as deeply engrained as a way of knowing like narrative, I do think that contemporary science and writing point in directions that we might usefully explore as we attempt to reimagine our lives in order to preserve this planet.  Two of these contemporary directions are ecology and the lyric, one a science concept and the other a poetic concept, which have been combined in literary circles into the term ecopoetics. 

            The idea of the ecosystem was pioneered by the British biologist (really, the first ecologist), Sir Arthur Tansley.  Here’s a quote from Tansley’s definitive work, “The Ecosystem.”  Notice how he identifies isolation as the inevitable limitation—the useful fallacy—of human thinking. 

“The whole method of science… is to isolate systems for the purpose of study… whether it be a solar system, a planet, a climatic region, a plant or animal community, an individual organism, an organic molecule, or an atom.”  Today, we might add a subatomic particle—after all, progress has continued to discover smaller and smaller “building blocks,” the further and further we are able to penetrate (I love the way that this inward “progress” signifies the possible presence of  infinity within us, as well as outwardly around us in the universe and perhaps beyond the universe).  Tansley continues: “actually, the systems we isolate mentally are not only included as parts of larger ones, but they also overlap, interlock, and interact with one another.  Isolation is artificial.”

For Tansley, the key was to understand the interactions within and between systems.  Tansley would not have been interested in isolating an individual’s experience within an externalized “environment.”  He would’ve sought a form of knowledge that honored the individual’s participation in, coevolution with, systems.

In the literary world, contemporary lyric poetry is perhaps best suited to explore the possibilities of thinking and feeling into and with the natural world.  And while ecopoetics has been studied from a variety of angles, and is explored, I believe, more and more regularly by poets writing now, I want to turn to a specific poem by A. R. Ammons which articulates, for me, the values of an ecopoetics in relationship to an environmental poetics that is rooted in narrative.  That poem is Ammons’s “Corson’s Inlet.”  I won’t quote the full poem, but it’s available here, at the Poetry Foundation website. 

            Ironically, Ammons’s poem employs some of the signature elements of narrative: “I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning / to the sea,” begins the poem, setting up the familiar linear structure of a travel narrative.  And while Ammons does supply observations in a fairly linear manner, those observations don’t amount to a plotted story.  Instead, they provide instances upon which Ammons reflects, and those reflections point him, and us, toward ecopoetical thinking.

“[T]he walk liberating,” writes Ammons, “I was released from forms, / from the perpendiculars / straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds / of thought / into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends / of sight.”  While traditional thought tends toward fixed forms, Ammons, liberated, enters a space of purer seeing—unprocessed experience, in which forms are not fit to predetermined structures, but are shades, risings, “bends and blends”—notice the verbal forms translated into nouns: things are not static, but are in motion, becoming.  I think of that moment in the movie The Girl with the Pearl Earring, where the painter Vermeer played by Colin Firth asks the maid played by Scarlet Johanssen what color to paint a cloud and she, because she sees purely, says yellow, not white or gray.  And we understand that this is the key to Vermeer’s greatness.  He sees.  His thoughts are not pre-cast, pre-formed.

            Ammons is the same, and goes on descriptively in this mode.

there are dunes of motion,

organizations of grass, white sandy paths of remembrance

in the overall wandering of mirroring mind:

but Overall is beyond me: is the sum of these events

I cannot draw, the ledger I cannot keep, the accounting

beyond the account:

in nature there are few sharp lines: there are areas of primrose

             more or less dispersed;

disorderly orders of bayberry; between the rows

of dunes,

irregular swamps of reeds,

though not reeds alone, but grass, bayberry, yarrow, all …

predominantly reeds.

I love that part.  Ammons is saying look how these systems interact, dune and swamp, everything mixing into its neighboring thing, everything interwoven.  And he catches himself getting carried away with the reeds thing—he’s approaching infinite regress in trying to discern among grass, bayberry, yarrow—so he just shrugs and chuckles and reverts to the good enough statement, “predominantly reeds.”  I love that self-deprecating sense of humor in Ammons.

            As if taking instruction from Tansely’s definition of ecosystem, Ammons goes along exploring the interpenetrating systems he encounters, reflecting both on what he sees and how he sees it:

every living thing in

siege: the demand is life, to keep life: the small

white blacklegged egret, how beautiful, quietly stalks and spears

             the shallows, darts to shore

                          to stab—what?  I couldn’t

       see against the black mudflats—a frightened

       fiddler crab?”

           

Considering his own act of observation, Ammons admits, “I have perceived nothing completely,” and “there is no finality of vision…. I am willing to go along, to accept / the becoming / thought, to stake off no beginnings or ends.”

I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries,

shutting out and shutting in, separating inside

         from outside … 

by transitions the land falls from grassy dunes to creek

to undercreek: but there are no lines, though

      change in that transition is clear

      as any sharpness: but ‘sharpness’ spread out,

allowed to occur over a wider range

than mental lines can keep.

Systems are the functional units in ecology, and if we could recast our thinking in this way, it might be harder to see ourselves as the stable center of a story that is ours.  Notice how Tansley’s idea of systems extends from the cosmos to the atom—we’re somewhere in the middle.  We, ourselves are a system made of and within other systems—our organs achieving homeostasis, our breath connecting us physically with the atmosphere we’re immersed in, our body parts fitting together nicely to allow us to move in this world.  Of course, when one thing goes wrong, we begin to understand the relationship of the parts to the whole.  This year, where I live, we’ve had the warmest winter and the warmest summer on record.  A record number of daily record high temperatures has been set.  From west to east, the whole country is suffering in drought, except where it’s flooding in northern Minnesota and the Dakotas.  The citizens of Devil’s Lake, North Dakota, continue their long battle with the rising water table—diking, moving houses, seeking high ground.  Many suspect that prehistoric Lake Aggasiz, the largest freshwater lake in the history of the world, is filling up again.   

From my friend Chris Arigo, I heard a great quote from the poet Juliana Spahr, criticizing traditionally oriented environmental poetry—it goes something like, “traditional nature poetry is irresponsible because it shows the bird and not the bulldozer.”  The bulldozer is nature, too.  There it is, creating and erasing habitat, itself manufactured from all-natural components—you could even call it organic.  It’s irresponsible not to see this, because when we deny our own nature, we separate ourselves from the consequences of our actions.

An ecological perspective argues that it’s no longer enough to isolate the bird or the human or any individual figure.  We have to understand how the systems we participate in interact with each other.

I will try

       to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening

scope, but enjoying the freedom that

Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,

that I have perceived nothing completely,

that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.

Narrative and "The Environment" (Part 2 of 3)

If we tend to perceive and understand our lives in terms of narratives, and if narratives have values like beginnings, middles, and ends, points-of-view, protagonists, and themes—values which are not necessarily inherent in the raw material of reality, but which are imprinted on the world by our principle way of knowing—then perhaps we can speculate about the consequences of our cognition by looking at how an important issue, “The Environment,” is framed within a manageably sized narrative, William Stafford’s “Traveling Through the Dark.”

To begin: “environment” itself is a concept like narrative.  If we consult the OED, we find that the word environment basically originates as “the circumstances or conditions that surround us.”  “Our environment.”  How often do we hear that phrase?  Not only do conditions surround us in a way that leaves us unconnected, isolated at the center, but we own those conditions.  In my teaching of writing, I often raise the question of what the word "natural" means, and I'm frequently astounded to discover that students do not consider themselves to be natural entities.  “Nature is what’s around me.”  Nature is a beaver dam but not a cul de sac.  A burrow but not a subway.  Things animals make are natural.  Things that humans make are artificial. 

There’s a close relationship between the limitations of narrative and the limitations of environment.  Both focus too discretely on the figure at the center, and isolate that figure from the world.  “Our environment” is the setting for “our story”—it’s there as background, and it’s subject to whatever the narrator or protagonist of the story does in the story’s plot.  At best it’s a stage and at worst it’s… well… Chernobyl or the Nevada Test Site or the Gulf of Mexico.  The killing ground.  Collateral damage.   

Right now, I want to look at a famous narrative, a poem that I like a lot, that’s pretty traditionally an environmental narrative.  It’s William Stafford’s “Traveling through the Dark.”

Traveling through the Dark

by William E. Stafford

Traveling through the dark I found a deer

dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.

It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:

that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car   

and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;   

she had stiffened already, almost cold.

I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason—

her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,   

alive, still, never to be born.

Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;   

under the hood purred the steady engine.

I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;   

around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all—my only swerving—   

then pushed her over the edge into the river.

Now: I love this poem.  I love its overall wisdom and the gravity with which that wisdom is delivered.  I love its moments, like the warm exhaust turning red—how resonant that image/metaphor is, how it connects the body of a car to the living bodies at the center of the poem’s drama, and to the living world that’s listening around them.  I love how the protagonist's moment of reflection is hidden but its consequences are not.  What did he think when he “thought hard for us all?”  About how many deer are struck by cars every year?  More broadly about how we travel through this world, the wake we leave behind us?  Even more broadly about the essence of mortality, human and deer alike?  I like how the content of that thinking is hidden.  But that he does it—that he stops to reflect in that moment—he acknowledges as a mistake, his "only swerving."  He needs to act: to move the deer, get it out of the road, get his own car out of the road.  At any moment another car could come barreling down the Wilson River Road and “make more dead.”  But that thinking—it’s the swerve he can’t help.  I love the human-ness of that.

In a poem like this, I believe that the narrative form offers a kind of consolation.  The story itself, obviously, is not a happy one.  Damage occurs.  Death occurs.  An unborn creature is not just killed, but is almost sacrificed to the requirements of the automobile.  But the accomplishment of the poem itself—the making of an elegant, sensible piece that begins, develops, and perhaps most crucially, ends, gives us what Frank Kermode calls “the sense of an ending,” that resolution that we have known all along will arrive—the resolution that plot itself depends upon, and that creates the terms in which we move away from the piece.  The story is over.  We don’t really have questions.  We’re somber.  We understand that our actions impact the environment.  We understand that it’s inevitable.  We will kill things, and we must bear that as we drive away.  But the way the poem achieves its beginning, middle, and end… it allows us to move away from the dead animals with a feeling of satisfaction, accomplishment, that, I think, leaves us, more or less, unchanged as readers.  Our ways are confirmed, and we move on down the road.

The environment surrounds us as stories begin and end around us, through us.  The point of satisfaction that we reach at the end of a good story is a kind of stasis—as it concludes, the narrative becomes whole.  The structure that has been unfolding, the structure that has been suspected, the structure that we have been through has become individual, indivisible, unquestionably concluded.   

Are stories bad because we’re so accustomed to their conclusiveness?  Do stories automatically make us complacent?  No: I don’t want to overstate my case, here.  Stories, of course, can help us direct our efforts in the world and will continue to be central to how we make meaning in our lives.  It’s important, though, that we recognize that the form of knowledge we call story has values, and that those values can be limiting.  It’s my belief that poetry—in the way that it embodies other ways of thinking than the discrete narrative—can help us re-imagine our position in the order of things.  If changing our relationship to quote-unquote “the environment” is going to be a top priority in the generations to come, perhaps poetry can help us find new subjectivities, new forms of meaning, new positions to occupy that are not isolated from the action.