Post Green: Literature, Culture, and the Environment 1666947903, 9781666947908

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Introduction: Philosophizing Post Green: Re/Moving Borderlands-Beyond Modernity’s Last Post • Murali Sivaramakrishnan
1 Recalling Herbert Marcuse on Socialism’s Radical Goals Today • Charles Reitz
2 Aesthetics of Survival • K. Satchidanandan
3 Ghost God Dancing with the Bat, and COVID-19 • Peter I-min Huang
4 From a Mythic City to a Rubbishmetropolis: Urban Imaginaries of Istanbul in Contemporary Turkish Non/Fiction • Kerim Can Yazgünoğlu
5 Oil Ecology, Niger Delta, and the Crisis of Survival in OgagaIfowodo’s The Oil Lamp • Oluseye Abiodun Babatunde
6 Passionate Specificity • Ann Fisher-Wirth
7 The Alchemy of Inside and Outside: Feminism, Ecology, and the Self in Kamala Das • Usha VT
8 Healing and Sweetening: Ted Hughes and the Regeneration of Elmet • Ann Skea
9 John Clare and the Horizon of Nature’s Mystery • Mihai A. Stroe
10 How Ideology Has Driven Beauty from Ecocriticism: The Allure of Oppositional Politics and Aesthetics • Peter Quigley
11 Eco-Phenomenology in Comparative Literature: Salvatore Quasimodo and Odysseus Elytis’ Eco-Poetics • Nikoleta Zampaki
12 Of the Forest: Ecology, Culture, and History • Debarati Bandyopadhyay
13 A World of Many Minds: Toward a Post Green Vision of the Future • Jack Hunter
Index
About the Contributors

Citation preview

Post Green

Ecocritical Theory and Practice Series Editor: Douglas A. Vakoch, METI Advisory Board Sinan Akilli, Cappadocia University, Turkey; Bruce Allen, Seisen University, Japan; Zélia Bora, Federal University of Paraíba, Brazil; Izabel Brandão, Federal University of Alagoas, Brazil; Byron Caminero-Santangelo, University of Kansas, USA; Chia-ju Chang, Brooklyn College, The City College of New York, USA; H. Louise Davis, Miami University, USA; Simão Farias Almeida, Federal University of Roraima, Brazil; George Handley, Brigham Young University, USA; Steven Hartman, Mälardalen University, Sweden; Isabel Hoving, Leiden University, The Netherlands; Idom Thomas Inyabri, University of Calabar, Nigeria; Serenella Iovino, University of Turin, Italy; Daniela Kato, Kyoto Institute of Technology, Japan; Petr Kopecký, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic; Julia Kuznetski, Tallinn University, Estonia; Katarina Leppänen, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; Bei Liu, Shandong Normal University, People’s Republic of China; Serpil Oppermann, Cappadocia University, Turkey; John Ryan, University of New England, Australia; Christian Schmitt-Kilb, University of Rostock, Germany; Joshua Schuster, Western University, Canada; Heike Schwarz, University of Augsburg, Germany; Murali Sivaramakrishnan, Pondicherry University, India; Scott Slovic, University of Idaho, USA; Heather Sullivan, Trinity University, USA; David Taylor, Stony Brook University, USA; J. Etienne Terblanche, North-West University, South Africa; Cheng Xiangzhan, Shandong University, China; Hubert Zapf, University of Augsburg, Germany Ecocritical Theory and Practice highlights innovative scholarship at the interface of literary/cultural studies and the environment, seeking to foster an ongoing dialogue between academics and environmental activists.

Recent Titles Post Green: Literature, Culture, and the Environment, edited by Murali Sivaramakrishnan and Animesh Roy Multispecies Thinking in the Classroom and Beyond: Teaching for a Sustainable Future, edited by Patty Born Intermedial Ecocriticism: The Climate Crisis Through Art and Media, by Jørgen Bruhn and Niklas Salmose Ibero-American Ecocriticism: Cultural and Social Explorations, edited by J. Manuel Gómez Animal Texts: Critical Animal Concepts for American Environmental Literature, by Lauren E. Perry-Rummel The Cultural Roots of Slow Food: Peasants, Partisans, and the Landscape of Italian Resistance, by Ilaria Tabusso-Marcyan The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism, edited by Kenneth K. Brandt and Karin M. Danielsson Ecodisaster Imaginaries in India: Essays in Critical Perspectives, edited by Scott Slovic, Joyjit Ghosh, and Samit Kumar Maiti An Ibero-American Perspective on Narratives of Pandemics, edited by Zélia M. Bora, Animesh Roy, and Ricardo Ballesteros de la Fuente The Animal Other in Narratives of Conquest: Uncanny Encounters, by Stacy Hoult

Post Green Literature, Culture, and the Environment

Edited by Murali Sivaramakrishnan and Animesh Roy

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Murali, S., 1959-, editor. | Roy, Animesh, 1982- editor. Title: Post green : literature, culture, and the environment / edited by Murali Sivaramakrishnan and Animesh Roy. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2024. | Series: Ecocritical theory and practice | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023046253 (print) | LCCN 2023046254 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666947908 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781666947915 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Ecocriticism. | Ecology in literature. | Politics and literature. | LCGFT: Essays. | Literary criticism. Classification: LCC PN98.E36 P67 2024 (print) | LCC PN98.E36 (ebook) | DDC 809/.9336—dc23/eng/20231003 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023046253 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023046254 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Prefacevii Introduction: Philosophizing Post Green: Re/Moving Borderlands-Beyond Modernity’s Last Post Murali Sivaramakrishnan

1

1 Recalling Herbert Marcuse on Socialism’s Radical Goals Today Charles Reitz

17

2 Aesthetics of Survival K. Satchidanandan

43

3 Ghost God Dancing with the Bat, and COVID-19 Peter I-min Huang

49

4 From a Mythic City to a Rubbishmetropolis: Urban Imaginaries of Istanbul in Contemporary Turkish Non/Fiction Kerim Can Yazgünoğlu

63

5 Oil Ecology, Niger Delta, and the Crisis of Survival in Ogaga Ifowodo’s The Oil Lamp Oluseye Abiodun Babatunde

77

6 Passionate Specificity Ann Fisher-Wirth

103

7 The Alchemy of Inside and Outside: Feminism, Ecology, and the Self in Kamala Das Usha VT

v

109

vi

Contents

8 Healing and Sweetening: Ted Hughes and the Regeneration of Elmet 119 Ann Skea 9 John Clare and the Horizon of Nature’s Mystery Mihai A. Stroe

135

10 How Ideology Has Driven Beauty from Ecocriticism: The Allure of Oppositional Politics and Aesthetics Peter Quigley

151

11 Eco-Phenomenology in Comparative Literature: Salvatore Quasimodo and Odysseus Elytis’ Eco-Poetics Nikoleta Zampaki

173

12 Of the Forest: Ecology, Culture, and History Debarati Bandyopadhyay 13 A World of Many Minds: Toward a Post Green Vision of the Future Jack Hunter

183

197

Index 215 About the Contributors

217

Preface

Eugene Stormer and Paul Crutzen popularized the term Anthropocene at the turn of this millennium in order to define a geologic time in Earth’s history when human activity had come to point where it made a considerable impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystem and life as whole. What it has done for us is to focus on issues of the role of humans in ecological disasters and climate change on the table of international debate and deliberation. And eventually, the global acknowledgment of the negative impact of such anthropocentric intervention has led to the urgency to find innovative solutions and alternative pathways towards a global reorientation of thinking. While the global North and South has often come together on issues of green thinking, their mutual fault lines in matters of shared histories, economics, politics, and culture have often created situations of conflict, thereby hindering the process toward a common consensus, and thus occluding the focus from the larger goal. It is in such a context that the concept of post green that this book focuses must be situated and becomes relevant. While ideas of sustainability and environmental consciousness have always been present across human history, dramatic deterioration of the environment hastened the need to redraw the human–nature relationship to understand and find pathways above and beyond this situation of no-exit. The desperate call for ecologically sensitive action from the developed countries came to be looked upon with doubt and distrust by the rest of the world that saw in them red flags of neoimperialism. The idea of post green is not to create another binary like East/West, but rather a call for a shift in the order of perception. It signals a movement from the conventional understanding of green thinking—acknowledging both the limitations of the green approaches as well as to explore new and holistic perspectives on environmental stewardship. It proposes to move beyond vii

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the monoculture of the mind toward a celebration of diversity and plurality. While the movement from red to green was a politics of difference, as essays in this book emphasize, the shift toward post green is based on an all-inclusive and holistic vision that contains within itself both difference and multiplicity, something that is quintessential for the stability of our ecosystem. Such affirmative bio-politics toward an alternative symbiosis challenges intellectual theorizing, without minimizing the need for radical questioning. It urges the need to do away with disciplinary boundaries drawing hopes for a new spiritual geography of the mind to surface. Animesh Roy

Introduction Philosophizing Post Green: Re/Moving Borderlands-Beyond Modernity’s Last Post Murali Sivaramakrishnan

To theorize on post green is to draw attention to the larger issues beyond conservation, preservation, and deep ecological practices. This calls for a relocation of green theory beyond boundaries. In more ways than one, the COVID pandemic has ushered in an awareness of a close-knit world; perhaps at no earlier time has such transparency in our interconnectedness become more evident and palpable—west or east, north or south. Having known it all along might be one thing, but to experience it in all levels is another one altogether. The world of today has come to recognize that ours is a sort of gossamer world, the web of life and living—not one that we had thought it was—stable and sturdy, where we relentlessly exploit the outer world. Further, there is little doubt that the major issue that our world today is confronted with is how to rebuild a resilient and sustainable post-pandemic world, where humans can survive alongside other humans as well as other nonhuman lives. All of a sudden, wave after wave of virus infections have so modified our life and living that we have hardly any time left to grapple with any other issue, at least, apparently for the present. Needless to say, there has been no time when our world was free from issues. Almost at every point in human history the thinking human being has been posed with one problematic or another ceaselessly. However, never to such a scale globally! The threat is not to the scale of species extinction. Its impact is in our social fabric, our societal connections. The pandemic, be it Nipah virus, or COVID-19 or O-MICRON, has ironically so unified the human being the world over, irrespective of class, creed, religion, race, or caste. The magnitude of this globalization is considerably large bringing into its purview hitherto untouched regions and climes, people and places.1 According to geologists, the last major division of geologic time lasting from sixty-five million years ago to the present is the Cenozoic era. However, 1

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now we have entered the Anthropocene, the age of the humans. Two hundred years ago, as one survey shows, there were less than a billion people on Earth. Today, there are 7.9 billion, and our population is still growing. According to the United Nations, unless we take action there is likely to be 30 percent more of us by 2050 and 11 billion people by 2100.2 Each one of us, irrespective of color or creed, places demand upon our planet—the very demands that have caused the changes that threaten us and the natural world we depend on. Only five times earlier in our planet’s history have so many species and so much biodiversity been lost so quickly. The fifth time was when the dinosaurs were wiped out—the reason why scientists and conservationists call what is happening now the “sixth mass extinction.” Some have even described the loss of biodiversity today as “biological annihilation.” Apart from this severe toll on biodiversity, there are several issues of equal gravity that we are called upon to confront: issues of pollution—of air, water and earth—massive overexploitation of nonrenewable energy, global warming, and climate change on account of our intervention in our planet’s delicate configuration, and above all the mode and manner of what we discard as garbage and waste all around us. Everything—the consequence of our actions—is piling up all around us. What the green movement—ecological, philosophical, political and otherwise—had done is to lead us toward a profound awareness of our delicate environmental balance. Its insightful prophets had insisted we mend our ways of living drastically if we are to avert a cataclysmic disaster. That was all much earlier than the pandemic times. There had been talks and deliberations, political demonstrations, and mass rallies, but the powers that be had paid little heed. Apparently we could behold only one dimension for development: urbanization and technological sophistication. This is not to blame it all on the western mode of modernity, or on science in a naïve manner.3 The world is on the brink of disaster, and a green awakening is far overdue. It’s not merely for one section of people to worry over. In the context of discussing the idea of post green and the environmental issues of our times, I would like to take off from the three key notions that the popular thinker Yuval Noah Harari, in his Sapiens, highlights: the success of Homo sapiens as a species on earth, as he sees it, has been primarily on account of these three factors—first, humans have a way of flocking under a “corporate” umbrella, held together by language and culture, despite their differences and find strength in their collective. Secondly, human collectives are characterized by their “flexibility”; and thirdly, the success of human domination has a lot to do with the creativity and ability to invent “fictional narratives.” Seen in this light, human cultures are fictionally constructed, and our entire conceptual fabric of reality is maintained through our collective belief in imagined narratives. Perhaps our ideas of the environment itself could be

Introduction

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imagined discourses! The advocates of the green movement had called for a change in perspective. Not only that we continue to live under the fine fabric of imagined fictions, but, we have shaped the rest of the world to follow suit. The charter of the global greens, as adopted in Canberra 2001 and updated in Dakar 2012 and Liverpool 2017, states in its “Preamble,” We, as citizens of the planet and members of the Global Greens, united in our awareness that we depend on the Earth’s vitality, diversity and beauty, and that it is our responsibility to pass them on, undiminished or even improved, to the next generation, recognising that the dominant patterns of human production and consumption, based on the dogma of economic growth at any cost and the excessive and wasteful use of natural resources without considering Earth’s carrying capacity, are causing extreme deterioration in the environment and a massive extinction of species Affirm our responsibility to one another, to the greater community of life, and to future generations Commit ourselves as Green parties and political movements from around the world to implement these interrelated principles and to create a global partnership in support of their fulfilment.4

This charter affirms the responsibility to change our ways of living and ways of thinking. Now how far the politics of the green has infiltrated into our daily living then and afterward is a moot point. What is called for is a shift in perspective from the hitherto anthropocentric to the biocentric or ecocentric ways of thinking. It is of great significance that more than two thirds of the world’s population have undergone the traumas and tensions of being colonized and subjugated and the dominant perception of life has been drilled into their minds. A hegemonial acceptance of the west (read “Eurocentric”) or the politics of a market-oriented development economics has been the result. Non-Eurocentric perspectives on life and living have been marginalized and decimated in the bargain. At this point, in addressing the biopolitics of green one cannot be simplistic and invoke a dyad or binary of the west/ technocratic modernity and the non-west/ecowisdom cultures. Our responses to the environment hitherto have been conditioned by our ways of thinking which in turn is currently manipulated by the forces of market economics and its power structures. Just as our relationship with one another is marked by competition, our relationship with nature is based on conquest aggrandizement and exploitation. To speak of cultures founded on understanding, love, and sympathy might sound way off and anachronistic. Ted Nordhaus is best known in the world of economics for his notorious position that the “environmentalist movement is doomed to failure,” and it should be extinguished with force so as to “allow pure market forces to come along and win the day!”5 Such unwitting, hard-core anti-green positions are

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plausible simply because we, humans, have taken but a one-dimensional view of human development. After all, it is not an easy task to take up a holistic view. This one-dimensional view propounds but one mantra—that of development—which has taken over the world as our futuristic ideal! We need to recognize the plurality and diversity of human and planetary existence, without which our transnational economics would swallow us whole! ECOSYSTEM CULTURE AND BIOSPHERE CULTURE In his Literature of Nature: An International Source Book, Patrick Murphy,6 the American critic, draws attention to the two major types of stories that people have usually told about the spaces they inhabit and the places they live. In more ways than one, these stories could be seen to delineate the difference between a planetary orientation and a global outlook, or what Gary Snyder has referred to as ecosystem culture and biosphere culture. . . . The ecosystem culture is attentive to local particularity and the benefits of heterogeneity, while the biosphere culture relentlessly attempts to homogenize the peoples of the world in the interests of transnational economics.

Murphy warns the sensitive ecocritic to be vigilant and to be wary of falling into prescriptive critical formulations, and suggests the threefold sense of place, which he demarcates as geographic location, historical location, and geo-psychic or self-aware location (Murphy 1998: xiv). Such a clear-cut understanding, I believe, is necessary in any approach to non-western-centric discourses of nature and human nature, when we try to theorize post green, disengaging it from the discourses of western modernity and its counter movements. Ecological sensitivity would lead us to a holistic perspective, beyond the narrow confines of the self, place, and center, toward a celebration of diversity and plurality based on a certain sense of bio-justice, should we say? Now, Ecological Criticism in the humanities and social sciences, as it is practiced, traditionally in our academies, might certainly be Anglo-American in its inception and outlook; however, it has opened up multiple points of entry and debate over the human and nonhuman nexus or divide. Both the local and the global discourses have gone in to its making. Economics and ethics, heterogeneity and plurality, instinct and awareness, marginality and multiculturalism—all have shaped it. We can extend our classrooms a little further and make the texts spill over on to the globe and beyond. Of course, we need to keep in mind that the narratives that people develop eventually shape their lives and living. And to a large extent we still are shaped by our academia. When disciplinary boundaries are done away with, it is hoped, that a new sense of spiritual geography of the mind would surface.

Introduction

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Ecocriticism and Intrinsic Value—an Indigenous Perceptive In his well-known work Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama has pointed out that despite the fact that classical civilization has always defined itself against the primal woods, their founding myths were sylvan. Greeks and Germanic people proclaimed their closeness to “brute nature.” At the heart of tribal belief “was a natural religion that believed it degrading to confine worship within masonry walls or to represent gods with human faces.”7 In a land like India with its heterogeneous culture and checkered history, the narratives linking place and humans are innumerable, couched in diverse perceptions and points of view, and filtered through multiple discourses over a long period of time. Geographically, historically, and geo-psychically narratives from this part of the world essentially afford pluralistic and complex readings. Philosophy, religion, and poetry have a deep history in this land, as much as oppression, domination, and, concurrently, ideologies of resistance, revolt, and subversions. In all, religion and spirituality proclaimed kinship with the outer and the inner, the nonhuman and the inner world of awareness—the self and the other. In more ways than one, the emergence of ecocriticism in the academic world has signaled a resuscitation of the idea of intrinsic value in nature that has almost come to be buried under the rubble of a postindustrial culture that constantly seeks to obliterate all differences into making the omnivorous discourse of globalization and technocracy as monolithic and one-dimensional. Perhaps this return to nature could even be mocked as mere retrogression toward the European Romantic tradition of linking the human and the nonhuman into some sort of metaphysical essence. Or ecologically sensitive critical theorizing could also be demonized as a debilitating attempt to reinstate the grand narratives of a misplaced cultural humanism, in the lines of high modernist elitism. A third probability is that of a universally developing urban culture demonizing its own predatory roles in the haloed light of a forfeited primitive human culture! Either way the very suggestion of the notion of sacred or spiritual at the heart of nature’s being is sure to invite many raised brows in our present-day world. Nevertheless, the direction that ecologically sensitive critical theory is currently pursuing seeking to reinforce idea and action in the material plane (a union of the spirit and matter in different scale), in terms of environmental justice, is a sure sign of not having lost its way in the dreary sands of dead habit. In general terms, the story of human nature relationship would appear as the story of the fall from grace, from a life sharing the sacred to one of utilizing mere resource. The absence of a cultural basis for valuing the land we inhabit is perhaps the root of human behavior that degrades and pollutes our world! The values that ancient Indian tradition (diverse, multidimensional, manifold, heterogeneous, and different) invokes are spiritual

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and a-temporal. They are rooted in a sense of place and time of course, but transcendental in their significance. They could be seen as proffering both a bioregional and an ecosystem view of life and living. The elemental symbolism of the Vedic and Upanishadic mantras is rooted in a culture of place and value while the ritualistic and sacred qualities that they evoke are trans-human and trans-natural. Above all the ancient Indian cultural outlook was a constant recognition of the sacred at the heart of all being. This notion of the sacred does not devalue the phenomenal world of the senses but on the other hand endows it with deeper significance and value. Ecology might be the socially evoked unified and holistic view of nature for the present, but the ecological vision that a poetic insight engendered through the spiritual would nevertheless enhance all qualities of life and living, in terms of both the human and the nonhuman, for its significance is not historically conditioned. The act of thinking in this part of the world is more concerned with seeking connections than separateness. Even from the very beginnings the conceptual concerns of the people of ancient India reveal a leaning toward the holistic and a seeking after the interconnectedness of all and everything. Ekam sad vipra bahudha vadanti, says the Rig Veda (1.164.46), the Existent is one, but the sages express it variously. One can herein perceive the human concern for a harmony of all life-forms. There exists a spatiotemporal interrelatedness of all existence in a continuum of quality, and this is further embedded in the notion of all life in the world as forming one whole continuous interrelated being—vasudaiva kudumbakam. The earth and all its life-forms—living and nonliving alike—are held to be of equal value. (This is not tantamount by extension to stating that the Indian values of quality and being are universal values, like the widely held view in the present-day world of market capitalism that economic prosperity ensures moral superiority! Neither is “Indian thought” a universal hold-all where one can throw in anything from physics to metaphysics and homogenize all and sundry.) Nevertheless, as pointed out earlier, in a land like India with its heterogeneous culture and checkered history, the narratives linking place and humans are innumerable, couched in diverse perceptions and points of view, and filtered through multiple discourses over a long period of time. Geographically, historically, and geopsychically Indian discourses afford pluralistic and complex readings. Indian thought was as much concerned with physics and mathematics as it was with metaphysics. The thinking human did not fall into the matrix of the self but sought a spiritual harmony of living and nonliving alike. A great deal of the projected image of India now revolves round the religion of this subcontinent—Hinduism—which is generally spiritual and theistic.8 However, we need to remember that to speak of an Indian spiritual tradition is not to deny the continued existence and significance of even

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hard-core materialist discourses alongside. In The Argumentative Indian, renowned Indian economist Amartya Sen has noted: An adequately inclusive understanding of Indian heterodoxy is particularly important for appreciating the reach and range of heterodoxy in the country’s intellectual background and diverse history. This is especially critical because of the relative neglect of the rationalist parts of Indian heritage in the contemporary accounts of India’s past, in favour of concentrating on India’s impressive religiosity.9

Recognizing the significance of this warning, we could state that a tolerance of diversity, understanding of difference and pluralism has been a distinctive characteristic of the Indian mind. Indeed, this long-lasting history of heterodoxy stems from the most intense and inquisitive poetic renderings of the Vedic texts, dating back to the middle of the second millennium BCE which was neither reductive nor closed. The Vedic Vision was a poetic one, and it would continue to proffer a distinct philosophy of transformation of the human’s being provided one reads it with openness and humility. In many ways the concern of Vedic poetry is practical, namely, the actual realization in one’s own person, of what it means to be fully human. The Vedas speak of nature and human nature as intimately linked, and the destiny of human’s being and that of physical nature is definitely interconnected. All this is a matter of perception and understanding. When life is seen from the perspective of the spiritual, it is qualitatively different from human action and interaction in the physical sphere. Philosophers from the times of the European Enlightenment have led the world into a theory of binaries, where the duality of mind and nature entered into a struggle to dominate. When Rene Descartes stated in cryptic terms, I Think Therefore I am, he was placing the meaning of life squarely on the segregation of mind and nature. When Arne Naess, on the other hand, endeavored to cultivate a different order of thinking based on “deep ecology,” he was calling for a brand of environmentalism that espouses that we must fundamentally change our ideas about how humanity fits into the natural world before we can dig our way out of the environmental crisis that befalls humankind and the planet. We need to cultivate a holistic identification with the natural world, where all living things have an equal right to live and flourish. We need a sense of human humility, where we do not dominate and exploit but understand coexist. We are now entering the territory of post green. In the world of post green thinking, we will place greater emphasis on eco-justice, tolerance, and compassion. Of course, we have moved a great deal from the basic understanding for the need to conserve and preserve the environment. Our environmental and ecojustice movements have sensitized us toward a green awareness. This is not some casual thought that makes for subtle distinctions and class differences

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surreptitiously. Some years ago Herbert Marcuse carried out a verbal onslaught on scientific and technical rationality and its social consequences. He asserted that “the science of nature develops under the technological a priori which projects nature as potential instrumentality, stuff of control and organisation” and “science, by virtue of its own method and concepts, has projected and promoted a universe in which the domination of nature has remained linked to the domination of man.”10 Charles Reitz, in his chapter on Marcuse, has pointed out that Herbert Marcuse’s caustic condemnations over fifty years ago of US capitalism and its systems of economic waste, wealth distortion, neofascist tendencies, race-based police repression, and war, are particularly timely and deserve invigorated attention across college campuses and in cultural and political circles today.

Toward Post Green Now, let’s return, briefly, once again to the origins of the Green Movement and green politics. There have been many revolutions in human history, but the Industrial Revolution has been one that drastically altered the human and the nonhuman world. The great Romantic revolt in imagination was the direct consequence of this impact. While the growth of industries and factories signaled the arrival of the modern age, the massive capitalist mechanization and destruction of the countryside—a favorite haunt of the romantics—also concurrently triggered peasant and working-class resistance to the juggernaut of development. Hence resistance and revolt evolved hand in hand.11 It is also interesting to note that this link between the Capitalist consumerism and the Romantic revolt in the present remains little explored. When ecologically sensitive criticism evolved in the academia, it was immediately taken up by the intellectuals who were neither left nor right and who belonged to a class neither exploited nor exploiting. Probably this has hastened the shift from red to green and further beyond the green still. K Satchidanandan clinically notes in his chapter in this book: Technofascism that leads to eco-fascism—both have their roots in human greed and aggression—is one of the inevitable fall-outs of blind and unsustainable patterns of development pursued by capitalism as well as the kind of socialism we found being put to test in countries that passed through popular revolutions.

On a similar note human justice movements evolved as resistance to colonialism and imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and a related concern with global ecological injustice, and inequality and power structures

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in the world came to the forefront. Petra Kelley quotes D. Eisenhower: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed.”12 Sensitive social scientists have thrown light on growing public perception of an “ecological crisis” in the 1960s, and claims of Limits to Growth rose from the 1970s onward. The emerging global environmental awareness triggered massive public movements in the 1980s and 1990s.13 Issue-based debates and discussions transcending the politics of industrialization and market consumerism beyond the left and right served increasing awareness of and moral sensitivity to our relations with the nonhuman world (from the promotion of “animal rights” and animal welfare to ideas that the Earth is “sacred” and/or has intrinsic value). This marks a turning point in human perception. The clear focus of feminist thinking the world over has been the interconnectedness of theory and praxis. Ecofeminism has been a call to thoughtful integration of what has been hitherto seen as binaries: nature and culture, mind and body, male and female, reason and feeling. Having said that, it might not be easy to bring forth a shift in perception and see the world in a new light all of a sudden. As William Blake puts it succinctly in his Auguries of Innocence: in order to see a world in a grain of sand/ And a heaven in a wild flower, one is called upon to “Hold infinity in the palm of your hand/ And eternity in an hour!” This is a unique poetic vision, mystical and evocative of another dimension of reality at the same time. Such sublime symbiotic vision becomes a possibility when one begins to explore the deeper areas of the self. When physicists and cosmologists speak of the quantum world and dimensions beyond the felt and experienced for the many of those who read and discuss these, the world often remains contained in the three dimensions: they simply remain as theoretical concepts. When Chaos and String-theories serve to shatter our normal awareness and common sense, the mathematical equations remain in their digital shelves. Because we have built our world on those concrete rocks of what we know as “common sense” those Himalayas of the mind are not so easily come by. But once touched by the infinite and the eternal, one can never remain the same. Probably this is where the domains of the literary and artistic imagination surface as significant transformers. They usher in an inclusive insight that links humans with rocks and soil, stars and dust. Literature and art have for ages been held as inspiring contemplative practices—they did play a central role in shaping human communities, until they lost their pride of place and were reduced to being mere entertainment and pastime. However, our present-day way of living is based on conquest, aggression, and exploitation as mentioned earlier. We assume that to have and to hold to possess and to own is all that is to life: little do we realize the need to be and

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to become. In the final analysis to theorize on post green is thus to draw attention to the larger issues beyond conservation, preservation, and even deep ecological practices. This calls for a relocation of green theory. Ecologists and environmental activists, very much like artists and writers, are generally concerned with establishing connections, and usually attempt to perceive reality in a holistic manner. If we recognize the values at the heart of nature and human nature, we would also recognize the need to reorder our priorities. Perhaps, the distance from Descartes to Patanjali is not long; it is just the other side of the paper. While Descartes dwelt on the mind-nature duality, Patanjali stated in one line in his Yoga Sutras, “yogas chitta vritti nirodha,” referring to stilling the mind in order to experience Ultimate Reality and move toward Self-realization. Of course, we move on to another dimension of thinking when we conceptualize yoga and engage with the philosophy of green alike. Post green signals the difference in the order of perception. Let’s take a look at this prayer that calls for universal peace: sarve bhavantu sukhinaḥ/sarve santu nirāmayāḥ/sarve bhadrāṇi paśyantu/ mā kaścidduḥ khabhāgbhavet। oṃ śāntiḥ śāntiḥ śāntiḥ॥ (May all sentient beings be at peace, may no one suffer from illness, may all get to see what is auspicious, may no one suffer. Om peace, peace, peace). The peace that percolates when the mind is stilled in silence is transcendental and immanent at the same time.14

There is now a tendency to play down anything that comes from our own local culture and trivialize it. Or, for the worse, sideline it and ignore it. However, at this point it might be wiser to recognize the wisdom of a common past that thought of everything from a non-egocentric point of view (idam na ma ma implying this is not mine).15 We now need to change our way of living and work toward ecologically based political and economic systems founded on love, compassion, and nonviolence. The conviction this calls for might at the outset sound idealistic or even romantic. As Mihai Stroe (see his chapter in this book) in the context of discussing Claire’s poetic reiterates the foundations of romanticism: Relevantly, John Clare’s sadasat / śūnyatā corresponds to Fr. Schlegel’s notion about the “infinite abundance in infinite unity” (“unendliche Fülle in unendlicher Einheit”), which describes the romantic ideal of the exquisite work of art; this concept is equivalent with the notion of “interfinitude” (for details, see Stroe 2004), by which we understand reality as finitude & infinitude existing in simultaneity, and which we identified as the most important foundation of romanticism.

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To be able to perceive the sat and asat in an infinite unity is to witness the dance of Shiva in the akhanda ananda (the infinite bliss). This is an alltransforming experience. In her chapter in this book, Ann Fisher-Wirth notes with passionate specificity: We humans are destroying the world. Anthropogenic change is causing what has come to be called the sixth mass extinction, in which, as the Pulitzer Prizewinning science writer Elizabeth Kolbert (2016) reports, “one third of all reefbuilding corals, a third of all fresh-water molluscs, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion,” and the mass extinction rate for amphibians—“the most endangered class of animals”—may be “as much as forty-five thousand times higher than the background rate.” (17–18)

How could we account for our call to an eco-spiritual resolution in the light of such serious depredation of our living planet? Despair, as she continues, can lead us only to inaction. Nevertheless, there is this interlocking of joy and sorrow as she cites HD Thoreau: Toward the end of Walden, Henry David Thoreau (1854; 2004) writes of listening to a bird, “O the evening robin, at the end of a New England summer day! If I could ever find the twig he sits upon! I mean he; I mean the twig.” (254) And because of the passionate specificity of this image, the bird and its song are alive for us 170 years later.

Both Usha V.T. and Anne Skea (see their chapters in this book) agree on the alchemy of human imagination that transforms even decay and death into sweetness and light. This is the magic of inner awareness of poetic resolution. However, in a rocky landscape the observer would be bound by the limits of the self, light, and sight. The land itself becomes an impediment to see its span and horizon. Once we have settled into the comfort zones that our postindustrial culture has led us to, we have laid aside our horizons of perceptions too. Our lives are now dictated by the ways in which our industrial and urban waste crosses the boundaries between the inside and the outside, the body and the earth, and culture and nature, and profoundly shapes our landscape and its meanings. In other words, waste transmutes every single moment of our lives. Insightful ecocritics claim that our waste has ecologically transformed the entire globe. There is no human-made object so well traveled, so ambient, as waste. It fills the oceans and the highest peaks. Our waste lays thick blankets of our chemical

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age across the entire planet, into every rocky outcropping, to the bottom of every sea’s floor, nestling in the trees and bogs and pools of the world. It’s in the air, in the water, in yard sales brimming with kitsch, in houses stuffed to the rafters with rubbish, in outer space, spreading out in invisible clouds of toxic chemicals, and piling up in immense mountains of garbage stacked in trash-bricks below ground at Fresh Kills or Puente Hills or a thousand other dump sites. [. . .] With our waste we have reordered space and place, reshaping them in its image the world over. (3–4) (Quoted in the chapter by Kerim Can Yazgünoğlu)

This might be true but the fact remains that at least now we have come to realize the magnitude of our perceptions: our ideologies can reorder our world; our ways of seeing can reinterpret our environment. We can caution and check our marauding. The shift from red to green had made a politics of difference and now the shift from green to post green, it is believed, would hasten in a difference in perspective—political, social, economic, and ideological. It would bring about a Copernican revolution, an all-inclusive and holistic vision that would contain within itself difference and multiplicity. We do not have an answer to human arrogance, nor do we have guides to perfect living in complete harmony. The laws of physics which govern our cosmos are distinctly different from the understanding that biologists and ecologists have garnered, because life itself is dependent on specific planetary situations and conditions; it’s a unique system different and particular at the same time. It is in such a system interdependent and interconnected that life and beauty exist. Why is beauty so threatening and what is the force that drives it into silence? So asks Peter Quigley. In the final analysis, we come to realize the wisdom in Heidegger’s observation: poetically man dwells. The eco-psychological dimension of the poets’ perception is based on the emergence among ecology and psychology as well as the emotional bond with the earth itself. Perhaps this amounts to the “sublime.” The reinvention of the self and the transformations of it within visionary embodied experiences tend to a tremendous spiritual revitalization as we recognize the natural and the more-than-human world as intimately interwoven with each other. The development of a transpersonal ecological consciousness postulates an identification of subjectivity as it is connected with the co-evolution with others including the world and all forms of culture, and secondly, an awareness for the human existence which is perceived within Nature and body. The matter of the rebirth and transformations of Nature presupposes a new kind of flesh’s rebirth which includes an ontological remark (see Nikoleta Zampaki, Ecophenomenology in Mediterranean Literature: A Study Case between Salvatore Quasimodo and Odysseus Elytis). When we

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recognize difference and multiplicity we can even reinterpret the old insight we had drawn from the Sanskrit: ekam sat vipra bhahuda vadanti—truth is one and the sages express it differently. The insight we have gained will tell us to recognize the point that the sages express it differently! Truth might be one but that it is expressed differently underscores its multiplicity at once. In our move toward a recognition of post green we concurrently recognize the characteristic diversity that maintains the stability of our ecosystem. This might be modernity’s last post that seeks convergences and divergences. We need to invoke our community and immunity at the same time recognizing an affirmative biopolitics. Post green could be then an alternative symbiosis. IN CONCLUSION In the final analysis the insights of post green would instigate the direct confronting of authority—an authority sanctioned by the early scientism which looks upon earth and everything as mere raw materials to be exploited; it would lead us to take our stance against dictatorial and authoritarian forces that cloud our skies and pollute our rivers. It would call for a politics of debate and resistance because it recognizes ecological history, ethics, and difference. It is not a naïve stand against western modernity, nor is it a falling back to environmental fundamentalism. It would call for action and compassion as much as grace and sanctity, goodness, beauty, and bliss. It would stand with the indigenous people of the earth who behold and revere the sacred at the heart of everything. Because all is not doomed even now, there is still space for promise. Echoing Native American views, Donald Hughes and Jim Swan have noted in “How Much of the Earth Is Sacred Space?” Whether we are Indians or others, we can agree with the words of John Muir, “we all dwell in a house of one room—the world with the firmament for its roof—and we are sailing the celestial spaces without leaving any track.” We will know that all decisions affecting any part of the natural environment are decisions about sacred space.16

Perhaps, to conclude this essay with a Vedic mantra is not to create another hold-all for all times but only to continue a prayer for better perceptions and better times: Bhadraṃ karṇebhiḥ śṛṇuyāma devāḥ /bhadraṃ paśyemākṣabh iryajatrāḥ (May we hear auspicious words with the ears, while engaged in yajnas, may we see auspicious things with our eyes). Thus, to theorize on post green is to draw attention to the larger issues beyond conservation, preservation, and deep ecological practices. This calls for a relocation of green theory beyond boundaries. Post green challenges the very foundations of intellectual theorizing, but all the while it retains

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the radical mind for questing and questioning. To be radical is, of course, to catch things by the roots, and the roots of thinking we recognize are holistic and heterogeneous. Post green engages with the radical politics of “blind economic development” and endeavors to subvert power centers that exist to dominate and dictate. Post green recognizes the need for human beings to survive alongside nonhuman living and nonliving world; post green is not for privileging the human cause above all else. Post green sanctions human rights as well as animal rights and upholds all nature to speak alongside. Post green challenges the economic structures that march on inadvertently regardless of all else upholding the ubiquitous slogan of development; post green stands for an environmental ethic based on sympathy and empathy. “Is an irresponsible civilisation inspired and informed by an obsolete world view—the mechanical paradigm—the only one imaginable?” ask J Baird Callicott and Roger T Ames.17 Further, they ask: “Aren’t there alternative technologies and alternative social goals?” Of course, now we know that there are alternate technologies that could reorder the local and the global values without hierarchies. An obsolete humanism inspired by the egocentric values could lead us only to a fragmented world of divisions, of separation and hierarchy; an alternate humanism that recognizes the values inspired by an alternate culture(s) would very well take us beyond divisions and binaries into an accommodative universe. We would now have moved from red to green, and a little beyond.

NOTES 1. There is a whole grey area in such arguments which still needs to be addressed, which, unfortunately, doesn’t fall within the purview of this chapter, so I haven’t yet endeavored to explore its politics. In the contexts of discussing biopolitics in the light of Foucault’s arguments, Daniele Lorenzini, in Biopolitics in the Time of Coronavirus, brings to focus the interrelation between biopower and the situation of corona virus pandemic: “In a recent piece, Judith Butler rightly remarks “the rapidity with which radical inequality, nationalism, and capitalist exploitation find ways to reproduce and strengthen themselves within the pandemic zones.” This comes as a much-needed reminder in a moment in which other thinkers, such as Jean-Luc Nancy, argue on the contrary that the coronavirus “puts us on a basis of equality, bringing us together in the need to make a common stand.” Of course, the equality Nancy is talking about is just the equality of the wealthy and the privileged—those who are lucky enough to have a house or an apartment to spend their quarantine in and who do not need to work or can work from home, as Bruno Latour already observed. What about those who are still forced to go to work every day because they cannot work from home nor afford to lose their paycheck? What about those who

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do not have a roof over their head? (https://www​.journals​.uchicago​.edu​/doi​/full​/10​ .1086​/711432). In the course of this chapter I have argued for a perspectival change which could eventually address the issues of economic difference and its biopolitic. 2. Growing at a slower pace, world population is expected to reach 9.7 billion in 2050 and could peak at nearly 11 billion around 2100. https://populationmatters​.org​ /campaigns​/anthropocene​?gclid​=Cjw​KCAi​Ao4O​QBhB​BEiwA5KWu​_ycY​2WBm​ MsmT​qjpS​cN5S​2s6h​iXY5JpA​-c6D​f3J6​piwY​sTQ5​o2uJ​Vyxo​CGMAQAvD​_BwE. 3. “The complex of problems constituting the environmental crisis . . . include environmental pollution, the aesthetic degradation of nature, human overpopulation, resource depletion, ecological destruction, and, now emerging as the most pressing and desperate of problems, abrupt massive species extinction. These problems are largely Western in provenance, albeit global in scope.” Baird Callicott and RT Ames, Introduction: “The Asian Traditions as a Conceptual Resource for Environmental Philosophy,” in Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought: Essays in Environmental Philosophy. Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, 1989, p. 3. Eugene C Hargrove, in his Foreword, traces the trajectory of environmental thought explicitly: “Looking back over two decades of work in environmental philosophy, two distinct phases of research are clearly discernable. The first focused primarily on Judeo-Christian responsibility—as both cause, and properly reformed, cure of environmental ills. The second abandoned that debate and focused primarily on the theoretical foundations of environmental philosophy, but still almost exclusively from a Western point of view. We are now ready, I believe, for a third period of study: one that teats environmental philosophy globally, while at the same time respects cultural diversity; one that goes beyond the broad categories of East and West and takes full account of regional, national, and religious differences.” This is the major contention of insightful environmental philosophers—this calls for escape from the clutches of environmental parochialism. 4. https://globalgreens​.org​/wp​-content​/uploads​/2020​/04​/Global​-Greens​-Charter​ -2017​.pdf. 5. https://www​.economist​.com​/by​-invitation​/2021​/11​/19​/ted​-nordhaus​-on​-how​ -green​-activists​-mislead​-and​-hold​-back​-progress. 6. Literature of Nature: An International Sourcebook. Ed Patrick D Murphy. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998. 7. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory. New York: Vintage Books, 1995, see p. 84. 8. The Persians referred to the people on the banks of the river Indus as SinduSaraswathy people. Herein lay the origin of the word Hindu and later Hindustan. It is interesting to note that there is no equivalent for the word “religion” in the Sanskrit; the nearest being Santana Dharma, or simply dharma. 9. Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity. London: Penguin, 2005, p. 25. 10. Quoted in Leslie Stevenson, “Is Scientific Research Value-Neutral?” Environmental Ethics: Divergence and Convergence. Susan J Armstrong and Richard Botzler. New York: McGraw Hill, 1993, p. 13.

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11. See Alex Hochuli, Is Contemporary Anti-Consumerism a Form of Romantic Anti-Capitalism? https://www​.academia​.edu​/32436755​/Is​_contemporary​_anti​_consumerism​_a​_form​_of​_romantic​_anti​_capitalism. 12. Petra Kelley, Thinking Green: Essays on Environmentalism, Feminism and NonViolence. Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1994, p. 119. 13. See Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture. New York: Bantam, 1984. Theodore Roaszak, Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Post-Industrial Society. New York: Doubleday, 1973; Schumacher Ernst, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. New York: Harper Collins, 1973. 14. This is often quoted and misquoted out of any specific context by scholars and academics alike. There is no specific source for this mantra. Invocations in a similar scale can be seen in the last verse of Garuḍa Purāṇa (2.35.51) and in Bhavishya Purāṇa (3.2.35.14). Either way, the point is to see the universal nature of the prayer. The general spiritual insight is carried forward through minor alterations and amendments. 15. As with Art and Answerability, in Toward a Philosophy of the Act, Bakhtin restates that our starting point from within our own existence need not be our ending point in ethical decision making. We need not be anthropocentric: “To live from within oneself does not mean to live for oneself, but means to be an answerable participant from within oneself, to affirm one’s compellent, actual non-alibi in Being.” See “Dialoguing with Bakthin on Our Ethical Responsibilty to Anothers,” Patrick Murphy, Transversal Ecocritical Praxis. New York: Lexington Books, 2013, p. 16. 16. Environmental Ethics: Divergence and Convergence. Ed Susan J Armstrong and Richard G Botzler. New York: McGraw Hill, 1993, p. 179. 17. Op cit. Epilogue, Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought: Essays in Environmental Philosophy, p. 289.

Chapter 1

Recalling Herbert Marcuse on Socialism’s Radical Goals Today Charles Reitz

Herbert Marcuse was lionized as the philosopher of the student revolts in 1968.1 He stood in solidarity with the movements against the Vietnam War and ecological destruction, and for women’s rights and civil rights for oppressed social groups. A similar spirit of revolt is resurgent especially among young people now in the 2020s—as diverse, global phenomena of protest have appeared against the ecological crisis, gun availability, militarism, gender oppression, police violence, and labor force precarity—Black Lives Matter, Me Too, Occupy! At the same time, Marcuse was a philosophical advocate of revolutionary social change in pursuit of the freedom he believed to be the innermost dynamic of human existence and a core feature of authentic social life. He saw the French Revolution as having begun to “assert the reality” of this freedom (Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory 1941: 4), yet it was the bourgeoisie and their business organizations, rather than the labor force, that enjoyed freedom’s new historical prerogatives. Nineteenth century labor would remain alienated in a new form of business/ industrial unfreedom and environmental devastation. His study of the “and” in Reason and Revolution turned to Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (newly published by the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research in conjunction with the Marx-Engels Institute of Moscow) for help in understanding the modern predicament of labor and the prospect of attaining the full political potential of free human beings within a new communist order. He notes that, for Marx, communism is “the real appropriation of the essence of man by man and for man, therefore it is man’s complete conscious .  .  . return to himself as a social, that is, human being” (Marx in Marcuse 1941: 286). Marcuse’s emphasis on the radical goals of socialism builds a through-line linking the critical theoretical work his eight monographs and over eighty journal publications. Realigning the social order to conform with 17

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the highest potentials of our economy, technology, and human nature requires the de-commodification of certain economic minimums: health care, childcare, education, food, transportation, housing—and work, through a guaranteed income. These are transitional proto-revolutionary goals. The more radical and revolutionary goals of socialism envisage a more encompassing view of liberation and human flourishing: the passage from wages and salaries to public work in the public interest—public work for a commonwealth of freedom, with work as life’s prime want. Change starts with the pleasure we find in meaningful work, mindful of our need to be of service to humanity. We need more than to be merely making a living; we need to be gratified knowing that we are making a life of love and justice, leisure, abundance, and peace. “The goal of radical change today is the emergence of human beings who are physically and mentally incapable of inventing another Auschwitz” (Marcuse [1979] 2011: 213). The global system of advanced capitalism is poisoning and depleting the resources of our material environment; a politics of neofascism is increasingly contorting our political lives. Refugees migrate from the Middle East to Europe and from the Global South to the United States only to be denied their rights to asylum. Derelict political leadership at the highest levels in the United States throughout the COVID-19 crisis led to surplus destruction and death compared to other nations.2 Establishment politicians in and out of office promote racial animosity and anti-immigrant scapegoating as they orchestrate social control policies in service to this system. There can be no escape from the pandemic or the refugee crisis without a global ethic comprehending the embeddedness of individual well-being within communal well-being. This is true also for ecological devastation and the generalized economics of despair worldwide. This interpenetration of our common economic, environmental, and ethical injuries was comprehended in the intersectional philosophy of emancipation developed over fifty years ago by Marcuse. His political-philosophical vision continues to offer intelligent strategic perspectives on current concerns― especially issues of neofascist white supremacy, hate speech, toxic masculinity, misogyny, hate crimes, police brutality, environmental destruction, and education as monocultural, nationalistic, and patriotic manipulation. These troubles are profound, yet they can be countered through a Marcusean strategy of radical socialism: revolutionary ecosocialism and ecofeminist liberation. In his posthumously published Paris Lectures at Vincennes University, 1974 Marcuse underscored his belief that the women’s movement was one of the most important political forces for system change. He saw this movement as key in the transformation of civilization’s traditionally patriarchal values, and this as central to what he saw as the “context of the enlarged depth and

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scope of the revolution, of the new goals and possibilities of the revolution” (Marcuse [1974] 2015a) such that the movement for the liberation of women finds momentous significance in his overall perspective. In the same year in which he delivered these Paris lectures, Marcuse’s essay, “Marxism and Feminism,” also appeared ([1974] 2005; more on this below). Marcuse’s ecological writings emphasize how both the earth and human life are distressed under the conditions of global financial capital. His littleknown, yet crucial, essays “Ecology and the Criticism of Society” ([1979] 2011) and “Ecology and Revolution” ([1972] 2005) need to be recollected especially. These propose a program of global action against capitalism’s wasted abundance and climate crisis, revolving around what Marcuse considered to be the radical, rather than minimum, goals of socialism. Marcuse is the only figure of the first-generation Frankfurt School who developed writings directly concerned with ecological and feminist problems or the counterstrategies to confront and overcome them. His essays on ecology are eminently cognizant of the interconnectedness of the biosphere and the negative impacts of the capitalist political economy. Environmentalist criticisms of extractive and polluting economic policies, he found, tended implicitly or explicitly to involve system-negations and epitomize a visceral repugnance at the totality of the efficiently functioning social order of advanced industrial society, that is, a Great Refusal. This society is obscene in producing and indecently exposing a stifling abundance of wares while depriving its victims abroad of the necessities of life; obscene in stuffing itself and its garbage cans while poisoning and burning the scarce foodstuffs in the fields of its aggression; obscene in the words and smiles of its politicians and entertainers; its prayers, in its ignorance, and in the wisdom of its kept intellectuals (Marcuse 1969: 7–8). [O]pposition is [now being] directed against the totality of a well-functioning, prosperous society—a protest against its Form—the commodity form of men and things. (Marcuse 1972: 49, 51)

Increasingly, the ecological struggle comes into conflict with the laws which govern the capitalist system: the law of increased accumulation of capital, of the creation of sufficient surplus value, of profit, of the necessity of perpetuating alienated labor and exploitation. . . . [T]he ecological logic is purely and simply the negation of capitalist logic; the earth can’t be saved within the framework of capitalism, the Third World [Global South] can’t be developed according to the model of capitalism. (Marcuse [1972] 2005: 175) Capitalism’s fetish with commodity production and profit is poisoning the earth. Profit comes before all else: gun manufacturers before victims in schools and churches. Drug manufacturers before diabetics and opioid addicts. This obsession is a many-headed hydra: cut off one head and five

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more appear: for example, with cigarettes having been restricted, vaping now generates renewed profits for the tobacco industry. “COMMERCIALIZED NATURE, POLLUTED NATURE, MILITARIZED NATURE . . .” MAY DAY! MAY DAY! In 1972 Marcuse understood that nature was under attack: “Commercialized nature, polluted nature, militarized nature cut down the life environment of man, not only in an ecological, but also in a very existential sense” (Marcuse 1972: 60). He regarded the environmental movement of his time as the embodiment of a life-affirming energy directed toward the protection of Earth and the pacification of our human existence overall. He recognized the importance of ecology to the revolutionary movement and the importance of the revolutionary movement for ecology. Both are linked through Eros into a campaign for revolutionary ecological liberation. To him this reflected the vernal spirit of “May Day” (colorful ribbons and flowers, Mother Earth, etc.), while embodying also the combative spirit of the revolutionary international labor force. May Day, as a revolutionary holiday, means protesting particular wrongs: fighting for reform struggles within capitalism is part of the struggle for system change. But this is also a fight at a higher level of engagement, protesting a political-economic wrong in general—capitalism—and having fateful implications for our future on the face of the planet. He advocated not only the Great Refusal, but what he called “revolutionary ecological liberation.” Wasted abundance and environmental degradation required a radical systemscritique and political opposition that Marcuse believed needed to become a revolutionary force. Nature’s power to sooth and quiet our souls and bring peace to the human heart was famously praised in nineteenth-century German Romanticism via poems like Goethe’s classic “Űber allen Gipfeln [Wanderer’s Night Song]” and his “Song of May”—“O wie herrlich leuchtet Mir die Natur”—“Oh how Nature’s splendor radiates within me!” For critical theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno—in 1944 after Auschwitz—all of the grand-sounding nature veneration rang hollow and left a bitter distaste for the myriad poetic praises sung to nature in German high culture. They wrote in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Only when seen for what it is, does nature become existence’s craving for peace, that consciousness which from the very beginning has inspired an unshakable resistance to Führer and collective alike. Dominant practice and its inescapable alternatives are not threatened by nature, but by the fact that nature is remembered. (Horkheimer and Adorno [1944] 1972: 254–55)

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For Horkheimer and Adorno, not nature, but its remembrance was key. Material nature requires the reflective powers of the human mind to itself be understood and liberated. Herbert Marcuse, on the other hand, held nature itself in higher esteem. In 1972 his Counterrevolution and Revolt contained a notable chapter on “Nature and Revolution.” He theorized in a more optimistic vein: What is happening is the discovery (or rather, rediscovery) of nature as an ally in the struggle against the exploitative societies in which the violation of nature aggravates the violation of man. The discovery of the liberating forces of nature and their vital role in the construction of a free society becomes a new force in social change. (Marcuse 1972: 59; emphasis added)

NATURE AS AN ALLY, NATURE AS EDUCATOR It’s extraordinary that Marcuse sees nature as an ally in the struggle for liberation! What revelations await? Can we even imagine it? It is not as if nature is a subject that can choose to act on our behalf (or not) giving us “following seas” or a tail wind—one might just as often be randomly becalmed or swamped. Nature is in motion; it is dynamic, and it is because humanity and nature are dialectically interdependent that the “liberation of nature” can be a “vehicle for the liberation of man” (Marcuse 1972: 59). Marcuse rejects the theology implied if one holds that nature can be a “manifestation of subjectivity” (Marcuse 1972: 65). Like Goethe and Schiller, American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson did classically propose certain advantages we owe to nature: refreshed sensations and awareness, our essential bond with both the living and the nonliving features and creatures of the material world. To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone. . . . [T]he universe is the property of every individual in it. Every rational creature has all nature for his dowry and estate . . . he is entitled to the world by his constitution. (Emerson [1836] 2009: 6–7)

To Emerson we are also educated through the study the environment: To the young mind everything is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things and see in them one nature . . . it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground, whereby contrary and remote things cohere, and flower out from one stem. (Emerson [1837] 2009: 151)

One might say with Emerson that such education affords insights into an incipient dialectics of nature. Emerson is no Engels. Nonetheless, we stand

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to benefit as Marcuseans when rereading of Emerson’s work on nature: we can both better appreciate and negate Emerson’s pantheistic and proprietary tendencies, sublating them, and thereby preserving and elevating his ecological strengths. Marcuse’s philosophy helps in this regard with his recognition of the humanizing propensities of nature. Appreciating the Romantic and naturalistic insights of Goethe and Emerson, Marcuse agrees that nature has been a “symbol of beauty, of tranquility, of a nonrepressive order” (Marcuse [1972] 2005: 174). Yet his contention that “nature is an ally” entails not only that, but that “[t]hanks to these values, nature was the very negation of the market society, with its values of profit and utility” (Marcuse [1972] 2005: 174). He emphasizes that human beings and the earth are enmeshed in an ecological web of mutuality and interdependence: nature will “help” liberate us—if we help liberate it. Nature itself requires liberation because we now encounter nature “as transformed by society, subjected to a specific rationality which became, to an ever-increasing extent, technical, instrumentalist rationality bent to the requirements of capitalism” (Marcuse 1972: 59–60). Nature needs us as an ally to prevent its destruction and we need nature as an ally given its power to ensure that we can endure. “[T]he restoration of the earth as a human environment, is not just a romantic, aesthetic, poetic idea which is a matter of concern only to the privileged; today, it is a question of survival” (Marcuse [1972] 2005: 175). The liberation of nature cannot mean returning to a pre-technological stage, but advancing to the use of the achievements of technological civilization for freeing man and nature from the destructive abuse of science and technology in the service of exploitation. Then, certain lost qualities of artisan work may well reappear on the new technological base. (Marcuse 1972: 60)

Science and technology must be enlisted in the service of humanity, not capital accumulation. The violations of the earth entailed in its commercialized exploitation must be halted and remedied. Marcuse does say that in a sense we must recognize “nature as a subject in its own right—a subject with which to live in a common universe” (Marcuse 1972: 60). From this perspective nature must be made whole where it has been damaged. The 2008 Preamble to the Constitution of Ecuador includes a recognition of nature’s rights in an explicit provision: “We hereby decide to build a new form of public coexistence, in diversity and harmony with nature, to achieve the good way of living [buen vivir, sumac kawsay].” Marcuse’s ecosocialism is likeminded: “The Marxian conception understands nature as a universe which becomes the congenial medium for human gratification to the degree to which nature’s own gratifying qualities and forces are recovered and released” (Marcuse 1972: 67).

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THE EARTHCOMMONWEALTH ALTERNATIVE EarthCommonWealth is my term for a Marcusean vision of an ecosocialist system alternative. Because its environmental vision sees all living things and their nonliving earthly surroundings as a global community capable of a dignified, deliberate coexistence, this is a green economic alternative. The ecological work of Aldo Leopold (1942; 1949) also comes into play for me here. Understanding the earth in global ecological terms Leoplold saw it is not merely soil and rock; it is a biotic pyramid, a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of land, minerals, air, water, plants, and animals including the human species. He proposed a dialectical and materialist “land ethic” as a call to conservation and cooperation, in which the individual’s rights to private property in land are contrasted unfavorably with historical patterns of communal ownership (Leopold 1949). The EarthCommonWealth Alternative seeks to restore nature’s bounty and beauty by opposing the profitable misuse of limited natural resources, in large measure by negating planned obsolescence and its attendant wasted abundance. Having such an alternative perspective is a prerequisite for overcoming the climate crisis and launching the restoration of our too-much abused nature and the renewal of our human nature from its alienated condition. EarthCommonWealth envisions the displacement and transcendence of capitalist oligarchy as such, not simply its most bestial and destructive components. It is a concept explored in preliminary form in my Ecology and Revolution (Reitz 2019), negating the capitalist fetish of exchange value, and by liberating commonwealth labor by eliminating its commodity or wage form. In addition to being a green alternative this is a commonwealth alternative because (1) it opts for a new system of ecological production, egalitarian distribution, partnership/humanist values, shared ownership, liberated (i.e., non-alienated) labor, and democratized governance having its foundation in the ethics of partnership labor and partnership productivity, and (2) because of its ecosocialist and humanist commitment to living our lives on the planet consistent with the most honorable and aesthetic forms of human social and political fulfillment. The EarthCommonWealth Alternative would entail the “expropriation of the expropriators,” abolish rent-seeking and the for-profit financial industry, and eliminate universal commodity dependency through the decommodification/socialization of the economy. It would decouple income both from individual labor activity and from property ownership through an ecosocialist form of universal guaranteed incomes. Incomes need to be distributed without reference to individual productivity, according to need, and as equally as feasible. Hours of labor need to be substantially reduced. The wellrounded scientific and philosophical development of the young needs to be made possible through a system of multicultural general education privileging

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no single culture, religion, or language. EarthCommonWealth aspires to be a social-political philosophy with the potential to fulfill humanity’s species being. If economics is (as Aristotle held) the study and practice of improving the human material condition enabling human families and communities to flourish, the capitalist system is obviously dis-economic in its extreme inequalities of immiseration and wealth, limitations on quality of life, and undemocratic monopolization of power. In economics and ethics, Aristotle (in contrast to Thrasymachus who viewed justice as whatever satisfied individual selfinterest) believed the chief vice was the boundless pursuit of property accumulation; the chief virtue, the pursuit of the well-being of the family and community (Politics: Chapter IX). In the United States today excessive military spending illustrates this vice catering to the owners of the U.S. suppliers to military industrial complex most vividly. The military budget is far greater than needed, and in fact could be reduced if the sole goal were national defense. In reality the military budget does more than provide for defense, it is a major mechanism to subsidize owners of military industrial capital and thus keep the nearly unbounded profits flowing. This doesn’t even begin to get at the fact that the U.S. military is the largest single source of greenhouse gasses. Seymour Melman wrote fifty years ago in Pentagon Capitalism of the “depleting consequences” of military spending for the U.S. economy and society: “Since the end of the Second World War, the United States government has spent an astronomical $1,000 billion for military purposes” (1970: 184). His Permanent War Economy established the thesis that “Industrial productivity, the foundation of every nation’s economic growth, is eroded by the relentlessly predatory effects of the military economy” (1985: 7). More recently, Andrew Feinstein (2012) comments on contemporary world military spending: An inestimably large amount of public money is expended on the arms trade. This is not only in direct government expenditure, which totals trillions of dollars a year, but in the massive state subsidization of R&D, export and other incentives, wastage on unnecessary weapons systems, overspending by contractors and bailouts to badly run companies. (Feinstein 2012: 524–25)

Marcuse had his own commentary in 1974 on U.S. militarism (Marcuse [1974] 2015a): [I]f you throw together—which as an orthodox Marxist you might well do— unemployment and employment for the military services, you arrive at the following numbers: a total of over 25% of the labor force, i.e. 22.3 million, were either unemployed or dependent on military spending directly or indirectly. (Marcuse [1974] 2015a: 42)

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This is a capitalism of wasted abundance. Capitalism represents the irrational perfection of waste and the degradation of the earth; profitable plastic litter, air pollution, trash (planned obsolescence), toxic dumping, air and water pollution, resource depletion, and so on. Ubiquitous advertising adds to the devastation by further boosting sales and the exchange value of a “new” product despite its diminished quality and use value. We get disposable consumer goods and a society in which lives become disposable too (as described decades ago by Vance Packard in The Waste Makers). Marcuse’s 1979 publication “The Reification of the Proletariat” ([1979] 2014) and the only recently published essay “Why Talk on Socialism?” ([1975] 2015b) provide further testimony to his enduring engagement with the dialectics of internal material contradiction within the economy: Can there still be any mystification of who is governing, and, in whose interests, of what is the base of their power? (Marcuse [1979] 2014: 395) The general form of the internal contradictions of capitalism has never been more blatant, more cruel, more costly of human lives and happiness. And―this is the significance of the Sixties―this blatant irrationality has not only penetrated the consciousness of a large part of the population, it has also caused, mainly among the young people, a radical transformation of needs and values which may prove to be incompatible with the capitalist system, its hierarchy, priorities, morality, symbols (the counter-culture, ecology). (Marcuse [1975] 2015b: 114–115)

Ecosocialism offers a counteroffensive against the dis-economics of cultural polarization, the destruction of nature, and humanity’s dread prospect of extinction. The evidence of impending economic, governmental, and/or natural catastrophe is mounting. Without an adamant ideology like EarthCommonWealth, there is no sufficient negation, and there will be no sufficient transformation away from oligarchy, when conditions are ripe for revolution, toward the new world system we seek, respectful of the material conditions of life on our planet and commensurate with the essential caretaking capacities of the human species. COUNTERREVOLUTION AND REVOLT Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man began with its famous first sentence: “A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress” (Marcuse 1964: 1). By 1972 he warned of the global economic, cultural, and political tumult that is now much more obvious given capitalism’s upsurge of economic failures

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since 2008 and in the aftermath of the Trump presidency. Political and philosophical tendencies that are often referred to as “neoliberalism” and/or “neoconservatism” in much analytical work of the past several years, Marcuse clearly understood back then as organized counterrevolution. The Western world has reached a new stage of development: now, the defense of the capitalist system requires the organization of counterrevolution at home and abroad. . . . Torture has become a normal instrument of “interrogation” around the world . . . even Liberals are not safe if they appear as too liberal. (Marcuse 1972: 1)

Marcuse’s 1972 book Counterrevolution and Revolt warned of the emergence of an (albeit stealthy) assault by an increasingly predatory capitalist system against liberal democratic change,3 not only against its radical opposition. Since September 11: 2001, this counterrevolution has produced: the police-state U.S. Patriot Act (Finan 2007), global “Terror War” (Kellner 2003), a “moneyis-speech” Supreme Court, and intensifying political economic inequalities. Disclosures about the U.S. military’s use of torture and prisoner abuse (Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo), civilian massacres and war crimes (Fallujah, Haditha), and the loaded intelligence (that the U.S. Defense Department desired as a pretext for the invasion and occupation of Iraq) once shocked many of us, but now such things have become routine items in the news. In the United States today we are experiencing a transition from liberal democratic forms of unfreedom to reactionary and in many places essentially fascist forms. Marcuse’s analysis of German fascism is a key component of his overall radical social critique. He first wrote of the future threat of neofascism in the United States in 1947 in an essay titled “33 Theses,” which was archived but not published until 1998 ([1947] 1998: 215). The article theorizes neofascism as the emergent political expression of the anti-Soviet, postwar West; that is, as totalitarian form of governance in the advanced industrial countries. Likewise, in subsequent years Marcuse repeatedly criticized fascist tendencies within the context of U.S. politics in An Essay on Liberation (1969), Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972), and his recently discovered Paris Lectures at Vincennes University ([1974] 2015a: 10). Within the framework of the objective conditions, the alternatives (fascism or socialism) depend on the intelligence and the will, the consciousness and the sensibility, of human beings. . . . At present, the initiative and the power are with the counterrevolution. (Marcuse 1972: 29) And we should never take comfort in saying, “All right, it may well be that fascism may come, but it will not last and in the long run socialism will triumph.” (Marcuse [1974] 2015a: 10)

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Marcuse’s “33 Theses” stressed the structural economic forces of corporate capitalism ultimately undergirded counterrevolutionary interests. Marcuse’s analysis is akin to that of Franz Neumann’s subsequent Behemoth ([1944] 2009) and Robert Brady’s (1937) Spirit and Structure of German Fascism. Marcuse’s piece links an ostensibly psychological discussion of the authoritarian mentality of fascism to the material social forces that made it possible: The submissive and authoritarian character of man under the Nazi system is not an unchangeable natural property but an historical form of thought and behavior, concomitant with the transformation of large-scale industry into a directly political dominion. This character will therefore dissolve when the social forces are defeated which are responsible for the transformation of an industrial into an authoritarian society. In National Socialist Germany, these forces are clearly distinguishable: they are the great industrial combines on which the economic organization of the Reich centers, and the upper strata of the governmental and party bureaucracy. The breaking up of their dominion is the prerequisite and the chief content of re-education. (Marcuse [1942] 1998b: 171)

These archival Marcuse sources are not simply of antiquarian interest. They offer a strategic advantage to us today during our own period of political turbulence. How shall we best protect human life and human rights in this era of white extremist mass shootings, police killings, acrid backlash against public health measures as well as against multicultural reform efforts—all this amid reactionary redefinitions of freedom (via anti-maskers, antivaxxers, and anti-Semitic khaki-clad Klansmen and paramilitaries)? Though Trump lost the 2020 election and has been impeached for a second time, the material conditions that gave rise to his reactionary political hostility (including persistent saber-rattling) will not stop, and angry white men will try to recoup after defeat and humiliation.4 Some of the most lurid features of fascism/neofascism are its machismo, racism, weaponry, and sadistic indifference to killing and death. Today the governmental policies and paramilitary tactics of “ICE” (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) directed against undocumented immigrants [rounded up by the hundreds5 in August 2019] portend a chilling neofascist police presence in everyone’s future. A theater of grievance that emerged from the Donald Trump White House emboldened not just hatred and fear within his base, but also fantasies of paramilitary vengeance. Despite the warped acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse, the world saw a neofascist crew mobilize him to use his military-style weapon to mow down anti-racist protestors in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in late August 2020. Donald Trump’s right-wing political leadership has beleaguered the United States for nearly four years with a garish authoritarian populism, and it threatened to do so for another four or more.

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Hungary, Chile, Brazil, and Bolivia have also moved in this direction, with similar tendencies incipient in Germany, Austria, and Great Britain. Having fled Germany’s Nazis in 1933 because of his radical politics and Jewish background to New York City, Marcuse developed a remarkable series of books each published as an English-language original that represented to the world what would become a potent new perspective, the refugee Frankfurt School’s critical social theory: Reason and Revolution (1941), Eros and Civilization (1955), One-Dimensional Man (1964), An Essay on Liberation (1969a), and Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972). “Critical theory” for Marcuse was not an Aesopian alternative or substitute for Marxism. He sought to raise the philosophy of Marx to its highest level. As he saw it, a critique of political economy in a classical Marxist manner was necessary to update our understanding: As the commodity form becomes universal and integrates branches of the material and “higher” culture which previously had a relative independence, it reveals the essential contradiction of capitalism in its most extreme concentration: capital versus the mass of the working population as a whole. (1972: 15)

Liberal forms of government are usually thought of as forms of democratic freedom, but at a deeper level, everyone in them is in near total dependence upon commodity exchange and markets. Over recent decades the income, wealth, and power of the most parasitic elements of the U.S. economy and military have grown excessively relative to the system’s total output. Meanwhile, components of the system’s productive forces (e.g., infrastructure, labor force skills, the global ecosystem) are being under-reproduced, its “surplus” population stigmatized, suffocated, crushed. Marcuse understood the capitalist state is an expression of material inequalities, never neutral, having been captured by the forces of class, race, and gender exploitation. Real crimes by the right (before 9/11, as well as in its aftermath) are systemically tolerated by the state in practice—such as racist police brutality, the deprivation of millions of Americans from comprehensive health care, treating asylum seekers as criminals, implementing the death penalty in a racially biased manner, supplying arms and training to governments and armed groups around the world that commit torture, political killings, and other human rights abuses (Amnesty International 1998; Bevins 2020; Harcourt 2018). In the late 1980s the right-wing’s culture wars accelerated an attack on the civil rights movement and multicultural education reform, through the likes of Pat Buchanan, Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Allan Bloom, Lynn and Dick Cheney, and Antonin Scalia. The Alt-Right and even many mainstream politicians asserted that society must maintain an absolute freedom/tolerance of race

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and gender-based speech in abusive and even assaultive forms―as protected modes of dissent (Scalia 1992; Kors and Silverglate 1998: 48; Reitz 2000: 257–58). Freedom of speech, as J. S. Mill conceived it of course, was intended to protect political minorities from domination by the prevailing bourgeoisliberal system. Marcuse’s critique of pure tolerance shows how the liberal doctrine of free speech could be twisted to protect hate speech and facilitate hate crimes. This critique is relevant especially today as we see record high number of hate groups (now 1,020 according to the Southern Poverty Law Center) and upward of sixty racist murders since 2018 in the United States alone,6 and more than fifty in a single incident in New Zealand. Why is this happening now? Hate crimes had been falling for several years prior to the 2014.7 Herbert Marcuse’s sharp critique of the counterrevolutionary power of U.S. militarism and Cold War empire-building in foreign policy stems in part because Marcuse witnessed Germany’s loss of Weimar democracy to a politics of ethnic national identity, an imagined community of blood and soil. Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance” (1965) essay was a product of critique of German fascism and right-wing activism, genocide. It expressed opposition to fascism as well as the liberal doctrines of tolerance that made the Third Reich possible. It contains insights and elements that make it extremely pertinent in our present era of counterrevolutionary backlash against the progress of the civil rights struggles and multicultural educational reform movement. This was written after Marcuse met Brandeis’s student Angela Davis, and began an intellectual/political relationship that lasted well beyond her student years (Davis 2013, 2004). Most recently Davis continues to criticize racist police brutality and connect the anti-racist uprising in Ferguson with the selfdefense struggles in Palestine (Davis 2016). As Angela Davis has pointed out, Marxists in the 1950s and early 1960s, like few others in the United States except the direct victims themselves, publicly challenged genocide8 and the resurgent racism in law enforcement, housing, employment, and education. “Repressive Tolerance” condemned the violence that actually prevails in the ostensibly peaceful centers of civilization: “it is practiced by the police, in the prisons and the mental institutions, in the fight against racial minorities. . . . This violence indeed breeds violence” (Marcuse 1965: 105). Marcuse is clear that anti-racist protesters are easily and customarily defamed in dominant media accounts as looters and rioters. Yet, in his estimation, if demonstrators do engage in violence, this is but an indignant counterforce (usually directed against property) to the overwhelming force of domination (that has directly and wantonly destroyed human life). In the United States today white supremacist rhetoric and attacks are on the rise because they are reactionary economic and political weapons of oligarchic capitalist power in a period when U.S. control of the world economy

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is waning. Threatening the conditions of existence of minority communities around the globe disempowers the entire human population, nearly all of which is made up of persons who must work for a living. Marcuse’s point was that the intensification of such deeply damaging hate speech and hate crime must be halted in any society that wishes to think of itself as a liberal social order, because the ability to protect minorities is the key criterion of any liberal form of government. No protection of minorities, no liberal democracy. The assertion, often heard today, that racist and sexist views contribute necessary components of cultural diversity and belong within an inclusive pluralism is an utterly perverse example of a vicious cultural and political double speak. A “new normal” has been unleashed through changes in the media, the law, the economy, education, and so on. Donald Trump’s ascendency is only the most recent brash expression of the predatory political economy of race, class, and gender—and the earth-killing tendencies latent in the essential contradictions of capitalism. Brutal forms of racial and other kinds of oppression (including crusading military invasions in order to “extend democracy”) are politically tolerated in service to the established system of unfreedom. Marcuse believed that the doctrine of “pure tolerance” was systematically utilized by reactionary and liberal forces to abuse equality guarantees and derail or destroy the possibility of democratic egalitarianism. This is now more widely recognized and criticized as “the free speech fallacy” (Jason Stanley 2016). Marcuse’s arguments undergird the right to a harassment-free environment in the public sphere and specifically on the nation’s campuses. Marcuse scholar Javier Sethness Castro highlights “Repressive Tolerance” as a militant “philosophical justification for insurrection and active suppression of fascism and militarism from below” (Sethness Castro 2018: 6). This interpretation is distinctive and extends the usual reading of Marcuse in an explicitly revolutionary way. Sethness Castro links Marcuse’s call for the withdrawal of tolerance from chauvinistic groups to a justification of the active suppression of fascism and militarism from below, that is, to revolutionary praxis, as a “militant endorsement of insurrection and counterviolence against the established system” (Sethness Castro 2018: 169). Interrupting Lethal “Liberties”—Opposing Hate Speech and Gun Terror “This pure tolerance of sense and nonsense . . . ,” practiced under the conditions prevailing in the United States today, “. . . cannot fulfil the civilizing function attributed to it by the liberal protagonists of democracy, namely protection of dissent” (Marcuse 1965: 94, 117). “To treat the great crusades against humanity . . . with the same impartiality as the desperate struggles for humanity means neutralizing their opposite historical function, reconciling the executioners with their victims, distorting the record” (Marcuse 1965: 113). Marcuse’s partisanship is clear:

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The small and powerless minorities which struggle against the false consciousness and its beneficiaries must be helped: their continued existence is more important than the preservation of abused rights and liberties which grant constitutional powers to those who oppress these minorities. (Marcuse 1965: 110)

Writing of the Nazi organizers of institutionalized violence, Marcuse said: if democratic tolerance had been withdrawn when the future leaders started their campaign, mankind would have had a chance of avoiding Auschwitz and a World War.  .  .  . Such extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly is indeed justified only if the whole of society is in extreme danger.  .  .  . Withdrawal of tolerance from regressive movements before they can become active; intolerance even toward thought, opinion, and word, and finally intolerance in the opposite direction, that is toward the self-styled conservatives, to the political Right—these anti-democratic notions respond to the actual development of the democratic society which has destroyed the basis for universal tolerance. The conditions under which tolerance can again become a liberating force have still to be created. (Marcuse 1965: 110–11)

It is a tacit tribute to Marcuse that a strategy for the defense of equal civil rights and intercultural solidarity with victims of hate speech has been developed by authors like Dolores Calderón (2009), Christine Sleeter and Dolores Delgado Bernal (2003), Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (1997), Mari Matsuda, Charles Lawrence, Richard Delgado and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (1993), and John K. Wilson (1995). They argue effectively that freedom of speech is not absolute, and must be viewed in the context of its real political consequences. This insight is a key component of what has today become critical race theory, misunderstood and often ridiculed by those who misunderstand or oppose it on the left and right. Utilizing Marcuse’s critical historical perspective we can get at the truth about our vaunted freedom of speech in the United States, namely, that we do not now, nor have we ever had it. What we do have in our advanced industrial society is a contest of ideas and a contest for control within cultures generally and within educational institutions in particular (Finan 2007). If we all have a de jure right to express any opinion in public, the de facto condition is that Left opinions are usually marginalized and often suppressed, while rightwing ones, which benefit the ruling class, are given free play. The problem today is really one of which ideas are distributed and amplified by the mass media, so that through repetition and placement in powerful media sources they become dominant, legitimized, and authoritative. Marcuse emphasized that the formation of public opinion in the West (and now nearly everywhere) is largely controlled by oligopolistic media. Dissenters had but a slim chance of influencing the debate. Furthermore, any state doctrine that purported to

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be neutral served to reinforce the conventional pretense to freedom while obscuring its factual absence. The force of counterrevolution in the United States today is largely attributed to angry middle-class white men, Western chauvinists or Christian chauvinists, whose attitudes of superiority over others in religion, culture, and race lead also to behavior mired in the cult of toxic masculinity: tough, hardnosed, unsparing, fascistoid, with a willingness to exert deadly force for control and domination. Losing their upper-caste cultural and political status and power to minorities, the right-wing extremists see Democrats as communists, “enemies” of white patriotism. Even the U.S. Congress is investigated as part of its 2021 defense appropriations act the degree to which the Pentagon and also law enforcement is infiltrated with white supremacist politics.9 Several momentous institutional changes have occurred, however, in addition to a rise in hate speech and hate crime, starting with the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court ruled in 1992 that the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protected the actual burning of a Ku Klux Klan cross on the front lawn of a Black, St. Paul, Minnesota, resident (Scalia 1992). Although Antonin Scalia and the Supreme Court majority would no doubt have publicly abhorred overt racist intimidation, as Donald Trump ostensibly also did when pressed in public (Proud Boys “stand back and stand by,” wink, wink), the Klan got off, and the law against hate speech in this case ruled unconstitutional. It supposedly limited free speech, forcing the racists to fight in Scalia’s words with “one-hand tied behind their back,” while anti-racists could use both hands! Today we are witnessing the mobilization of the ideology and practice of murderous racism in the United States, now aimed in particular against the Black Lives Matter movement and its allies including the antifascist left (Antifa) activists. At the same time, former president Trump’s appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court, Amy Coney Barrett, takes pride in her adherence to Antonin Scalia’s perspective on the Constitution. Scalia’s record on racial justice matters is atrocious. His 2013 remarks during oral arguments in the Supreme Court’s review of the Voter Rights Act also indicated his scorn for what he called a politics of “racial entitlement.”10 (Scalia’s son, the Harvardtrained lawyer Eugene Scalia, subsequently decimated labor protections as the Trump administration’s Secretary of Labor.11) Marcuse understood the capitalist state is an expression of material inequalities, never neutral, having been captured by the forces of class, race, and gender exploitation. Within the current forms of unfreedom that are yet called democracies, real crimes by the right (years before 9/11, as well as in its aftermath) are tolerated by the state in practice—such as systematic police brutality, depriving millions of Americans from comprehensive health care, treating asylum seekers as criminals, implementing the death penalty in a racially biased manner, supplying arms and training to governments and

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armed groups around the world that commit torture, political killings, and other human rights abuses, and so on (Amnesty International 1998). The Federal Reserve bank’s financial and monetary policies have also entailed intensifying wealth and income inequalities (Petrou 2021) and political economic repression that is more widely recognized as such (see Kellner 2003, 2012; Harcourt 2018; Bevins 2020). Donald Trump’s reaction to The New York Times’ advocacy of the antiracist 1619 Project and his propaganda campaign against critical race theory culminated in September 2020 with his promotion of schooling for American patriotism.12 This reinforces the repressive and reactionary political mission of traditional monocultural approaches to education. It also extends the counterrevolutionary culture wars. Marcuse anticipated back in the 1960s the counterrevolutionary tendencies now raging in the higher education to reduce the liberal arts in American general education to the conservatively filtered monocultural residue13 of an elitist, Anglocentric program. I have called this the “American Pageant” version of this nation’s history and curriculum (Reitz 2008: 14). Historical writing of this conventional sort has played down immigrant, indigenous, women, and ethnic minority voices, and the resistance of these subaltern groups to class, race, and gender-based exertions of power (Reitz 2016: 217). Following a line of thinking from Eros and Civilization (1955), he theorizes that the “mobilization and administration of libido may account for much of the voluntary compliance .  .  . with the established society. Pleasure, thus adjusted, generates submission” (Marcuse 1964: 75). He explains that society’s control mechanisms become even more powerful when they integrate sexually suggestive and explicitly erotic and violent content into advertising and the mass media and infuse these into the content of mass entertainment and popular culture. The unrestrained use of sex and violence by large-scale commercial interests accomplishes more effective social manipulation and control in the interest of capital accumulation than had repressive sublimation. Repressive desublimation fuels counterrevolution by substituting reactionary emotional release in place of rebellion, and counterrevolutionary illusion in place of freedom. Marcuse posed the question of whether the ascendency of a neofascist regime in the United States can be prevented. Among the reasons why he asked this was his conviction that since at least 1972 the United States had entered a period of masculinist counterrevolution. According to Freud, the destructive tendency in society will gain momentum as civilization necessitates intensified repression in order to maintain domination in the face of ever more realistic possibilities of liberation, and intensified repression in turn leads to the activation of surplus aggressiveness, and its channeling

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into socially useful aggression. This total mobilization of aggressiveness is only too familiar to us today: militarization, brutalization of the forces of law and order, fusion of sexuality and violence, direct attack on the Life Instincts in their attempt to save the environment, attack on the legislation against pollution and so on. (Marcuse [1974] 2005: 167)

SYSTEM NEGATION AS NEW GENERAL INTEREST Marcuse noted that the development of the women’s movement and intensifying student antiwar protests were resonant with the ecology movement, and that they could be united in protesting against the capitalist “violation of the earth” (Marcuse [1972] 2005: 174; Sukhov 2020: 372–73). Marcuse’s pronounced feminist commitment was explicitly expressed in his 1974 essay “Marxism and Feminism” (Marcuse [1974] 2005): I believe the women’s liberation movement today is perhaps the most important and potentially the most radical political movement that we have. . . . [T]he very goals of this movement require changes of such enormity in the material as well as intellectual culture that they can be attained only by a change in the entire social system. (Marcuse [1974] 2005: 165–66)

They required also a modification of the essential goals of socialism which were at times oblivious to the discrimination against women. Beyond that for Marcuse feminism had emphasized making life an end in itself, for the development of the senses and the intellect for pacification of aggressiveness, the enjoyment of being, for the emancipation of the senses and the intellect from the rationality of domination: creative receptivity versus repressive productivity. (Marcuse [1974] 2005: 170)

The extraordinary value of Marcuse’s feminist-informed and ecologically conscious strategy—against the sociopathic disregard for our future; for our common humanity—is that system negation can have the appeal of a new general interest—offering a constellation of radical goals and forces made viable through the decommodification of labor and technology and the elimination of profitable waste and destructive divisions—moving toward racial equality, women’s equality, the liberation of labor, the restoration of nature, leisure, abundance, and peace. These goals, and the means to them, can bring together a global alliance of transformative forces. Such a strategy forms the key to the emancipatory universalization of resistance—the revolt of youth as a global phenomenon—against guns, war, and militarism, women’s oppression, police violence against minorities and protesters, labor force precarity

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and exploitation. Marcuse knew we needed a New Global Left for the “The Revolution of 20XX.”14 The revolt of youth (students, workers, women), undertaken in the name of the values of freedom and happiness, is an attack on all the values which govern the capitalist system. And this revolt is oriented toward the pursuit of a radically different natural and technical environment; this perspective has become the basis for subversive experiments such as the attempts by American “communes” to establish non-alienated relations between the sexes, between generations, between man and nature—attempts to sustain the consciousness of refusal and of renovation. (Marcuse [1972] 2005: 174) [W]hat is at stake in the socialist revolution is not merely the extension of satisfaction within the existing universe of needs, nor the shift of satisfaction from one (lower) level to a higher one, but the rupture with this universe, the qualitative leap. The revolution involves a radical transformation of the needs and aspirations themselves, cultural as well as material; of consciousness and sensibility; of the work process as well as leisure. The transformation appears in the fight against the fragmentation of work, the necessity and productivity of stupid performances and stupid merchandise, against the acquisitive bourgeois individual, against the servitude in the guise of technology, deprivation in the guise of the good life, against pollution as a way of life. Moral and aesthetic needs become basic, vital needs and drive toward new relationships between the sexes, between the generations, between men and women and nature. Freedom is understood as rooted in these needs, which are sensuous, ethical, and rational in one. (Marcuse 1972: 16–17)

Marcuse proposes a vision of intercultural solidarity against the resurgent politics of white supremacy, oligarchic wealth idolization, profitable waste, as well as the toxic masculinity characteristic of the authoritarian populism. In his (and my) ecosocialist view the radical transformation of the labor process itself—labor’s liberation from commodification and alienation—stands centermost. Marcuse’s philosophy of labor did not reduce it to a narrowly understood class circumstance. As a species we have endured because of our sensuous appreciation of our emergent powers: the power to subsist cooperatively, to create, communicate, and care communally. I argue elsewhere that the very foundation of ethics is to be found in commonwealth labor (Reitz 2019: 93–118). Humanity’s earliest customs, that is, communal production, shared ownership, and solidarity assured that the needs of all were met, that is, including those not directly involved in production like children, the disabled, and the elderly. The right of the commonwealth to govern itself, and humanity’s earliest ethic of holding property in common, derive only secondarily from factual

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individual contributions to production; they are rooted primarily in our essentially shared species life and our being as humans, as sensuous living labor. Humanity’s rights to a commonwealth economy, politics, and culture reside in our common work. Our earliest proverbs, fables, and riddles from the oldest African cultures teach the survival power of partnership and cooperation and the categorical ethical advantages of empathy, reciprocity, hospitality, and respect for the good in common. Humanity experiences the satisfactions/dissatisfactions derived from our bioecologically generated economic, aesthetic, intellectual, and moral standards gravitating toward the humanism of a communally laboring commonwealth. Humanism in ancient times (Plato and Aristotle) was not a philosophy of the natural and unmediated goodness of human beings, as in the Romanticism of a latter-day Rousseau. It was a philosophy of the humanizing influence of parents and teachers, customs, culture, and laws within a societal context. Marcuse, like Marx, asserted a radically materialist conception of the essence of socially active human beings: seen from the outside, we are the ensemble of our social relations; seen from the inside, we are sensuous living labor (Marcuse [1933] 1973). Sensuous living labor is the substrate of our being as humans. It is the foundation of our affective and intellectual capacities (and vulnerabilities), bio-ecologically developed within history. I am stressing Marcuse’s underappreciated insights into the power of sensuous living labor to liberate itself from commodification and exploitation in order to make commonwealth a universal human condition. As a species we have endured because of our sensuous appreciation of our emergent powers: the power to subsist cooperatively; to create, to communicate, and to care communally within that form of society that we may rightly call a commonwealth. The liberation of labor from commodification is the ground of authentic dis-alienation and freedom “within the realm of necessity,” where satisfaction is restored to the processes of social labor and social wealth production, not in terms of greater, more efficient production, but in terms of an ethics of partnership, racial and gender equality, and gratification through work, earth admiration, and ecological responsibility. The convergence of the environmentalist and labor movements is essential in terms of a unified emancipatory praxis if the human species is not only to endure but to flourish. A philosophical and political recognition of the meaning of commonwealth labor serves as the fundamental legitimation of a socialist philosophy and its promise of abundance and leisure for all within a context of respect for the earth. Marcuse’s writings contain essential philosophical resources for critical social theory and revolutionary ecological liberation. His work models the path by which we, an international political force of “the 99 percent,” can be politically prepared and strengthened. With his insights we can

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reconceptualize our understanding of our world and our work in order to collectively retake and repossess our commonworld and commonwealth.

NOTES 1. Some materials included this new and extensively revised essay were developed in my monographs The Revolutionary Ecological Legacy of Herbert Marcuse (Daraja Press 2022) and Ecology and Revolution: Herbert Marcuse and the Challenge of a New World System Today (Routledge, 2019) and other works. I wish to acknowledge publishers who generously granted permission to reemploy short passages and to thank also those whose formal permission was not necessary when representing my own work in an extensively revised context: SUNY Press, Peter Lang Publishing, Lexington Books, Routledge, Theory, Culture & Society, and Daraja Press. 2. “The American coronavirus fiasco has exposed the country’s incoherent leadership, self-defeating political polarization, a lack of investment in public health, and persistent socioeconomic and racial inequities that have left millions of people vulnerable to disease and death”—Joel Achenbach, William Wan, Karin Brulliard and Chelsea Janes, “The Crisis that Shocked the World: America’s Response to the Coronavirus,” The Washington Post, July 19, 2020. See also David Leonhardt, “US Is Alone among Peers in Failing to Contain Virus,” The New York Times, August 7, 2020, A–1. 3. Aaron Blake, “Trump promoted N.M. official’s comment that ‘the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.’ Now the man is arrested in the Capitol riot,” The Washington Post January 18, 2021. 4. Charles M. Blow, “Trump’s Army of Angry White Men,” The New York Times, October 26, 2020, A-23. 5. Miriam Jordan, “ICE Arrests Hundreds in Mississippi Raids Targeting Immigrant Workers,” The New York Times, August 7, 2019, retrieved August 8, 2019 from https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2019​/08​/07​/us​/ice​-raids​-mississippi​.html​?sea​rchR​ esul​tPosition=3. 6. SPLC (Southern Poverty Law Center) Report, Spring 2019, page 1. See www​ .splcenter​.org. 7. Ibid. 8. Angela Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), p. 132. 9. Robert Burns and Lolita C. Baldor, “Pentagon report cites threat of extremism in military” Washington Post, March 2, 2021. Leo Shane III, “Lawmakers want closer tracking of white supremacy, Nazi sympathizers in the military” Military Times, September 12, 2019. https://www​.militarytimes​.com​/news​/pentagon​-congress​/2019​/09​ /12​/lawmakers​-want​-closer​-tracking​-of​-white​-supremacy​-nazi​-sympathizers​-in​-the​ -military/. 10. Amy Davidson, “In Voting Rights, Scalia Sees a ‘Racial Entitlement,’” in the “Close Read” blog of The New Yorker, February 28, 2013. ​http:/​/www​.newyorker​

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.com​/online​​/blogs/ close​read/​2013/​02/in​​-voti​​ng​-ri​​ghts-​​scali​​a​-see​​s​-a​-r​​acial​​-enti​​tleme​​ nt​.ht​​ml​​#ix​​zz2Mr​​iqv04​​Y. 11. Eyal Press, “Trump’s Labor Secretary is Wrecking Ball Aimed at Workers,” The New Yorker, October 19, 2020. 12. Michael Crowley, “Trump Calls for ‘Patriotic Education’ to Defend American History From the Left,” The New York Times, September 17, 2020. 13. See Eric Kelderman. “Can ‘White Resentment’ Help Explain Higher Education Cuts?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 27, 2020. https://www​ .chronicle​.com​/article​/Can​-White​-Resentment-​/247921​?cid​=at​&source​=ams​&sourceId​=2251462. 14. Christopher Chase-Dunn and Sandor Nagy, “The Piketty Challenge: Global Inequality and World Revolution” in Lauren Langman and David A. Smith, TwentyFirst Century Inequality & Capitalism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018).

REFERENCES ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union). 2014. War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing. New York: ACLU. Amnesty International. 1998. United States of America: Rights for All. New York: Amnesty International USA. Bevins, Vincent. 2020. The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade & the Mass Murder Program that Shaped our World. New York: Public Affairs/ Perseus/Hachette Book Group. Brady, Robert. [1937] 1971. Spirit and Structure of German Fascism. New York: Lyle Stuart. Buchanan, Patrick J. 2002. The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperial Our Country and Civilization. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin Thomas Dunne Books. Calderón, Dolores. 2009. “One-Dimensionality and Whiteness,” in Douglas Kellner, Tyson Lewis, Clayton Pierce, and K. Daniel Cho (Eds.), Marcuse’s Challenge to Education, 159–180. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Davis, Angela. 2004. “Marcuse’s Legacies,” in John Abromeit and W. Mark Cobb (Eds.), Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader, 43–50. New York: Routledge. Davis, Angela. 2013. “Critical Refusals and Occupy,” Radical Philosophy Review 16: 2. Davis, Angela. 2016. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous People’s History of the United States. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. [1836] 2009. “Nature,” in Nature and Other Essays, Minneola, NY: Dover Publications. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. [1837] 2009. “The American Scholar,” in Nature and Other Essays. Minneola, NY: Dover Publications.

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Feinstein, Andrew. 2012. The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade. New York: Picador [Farrar, Straus, and Giroux]. Finan, Christopher M. 2007. From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America. Boston: Beacon Press. Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Vintage. Greene, Felix. 1970. The Enemy: What Every American Should Know About Imperialism. New York: Random House. Harcourt, Bernard E. 2018. The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens. New York: Basic Books/Hachette Book Group. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. 1972. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Herder and Herder. Jansen, Peter-Erwin. 2020. “Mobilization of Bias Today: The Renewed Use of Established Techniques; Reconsideration of Two Studies on Prejudice from the Institute of Social Research,” translated by Charles Reitz, in Jeremiah Morelock (Ed.), Critical Theory and Authoritarian Populism, 293–311. London: University of Westminster Press. Kellner, Douglas. 2003. From 9/11 to Terror War. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Kors, Alan C. and Harvey Silverglate. 1998. The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on American Campuses. New York: The Free Press. Leopold, Aldo. [1942] 1991. “The Role of Wildlife in Liberal Education,” in Susan L. Flader and J. Baird Callicott (Eds.), The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold. Madison, 301–305. WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Leopold, Aldo. [1949] 1966. A Sand County Almanac. New York: Oxford University Press. Leopold, Aldo. [1953] 1966. “The Land Ethic,” in A Sand County Almanac, 217–241. New York: Oxford University Press. Leopold, Aldo. [1953] 1993. Round River. New York: Oxford University Press. Marcuse, Herbert. [1933] 1973. “On the Philosophical Foundation of the Concept of Labor in Economics,” Telos. No. 16, Summer. Marcuse, Herbert. [1942] 1998. “The Presentation of the Enemy,” in Douglas Kellner, Herbert Marcuse: Technology, War, and Fascism Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse. Volume 1, London and New York: Routledge. Marcuse, Herbert. [1947] 1998. “33 Theses,” in Douglas Kellner, Herbert Marcuse: Technology, War, and Fascism Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse. Volume 1, London and New York: Routledge. Marcuse, Herbert. 1965. “Repressive Tolerance,” in R.P. Wolff, B. Moore, and H. Marcuse (Eds.), Critique of Pure Tolerance, 81–123. Boston: Beacon Press. Marcuse, Herbert. 1969. An Essay on Liberation. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Marcuse, Herbert. 1972. Counterrevolution and Revolt. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Marcuse, Herbert. [1972] 2005. “Ecology and Revolution,” in Douglas Kellner (Ed.), Herbert Marcuse, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse. Volume 3, The New Left and the 1960s. New York and London: Routledge. Marcuse, Herbert. [1974] 2015a. Paris Lectures at Vincennes University, 1974. Philadelphia, PA: International Herbert Marcuse Society.

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Marcuse, Herbert. [1975] 2015b. “Why Talk on Socialism?” in Charles Reitz (Ed.), Crisis and Commonwealth: Marcuse, Marx, McLaren, 303–309. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Marcuse, Herbert. [1979] 2011. “Ecology and the Critique of Modern Society,” in Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce (Eds.), Herbert Marcuse, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse. Volume 5, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Emancipation. New York and London: Routledge. Marcuse, Herbert. [1979] 2014. “The Reification of the Proletariat,” in Herbert Marcuse, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse. Volume 6, Marxism, Revolution, and Utopia. Edited by Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce. New York and London: Routledge. Melman, Seymour. 1970. Pentagon Capitalism: The Political-Economy of War. New York: McGraw-Hill. Melman, Seymour. 1985. The Permanent War Economy. New York: Simon & Schuster. Neumann, Franz. 1942. Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933–1944. London: Victor Gollancz. Olsen, Gary. 2021. “Will Neoliberalism Morph into Fascism in the United States?” CounterPunch, March 5. Packard, Vance. 1960. The Waste Makers. New York: David McKay Publishing. Petrou, Karen. 2021. Engine of Inequality: The Fed and the Future of Wealth in America, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Reich, Wilhelm. [1946] 1980. The Mass Psychology of Fascism. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Reitz, Charles. 1976. “Imperialist Rivalry and Industrial Education,” The Insurgent Sociologist [Critical Sociology] July 1. Reitz, Charles. 2008. “Horace Greeley, Karl Marx, and German48-ers, Anti-Racism in the Kansas Free State Struggle, 1854–64,” Marx-Engels Jahrbuch 2008. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Reitz, Charles. 2019. Ecology & Revolution: Herbert Marcuse and the Challenge of a New World System. New York and London: Routledge. Reitz, Charles. 2016. “Herbert Marcuse and the New Culture Wars: Campus Codes, Hate Speech and the Critique of Pure Tolerance,” in Charles Reitz (Ed.), Philosophy & Critical Pedagogy: Insurrection & Commonwealth, 105–114. New York: Peter Lang Publishing. Reitz, Charles. 2021. “Herbert Marcuse Today: On Ecological Destruction, Neofascism, White Supremacy, Hate Speech, Racist Police Killings, and the Radical Goals of Socialism,” Theory, Culture & Society 38 (7–8): 87–106. Reitz, Charles and Stephen Spartan. [2013] 2015. “The Political Economy of Predation and Counterrevolution,” in Charles Reitz (Ed.), Crisis and Commonwealth: Marcuse, Marx, McLaren, 19–42. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Robinson, William I. 2020. The Global Police State. London: Pluto Press. Scalia, Antonin. 1992. R.A.V. vs. City of St. Paul 505 U.S. 377. Sethness Castro, Javier. 2018. Eros and Revolution: The Critical Philosophy of Herbert Marcuse. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

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Sleeter, Christine and Delores Degaldo Bernal. 2003. “Critical Pedagogy, Critical Race Theory, and Anti-Racist Education,” in James A. Banks and Cherry A. Banks (Eds.). Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education, 111–121. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Stone, Oliver and Peter Kuznik. 2019. The Untold History of the United States. New York: Simon & Schuster Gallery Books. Vine, David. 2015. Base Nation. New York: Metropolitan Books. Henry Holt & Company. Wilson, J. K. 1995. The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on Higher Education. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Winter, Rainer. 2020. “Review: Bernard E. Harcourt, The Counterrevolution,” Theory, Culture & Society 37: 7–8, December: 46–53.

Chapter 2

Aesthetics of Survival K. Satchidanandan

Now the issue of the environment has not only acquired several new dimensions but has become the most crucial question that concerns the survival of human species and of our planet itself. It is not surprising that some of the hottest battles of our time are being fought around ecological issues, especially in the context of the aggressive developmental policies pursued by neoliberal and often pro-imperialistic regimes across the globe. Several small and big movements, including the international movements, have come up in the past one or two decades around global warming, ozone layer damage, fatal radiations, soil erosions, forest fires, industrial pollution, the drying up and depletion of rivers strangely coupled with their opposite, floods and avalanches, the changes in the cycle of seasons, the exhaustion of nonrenewable resources due to the use of unsustainable developmental strategies rationalized by what Schumacher and Ivan Illich used to call “industrial ideology” and social entropy and genetic manipulation that cut across national boundaries. Not only the future of the human species is at stake, but animals and plants too are facing extinction due to environmental damage which is ultimately linked to our unscrupulous profit-mongering and infinite greed. While these struggles have produced martyrs like the poet Ken Saro-Wiwa, they have been supported by concerned intellectuals and writers across the world. It is already late for the human race to do some serious introspection about its ways of life, development, and acquisition that are denying posterity the very chance to exist and grow. The recent pandemic has given a new focus and orientation to the ongoing discussions and also inspired writers to engage with the issue in novel and creative ways. There are many who argue that the most serious problem we face is producing enough food for everyone. Here I would agree with Eric Hobsbawm’s observations in his conversations with Antonio Polito (The New Century), 43

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where he says that in the past fifty years the world has produced enough or more than enough food to keep pace with the tripling of the population using rather traditional technologies like selective breeding rather than the use of aggressive biotechnologies that are now becoming available. The amount of food in the world today, if properly distributed, can sustain a large increase in population. So, the argument of the industries that produce genetically modified foods that this is the only way to feed the world does not hold water. For the first time in history humanity is capable of exhausting the stock of renewable resources. We are capable of making the world unlivable, because of poisons, pollution, or the way in which industry modifies the atmosphere. The awareness of this problem did not exist at least on a global scale before the seventies of the past century. Humanity’s power to degrade the environment has become unprecedentedly dangerous, and the more there are of us, the more dangerous we will be. In fact, we have already changed the environment irreversibly to suicidal extent. What we call nature is no longer nature in its pristine glory; human intervention has transformed it into something semi-human, a combination of climate, topography, the original environment, and the effects of the long history of human intervention. If earlier it was agriculture that had transformed the landscape, now it is urbanization. Managing the environment is becoming a practical rather than a merely theoretical problem. It is not enough we create theme parks or conserve certain selected areas as they are. “Museumizing” nature and landscape will not do. Several animals and birds are on the verge of extinction; the list is growing day by day and human beings can easily be the next in the risk-list. What we require today is not isolated action, but concerted action at the global level. Technofascism that leads to eco-fascism—both have their roots in human greed and aggression—is one of the inevitable fallouts of blind and unsustainable patterns of development pursued by capitalism as well as the kind of socialism we found being put to test in countries that passed through popular revolutions. The original sin, perhaps, lies with the advocates of “scientism,” who began to speak about “conquering” nature. Thinkers like Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes were the first to create an anti-nature philosophy and a reductive scientism through works like Novum Organum (Bacon) and Discourse on the Method (Descartes). Bacon uses the language of violence, war, and rape while dealing with nature. In their anthropocentric arrogance, they did not realize that man can only collaborate with nature and coax her and not to attack and destroy her in the process of production. We can discover her secrets and put them to human use; but if we are trying to “conquer” her she will have her revenge in the form of climate changes, pollution, earthquakes, epidemics, and floods as we are witnessing now. Adam Smith applied this greed to economics in his Wealth of Nations, where he argued that the

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selfish competition between individuals for the accumulation of wealth will ultimately lead to common good; capitalism with its “open market” theory built further on this instinct for individual possession and accumulation as against even distribution and collective management of wealth. The idea of “conquest” was also linked to the actual conquest of lands leading to colonial exploitation and the slavery of peoples and nations. Colonialism meant plunder and led to severe destruction of natural habitats and environments, and the different approach to nature cultivated in many colonized countries over centuries, one of respect for the sacredness of nature and modest, careful, and responsible use of natural resources. The greedy and aggressive colonial “gaze” turned our beautiful forests and landscapes into mere revenue resources. Clive Ponting, in his A Green History of the World, has traced this tendency to ancient civilizations like those of Mesopotamia, Indus Valley, and Rome where deforestation and over-cultivation had a disastrous impact on the environment; in the post-industrial world with its density of population, colonial exploitation and capital accumulation, the unscrupulous use of technology, un-moderated industrial development, and the hegemony of economics over culture, this degeneration and depletion have found a new, suicidal, acceleration. Even in the postcolonial nations, development is mechanically identified with industrial growth ignoring in the process the cultural and ethical dimensions of development. This concept also impacted art as that too began to be looked upon as a commodity. Louis Fischer, in his Necessity of Art, has qualified capitalism as a new King Midas that turns everything it touches into a commodity. Painting, sculpture, music, literature, theatre, cinema: nothing is an exception. Everything is today part of what Theodore Adorno would term “culture industry” where culture is subjected to the law of capital and the market. Octavio Paz has observed that modernism in art and literature that began as a reaction to capitalist modernity also failed to develop “creative participation” as it celebrated the alienation of the individual from nature and society, thus failing to discover the beauty of nature and of positive relationships and leading to what Max Weber would term “disenchantment.” Today we need to overcome the whole dualist philosophy based on binaries like nature/culture, man/woman, body/mind, and time/space and re-enchant the world with a holistic approach that interrogates the post-Enlightenment belief that man can create culture only by destroying nature. Art is organically linked to nature and derives its raw materials from nature. Only by reconnecting with nature and its wildness, myths, oral lore, and the eco-aesthetic principles like those found in the ancient Tinai poetics in Tamil where each ecological region was linked to certain situations, moods and emotions, or the whole of tribal and folk literature can we move forward to what the socialistecologist David Pepper calls “green post-Modernism” where the material will

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no more be the antinomy of the spiritual and individual happiness will not be the opposite of collective happiness as it is today. The past fifty years have also seen the development of an ecocritical philosophy across the globe which has tried to theorize the links between writers and environment. Even though it was William Rueckert (Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Eco-Criticism, 1978) who introduced the term, it was Joseph Meeker’s The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology (1974) that first defined the subject. According to Meeker, literary ecology was concerned with the biological themes appearing in literature. Its aim was also to discover the role of literature in human ecology. Literary works, he said, often reveal man’s beliefs about the truth of natural processes and the cultural ideologies that have brought human race to the modern environmental crisis. Cheryll Glotfelty who edited the first ecocriticism reader (1996) describes ecocriticism as an attempt to unravel the exchanges between nature and culture. It has one leg in literature and the other on earth: as a theoretical discourse it connects equally with human beings and nonhuman ones. Writers’ world is not only the social world, but the ecosphere itself. Earth, she says, is at the center of ecocriticism just as gender is at the center of feminist criticism and class at that of Marxist criticism. Ecocriticism, according to Lawrence Buell, brings space into the critical agenda that has so far been confined to the theme, plot, and characters. He sees it as an umbrella term that embraces various modes and approaches. It has also been called “egocriticism” (Sven Birkerts, Only God Can Make a Tree: The Joys and Sorrows of Eco-Criticism) as it rereads literature to discover what it has to say about man’s ego-centrism, greed, and craze for wealth and power. Some ecocritics also draw strength from Engels’s Dialectics of Nature, Raymond Williams’s insights into the city–country contradictions and the works of Theodore Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and other New Left thinkers. Recent literary criticism presents several samples of re-readings of literary texts based on the concepts of eco-Marxism, eco-Feminism, eco-Ethics, and eco-Spirituality. The recent pandemic has intensified the call for a paradigmatic change in our very self-awareness. Noam Chomsky points to the danger of our not making nature an organic part of our common sense and our philosophy. Modernity failed to understand man-nature relationship in a holistic manner. We need to probe deeper into the thinking of the so-called “primitive” or tribal communities. Nature does not do anything without purpose. Perhaps we need to interrogate the old Enlightenment humanism whose emancipatory mission was defeated by instrumental rationality as has been reiterated by Horkheimer, Adorno, and Michel Foucault, a tradition that goes back to Spinoza and has inspired other thinkers like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. What is called for is not a rejection of humanism, but the expansion of its intellectual and ethical territory. It is a structure, as Edward Said would

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say (Humanism and the Critique of Democracy), that we need to attain through the intervention of the human will and active subjectivity. Thinkers like Bruno Latour, Donna J. Haraway, Manuel DeLanda, Francesca Ferando, Katherine Hales, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Amitav Ghosh, and others have argued howhuman beings have now become a geological force, and it is for us to move away from the transhumanist schemes to develop the species into a superhuman ethereal power. Instead, we need to retrieve the lost continuity between natural history and human history and unlearn the histories where Man is at the center of everything and the crown of creation. This Anthropocene age demands a reworking of all our discourses as even objects and chemicals—from hormones and enzymes to mood-altering drugs can alter human psyche and artificial intelligence is no more mere science fiction. The old nature/culture binary has become obsolete. We need to know our history is but a small chapter in the history of our planet and of evolution, nature can exist without us as it had done before our emergence, and other beings too have their claim on the earth’s resources that we plunder in the name of “progress.” Slavoj Zizek points out how a virus has turned our bodies into mere photocopy machines. We need to redefine ethics, expand our understanding of equality and democracy, whether we choose to call this post-humanism or something else. Writers, vates by the old definition, have a leading role to play in sensitizing the people to the impending environmental disasters through their writing as also through their actions as concerned citizens, since the question here is one of the ultimate survival of the human race which sadly is on the path of self-destruction prompted by what ancient Indians called trshna and lobha— desire and greed—against whose temptation many Indian philosophers and poets, like the Buddha and Mahavira, Tirumular and Basavanna, Kabir and Raidas, Chokhamela and Chaitanya, Guru Nanak and Mahatma Gandhi, and prophets and philosophers from Socrates and Jesus Christ to Karl Marx and Gilles Deleuze, have been warning us in diverse ways through centuries.

Chapter 3

Ghost God Dancing with the Bat, and COVID-19 Peter I-min Huang

The COVID-191 pandemic, as with other pandemics, is the consequence of the ruthless and wholly unnecessary exploitation of nonhuman animals in food production. This exploitation includes the practices of encroaching on and obliterating spaces where nonhuman animals are relatively free animals (or so-called wild animals) and incarcerating animals in industrial food production facilities such as CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) as well as in non-industrialized sites such as wet markets. Run-of-the-mill discussions of pandemics either do not mention or gloss over the ties between pandemics and the exploitation of nonhuman animals in food production. Moreover, while there has been some discussion of zoonosis, which refers to the transfer of diseases between nonhuman and human animals, the discussion leaves out notice of the ties between zoonosis and the exploitation of nonhuman animals in food production. This discussion also leaves out notice of the fact that there have been no pandemics triggered by the transfer of a disease from a plant to a human animal. In the case of the zoonosis that precipitated the COVID-19 pandemic, it is well known that the pandemic was set in motion by zoonosis, and by, specifically, the transfer of a virus from one or more caged bats to one or more human beings in a wet market in Wuhan, China. The risk of zoonosis will decrease if humans are willing to see nonhuman animals as being more like themselves and so deserving of the rights that are mostly reserved for humans. One of the ways that literary and cultural studies scholars promote that willingness is by drawing more attention to nonhuman animal figures in literature and art and to how these figures reflect both positive and negative attitudes toward nonhuman animals. That pathway is illustrated here, in an argument that begins by references to bats in Chinese literature and art and extends to a discussion of speciesism and 49

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anthropocentrism, two formidable sets of attitudes and behaviors that allow for and cater to zoonotic transfer, pandemics, and COVID-19. GHOST GOD DANCING WITH A BAT ​ any years ago, my uncle gave me a watercolor painting of Zhong Kui, or M Ghost God, dancing with a bat. The animal is a diminutive, barely discernible figure in the painting yet central to representations of Zhong Kui. In the intervening years, I overlooked or did not give a great deal of attention to the painting. In the year 2020, when COVID-19 first announced itself, I again looked at the painting and the tiny, exquisite, bat figure in it, and when my partner asked me about the figures of both the bat and Ghost God, I began to reflect on the pertinence of the painting—inclusive of the inscription (in Chinese characters) that is part of the painting: 鍾進士引蝠歸 (“Scholar Zhong brings the bat home”)—in the context of the current pandemic and its own bat tracings (see figure 3.1). I began to research Chinese literature about bats

Figure 3.1  “Scholar Zhong brings the bat home” (Artist: unknown) Source: Peter I-min Huang (Private collection; permission granted by author)

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and found that not that long ago, common attitudes toward the Chiroptera species—as well as toward mice, animals who, like bats, are now almost universally condemned for being vermin, dirty, and spreaders of disease—were starkly different from attitudes that prevail today. Zhong Kui, a conventionally unprepossessing god as well as a clumsy and good-natured deity, is respected for warding off evil spirits and bringing good luck to the household. Of the many stories that tell of Zhong Kui’s origins, one is that Zhong Kui once was a martial arts student and earned a high score in the imperial exam for martial arts. Some of his peers were extremely envious of his achievement and punished him for it, stripping him of his honors and also ridiculing him for being ungainly and ugly. Not long afterward, Zhong Kui committed suicide. When he arrived in the next world, the hell god put Zhong Kui in charge of capturing ghosts. Thus, he is known as Ghost God. Another legend about Zhong Kui refers to a story about a Tang dynasty emperor. He fell ill and subsequently dreamt of a larger ghost eating a smaller one. The larger ghost introduced himself to the emperor as Zhong Kui and explained that he was an official responsible for ridding the empire of evil and the smaller ghost was one of those evils. When the emperor woke up, he was no longer ill. Grateful to Zhong Kui, the emperor commissioned a painting of Zhong Kui in thanks to and in honor of him. Zhong Kui also is characteristically depicted with a bat or bats, for the Chinese character for the word, luck, sounds similar to the character for the word, bat. This depiction includes the folk performances of Zhong Kui that are especially popular in the south. Typically, a small ghost carries a lantern in the shape of a bat. As the ghost is making its rounds, Zhong Kui makes an entrance onto the stage accompanied by the sound of shrill trumpets and other fanfare. Dressed in official red garb, he is stern, intimidating, and rather repelling to look at. The diminutive ghost trails behind him. Zhong Kui then begins to dance with figures of bats, which represents the bestowing of blessings. On the whole, in Chinese popular culture and in Chinese painting and other art, there seems to be great affection for bats, these diminutive, beautifully bizarre, unearthly, and science-fiction-like winged beasts, creatures who fly at night and cling to dark spaces. Many representations of bats reflect the belief that when bats, as well as mice, reach the age of a thousand years, they turn white and become immortal. The Tang dynasty poet Li Bai wrote a poem that is part of that representational tradition.2 In “A Preface to Tea Given to a Relative,” the poem’s speaker visits a high mountain and is astonished to discover a cave populated by thousand-year-old bats as well as mice. He compares mice to white crows. They hang over a moon that illuminates far below them a river of dazzlingly, clear, crystalline-like water.

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In the past, mice and bats were associated with beauty, old age, and pristine nature. We see this older association in Li Bai’s poem. We also see it in another poem by a Tang dynasty poet, Bai Juyi, and in a poem by the Song dynasty poet Li Shangyin. Bai Juyi’s reputation mostly rests on the fact that he heralded some major literary reforms inclusive of the turn away from the use of artifice toward the use of observation of real, so-called natural, phenomena. Li Shangyin is famous for his unique style of flowery language and for the use of a delicate, fragile, sensual, and affective language. When Bai Juyi was very old (in the time of the Song dynasty), he admired Li Shangyin’s poetry so much that he said to the younger poet that he wished in his next life to be born the son of Li Shangyin, and, indeed, when Li Shangyin’s son was born, his father called him Bai Lao (“old Bai”). Li Shangyin’s literary reputation is second to none but the reputations of Li Bai and another poet, Du Fu, and if Li Shangyin had a peer in the West, it would be the British Romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Here, I will draw attention to Li Shangyin for his poem, “Midnight,” and to Bai Juyi for his poem, “Bat in the Cave.” In Bai Juyi’s “Bat in the Cave,” the speaker admires bats for their intelligence as well as their longevity. He also describes them in the language of trans-speciesism. The speaker says, “Thousand-year-old mice become white bats, hiding themselves in dark caves to avoid trouble / intelligence prevents them from harm / what matters if one lives throughout one’s life in darkness?”3 Li Shangyin’s “Midnight” also describes bats and mice in the language of trans-speciesism, and he represents these animals in hauntingly beautiful language. The speaker says, In the early hours of dawn, when thousands of families are asleep / when the mist is frozen and the moon falls in the fog / when house mice appear in the living room / when the bats fly out / I take out my dulcimer and play it by the window. (“Midnight”)

I make a small diversion here, but it does have some relevance to the main subjects of this chapter. As I was drafting this chapter, my partner was reading Deliverance, a novel by the U.S.-American writer, James Dickey. Inspired by the breathtaking beauty of an area of the Appalachians slated to be flooded and dammed, and equally inspired by the people and music of the region, Dickey mentions a dulcimer: “there are songs in those hills that collectors have never put on tape. And I’ve seen one family with a dulcimer” (40). Li Shangyin’s poem was inspired by the breathtaking beauty of bats and mice, and by the music they inspired. The twentieth-century North American writer and the Song dynasty Chinese poet commemorate their respective subjects by references to that most exquisite of musical

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instruments, the dulcimer (an instrument that also makes a remarkable appearance in “Xanadu,” one of the most famous poems by Coleridge, Li Shangyin’s erstwhile poetic peer). Another poem, “Ode to the Bat,” by the poet Cao Zhi (192–232 CE), diverges from the bat tradition that I summarize in the foregoing paragraphs. This tradition positively represents bats. They associate with and evoke longevity, luck, the exorcism of mean spirits, and immortality. Cao’s poem reflects a different trajectory, one that negatively represents bats. Cao Zhi, the son of a warlord (Cao Cao), lived through the time of the Three Kingdoms (220–280 CE), a period of great political turmoil following on the heels of the breakup of the Han dynasty in the third century. Cao Pi, Cao Zhi’s older brother, was deeply resentful and fearful of Cao Zhi and charged him with treason and ordered his execution. Cao Zhi’s life was spared when his mother pleaded for his life, but he was banished from Cao Pi’s court and died in exile. In “Ode to the Bat,” Cao Zhi compares bats with his brother, and so vilifies them: “How hypocritical is the bat! How grotesque and devious is its shape. How utterly distrustful it is! . . . It does not operate in daylight but rather flits in secrecy in the dark.” Su Shi is one of the Song dynasty’s most distinguished poets. Critics compare his illustriousness to that Cao Zhi and Li Bai, among other poets. The son of a distinguished member of the literati of the time, Su Shi excelled in the imperial civic service examinations, earning the highest honors. The emperor was so impressed with Su Shi’s poetry that he recruited Su Shi into his court. However, Su Shi offended or was resented by his peers and ended up being thrown into prison. Later, he was exiled. While in exile, he wrote poetry. He lived in a small hut in Dongpo, in a remote farming area, which is why he is known today as the “Hermit of Dongpo.” From time to time, the emperor would bestow some more or less minor conferment on Su Shi. One of these was the position of mayor in Hangzhou, at West Lake. (In this position, Su Shi supervised the construction of a causeway, sudi, and it is one of the most popular tourist attractions in China today.) Su Shi also was sent to one of the most remote and poverty-stricken districts of Heinan Island. There, he became interested in the local culinary practices, just as he had taken notice of the local culinary practices (of slaughtering and cooking the flesh of pigs) in Dongpo. He wrote of how the people on Heinan Island survived by eating taro and sweet potatoes, and the flesh of mice and bats, a sought-after animal protein supplement. In the poem “A Poem to My Brother,” he writes, The locals ate taro and sweet potatoes at every mealtime. Roasted mice and bats also were highly recommended by the locals. They ate baby mice with honey. I did learn to acquire the custom of swallowing toads but at that [the eating of baby mice with honey], I threw up.

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Su Shi’s poem reflects a time when the eating of the flesh of animals was primarily for sustenance not for profit. Today, the eating of the flesh of animals is no longer needed to survive; the vast majority of animals who are killed for their flesh in industrialized countries are being driven by venal motives, not by a need to prevent starvation or malnutrition.

SPECIESISM AND ANTHROPOCENTRISM Bats and other nonhuman animals are no less worthy than human beings are of literary, philosophical, and moral investigations. Literary studies scholars—scholars situated in the environmental humanities and specializing in such areas of inquiry as ecocriticism, critical animal studies, and posthumanism—undertake these kinds of investigations. They represent a relatively recent turn in literary studies. Even at the height of poststructuralism in the 1980s, when scholars began to rigorously question and deconstruct binaries, few scholars questioned the human/nature binary or the human animal/nonhuman animal binary. These are two of the most persistent and formidable binaries. Under their applications, emanations, manifestations, and so forth, nature and nonhuman animals have secondary value and human beings have primary value. Such separation also is interrogated under the terms “speciesism” and “anthropocentrism.” Speciesism is a form of prejudice. Under it, humans discriminate against other beings inclusive of nonhuman beings. Anthropocentrism is a bias. Under it, humans give little notice to the interests and needs of species other than their own species.4 Speciesism and anthropocentrism relate in turn to the term “the Anthropocene,” arguably the most important term for the twenty-first century and one that has overtaken and replaced “globalization” in critical significance (Moore 3). The Anthropocene refers to the profound impact that the human has had on the planet and to the apparent ambition by some humans to absolutely control all planetary life. Jason W. Moore, in Anthropocene or Capitalocene: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, argues that rampant or unchecked capitalism is the main driver of the Anthropocene. One of the most fundamental principles of capitalism—and more often than not this principle is undisclosed, undeclared, or taken-for-granted—is that it is acceptable and meritorious to sell something for more than what one pays for it (in labor, money, time, and so forth). The result is, paradoxically, the degrading of that something and the rendering of it “inferior in an ethicopolitical sense” (Moore 3). That something includes foremost, the things and beings of nature, as Moore elaborates on in one of the chapters (“The Rise of Cheap Nature,” 78–115) in Anthropocene or Capitalocene: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Industrially farming of animals in the

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West epitomizes that degradation. Caging animals in the East at such sites as wet markets is an older practice associated with animal exploitation. That older practice caused suffering to animals, but it was on a much smaller scale compared to that of today and it was driven more by the need to survive than the need to make a financial profit. Moore’s edited anthology is one of many studies by scholars who situate their work in the environmental humanities, a capacious, interdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary field of inquiry that includes the sub-areas of inquiry of ecocriticism, animal studies, plant studies, and green Marxism. The chief aims of environmental humanities scholars are bringing about changes in our public and private institutions such that there will be more projects of cooperating with nature and less projects of combating it, and so more “just” projects and “habitable” environments (Moore 80). Another study that reflects those aims is ecocritical philosopher Timothy Morton’s The Ecological Thought. In it, Morton uses the term “mesh” to bring more attention to what humans typically background or give secondary value to. He explains this term by observing what art critics say about the landscape paintings of the French modernist-cubist painter Paul Cézanne: “since everything is interconnected, there is no definite background and therefore no definite foreground” (Moore 28). In an interview of Morton, some of the content of which is cited here, Alex Blasdel summarizes the contribution to the environmental humanities of this and other studies by Morton. A “philosopher prophet of the Anthropocene,” Morton questions the human species for indulging in a fantasy that it “can control the planet,” and for holding that it is morally “above” other beings” (Blasdel). Morton’s work represents advocating for something far different from that, for an “ecological awareness,” a “sense of eerie intimacy with other species,” the acceptance of “[humans’] interdependence with other beings,” and a rejection of the separation between humanity and nature (Blasdel). All of these positions are reflected in Morton’s concept of “dark ecology” (qtd. in Blasdel). It represents the opposite direction from that which mostly is steering the present epoch, one now being called “the Anthropocene” (Blasdel). The Anthropocene epoch likely will replace the Holocene, an epoch of “relatively stable, temperate climes” for over 12,000 years (Blasdel). The present epoch is formally recognized as being the Holocene epoch, but stratigraphers, geologists, and other scientists now are considering formally adopting the term, the Anthropocene epoch, and using it to demarcate either a late time in the Holocene or a break with the Holocene (Zalasiewicz et al., 15). While they debate about when that demarcation or break is visible, they generally agree that the Anthropocene begins around the time of the Industrial Revolution, in the eighteenth century, and intensifies and accelerates after the middle of the twentieth century. The term, which first “caught on”

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in mainstream culture at the turn of the last century, when it was used by Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stormer (Zalasiewicz et al., 14), is widely used today; and it draws attention to the sheer “scale of the human-driven chemical, physical, and biological changes to the Earth’s atmosphere, land surface and oceans” (Zalasiewicz et al., 14).5 Environmental humanities scholars also call attention to the fact that the most economically privileged humans (comprising the middle classes, uppermiddle classes, and the extremely wealthy) are primary drivers of the Anthropocene. For example, simply by turning on the ignition in one’s car or the air conditioning in one’s home, one participates in “a collective act of ecological destruction” (Blasdel). These scholars, who include Morton, also critique the many “utopian fantasies” of the most economically privileged humans. Such fantasies state in effect that developments in artificial intelligence and other technologies can solve the significant problems associated with the Anthropocene. As Morton and other environmental scholars argue, humans “can’t transcend [their] limitations or [their] reliance on other beings. . . . [They] can only ‘live with them’” (Blasdel). This argument does not mean some kind of recidivism or regressive step; rather, it means coexistence with as opposed to domination of the other and “liberation” as opposed to enslavement of the other (Blasdel). Another environmental humanities scholar who inspires this chapter is Timothy Clark, author of The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment. Clark examines the human/nature binary as it has been relied on in science to deprive nature of its own capacious agencies and powers: major rivers have been and are being “reduced to an energy source for hydroelectric dams,” the sea, once a queendom or kingdom in its own right, and once a vast highway for marine life, now is increasingly a slick “thoroughfare for oil tankers and a vast waste disposal site” for dumping anything and everything from microscopic plastic particles to animal carcasses, to last year’s washing machine (Clark 143). Discoveries in science and technology, which are being made with seemingly lightning-like speed, for sure are effectively challenging, in true and exciting posthumanist fashion, the human/ nature demarcations between “what is ‘natural’ and what is not” (Clark 63). However, many of those discoveries, those being commercially backed in the public and private sectors, are not being used to increase awareness of and protect what is left of environments where the human imprint is slight, and so most extant, so-called natural, environments are no longer “natural” and no longer “the reliable ‘dense’ background” that existed in the past (Clark 63). Most of these environments have been or are being reduced to a “fragile mechanism which, at any point, can explode in a catastrophic manner” (Clark 63). One thinks of the increase in the frequency and severity of fires, floods, and typhoons in recent times. These events have become partly

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human through excessive human intervention in nature. Their cumulative effects are what is known as “global warming.” One also thinks of pandemics. The most recent is COVID-19, the result of excessive interference in the lives of animals, the excessive subordination of them, and the hyperbolic exploitation of them. I now slowly wind toward the conclusion of this chapter by turning to scholarly debates in the East that closely intersect with those in the West in the context of questioning of the human/nature binary, the human animal/ nonhuman animal binary, and the ideological drivers of anthropocentrism and speciesism. Ding Jianxin, a scholar of linguistics and author of a study, Linguistic Prefabrication, in an article co-authored with Yang Tai, writes about how the COVID-19 disease has functioned in effect as a symbolic code as well as a social metaphor and how one or more human populations have deployed it in order to racialize and stigmatize another human population. He focuses on one of those populations, the people of Wuhan, who grievously bore the double brunt of the disease and the racist attacks from the West. As Ding cogently argues, in an epoch that is likely to confront more pandemics after COVID-19 we should restore the disease to the disease itself, let modern medicine correct ignorance and dispel fear, and uncouple metaphors from facts. I concur with Ding Jianxin’s lucid argument; and, if Ding does not specifically tackle the links between pandemics and the death of nature, then at least he points to the urgent necessity of understanding COVID-19 from wider, more encompassing, ecological and environmental perspectives, perspectives that address speciesism and anthropocentrism. Little attention has been given to the links between the outbreaks of pandemics such as COVID-19 and speciesism and anthropocentrism. Nonetheless, what exists of this attention is exemplary, and it is illustrated by an article by Liu Huajie, a Professor of Philosophy at Beijing University, and Tian Song. In “Corona Virus, an Ecological Explanation” published in the weekly journal Scholar, Liu Huajie and Tian Song comment on an article by the animal activist, Liu Xiaolong, and so they comment on common practices involving capturing animals in the wild and transporting them to other environments, where any diseases those animals carry, before kept in check, now are free agents.6 The bats in the Wuhan laboratories in the province Hubei were captured in another province, Yunnan. In their own home province of Yunnan, the viruses that the bats carry were kept in check by the bats themselves and the ecosystems that the bats supported. However, when humans remove those bats and transport them to wet markets and other sites, any diseases that they carry have the potential to be unleashed and mutate. These diseases have, one might say, a field day. In the case of the bats that carried the COVID-19 virus in Wuhan, the disease raced round the city, traveling freely from one human body to another, because there were no natural checks

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on it. The bats were too weak to keep the viruses in check and were no longer in the environments that could keep those diseases in check. Liu Huajie, Tian Song, and other scholars in the East, like their peers in the West, recognize that the environment is deeply part of the human and not to be lightly dismissed, overlooked, or ignored. Liu Huajie and Tian Song point out that emergency measures, rather than preventative ones, have defined the response to the COVID-19 crisis, for to adopt the second kinds means decelerating rather than accelerating the virtually wholesale commodification of nature. If there is to be any kind of “heavenly justice,” humans need to be just to the earthly heaven of nature. Eating and killing nonhuman others is unavoidable but eating and killing nonhuman others—such as bats, pangolins, snakes, civets; and cows, pigs, and chickens—for reasons that have more to do with profit and less to do with survival are meretricious and unjust. In “Corona Virus, an Ecological Explanation,” Liu Huajie and Tian Song also comment on the popular Hollywood movie Contagion. They critique the movie on the basis that it reinforces and foments specious and speciesist attitudes toward bats. Citing the animal rights activist Liu Xiaolong, the authors also critique popular Hollywood films in general for reinforcing the human/ nature binary. They also question what might seem to stand at the far end of popular Hollywood films: philosophy. As they argue, philosophy, in its most popular forms today, betrays ecology. In the same article, they observe that humans are a forgetful species. After the disappearance of SARS, we returned to our old habits and resumed trading in the flesh of animals, billions of whom spend their entire lives in confined, crowded, disease-prone, unnatural environments. Indeed, these environments are the new natural environments. They are the new environmental norm, not the exceptional environmental condition; so are the pandemics that exploded in those kinds of environments and the pandemics that are poised to explode. I began this chapter by commenting on a well-known and popular “dance” in ancient Chinese art. The dance, and relationship, is between Ghost God and a bat. In critical animal studies terms, that dance might be understood in terms of another sort of dance or meeting, zoonotic transfer. Zoonotic transfer conjures negative, or unwanted, kinds of meetings between nonhuman animals and humans. Those kinds of meetings include diseases like COVID-19, which humans catch from coming into contact with bats. These material meetings are also caused by the moral separations that humans erect between themselves and other animals. Under such separations—namely, the human animal/nonhuman animal and human/nature binaries—humans do not consider it unfair or unjust to cram animals into confined spaces solely for the sake of expediency (in the West as much as in the East). In such conditions, the risk of diseases increases. In more general and neutral terms, zoonotic transfer

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tells us that there are no hard lines between human animals and humans’ fellow beings, nonhuman animals. If we think about zoonotic transfer in moral terms, we might become more open to cultivating relationships with nature that are based on mutuality, multidirectionality, and coexistence as opposed to exclusivity, linearity, hierarchy, and domination. All beings seek and deserve a degree of freedom and space in which to be free, even bats! Giving them some freedom helps to give us freedom. Scrolling through a mere sampling of Chinese poems about bats and making some brief comments on a popular bat legend in China, I have sought to illustrate how literature and other art or aesthetic production can and do play a role in the given cultivation. In the twenty-first century, bats are commonly associated with either a disease or with a flesh that is delicious to eat. They should associate with more than that. For sure, we cannot avoid killing other beings, but we can reduce much of that killing. That reduction will alleviate the suffering of nonhuman animals, and it will revive nature (a word that here mostly means environments that only bear the lightest tread of the human). Reading Chinese literature and other art for what it says about bats and other nonhuman animals, and so paying more attention to these animals and their inestimable contribution to the planet, is part of the effort to restore more balanced relations between ourselves and others. NOTES 1. I would like to thank Professor Wang Jianjiang, Professor Keaton Wynn, and the other organizers of the 2nd American and 6th International Conference on Bi-modern Studies: Bie-modernism: Current Challenges and the Future—Chinese and Western Dialogues on Art, Modernity, Postmodernity, Concepts of Truth and History, October 1–3, 2020. I attended and presented a draft of this chapter at this (online) conference. 2. In the body of this chapter, Chinese names are spelled according to the way they appear in the Chinese language, where the surname (family name) precedes the given (first name); and in the Works Cited, Chinese names also appear as they appear in the Chinese language, but the surname is separated from the given name by a comma. For example, Li Bai appears as “Li Bai” in the body of the paper and as “Li, Bai” in the Works Cited. 3. The English translation of Li Bai’s poem, as the English translations of the other Chinese poems that I refer to in this chapter, is mine. 4. I address those negative attitudes here under the terms of speciesism and anthropocentrism. Ecophobia is another useful term. Similar to speciesism and anthropocentrism, ecophobia is an overarching term for humans’ distaste and contempt for, indifference toward, and even hatred of nonhuman animals. Simon C. Estok’s monograph The Ecophobia Hypothesis is the most comprehensive study of the term. For a short discussion on the significance of this term, see, also, an essay by Iris Ralph, entitled “Ecophobia and the Porcelain Porcine Species.”

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5. The Anthropocene also associates with “The Great Acceleration,” which refers to the rapid increase in exploitation of “natural resources” and “emission of pollutants” between 1950 CE and today (Zalasiewicz et al., 15). 6. The title of Liu Xiaolong’s essay is “Don’t Put the Blame of Humans on Bats” (my translation of the Chinese).

REFERENCES Blasdel, Alex. “‘A Reckoning for Our Species’: The Philosopher Prophet of the Anthropocene.” The Guardian. 15 June 2017. Accessed 12 Feb. 2022, https://www​ .theguardian​.com​/world​/2017​/jun​/15​/timothy​-morton​-anthropocene​-philosopher. Bai, Juyi (白居易). “Bat in the Cave” 《山中五絕句。洞中蝙蝠》 (Shānzhōng wǔ Juégōu Dòng zhōng biānfú). Chinese Ancient Poetry. 《讀古詩詞網》. Accessed 12 Feb. 2022, https://fanti​.dugushici​.com​/ancient proses/23483. Cao, Zhi (曹植). “Ode to the Bat” 《蝙蝠賦》 (Biānfú fù). In Huang. Clark, Timothy. 2011. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Environment. Cambridge University Press. Dickey, James. 1994. Deliverance (1970). Delta. Ding, Jianxin, and Yang Tai (丁建新 and 楊荟). “Virus as the Other: A Discourse Analysis of the Metaphor of Covid-19” 《作為他者的病毒：關於新冠肺炎隱喻的話語分析》. Language Newsletter《語言通訊》21 Aug. 2020. Accessed 13 Feb. 2022, http://www​.discourse​-studies​.com​/upload​/file​/2020​/cda100​/03​.pdf. ———. 2018. Linguistic Prefabrication: A Discourse Analysis Approach. Springer, https://link​.springer​.com​/book​/10​.1007​/978​-981​-10​-7010​-5. Estok, Simon C. 2018. The Ecophobia Hypothesis. Routledge. Huang, Guoxuan (黃國軒). “The Embodiment of Evil—A Recent Reading of Cao Zhi’s ‘Ode to the Bat’” 《邪惡的化身—近讀曹植〈蝙蝠賦〉》 (Xié'è de huàshēn—jìn dú cáozhí biānfú fù). 2 Feb 2022. Accessed 12 Feb. 2022, https:// medium​.com​/azaleahintz/邪悪的化身—近讀曹植—蝙蝠賦—e27b5350c5d9. Li, Bai (李白). “A Preface to Tea Given to a Relative” 《答族侄僧中孚贈玉泉仙人掌茶並序》(Dá zú zhí sēng zhōng fú zèng yùquán xiānrénzhǎng chá bìng xù). In “Li Bai: The Only Poem About Tea That was a Blemish on His Character” 《李白一生唯一一首茶詩，成為他的人格污奌》 (Lǐbái yīshēng wéi yīyī shǒu chá shī, chéngwéi tā de réngé de wūdiǎn). KKnews. 31 May, 2017. Accessed 12 Feb. 2022, https://www​.google​.com​.tw​/amp​/s​/kknews​ .cc​/culture​/ovxllp6​.amp. Li, Shangyin (李商隱). “Midnight” 《夜半》 (Yèbàn). In Chinese Ancient Poetry .dugushici​ .com​ /ancient 《讀古詩詞網》. Accessed 12 Feb. 2022, https://fanti​ proses/ 28406. Liu, Huajie, and Tian Song (刘華杰 and 田松). “Corona Virus, An Ecological Explanation” 《新冠病毒：一種生態學的解釋》. Scholar. 15 Apr. 2020. Accessed 12 Feb. 2022, https://www​.google​.com​.tw​/amp​/s​/kknews​.cc​/news​/a6nykpv​.amp. Morton, Timothy. 2010. The Ecological Thought. Harvard University Press.

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Moore, Jason, ed. 2016. Anthropocene or Capitalocene: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Jason Moore. PM Press. Ralph, Iris. 2019. “Ecophobia and the Porcelain Porcine Species.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 26, no. 2, Spring, pp. 401–412. https://doi​.org​/10​.1093​/isle​/isz050. Su, Shi (蘇軾). “A Poem to My Brother” (“I Heard My Brother Lost Weight”) 《聞子由瘦》(Wén zi yóu shòu.) In “Did Su Shi consume a bat thousand years ago? He wrote a poem about bats that will disgust you before you finish reading it” 《蘇軾千年之前就曾吃過蝙蝠?他寫下一首詩，還未讀完便令人作 嘔》. (Sūshì qiānnián zhīqián jiù céng chīguò biānfú? Tā xiě xià yī shǒu shī, hái wèi dú wán biàn lìng rén zuò'ǒu). KKnews. 31 January 2020. Accessed 12 Feb. 2022, https://www​.google​.com​.tw​/amp​/s​/kknews​.cc​/n​/3qpkn4y​.amp. Zalasiewicz, Jan, Mark Williams, and Colin N. Waters. 2016. “Anthropocene.” Keywords for Environmental Studies, edited by Joni Aadamon, William A. Gleason, and David N. Pellow. New York University Press, pp. 14–16.

Chapter 4

From a Mythic City to a Rubbishmetropolis Urban Imaginaries of Istanbul in Contemporary Turkish Non/Fiction Kerim Can Yazgünoğlu

In his 1992 Nobel Lecture, Derek Walcott argues that “[a] culture, we all know, is made by its cities” (“Antilles”). Resonating with Walcott’s remark, I claim that Istanbul is such a multistoried city that not only cultures are construed, but identities, bodies, and struggles, be it historical, technological, or modern, are molded by it. But what about numerous writers, painters, architects, travelers, and fabulists would remake Istanbul as a transmetropolis, one that emerges between old and new, natural and urban, light and dark, human and nonhuman? The answer lies not just in the material figuration of Istanbul but rather in what contemporary Turkish urban imaginaries depict as the reconfiguration of Istanbul as a material-cultural mesh where the strict demarcations between nature and culture, green ecology and urban ecology, city and country, Europe and Asia conflate. Indeed, Istanbul as a city has a Janus-faced nature. With Hagia Sophia, mosques, minarets, streets, the Galata Tower, mini-islands, green woods, and its blue Bosporus, on the one hand, Istanbul is a storied city of dreams, myths, histories and memories, of the past and nostalgia. Contemporary Turkish urbanization and modernization of Istanbul have brought about a new urbanized landscape, on the other. So, this chapter ecocritically explores the way the dual nature of Istanbul prompts us to reconsider the very relationship between urbanity, ecology, and city. In contrast to the common readings of the city focusing on cultural dimensions, my contention is that the city, in particular Istanbul, is a composite place of green and urban ecologies, a site of multiplicity and hybridity in which every life-forms, cultural structures, technological systems, and ecosystems coexist in contemporary Turkish non/ 63

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fiction from Latife Tekin’s Berji Kristin Tales from the Garbage Hills (1984) to Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City (2003) to Buket Uzuner’s Istanbullu (2008). Such works, I argue, construe Istanbul as a multistoried city of myths, as an urban city of ruins, and as a rubbishmetropolis, respectively. This study also adds an ecological dimension to the understanding of this metropolis by exploring trashscapes. In order to understand Istanbul as such a composite metropolis, we thus need to examine the underlying assumptions behind the dual nature of Istanbul, and how Istanbul is construed from a magical city of dreams to a dark metropolis in Turkish literary imaginations.

ISTANBUL: A MULTISTORIED CITY OF DREAMS AND MYTHS From Byzantion to Byzantium to Constantinople to Istanbul, the city has been in itself a lived character, a mythic knot of dreams, a strange network of cities, as it has been significantly both a porous boundary between Europe and Asia and a connecting nodal point between the Black Sea, the Aegean Sea, and the Mediterranean Sea. The Bosporus in Istanbul is exemplary in this sense. Its name is a mark of ancient mythology, reflecting the clash between border and transition. Bosporus originates from the Ancient Greek word, bos = ox and poros = passage, meaning the “Channel of the Cow” (Roberts et al. 33). Dating back to the Ancient Greek myth of Io, the Bosporus is the place where after the transformation and Hera’s punishment, Io as a white heifer, meets the Titan Prometheus. This meeting is the harbinger of Io’s retransformation into a human being; thus, the Bosporus indicates a metamorphosis, a “poros” between human culture and nature, love and hate. Although the Bosporus split Istanbul in two contrasting, but entangled, parts, Istanbul has become a crossroad of cultures, continents, natures, and empires. Istanbul is, unlike other ancient cities, a center made possible by myths, Byzantine palaces, Basilica Cistern, Hagia Sophia, walls, gates, aqueducts, Ottoman palaces, Grand Mosques, hamams, and significantly the Bosporus that contributed to the city as becoming a transmetropolis, a network where every human and nonhuman entities coexist and work to build one of the most significant cities of commerce, art, knowledge, politics, and urbanity. A key aspect of this transmetropolis, Istanbul, is also that it has greenery landscape and seascape, encompassing a hybrid condition. This condition is best illustrated as what Önay Sözer and Ferda Keskin call “pera, peras, poros,” reflecting the porosity of the city: “This other side / beyond-edge / border-crossing (pera-peras-poros) structure has formed the life of the city not only in terms of city history but also in terms of the birth of its symbols” (1)1. If one looked beyond the walls and gates of Istanbul, s/he would find

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himself in the other part of Istanbul. In a way, these different, but familiar, parts coexisted in the porous body of Istanbul. Stating that the “name of the present center of Istanbul was Pera,” Sözer and Keskin contend that Pera, before urbanization, “represented the ‘other side,’ ‘beyond’ of the Galata neighborhood, where foreign merchants and sailors as well as ambassadors lived,” whereas Galata was “on the other side of the neighborhood, where Hagia Sophia Church-Mosque and Topkapı Palace were located and which was accepted as the center” (1). In this view, Pera and Galata became two important axes on which Istanbul was constructed. It is important to note here that Istanbul is a place founded on porous relations in which monolithic culture no longer existed but instead different cultures coexisted to create a hybrid city. Istanbul in this sense is an urban city “where self and other are inextricably mixed; it has become a living form of aporia (impasse, impossible poros) where different peoples and cultures are neighbors in the transition between their place and the wild” (Sözer and Keskin 2). So conceived, Istanbul epitomizes that humans are inseparable from their environments, as it creates a liminal zone for humans and nonhumans. This is one reason why some contemporary Turkish writers, such as Buket Uzuner, Şebnem İşigüzel, and Roni Margulies, provide a multiple perspective on Istanbul’s liminality as a porous city. Pointing out the significance of the city’s liminality, for instance, contemporary Turkish woman novelist Buket Uzuner anthropomorphizes Istanbul, giving a voice to the city in her novel Istanbullu: “I am Istanbul, city of cities, mistress of metropolises, community of poets, seat of emperors, favorite of sultans, pearl of the world!” (11). Obviously, Uzuner paints a picture of Istanbul not as a city of ruins but instead as a city of coexistence in which Istanbul is fabulated: I am without doubt the most magnificent, mysterious and terrible, a city upon whose shores Pagans, Christians, Jews and unbelievers, friend and foe alike, have found safe harbor through the ages, a place where love and betrayal, pleasure and pain, live side by side. (11)

It is through the literary fabulation of Istanbul that Uzuner espouses how the boundaries between the outside and the inside, nature and city, textuality and reality, urbanity and rurality in Istanbul are not solid and firm; rather, they are interdependent with one another, thereby becoming porous and viscous. Seeing itself as the “city of prosperity and ruin, of defeat and glad tidings,” the voice of Istanbul further states that “[b]lue as hope, green as poison, rosy as dawn, I am Istanbul; I am in the Judas tree, in acacia, in lavender; I am turquoise! I am the unfathomable; the muse of possibility, vitality, creativity” (11, 12). The important key characteristic of contemporary Turkish imaginaries of Istanbul is the recognition of the city not just as a passive background but an agentic actor that is enmeshed within human, animal, plant, and

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nonliving domains, which extends beyond the urban territory. In other words, Istanbul, for all its importance, might no longer be considered only as a material object; instead, we might be cognizant of the dynamic and relational connections, both agentic and imaginary, that reflect how Istanbul becomes a porous body. As such, Istanbul embodies what Ihab Hassan propounds, stating that cities are “grime, glamour, geometries of glass, steel, and concrete,” while simultaneously being “invisible, imaginary, made of dream and desire, agent of all our transformations” (94). This demonstrates an entanglement of social, ecological, and imaginary realms in which it is much harder to identify the strict boundaries and structure the relation between bodies and spaces. ISTANBUL: AN URBANIZED CITY OF RUINS Istanbul has been, moreover, foremost a manifestation of the material and textual relations of human and nonhuman bodies, spaces, and times, and contemporary urban space of Istanbul thus develop out of this interconnected mesh. It is worth noting here that this line of understanding has been developed by some urban theorists, such as Kevin Lynch, Henri Lefebvre, and Edward Soja. In The Image of the City (1990), for instance, Lynch proposes cityspace as the culmination of material form, experience, and imaginary, contending that “we must consider not just the city as a thing in itself, but the city being perceived by its inhabitants” (3). In a similar vein, Henri Lefebvre argues that urban space is socially produced, referring to “lived space.” Yet it is important that Lefebvre identifies old city not as a lived space but just as an object of consumption: The city historically constructed is no longer lived and is no longer understood practically. It is only an object of cultural consumption for tourists, for aestheticism, avid for spectacles and the picturesque. Even for those who seek to understand it with warmth, it is gone. Yet, the urban remains in a state of dispersed and alienated actuality, as kernel and virtuality. (148)

This position is as much a criticism of urbanization that erases the old city as it shows how the urban fabric deepens the conflict between the past and the present, city and country, the built and the natural. According to Lefebvre, although under urbanization and industrialization the urban core—image and concept of the city—remains, it becomes “overrun, often deteriorated, sometimes rotting” (74). On this view, it is arguably stated that under urbanization, modernization, and westernization, Istanbul has become such an urban city. More specifically, in Orhan Pamuk’s oeuvre exploring this predicament, there are a variety of attitudes and reflections the author could take toward his characters and their relation with Istanbul, ranging from melancholy to

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love to death. Having become widely recognized as Turkey’s foremost novelist for his figuration of Istanbul, the Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk is very much preoccupied with the soul of the city as well as its social, cultural, historical, economic, and psychological relations with human and nonhuman inhabitants. In his fiction and nonfiction alike, Pamuk displays a complex, but melancholic, engagement with Istanbul, as personifying Istanbul as a city of ruins. In his works, what has happened to Istanbul as a megapolis is a history of the city from the ancient, mythic city to the industrial, transformed conurbations of capitalism and the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. In his memoir, Istanbul: Memories and the City, for instance, Pamuk articulates the material and textual manifestations of Istanbul as beautifying the ruins of the old empire through the Turkish word, “hüzün,” meaning material, spiritual, and communal melancholy: “it has always been a city of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy” (6). Pamuk describes Istanbul in his novels such as The Black Book and The Museum of Innocence as a mythic, grandeur city and a melancholy one, which suggests that the literary imaginary of Istanbul is produced and transformed by the very conflict between the old magical Ottoman Empire and the modernized present of Turkey. Viewing Istanbul as “an aging and impoverished city buried under the ashes of a ruined empire” (6), Pamuk sees melancholy in every old relic around Istanbul. He writes that “the melancholy of this dying culture was all around us” (29), as he sees “the city’s soul in black and white” (37), as “the chiaroscuro of twilight—the thing that for me defines the city” (35). Pamuk’s idea that “hüzün”—melancholy— involves failure, obliviousness, and what he feels spiritual pains might strike many people as being strange and a highly sensitized perception of Istanbul. In Pamuk’s words, to understand the central importance of hüzün as a cultural concept conveying worldly failure, listlessness, and spiritual suffering, it is not enough to grasp the history of the word and the honor we attach to it. If I am to convey the intensity of the hüzün that Istanbul caused me to feel as a child, I must describe the history of the city following the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and—even more important—the way this history is reflected in the city’s “beautiful” landscapes and its people. The hüzün of Istanbul is not just the mood evoked by its music and its poetry, it is a way of looking at life that implicates us all, not only a spiritual state but a state of mind that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negating. (91)

Pamuk’s concept of “hüzün” indicates physical and spiritual processes of pain, and its associational relations with the city and its inhabitants that constitute a communal sense of feeling that might be affirmative or negative. However, what Pamuk emphasizes through “hüzün” is that it is not the

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melancholy of Istanbul but the hüzün in which we see ourselves reflected, the hüzün we absorb with pride and share as a community. To feel this hüzün is to see the scenes, evoke the memories, in which the city itself becomes the very illustration, the very essence, of hüzün. (94)

Pamuk talks here about the way melancholy seeps into the very soul of Istanbul, and the urban fabric thus cannot be thought of without “hüzün.” Most notably, Pamuk uses the concept “hüzün” to explain the divergence between a past, prosperous Istanbul as a multicultural metropolis and a nowdysfunctional Istanbul. Pamuk’s view of Istanbul as “hüzün,” when combined with his nostalgic view of the past, is a luminous encrustation on places and people in his works. Pamuk’s Istanbul, as Scott Slovic argues, discloses “a nostalgic sensibility inherent to the city of his birth, the source of his own outlook and literary voice” (93). For Pamuk, in order to see the essence of Istanbul, it is necessary to “‘discover’ the city’s soul in its ruins, to see these ruins as expressing the city’s essence” (256). In a way, referring to four important Turkish authors in Istanbul, Pamuk associates Istanbul with what he calls “the melancholy of the ruins” (113). In this regard, Turkish authors Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar, Yahya Kemal, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, and Reşat Ekrem Koçu, Pamuk remarks, did “believe that they could find their own authentic voice only if they looked to their city’s past and wrote of the melancholy it inspired” (113). He also continues to write that when they “recalled the splendor of old Istanbul, when their eyes lit on a dead beauty lying by the wayside, when they wrote about the ruins that surrounded them, they gave the past a poetic grandeur” (113). The melancholy and nostalgic sensibility that grounds Pamuk’s skirmishes with Istanbul around him ultimately leads him to find beauty in the ruins of the old city. He acknowledges the beauty in ruins, stating that “beauty resides entirely in the crumbling city walls, in the grass, ivy, weeds, and trees still growing when I was a child from the towers and walls of the fortresses of Rumelihisarı and Anadoluhisarı” (255–56). For Pamuk, Istanbul as a melancholy of ruins encompasses a beauty sensed in wreckage. So, under modernization and westernization, any firm and coherent sense of Istanbul disintegrates, as Pamuk wonders where Istanbul’s glorious past is, whether the past in his life in Istanbul makes sense. Filled with repugnance for the practices for modernization and westernization, Pamuk did actively experience the process of development of his society and the city. In Istanbul: Memories and the City, Orhan Pamuk further hyperseparates the city as a filthy one and the Bosporus as a healthy one. “If the city speaks of defeat, destruction, deprivation, melancholy, and poverty,” Pamuk emphatically notes, “the Bosphorus sings of life, pleasure, and happiness. Istanbul draws its strength from the Bosphorus” (47). The filthy city is transmuted into a dynamic and life-affirming image of life. As “an ever-mutating mirage”

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(Pamuk 52), the Bosporus symbolizes the healthy body of the city in contrast to the urban core of the city. This attempt to transpose salubrity into a green image of Istanbul is at its most striking in the double depiction of Istanbul. Whereas the ruins in the city are “reminders that the present city is so poor and confused that it can never again dream of rising to its former heights of wealth, power, and culture” (101), the Bosporus is still seen as “the font of our good health, the cure of our ills, the infinite source of goodness and goodwill that sustains the city and all those who dwell in it” (61). In doing so, nonetheless, Pamuk establishes a strict boundary between the built and the natural, green and rubbish environments, thereby limning a strange urbanized city where “no one has been able to feel completely at home” (115). And then, in the urban depiction of Istanbul, Pamuk broadly refers to cityscapes as rubbish and dirt. Pointing out the 1968 newspaper account, for instance, he states that the “Golden Horn is no longer the Golden Horn; it’s become a dirty pool surrounded by factories, workshops, and slaughterhouses; chemicals from those factories, tar from those workshops, the outflows of ships, and also sewage pollute its waters [1968]” (142). A critical observer of an urban culture and city which he radically rejects, Pamuk is clearly aware of the inhumanity and slow violence of urbanization and modern industrial society. Explicitly repudiating such an urban fabric of the city, Pamuk highlights the alienation and abjection of the urban metropolis as follows: [O]ne’s city can look like an alien place. Streets that seem like home will suddenly change color; I’ll look into the ever-mysterious crowds pressing past me and suddenly think they’ve been there for hundreds of years. With its muddy parks and desolate open spaces, its electricity poles, the billboards plastered over its squares, and its concrete monstrosities, this city, like my soul, is fast becoming an empty—a truly empty—place. The filth of the side streets; the foul smell from open rubbish bins; the ups, downs, and holes in the pavements; all this disorder and chaos; the pushing and shoving that make it the sort of city it is—I am left wondering if the city is punishing me for adding to the squalor, for being here at all. When its melancholy begins to seep into me and from me into it, I begin to think there’s nothing I can do; like the city, I belong to the living dead, I am a corpse that still breathes, a wretch condemned to walk streets and pavements that can only remind me of my filth and my defeat. (317)

It is here necessary to quote this passage in its entirety due to the way the urban Istanbul is framed by debris, decay, waste, and filth. This urban territory lies like a corpse decomposing, carrying the trace of what has been urbanized and industrialized. Pamuk gives grounds for construing an abject city, alienated subjectivities and souls as an urbanized problem, only to demonstrate how he mythologizes Istanbul as ruins of melancholy, and ontologizes the city as trapped between the dark urban city core and the green Bosporus. In fact, this position, despite Pamuk’s approach to Istanbul,

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would appear to characterize the way Istanbul as a porous city could dissolve the boundary between the built and the natural, and transform material and symbolic relations, thereby constructing a post green urban earth imbricated in human and nonhuman practices.

ISTANBUL AS RUBBISHMETROPOLIS As can be seen in relation the above reflections, Istanbul, I argue, might be re-defined as a “rubbishmetropolis” in Latife Tekin’s novel Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills, when considering the entangled spaces of the natural and the urban, the material and the textual, green and rubbish environments. In order to comprehend what constitutes a rubbishmetropolis, it is helpful to elaborate on the concept of “rubbish ecology.” Patricia Yaeger develops the concept of rubbish ecology to analyze a transition away from green nature to urban ecological configurations characterized by waste and garbage. Specifically, Yaeger argues that if nature under waste, rubbish, and trash is a transformed nature, this global condition can only be characterized as “rubbish ecology.” In her view, the search for a seamless, pristine, coherent nature is fruitless, for “[w]e are born into a detritus-strewn world,” and “the nature that buffets us is never culture’s opposite” (323). Not only does she question the distinction between nature and culture, but also uses trash as a substitute for nature. In what she calls “rubbish ecology,” “detritus replace[s] nature” (331). In doing so, she defines rubbish ecology as “the act of saving and savouring debris” (329). In rubbish ecology, every place is now a place of rubbish, and various types of waste that infiltrate into every territory and body radically reconfigure our reality. In this context, Susan S. Morrison’s question that she poses at the beginning of her book, The Literature of Waste: Material Ecopoetics and Ethical Matter (2015), is crucial: “In a world in which material prosperity and life itself are inevitably linked to pollution and the production of waste, how can we humans—ourselves sources of waste in terms of all that we discard—understand and cope with waste?” (1). The answer here is that it is really difficult to cope with waste in any easy way. Since waste has become the inevitable part of our bodies and environments, other ecocritics on this matter also agree, such as Dana Philips, John Scanlan, Gay Hawkins, and Brian Thill who claim that waste has ecologically transformed the entire globe. Hawkins, for instance, notes that waste “has been revalued and recorded from rubbish to recyclable resource, it has moved from the bin to the compost heap, it has insinuated itself into our lives in different ways and with different effects” (5). As long as humanity generates increasing amounts of waste, garbage, trash, and debris on a planetary scale, it is hard to see any undefiled environment. Emphasizing

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this ecological predicament as inevitable, Brian Thill similarly writes the following: There is no human-made object so well traveled, so ambient, as waste. It fills the oceans and the highest peaks. Our waste lays thick blankets of our chemical age across the entire planet, into every rocky outcropping, to the bottom of every sea’s floor, nestling in the trees and bogs and pools of the world. It’s in the air, in the water, in yard sales brimming with kitsch, in houses stuffed to the rafters with rubbish, in outer space, spreading out in invisible clouds of toxic chemicals, and piling up in immense mountains of garbage stacked in trashbricks below ground at Fresh Kills or Puente Hills or a thousand other dump sites. [. . .] With our waste we have reordered space and place, reshaping them in its image the world over. (3–4)

This quotation is a good illustration of the ways in which waste crosses the boundaries between the inside and the outside, the body and the earth, and culture and nature, and profoundly shapes the landscape and its meanings. In other words, waste transmutes every city, society, and body into rubbish ecologies fed from consumerist societies for which humans are responsible. In the twenty-first century, as stated by Brian Thill, “[e]very place is a place of waste” (71). Hence, the articulation of rubbishmetropolis can be understood through landscapes of waste and living in a community choked with garbage, an unsavory position that puts every human and nonhuman realm in touch with waste. So, thinking through nature and city as rubbish radically affects how we define the environment, society, and urbanity. In this sense, contemporary Turkish woman author Latife Tekin prompts us to rethink of Istanbul as such via Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills. Propelled by the urban predicament through which the migrated illiterate people went in the slum areas of Istanbul in the 1960s, Latife Tekin conjures up a darker world without a green ecology in the text, focusing on the environmental and bodily contamination and its effects on social and moral structures of everyday life in a toxic waste dump area, called Flower Hill. Set in a toxic refuse heap where rubbish is buried, Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills depicts a bleak future where waste crisis, economic crisis, health crisis, and personal crises all jostle, each of which poses a threat to human and nonhuman life. While Tekin points to the strange otherness of the slum area, however, she also illustrates how human and nonhuman bodies are intimately and dangerously enmeshed with rubbish things in urban territories. The novel opens by a lucid description of garbage territory, and a community is founded on it: Next morning, by the garbage heaps—downhill from the factories which manufactured lightbulbs and chemicals, and facing the china factory—a complete

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neighbourhood was fathered by mud and chemical waste, with roofs of plastic basins, doors from old rugs, oilcloth windows and walls of wet breezeblocks. (16)

This new, rubbish environment provides a living space, albeit toxic, for neighborhood immigrants while not offering an amenity for the inhabitants. The narrative draws attention to how capitalism and industrialization negatively and lethally affect the way of life and existence through their practices. Through the demolitions of the huts where the inhabitants shelter to eke out an existence, their life is shattered, as they begin to fight against these inhumane practices. Tekin reflects this cataclysm, stating that the destruction went on for exactly thirty-seven endless days, and after each raid the huts became a little smaller and gradually lost all resemblance to houses. The hut people seemed no longer human, smeared with dust, mud, garbage, their clothes in rags. Three babies died, weary of cold and destruction. (22)

Rather than demarcating the boundaries of the house, the body, or the city, every entity becomes part of rubbish ecology that blurs the allegedly irrevocable boundaries between pristine nature and social culture. The garbage hills in the novel showcase how these boundaries become viscerally porous, as the narrator raises her voice about the relationship between humans, nonhumans and the landfill: [R]efuse was dumped continuously on the Hill, and with the milder weather the seagulls forsook the garbage. Amidst their shrill cries new little refuse mounds grew up around the piles of pickings and all hell broke loose over the division of these mounds among the neighbourhoods and the hut people. People took their children there very early in the morning and did not go home until dark. The bits of plastic, iron, bottles and paper they gathered were sold to the nearby workshops. (30)

Humans, children, and gulls here are part of this dark “litter-ary” landscape of ironically called “Flower Hill.” This passage resonates with Patricia Yaeger’s observation that “in a world where molecular garbage has infiltrated earth, water, and air, we cannot encounter the natural untouched or uncontaminated by human remains. Trash becomes nature, and nature becomes trash” (332). Thus, this rubbish landscape dissolves the very nature/culture binary. A cogent point is that turning nature into trash attests to a post green situation that is the nexus where two actors, trash and nature, undergo a kind of fusion. That is the premise of rubbish ecology conceived as a vast heterogeneous mix of varied in/organic entities, bodies, and spaces. The rubbish landscape is a glittering monument to consumer society and global capitalism. “Every landscape,” Brian Thill also claims, is “a trashscape. This not only transforms the

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world into one vast and unevenly distributed trash heap; it changes, in ways that might not even be perceptible to us, our sense of self and humanity in the world” (4). Obviously, as landfills, dump sites, and junkyards increase all around the world, it is no longer possible to find a pristine place. Regardless of its filthy condition, moreover, the trashscape on Flower Hill in the novel becomes permanent and a deadly end for the hut people. Replete with valueless, unhealthy, and impure objects, the dump site on Flower Hill is a toxic and destructive place, affecting humans and the environment. For instance, Güllü Baba, one of the major characters, functions as a wise senior, predicting what will happen to Flower Hill. As the narrator says, Güllü Baba could foresee the fate of the Flower Hill folk: on their foreheads were inscribed, in deep black letters, factories, wind and garbage. These would be the bringers of good luck and bad; factories would be opened on Flower Hill. [. . .] The factory waste would alter the colour of the earth. (46)

For the people of Flower Hill, factories, wind, and garbage extend beyond the dump area to encompass the whole neighborhood. Hence, toxins, leachate, and other rubbish substances which emanate from the dump area have a substantial influence on human and nonhuman worlds. In other words, waste cannot be viewed as a distinct entity independent from human presence; rather, it erases the boundaries between bodies, cultures, and environments. This is what Latife Tekin exemplifies in the novel, which shows how rubbish landscape is an adjunct of excess production and consumption of urbanity. In fact, dump areas are the very embodiment of irrevocability of destructive and malicious behavior of humans in urban areas as a whole. Further, the novel complicates the Flower Hill not as a biopolis but as a necropolis. Although urbanization and industrialization blur the boundary between biopolis and necropolis in urban cities, the novel demonstrates the culmination of rubbish ecology through sickness: In early summer, showers of pure white from this factory began to pour over Flower Hill. At first they thought it was snow and were amazed. Then an intolerable stench reached the huts and within three days this factory snow had withered the first blooms on Flower Hill and wilted the branches of trees. Hens curled up with drooping necks and died, and people were unable to hold their heads upright. In the middle of playing, children turned dark purple as if drugged and fell into a deep sleep. One of the sleeping children never woke up. (27–28)

Here, the chemical factory, like the dump area, emerges as a locus of toxification and sickness, a predicament that interweaves human bodies and the environment through illnesses. As such, pointing to the permeable boundaries

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in rubbish ecological spaces, the narrative imbricates the body and the environment, the industrial and the natural through sickness. Indeed, it may come as no surprise that under dreadful conditions of urbanization and industrialization all humans and nonhumans might become sick. Reflecting on the novel, nevertheless, John Berger claims that the “promise is that again and again, from the garbage, the scattered feathers, the ashes and the broken bodies, something new and beautiful may be born” (8). Irrespective of whether the beautiful can be born out of the terrible, what emerges from this analysis is that through the Flower Fill dump site which urbanization and industrialization have created, Tekin’s novel presents a critique of modern urbanism and consumerism that deplete the planet. Tekin’s view of Istanbul as rubbishmetropolis in the novel also highlights the conflation of the opposition between waste, society and the environment through rubbish ecology. Urban cities around the world, to conclude, are material and discursive ecosystems that change the direction of humans and nonhumans by showing us something terrible or beautiful about ourselves, our cultures, and our environments. Istanbul is such an urbanized transmetropolis that one can make discoveries about its magical past, the melancholy of ruins, and rubbish ecologies. Istanbul might act, as Ihab Hassan puts it, as a mediator between the human and natural orders, as a changing network of social relations, as a flux of production and consumption, as a shadowy financial empire, as an arena of violence, play, desire, . . . [and] as an incipient force of planetization. (95)

As discussed in contemporary Turkish urban imaginaries of Istanbul, Istanbul as a porous body has emerged between arcadia and polis, between the built and the natural, between Europe and Asia, between the past, the present, and the future. In other words, the urban imaginaries materially and textually construed by Buket Uzuner, Orhan Pamuk, and Latife Tekin “interlink the different structures and signs, minds and bodies, facts and subjectivities, actualities and virtualities, economies and ecologies of urban social space” (Lindner and Meissner 6). Urban imaginaries in this chapter, all in all, demonstrate how Istanbul as an urbanized transmetropolis is always in transition, viewing it as a complex and ambivalent meeting point of human and nonhuman realms, full of tensions and frictions.

NOTE 1. All translations from Turkish to English belong to the author unless it is stated otherwise.

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REFERENCES Berger, John. 1983. “Preface.” In Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills, edited by Latife Tekin, 5–8. London: Marion Boyars Publishers. Hassan, Ihab. 1981. “Cities of Mind, Urban Words: The Dematerialization of Metropolis in Contemporary American Fiction.” In Literature and the American Urban Experience: Essays on the City and Literature, edited by Michael C. Jaye and Ann Chalmers Watts, 93–112. Manchester: Manchester UP. Hawkins, Gay. 2006. The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish. New York and London: Rowman & Littlefield. Lefebvre, Henri. 2000. Writings on Cities. Translated by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Oxford: Blackwell. Lindner, Christoph and Miriam Meissner, eds. 2019. “Introduction: Urban Imaginaries in Theory and Practice.” In The Routledge Companion to Urban Imaginaries, edited by Christoph Lindner and Miriam Meissner, 1–22. New York and London: Routledge. Lynch, Kevin. 1990. The Image of the City. Cambridge and London: MIT Press. Morrison, Susan Signe. 2015. The Literature of Waste: Material Ecopoetics and Ethical Matter. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Pamuk, Orhan. 2006. Istanbul: Memoirs and the City. Translated by Maureen Freely. Vintage. Roberts, Timothy R., Morgan J. Roberts, and Brian P. Katz. 1997. Mythology: Tales of Ancient Civilizations. MetroBooks. Slovic, Scott. 2020. “Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City and the LocalGlobal Tension in Ecocritical Place Studies.” In Turkish Ecocriticism: From Neolithic to Contemporary Timescapes, edited by Serpil Oppermann and Sinan Akıllı, 87–98. New York and London: Lexington Books. Sözer, Önay and Ferda Keskin, eds. 2012. Jacques Derrida İle Birlikte: Pera, Peras, Poros. İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları. Tekin, Latife. 1993. Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills. Translated by Ruth Christie and Saliha Paker. London and New York: Marion Boyars Publishers. Thill, Brian. 2015. Waste. New York and London: Bloomsbury. Uzuner, Buket. 2008. Istanbullu. Translated by Kenneth J. Dakan. Everest. Walcott, Derek. “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory.” Nobelprize, https://www​ .nobelprize​.org​/prizes​/literature​/1992​/walcott​/lecture/. Accessed 25 January 2021. Yaeger, Patricia. 2008. “Editor’s Column: The Death of Nature and the Apotheosis of Trash.” PMLA 123 (2): 321–39.

Chapter 5

Oil Ecology, Niger Delta, and the Crisis of Survival in Ogaga Ifowodo’s The Oil Lamp Oluseye Abiodun Babatunde

Environmental justice is the activism strand of ecocriticism that confronts the existence of environmental inequalities in the world. It is a concept that trenchantly seeks to foster an ecological integrity in the world by demanding the protection of all people and communities against environmental injustices. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) defines environmental justice as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, colour, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.” Also, Joni Adamson et al., in the Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics and Pedagogy, define environmental justice as “the right of all people to share equally in the benefits bestowed by a healthy environment” (5). Environmental justice also often referred to as ecological justice or eco justice attempts to empower indigenous people and communities toward sustainable livelihoods, demanding environmental justice and maintaining communal sacred traditions. Though environmental justice was a later turn in the emergence of ecocriticism, it remarkably gained prevalence more than other dimensions of this literary theory due to its welfarist preachments. Ursula Heise notes that While a certain kind of multicultural consciousness accompanied the emergence of ecocriticism from its beginnings through its pronounced interest in Native American ways of life, mythologies, oratures, and literatures, a more politicized type of multiculturalism with broadly leftist orientations only became a sustained presence in the field with the rise of the environmental justice movement at the turn of the millennium. (386)

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Environmental justice, quite useful in the areas of public health and social discrimination, started in the 1980s as a movement and as a result of the growing multiplicity of polluting industries, power plants, and waste disposal areas located near low-income or minority communities. The movement, steeped in social ecology, was set to warn of the cultural complexity of issues bothering on the environment and to ensure fair distribution of environmental burdens among all people regardless of their racial background. Bookchin, in the Ecology of Freedom, argues that “the objectification of people as mere instruments of production fostered the objectification of nature as mere ‘natural resources’” (240). It may then be right to state that the injustice and the oppressive appropriation of nature and the people, among other things, led to the emergence of environmental justice. Clark says, “Environmental justice primarily names a social movement, plural and engaged in the urgency of local campaign work” (88). Many organizations abound in the world now take up different levels of environmental advocacy bothering on ecological injustice. Some of these include: the Greenpeace, Earth System Governance Project (ESGP), Global Environmental Facility (GEF), Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI), Local Authorities International Environmental Organisation (KIMO), Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Sierra Club, and the Indigenous Environmental Network, among others. The social ecologists, as the social justice advocates are sometimes called, are always interested in the social cost of environmental problems. They, according to Bertens, “target the power and social relations they seek at work in the process of decision making that leads to socio-environmental problems” (205). They engage in activism that confronts the industrial western world against damaging activities to the environment and the people especially as it relates to pollution and waste disposal, among others. The cupidity and the hegemonic nature of capitalism afford a crass exploitation and plundering of the natural resources and leaving the people around such resources ravaged and immiserated. The world has also witnessed other forms of environmental injustices oftentimes eventuated by irreverent shipment of wastes—toxic and nontoxic—from some industrial countries and deposited at the back yard of other countries especially third world countries. In 1988, it was the Nigerian students in Italy that alerted the media of the heaps of wastes that were shipped from Italy only to be deposited at the small Nigerian village of Koko. But for the activism of some environmental organizations which heightens consciousness around indiscriminate waste handling, some countries would have permanently become waste dumps of the industrial centers. It is common for governments and corporate bodies to locate power plants, industrial sites, dams, and such other environment-despoiling projects having dire environmental implications in areas where the poor reside.

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This most times carries a tome of devastating consequences on the people and the environment and sometimes also met with tragic pushbacks. This is what Joan Martinez Alier calls “the environmentalism of the poor” (2002). Environmental justice encourages communities to speak up so that their cases could be taken up and projected to a national or international scale as the case may be. Ulrich Beck agrees this much when he asserts that: In terms of social politics . . . the ecological crisis involves a systematic violation of basic rights whose long-term effect in weakening society can scarcely be underestimated. For dangers are being produced by industries, externalized by economics, individualized by the legal system, legitimized by the natural sciences and made to appear harmless by politics. That this breaking down the power and credibility of institutions only becomes clear when the system is put on the spot, as Greenpeace, for example has tried to do. (39)

The activism of Greenpeace and other environmental organizations has kept governments, corporations, and multinationals on their toes. These environmental organizations serve as worthy watch dogs to keep the environment save. It is also the activities of these organizations that have spurred many communities to protest the siting of projects that could orchestrate hazards for them and their environments. Degradation in the Niger Delta The Nigerian economy prior to the discovery of oil in 1956 was largely agrarian. The birth of crude oil exploration changed the texture and the fiber of the Nigerian economy and indeed the political space. Oil generated a lot of money into the Nigerian economy as the country’s legal tender became a petrol currency, and since then oil has become the backbone and the mainstay of the country’s economy. The centrality of oil to the Nigerian economy is further attested to by Jean Balouga when he says, oil is central to the development of Nigeria and constitutes the backbone of the economy. In the early 1990s petroleum production accounted for 25% of GDP, oil exports accounted for over 95% of its total export earnings, and about 75% of government revenue. (11)

According to the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics, in 2019, the oil and gas sector accounted for 5.8 per cent of Nigeria’s real GDP and indeed responsible for about 95 percent of the country’s export earnings. At first oil was a blessing as its proceeds were channeled toward the development of the country; it helped to fast-track growth through infrastructure upgradation and in building an enviable foreign reserve. The Nigerian economy was respected all over the

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world owing to the petrol currency the country was streaming in from the sale of crude which was in high demand all over the world. The country, however, soon became prodigal, frittering away resources through megalomaniac and corrupt leaders who immersed themselves in unimaginable corruption, building behemoth political structures that grew too heavy for the resources of the country to accommodate. The complicit forays of industries in the despoliation of the environment nudge both the environment and the people into subjective categories. This is instantiated by the slipshod and indeed the repression into which the oil prospecting areas and the people of the Niger Delta in Nigeria have been immured. Since the discovery of oil in Nigeria, the people of the Niger Delta have always been alienated not only from their resources but completely denied of normal existence as their means of livelihood like farming and fishing have become almost impracticable. This alienation is heightened by the government’s insalubrious support for the oil companies. Phia Steyn corroborates this when she writes that The process of alienation was further enhanced by active government support for the oil industry in their often conflicting relations with local communities. This trend was firmly established in the 1940s when the colonial government gave their full support to Shell / D’Arcy in their dealings with local communities, and was further enhanced by the 1949 decision by the Executive Council to all the company to continue work along lines dictated by the company because oil was national interest to Nigeria. (254)

This portrayed the datedness of the oppression of the Niger Deltan people to the colonial era, and it is most unfortunate that this practice is yet to abate. In fact, to date, while the oppression continues prevalently, government insouciance to the despoliation and the hardship of the people also continues unremittingly. The activities of the oil companies have made life unbearable for the people of the Niger Delta as many of them have been displaced from their ancestral lands and subsequently from their major preoccupations such as farming, fishing, and hunting. The poor environmentalism practiced by the oil companies and the successive compromising governments has paralyzed and altered the Niger Delta eco-system and its geo-histories. Indeed, the environment has suffered so much utter destruction and gross violation in the hands of the oil companies that the situation seems irredeemable. The situation is so awful and shattering that some have activated the curse theory to describe the Niger Delta and by extension the Nigerian situation. For instance, oil has made Nigeria too reliant on the resource with different components of the country ever waiting for oil revenue and windfall for survival and sustenance. Many of the states in Nigeria are economically unviable while the few sustainable ones are reluctant to grow their Internally Generated

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Revenue (IGR) based on their home resources or are encumbered by unfavorable constitutional frameworks. The resources curse theory according to Richard Auty (1983) is used to symbolize a situation where nations with rich resources often underperform economically. The study established a pattern that countries endowed with natural resources are unable to use their wealth as springboards of developments for their countries and boost their economies. This has also been corroborated by Jeffery Sachs and Andrew Warner in their Natural Resources and Economic Development: The Curse of Natural Resources (2001). The duo argued that “countries with great natural resource wealth tend to nevertheless grow slowly than resource-poor countries” (827). This claim seems patently valid to the Nigerian situation. It may be right to suggest that the people and the environment have been at the receiving end of oil exploration and exploitation in the Niger Delta region. Indeed, oil exploration has had negative and disastrous impacts on the people of the Niger Delta. Incessant oil spillage has caused massive destruction of farmlands as most of the land has been covered in sheens of greasy oil and continues to atrophy plants and vegetation. Also, the uncontrolled and incessant oil leakage has triggered contamination of potable water and the depletion of the forests and the mangroves. Pollution has also led to the asphyxiation and reduction in fish population, among others. The deplorable state that this has occasioned for humans and the environment is appalling and heartrending. The ineffectual response of different government to this situation has continued to rankle as some of the people intermittently indulge in restiveness, kidnapping, and such other criminality such as pipeline vandalism, and oil theft, among others. This for a long time has left the area largely volatile, worsened the loss of biodiversity, and indeed escalated the excruciating poverty situation in the area. The eco-unfriendly posture of the multinational companies is a major factor responsible for most of these harms, while the neglect and negligence of the government is another. Both the carefree attitude nature of the Nigerian leaders and the gross irresponsibility of the multinational corporations have created in the people a high level of despondency. The hopelessness is so grave that many Niger Delta people tend to exercise doubt in the Nigerian project. Okunoye identifies this when he opines that The people of the Niger Delta consciously define themselves as “Other” within Nigeria. This is evident in the way they draw attention to their marginal location in the Nigerian project and the growth in various parts of the region of associations and movements committed to articulating and realizing their basic rights. (415)

The paradox created by the oil-rich region and the inexplicable shortfall in the socioeconomic lives of the people led the people into some cheerlessness and

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lack of faith in the Nigerian state. This feeling of revulsion and animosity has been the stimulating attraction for the militants in the area to commonly and routinely take up arms against the Nigerian state. Obviously, when people are sandbagged and their resources taken away from them without adequate compensation, the resultant indignation and anger may result in actions capable of convulsing the structure upon which such a society is established. Eco Justice therefore forbids such ignoble development. In truth, eco justice seeks that ecological responsibilities should attract a linkage with social justice. This is why in its advocacy it often clamors for ecology and justice. This is not the case with the Niger Delta an area which, according to Ayuba Kadafa, “consists of diverse ecosystems of mangrove, swamps, fresh water (which) is the largest wetland in Africa and among the ten most important wetlands and marine ecosystems in the world” (19). Yet the lot of the inhabitants of the land does not reflect its richness. Indeed, oil pollution and other exploratory activities have turned the Niger Delta according to Kadafa into an “ecological wasteland” (19) where streams and rivers are contaminated, forests destroyed, and one in which an overwhelming general biodiversity loss has replaced a once wondrous landscape, one of the most profound natural ecosystems in the world. Uyigwe, quoted in Kadafa, says that “the ecosystem of the area is highly diverse and supportive of numerous species of terrestrial and aquatic fauna as well as human life” (19). The despoliation and the devastation that have taken over the region are not only huge but also of cataclysmic proportion so much that it has badly altered and restyled the ecology of the area. The National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA) claims that between 1976 and 1996 more than 2.4 million barrels of oil contaminated the environment. Kadafa also notes that “in fifty years at least 9–13 million barrels have been spilled in the Niger Delta” (19), thus damaging the land and her ecosystem fundamentally. Aside from exploration and exploitation, other eco-unfriendly activities devastating the environment include laying of pipelines across forest and mangroves, pipe leakages, vandalization, and gas flaring, among others. Some of the pipelines are aged and corroded, thus causing incessant spilling of oil on water and land. This pollution does not only affect humans and the environment alone, but it does also affect animals too. Briggs, Yoshida, and Gershwin say that “birds and mammals are vulnerable to oil spills when their habitats become contaminated, and this may reduce reproductive rates, survival and physiological impairment” (147). This is confirmation that even animals are affected by this environmental pollution and degradation. Therefore, the battle for survival in the degraded environment affects not only humans but also animals, plants, the air quality, and numerous other microorganisms that have roles to play in the efficient functionality of the ecosystem.

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The birth of activism and militancy in the Niger Delta is traceable to the engagement of Ken Saro-Wiwa, an intellectual and a writer who articulated the Niger Delta condition more than any individual from the region. SaroWiwa, an environmentalist of Ogoni extraction, upgraded the Niger Delta struggle by internationalizing it. He attracted the world’s attention to the huge despoliation that was going on in the oil region. In the words of Basil Gomba et al.: The region confronts a conspicuous menace on a daily basis: its biosphere is being diminished due to a lack of environmental considerations in the business of oil prospecting and extraction. While agitations to right such infractions initially remained largely internal to Nigeria, Saro-Wiwa became one activist who tore the mask off the crude face of profiteering and industrial abuses. And the world was let into the knowledge that, in the oil rich Niger Delta, the environment and its human populations are victims of one of the world’s greatest ecological tragedies. (65)

Ken Saro-Wiwa had used the platform of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) now Earth Summit held in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro to expose to the world the ecological barbarism of the multinational companies in the Niger Delta. But this was to cost him his life two years after as the head of the then Nigeria’s ruling junta, Sani Abacha, ordered the hanging of Saro-Wiwa and eight others on November 10, 1995, despite the huge outcry from voices of reason within the country and from the global community. The killing, rather than cow the people in the region as that seemed the intent, exacerbated the situation and led to greater activism and violence. It also led to the emergence of hordes of armed groups in the creeks. Again, it caused a swell in the ranks of activist-writers whirling out protest writings against the oppression and injustice being meted to the land and the people of the region. While Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Movement for the Emancipation of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) was intellectual and pacifist in its approach to the Niger Delta question, other groups such as the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) chose to confront the state terror machine with terror. As mentioned earlier, the Niger Delta condition became a stimulus for writers, and this could only account for the fecundity in the literary enterprise of the region. The Niger Delta struggle easily finds a fertile ground to launch a literary war on the oppressors of the land. Nigerian literature has often been accused of being too confrontational. Indeed, the literature is largely steeped in socialist realism where art is not for art’s sake but one pressed into a social function. Stewart Brown maintains, “the defining characteristic of Nigerian poetry in English has been its confrontational attitude to authority” (58). The

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irreverent exploration of the resources of the people and the attendant degradation that sentenced the people into penury and hardship therefore provide the inspiration for the area’s productiveness in reeling out various literary works of different tenor and temper. From the spirituality of J. P. Clark’s, A Reed in The Tide to the romantic irredentism of Gabriel Okara’s The Call of the River Nun and from Tanure Ojaide’s gripes about the appalling Niger Delta degradation, to Ogaga Ifowodo’s reproaches, among others, the story of the Niger Delta continues to be told in cadences of pain and anguish. Ifowodo’s The Oil Lamp, his third collection, is a book that captures the crisis of survival by the people of the Niger Delta whose natural resources have turned their land into a harsh and hostile environment orchestrated by a seeming grand conspiracy and complicity of the multinational companies, government and the western world that unremittingly profits from the plundering. It is saddening that the wreckage continues in the Niger Delta till today in the name of oil prospecting. An oil lamp, from which the title is derived, is an object meant to produce light or energy continuously suggesting the position of the Niger Delta as the area producing light or energy that the country needs to run both financially and as real time energy source of the country. The title also suggests that most of the poems in the collection are Ifowodo’s reflection on his homeland. It is, therefore, not surprising that some of the poems capture the struggle for survival of a people whose environment becomes overly destroyed due to oil exploration. The whole collection which is divided into five parts is the narrative of the agony, pain, and the suffering of the people of the Niger Delta entrapped in an inferno of oil profiteering and utter government connivance. The five parts are broken down into Jese, Odi, Ogoni, the Pipes war, and Cesspit of the Niger area with Waterscape and The Agonist serving as prologue and epilogue respectively. The names under which the sections are divided are symbols of death, torture, and anguish, all acting as sad reminders of the horrendous disasters that have been visited on the region. The collection therefore is the narrative and the encoding of the annoyance, agony and the horrors of the Niger Delta people. The poem “A Waterscape” serves as the prologue to the collection providing the much-needed background about the geography of the Niger Delta. The poem presents the reader with a rich and profound nature of the natural environment of the Niger Delta area. The Niger Delta sits on water and therefore belted to the coastlines. Its littoral setting is further confirmed by the white mangroves that beautify the entire landscape and this is only characteristic of coastlines worldwide. The poet using the rich images of riverine objects like plankton, shrimp, egg and fish in the bloom, creeks, among others, reflects on the seaside nature of the topography of the Niger Delta. Also, the reference to “ancestral lake” denotes the long connection and attachment of the people to the area. It has been observed that most Niger Delta poets

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seem connected irretrievably to the land; hence, their choice of images and symbolisms are often sourced from the area. Okunoye, quoted in Egya, notes that “[the] liberty with which Okara in particular drew imagery and symbolism from his birthplace betrays the harmony and communion that the [poets of Niger Delta origin] maintain with their immediate physical environment” (416–17). The connection to the land is also a confirmation that place has a way of influencing culture and occupation of the people. Little wonder that the survival of many in the area depends on the environment and ineluctably therefore not surprising that the major preoccupation of the people is fishing. Ifowodo captures this when he says: free the creeks of weeds, fishermen glide home to the first meal. (ix)

The Niger Deltans live literally on water and are accustomed to fishing as this is the mainstay of their economic life. Their other preoccupations include farming, hunting, and trading. The notion of having their first meal after a hard day’s job is therefore suggestive of a people that are hardworking and productive. The degradation of the environment, especially the contaminated waters, exposes the damning consequences on the fishing preoccupation that the people are reputed. This is eventuated in the poet’s description below: Blacker than the pear, deeper than soot, Massive ink-well, silent and mute: Water, black water. (ix)

Water is supposed to be clean and transparent, but black water indicates contaminated water that may not be drinkable or useful in exercising other domestic shores. Similarly, contaminated waters is injurious to fish and other animals whose existence largely depend on water. The plausible question to ask then is how humans survive in an unhealthy water and environment. Yet this is the lot of the Niger Delta people. The black water obviously is not natural but polluted as a result of oil spillage and despoliation of the land owing to oil exploration. It really is unimaginable how people of the Niger Delta survive in an environment where there is no clean water especially in a country where public water supply is a far cry. This suggests such a pitiable and agonizing existence that has characterized living for the Niger Delta people. The poems grouped under Part 1 Jese are divided into fifteen subsets labeled in roman numerals, and they piece the different experiences of the degradation that threaten the people’s survival. Oil being in high demand all over the world ought to have impacted positively on the lives of the people and indeed on the environment but rather it manifested into a peripeteia. Indeed, as oil became the doomsday of the people, it also resulted in

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Nigeria’s Dutch disease. This is what Ojaide calls “sitting on oil and yet remaining impoverished” (244). Subsets I–III of the collection address the degradation of the earth through deforestation, the failed promise of government to provide electricity, and the piping away of the wealth of a people. All these as X-rayed in the different poems become the standpoint of a penetrating social commentary on the provision of basic infrastructure and on the failure of government to cater for the people and the environment. The poems lament the survival of trees that have become victims of cooking, yet the gas being used in cities and metropoles are sourced from the Niger Delta land. The forests have become perforated as a result of incessant tree felling and the forest that normally serves as the shield for the human community is removed and humans become vulnerable to danger from all fronts. Ifowodo shows how vulnerable the trees have become when he writes that The forest quivered as trunk after trunk snapped, and a nameless rage wagged green-fingered. (3)

There is an inscribed and magnified Anthropocene discernible in the Niger Delta. The underlayer to this is in the hostilities and the counter hostilities that have characterized engagement in the region. This is to the extent that human actions and activities have been responsible for the depletion of the region’s environment. While, on one hand, the forests are wiped out by the exploration of the oil companies, on the other hand, in the event of fuel scarcity especially kerosene which is used for cooking in many homes, people resort to firewoods, and this often leads to the felling of trees. Some of these trees are cut and not allowed to dry properly before they are converted into firewood; hence, the poet writes “with logs still alive they hissed”/ “then puffed out clouds of wet smoke so bitter” (3). The earlier humans appreciate the place of forests and its eco-systems in human lives the better for our collective survival lest the death of the earth may be nearer than expected. Forests serve as food, as timber, as carbon storage, as nutrient cycling, as water and air purification, and as maintenance of wildlife habitat and as materials for drugs for the treatment of ailments. Forests in Africa also serve as sanctuaries where deities are worshipped and other religious activities conducted among others. The importance of forest in human and animal lives cannot be overemphasized; there is, therefore, a strong need for humans to show greater restraint in acts capable of causing deforestation. There should rather be more commitments and efforts in the preservation of forests than depleting it. In the light of this, the tree planting initiative sweeping across the world is laudable, and indeed the campaign should be intensified. Humans and animals are endangered when the forest is completely degraded as this may resort in dire climate change consequences such as causing excessive heat, flood, and

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habitat loss, among numerous other effects. As part of stemming the tide of unusual heat that took over Akwa Ibom State recently, the Tropical Research and Conservation Centre planted 500 trees in five villages (Tropical Research and Conservation Centre). This is an exemplary effort that should be reproduced in all human environments. Some of the poems are also social commentaries that expose the ploy of some politicians who glib their ways into position without fulfilling the promises they made. Some of these politicians capitalize on the sufferings of the people in this regard; hence, they promise to redress the situation if voted into power, but surprisingly they do not. Some of them even exploit the people’s sufferings as cannon fodder to enrich themselves. The poet writes that on moonless nights when fireflies mocked the dimmed promise of eletiriki. (3)

Most Nigerian politicians fib to covet and harvest the votes of malleable voters who fall prey to their lies, a ploy that some of them have mastered adroitly. This has become a trend in Nigerian politics which, if unchecked, may be the Achilles’ heel of the Nigerian democratic enterprise as the people’s patience is fast running dry. Politicians at events speak vauntingly and mendaciously of things they do not have plans of realizing. The poet captures one of such occasions when he writes that Promises made by a hard-hatted minister at the tape-cutting for the first. (4)

The social frame within which the Niger Delta is geographically entrapped is soused in a number of vices upon which the quandary of the Niger Delta continues to glide. Politicians rule by deceit and falsehoods, and this has become a delineating feature of some of these politicians and their allies. The piping away of the wealth of a people is also couched in legerdemains and fake promises. The wealth of the Niger Delta people is shipped away to strange lands to construct luxuries, yet the people are left to carry the burden. Almost everything in the Niger Delta is burdened—the environment, the people, the plants, animals, and even the pipes through which oil is channeled to other parts of the country have been left unattended for long and are overburdened. Ifowodo relays that This was how the damage was done, With old pipes corroded and cracked. (5)

Most times some of these politicians are in league with the profiteering multinational oil companies and are only interested in the sleaze that such

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connivance affords. The people must learn to vote out irresponsible politicians. This is the surest way of blurring out the oppressive forces that torment them. People should not compromise during elections and later expect good governance. Nigeria really needs new crop of committed politicians who could right long-standing environmental compromises and situate the country well on the line of progress and civility. In poems iv–xv, the poet through a piercing narrative instantiates some of the events, leading to the devastations in the Niger Delta. In the poet’s account, the one of Jese occurred when a group of boys’ chase rodents into a burst oil pipeline that has created a fountain. Exultant of this discovery, the four boys, obviously from a poverty-stricken background, race home to fetch pails and kegs to collect the booty they just discovered to probably make some quick earnings out of it. In the midst of the frenzy, scrambling, and scooping by the impoverished community, an inferno ensues and consumes a whole generation. The poet captures the fascinating media coverage of the incident as follows: The news came on the twelfth night: A breach in a refined products pipeline. (7)

The news of Jese inferno was widespread, and it was a major event that the media really feasted on ineluctably. But within the Nigerian space, it was another blaze usual in the Niger Delta where people in great numbers would have been roasted into different shapes with the scene resembling a sculptor’s gallery. Humans and the environment are destroyed in one fell swoop and rather than the people and the government learning from this, everyone carries on as if nothing has happened and the story of horror continues as the one captured by Ifowodo thus: the dripping and drying fat of breasts and buttocks spiced by the aromatic thyme of the shriveling. (11)

This scenic and gory depiction of the Jese furnace is sufficient to jolt a discerning mind into finding culpability for this incessant destruction of the environment and the people. The triad notion that Egya suggested provides the answer when he opines that “the people, the multinationals and the government” (2) share levels of responsibilities and affectations in the continued ruin of the environment and the people. For instance, while the multinational oil companies in their usual capitalistic reveling are preoccupied with criminal profiteering and in the bid continues to degrade the environment, the people’s violent disposition to the multinational oil companies attracts greater violence from the government that seems only interested in the dollar

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proceeds of oil rather than securing the welfare of the people and the environment. Some critics have pointed at corruption as one of the factors for government’s insensitivity. But Egya suggested that it is not in all cases that environmental degradation is tied to corruption. Egya opines that the dialectic for these poets is not the clash between humans and the environment but, more importantly, a tripartite dimension that aligns the fate of the environment to that of the people, and pitches both against the ineptitude of the establishment. It focuses on the class conflict between the perceived traditional owners of the land, such as the farmers and the fishermen, and those who otherwise tap the wealth of the land, such as public and private institutions. (2)

The continued insensitivity of the government continues to eclipse the hopes of the people. Of the three major stakeholders in the degradation of the Niger Delta, namely, the government, the multinationals, and the people, the government has the yeoman’s responsibility of securing the people and ensuring that their resources are not siphoned at the detriment of the people and the environment. The Jese incident opens a breadth of concern for examining the nexus between humans and animals especially when the shared environment is threatened. The incident reveals that animals are as endangered as humans in moments of danger. The situation also reinforces the commonality of attitude between humans and animals most times. For instance, the poet paints a picture of how some of the animals reacted to the inferno. While some animals are trapped and killed in the inferno, some wait in the wings for a feast like no other. Nature sometimes can be inexplicable. Some animals like some humans derive pleasure in the downfall of others and in the human world just like in nature, might is right. Ifowodo writes that They came swiftly to the wreck, the prey birds, Circling the rising and spreading smoke. (12)

In a similar vein, even crops and farm fields are not left out of the utter destruction. Occurrences like these reinforce the argument that the Anthropocene is truly here with the world. Human activities have increasingly impacted the Earth system and are now major factors of the processes of environmental changes. The poet says: The fire uncoiled like an infinite Cobra, stretched to the farthest edges. (13)

When crops and farmlands are affected in this manner it breeds famine which threatens human survival. The laying of pipelines and other oil exploratory

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activities in the area has a way of affecting farming activities not to talk of oil spillage and inferno which often worsen the situation. The country currently is yet to be food sufficient, situations that could aggravate a brewing food crisis in the country must therefore be prevented. Again, farming gulps a lot of efforts; it is thus frustrating to see ones sweat wasted without any compensation. Also affected by this blaze are the creeks and the ponds that are not spared in the wreckage. Ifowodo captures their agony thus: The creeks and ponds, soon to boil dry Joined the fields, thinking the case. (13)

It is unimaginable that creeks and ponds would dry off as a result of an inferno. But this though may be exaggerative, it portrays the depth of the despoliation and also a reflection of how battered the ecosystem in the Niger Delta area has become. But when one considers the enormity of the destruction done to the cycle of nature one may but agree with the horrendous submission hereby painted when the poet records that: The land burned, the trees burned, the rivers, burned The smoke unrolled endless bolts of cloth. (14)

The annihilation of humans and the environment is therefore total and of serious devastating effect. The attendant complete cycle of destruction distresses the environment and the people yet carries a tome of immediate and long-term fatal consequences on both categories. Matters of this nature are better handled by the government to provide succor and relief to the people but rather than do this the Head of State talked down on the victims with harshness and arrogance. Ifowodo says This was the peace plan: death by hunger or fire It was fire for Jese, ashes and scars for all. (14)

The logic of the state based on repression in addressing the Niger Delta issue seems to condense the indignation of the people. The chary reaction of the leader of the group here suggests a knee jerk approach to an issue impinging on the existence of a people and their environment. Such sassy remarks and attitude often characterize government’s response to the plight of the people in instances like this and rather than calm nerves it has often exacerbated the situation. For instance, the leader of the group’s reaction smacks of insensitivity and sheer wickedness. One of the major problems confronting many African nations today is that some of their leaders are quite oblivious and indifferent to the yearnings and aspirations of their people. Ifowodo further records the arrogance of the head of state when he says:

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Will the government aid the victims of Jese? Then steadied his nerves: No, he said, (15)

Government officials and their agencies without compunction continue to ideate a solution to the crisis in the threat of force or the actual use of it. For this reason, among others, the Niger Delta has been a hotbed of militancy which dragged on for a long time until the Federal Government recently initiated some amnesty programs which seem to be working as this initiative has kept the militants out of the creeks. The militants occupied and became lords of the creeks living on criminality such as vandalism, and illegal sale of crude and illegally refined petroleum products. They blew pipelines and kidnapped many of the expatriates working for the oil multinational companies as hostages taking ransom before they were released. Similar frustration led madam Edoja to resort to singing an elegy to oil that ordinarily should have affected their lives positively but which has become a nightmare to their survival and that of their environment. One therefore agrees with Egya that “any engagement with eco-writing in Nigeria would rather center on the interface between the yearnings of the people for liberation from an inhumane authority, and the fate of the environment exploited by that same authority” (2). For instance, Mrs. Edoja’s lamentation points directly at this when she cries that Oil is my curse, oil is our doom. Where is my husband, where is my only love? (17)

Mrs. Edoja, a ninety-year-old woman, laments the dangerous environment which has inhibited their survival from different generations. She bemoans the doom that oil has brought to their community. The woman has lost her children and her husband to the inferno that gulps the community she is therefore left alone mourning the loss of her loved ones. All this is an indication that the Niger Delta environment is a highly volatile and precarious environment to biotic and abiotic lives. It thus becomes incumbent on the multinational oil companies and the relevant government agencies like the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) to be more proactive in attending to some of the attendant problems in the Niger Delta particularly as regards cleaning up the land and preventing further oil spillages. This would go a long way in preventing disasters like the one of Jese. Unfortunately, there has been many Jeses in Nigeria and just like the real Jese, they were preventable. Odi is next in line in the dooms that oil has brought to the Niger Delta. The Odi Massacre as it has come to be known occurred on November 20, 1999. It was a disastrous attack on the Ijaw community of Odi, a town in Bayelsa State of Nigeria. Nnimo Bassey quoted in Tope Fasua claimed that “nearly 2,500 people” were killed in the catastrophe (113). The incident was

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orchestrated when five members of the Nigerian Police were murdered by a gang near Odi. The attendant revenge mission by the military ordered by President Olusegun Obasanjo left the whole town completely annihilated but for an Anglican Church, a bank and a health center. The Odi disaster is a further testimony to the dangerous environment that the Niger Delta environment has become. Adopting a lucid narrative style, the Odi experience is captured by Ifowodo from poem xvi to poem xxviii. The poet takes us through the background of the incident to the catastrophe indicating that five cops and four soldiers sent to maintain peace off a youth revolt arising from a matter of homicide were killed. Ifowodo further narrates how the president ordered for the destruction of Odi: A battalion of justice scorched its path To Odi, came to solve by war. (21)

The tension and the breakdown of law and order are deducible from the image painted by Ifowodo in the collection. Though it is almost hidden and almost unnoticeable, an environment in which a group of criminals can hide and reside and probably even given cover from being apprehended till it degenerated into such humongous disaster, is an indication that such a community is complicit and crime prone. The criminal temerity of a group of criminals to kill law enforcement agents is disdainful and uncharitable. However, the order of the “president” to have declared an onslaught on the entire community as if the criminality was a communal act, thus killing many innocent souls including women and children in retaliation was extreme. This explains how endangered the Niger Delta people and the land truly are. The people of Odi were dislocated, and everybody ran in different directions hiding in the creeks. Bombs were thrown here and there and the whole community became a terror enclave. Humans were forced to live in the Hobbesian state as they eat insects and wild roots raw: And the men, far from yam or fish, turned insect Hunters, wild root diggers. Banished. (23)

Bombs continued to descend on Odi with craze and utter deviltry while the people flee deeper into the forest with their children strapped to their backs crying, famished and fearful. As this goes on, the soldiers having been satisfied that the insurgent would have run into the forest enter into the town and begin a house-to-house campaign with inexplicable flagrancy. It is the height of man’s inhumanity to man. On the one hand is the insensitive and the oppressive Federal Government; on the other hand is the overzealousness

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on the part of the security agencies who sometimes, when drafted to a crisis spot to maintain the law, exhibit ruthlessness and aggravate the scale of violence. Ifowodo writes about such overzealousness of the soldiers especially when they discover during house-to-house search that some military materials like “the army combat kit: fatigues, olive wide buckle belt hanging from a wall, dusty boots and helmet.” The fact that these obviously must have been stripped from a murdered soldier sends the soldiers into a wild frenzy founded unjustly on an esprit de corps vindication to go berserk on the village, the people and the land. Ifowodo writes that They emptied their riffles on the walls On the wing of the roof unbroken. (28)

Such is the brazen dementia that the soldiers exhibit in demolishing Odi. They spare nothing. Not even Sergeant Tobi alias One Nigeria who is killed by a tree felled by the brutality of the soldiers is spared. Sergeant Tobi is paralyzed by a spinal cord injury he suffered in the Biafran war and had for thirty years begged death to end his anguish. Adopting the omniscient narrative technique, the poet takes us into the inner recesses of the One-Nigeria man as he considers between taking flight like others and staying to be killed by the rampaging forces. He chooses the latter. And truly as he predicts, he is killed by the forces of the country he fought to keep as one nation. In a fluid poetic narration Ifowodo captures the death and the latent irony associated with his death. He writes: What they had not seen was the body Of Sergeant Tobi, alias One Nigeria. (29)

Sergeant Tobi, according to the poet, says “One war spared only my breath, froze me to a bed/let this mark my end/” (29). The soldiers at the fish market split a dead dog open, write on standing doors and walls with the dog’s blood declaring the end of Odi and the war they unleashed on the tiny village and her people. Ifowodo writes: This is the end of Odi This is what we do to cowards. (30)

An army of a nation reduces itself into ragtag armed men jubilant over annihilating a people it swore to protect. The oil in Odi ironically becomes the cause of the destruction of the land. The incident is a further confirmation that the world has gone really capitalistic where materiality is worshipped. In the case of Odi, oil assumes a better value than human lives; hence, oil is defended at

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the expense of human lives. Little wonder that Ifowodo writes that “We will protect our oil wealth at any cost, says the President.” It is, therefore, not surprising the bewailing of Pa Piriye who after returning to his house is greeted with ruins and the blood sign that reads: “NEXT TIME YOU SEE SOLDIER YOU WILL RUN.” The pain of the old man seems not the devastation that has been visited on himself, his people, and their environment as much as the perpetrators who are blacks as himself. The old man remembers the invasion of Benin kingdom by the white colonialist and how they cursed them. But the old man could not come to terms with the fact that this colossal destruction was effected by his fellow countrymen. The old man laments: I have lived too long. Today, my feet . . . My eyes have seen two evils, must not see another. (31)

Such is the regret of independence as expressed by Pa Piriye as Ifowodo deploys a dramatic technique to allow the character speak for himself. The feeling and the thought that colonialism was the worst thing to have happened are dwarfed by the reality of black-on-black inhumanity. This feeling is strong and potent enough to evoke a feeling of revulsion, disappointment, and agony as it does in Pa Piriye. Many Africans had thought the worst was over in colonialism, but the current realities in various African states affirm the contrary, as many African leaders who replaced the colonialists are worst off. Many of the African leaders have become gods who must be worshipped by their people. Many of them stay in power throughout their life time. Their own blend of democracy is monarchical in content and form. Hence the constitution and the people are their appendages available to them to twist and turn according to their mood and temper. The soldiers’ plea to a fisherman returning home after a long time on the sea that he should not return home is a testimony of their wicked venture in Odi. They said, “You have no home anymore. Go back to sea!” (32). But this did not stop the fisherman from seeing the ruins that their village has become, the ashes that the schoolbag from where his daughter usually brings out The Fisherman’s Invocation (1978) which she reads to welcome him from the sea. According to the poet, “He held the book and wept into the ashes of burnt-out things, / the bitter memory of unusable fragments” (32). Odi thus ineluctably becomes the metaphor for state’s brutality, cruelty, and oppression. The Odi narrative is replete with woes and gory tales of killings, devastation, and suffering, and it is symbolic of the general experience that has characterized the day-to-day living of the Niger Delta people. The Odi massacre is a huge sour point in the history of Nigerian statehood, an abuse of power, a denigration and commonization of human lives, and a privileging of oil over humans. Egya aptly puts it when he says that “the

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people face extinction because of the wealth of the land, and the land faces depletion because of the greed of certain people” (10). It is indeed tragic and heartrending the way the land is exploited, the humans are maltreated, and the environment jeopardized. Nnimo Bassey, in “United Niger Delta Oil Co.” captures it succinctly when he says, “As the oil companies suck crude from the belly of the earth” (39) they also “pump blood into the belly of the earth” (41). As paradoxical as this may sound, Bassey has in these few words painted the sanguinary reality that pervades the Niger Delta. There is much oil in the Niger Delta as there is much blood. Similarly, Ifowodo is able to depict the extreme cruelty suffered by the Niger Delta people through the gory depiction of the Odi tragedy and he is thus able to move the reader to pity and empathy. This has been a major devotion of many of the Niger Delta poets who tend to attract attention to the area by portraying the inhuman treatment that the people and the land are subjected. And this, they have effectively achieved as they have raised the issue of the Niger Delta to international consciousness, a move piloted by Ken Saro-Wiwa. The sequence of the poems captured under “Ogoni” are in furtherance of Ifowodo’s argument that the Niger Delta people have rather been unfairly treated despite their abundant wealth that is being shipped away to develop other areas. These poems portray the oppression and the brutality of the Ogoni land by the military obviously approved by the federal authorities to unleash brutality on the Niger Delta people and their land. In a fearful, yet sympathy-laden, tone, Ifowodo painstakingly and in a gripping dramatic poetry relates the terror and the subjugation of the people living in perpetual fear and horror. Beyond the words of the poet, Ifowodo creates some characters representative of the two groups that can be blamed for the turn of events in the Niger Delta. These are Major Kitemo or Major Kill Them All who later became Colonel Kitemo representing the oppressors, an old man, the school boy, his father, and a woman who represent the community, the oppressed. These people, rather than being readily available to sheepishly, take in the indoctrination of Major Kitemo, display an unexpected grit, brilliance, and a sound knowledge of the historicocultural context of the subject matter in a manner that not only shocks Major Kitemo but makes him answer unexpected questions uncomfortably. The quartet display a rich sense of history of their land which jolts the oppressor by their sound arguments which is able to deflate the chicanery that Kitemo is wont to sell to them. Indeed, the soundness of their argument makes Kitemo almost lose his temper being a soldier trained in brute force other than in bowing to superior argument. The argument between Major Kitemo and the people raises germane issues of ownership, resource control, and the centrality of the people in the exploitation of the resources of their land. When Major Kitemo asked the people whether they really own the land,

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the kind of answers he got must have sent jitters down his spine. Ifowodo captures this: “The land is Nigeria’s,” I corrected them. “And how did Nigeria come to own the oil?” (40)

The poet through this dramatic posturing adopts multiple voices to give vent to different opinions and perspectives. From what the soldier says, one is able to access his inner recesses. Similarly, through the same technique, one could decipher the mindset of the people. The dramatic nature of the poetry therefore creates a good ambiance for accessing different opinions on the subject matter in focus. The woman asks: No vex Oga soja, but who (Don’t be irate officer but who} Or wetin make up dis Nigeria? (or what makes up the Nigeria?) (40)

Such is the level of intelligence displayed by the people, the soldier felt they could brainwash and break their resolve to demand for justice. It has been a long struggle and agitation that started since the oil exploitation and the struggle has been handed from generation to generation. It would then be foolhardy for anybody to feel that the long agitation would be wished away on a platter of indoctrination, brute force, and blackmail. The Niger Delta struggle has become a culture, a way of life, and part of the ethos of a people that have continually been battered and submerged in oppression and travails occasioned by years of neglect by some capitalistic oil companies and an insensitive government. This neglect thus becomes the fuel upon which history laden with anger and despair is transferred from generation to generation. This accounts for why the Niger Delta is the hotbed of protests and activism aimed at correcting the long period of injustice. Even “Major Kill Them All” as Major Kitemo is sometimes called attests to the doggedness of the Niger Delta people and their commitment to save themselves and their land. Ifowodo captures his confession when he says: I had used two centuries of killing skills, Yet they clung to their claim. (44)

The speaking voice here obviously that of the killer soldier brags about his killing skills, and one wonders who his victims are other than the people he is paid to defend. This depicts the cruelty and the oppressive nature with which the oil corporations and their Nigerian state collaborator have been handling the Niger Delta issue. The clamor of Environmental Justice for a fair treatment and the meaningful involvement of the people in the appropriation of

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their resources should be upheld and made practicable. Attempts by capitalist institutions to try and mock the degradation of the people and their land as Huggan and Tiffin want to do, when they try to diminish the writings of Ken Saro-Wiwa as theatrical, are nothing but pretentious. This is not only annoying but also repulsive. The duo wrote in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing that the combination of fable and high moral drama that can be seen in SaroWiwa’s autobiographical accounts of the Ogoni’s struggle also tends to be replicated in the critical discourse that is applied to them, indicating a general tendency in activist writing towards a theatricalization of the issues it sets out. (43)

One can only wonder if theatricalization is apposite in the capturing of the suffering of a people from the point of view of an insider. For instance, the quartet almost summarized the agony of the people of Ogonis in the hands of their oppressors when they eventually emerge from the creeks where they hid themselves throughout the period the military unleash terror on them. Ifowodo writes: three have died of snakebites, four of malaria. two women have given birth under trees. Five elders’ hearts. (48)

One then wonders what is theatrical in this kind of portrayal. The events around which Ogaga has built a poetic narrative are real and are verifiable historical facts recorded in the media and in different research works. When human beings and nature are annihilated for profiteering or economic gains, it leads to the commodification of human lives where material gains are made to override human and ecological concerns. Deep ecology frowns at attempts by humans blindfolded by crass profiteering by looking at the atomistic self in pursuit of liberal capitalism. Deep ecology, out of its biocentric ethics, perceives that to kill another creature is an act of violence against oneself because the “self” truly consists of the self and other creatures. So, when humans destroy fellow humans, they destroy themselves. The same way when humans destroy nature, they destroy themselves. Humans therefore must move to shelve any social and ecological structure that privileges aggressive capital accumulation which creates “self” as the utmost focal point of significance. Indeed, Shell, the major beneficiary of the oil in the Niger Delta has severally been accused of being complicit in the killing of the people of the area. It is instructive that for peace to rein, the people of the Niger Delta deserve a better treatment and their environment given a better attention.

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So great and intense was the crisis of survival in the Niger Delta at a point that it yielded the greatest vandalization that Nigeria has ever seen. Many of the youths of the Niger Delta obviously jaded by the status quo and inspired by massive unemployment took to arms and challenged the Nigerian state. They seized the creeks and continually broke the oil pipes. They vent their angers on the oil corporations by kidnapping their expatriates. The Niger Delta became a sweltering point for violent engagements as different armed militant groups took over the reins committing all manners of atrocities in the name of activism. The crisis was so bad that it did not only affect the internal oil consumption of the country, the international oil market too was badly affected. The government mobilized the terror machine of the state, and the theatre of war was set. The resort to arm by the Niger Delta youths is what Ifowodo attempts to explain and defend in the poem Pipe wars. The “Pipe wars” is the tag for the different poems that narrate the experiences written in defense of the resort to arms. Ifowodo recollects the hanging of the Ogoni Nine, a group of activists who led the struggle against inhuman treatment of the people of the Niger Delta and their environment. The poet created this as the reason for the taking up of arms by the youths. The uprising is also fueled by the long brutality of the state and the oil corporation’s insensitivity to the plights of people of the region arising from their exploratory activities: they hang nine for murders pre-planned. (51)

The killing of Ogoni Nine against all international implorations and pleas may likely continue at least for a long time as the reason for all manner of activism in the Niger Delta. The act was seen as an attempt to silence agitation in the area but if that was the intent, then the strategy was counterproductive. Indeed, it escalated the agitation and in fact took it to a heinous violent scale. Another reason for the escalation of the crisis in the Niger Delta is the continuous despoliation of the land that seems insuperable. The more the despoliation continues to affect the lives of the people and their environment, the more the people feel trapped in a seemingly irredeemable perplexity. Ifowodo tries to summarize the sufferings of the people when he writes: They are that lives amidst such wealth in our favour Land; to hear them bewail the dissipation. (52)

These threnodic lines present the hardship of a people; oil on river kills the fishes and takes away the fishermen from work, sludge irrigates the lowland, and sends away the farmers from their work. The people live in a violated environment. In all of this, the government seems most culpable of failing to

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protect its citizens. Sometimes, the government is even alleged of sponsoring rifts among the oil nations to weaken their resolve to fight against the wretchedness that oil has placed on them. A case in point is the feud between Oleh and Olomoro, two oil communities that had lived in peace for many years only to get embroidered in an internecine feud that has devastated the two communities. Ifowodo suggested that this rift was induced by the government as he writes that:

into a war for territory Between Oleh and Olomoro. (54)

The government and the oil companies’ collaborators sponsor feud among the host communities to present the government an excuse to foist mayhem on them. Sometimes these unsuspecting host communities fall into such trap willy-nilly with brother killing brother and devastating their environment the more through trappings of war and violence while government plays the ostrich. The continuous gas flaring that pollutes and makes the air inky is yet unattended, yet successive governments continue to look on as the wealth of the country is frittered away and the lives of the people endangered. Ifowodo says: by the flame of Iron-Dragon— the gas-flaring stack whose awful mouth spits fire. (55)

Indeed, it is the gas flaring stack that Ifowodo calls the oil lamp from which the collection derives its title. The gas flaring stack is the oil lamp that lights up the Niger Delta instead of providing “eletriki” (55) which is the name the people of the area has given to electricity, which many of the host communities lack among other infrastructures, yet the same oil proceeds are applied to provide infrastructures in other communities. The oil lamp at another level refers to the area that provides light to the dark economy of the country which the Niger Delta epitomizes. Indeed, at another fold, while the crude proceed is made to oil the economies of metropoles across the world, it woefully fails to address the infrastructural deficits in Nigeria. Though the oil lamp lights Nigeria (as the mainstay of the economy), it fails to harvest the much-needed basic infrastructure and development for the Niger Delta community. For instance, the women still visit “Old Tobrise” (61) for child birth. This is an indication of lack of health care facilities. The women have to rush Wonodi’s wife to Warri, “where they say there’s a machine / to save the ones that come too soon” (61). Wonodi’s wife has a premature delivery which the local midwife cannot handle. Sick people are taken to Warri or Port Harcourt on canoes as there are “no motor ways’ (60) and /there’s no doctor in Asaba-Ase/ no

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clinic in a hundred miles, /” (60). So, whether it is in the midnight or not, the sick must be rushed to Warri or Port Harcourt where there are modern health facilities. But when the people get to these towns, they see a great division. While there is the side that is always in perpetual darkness courtesy of the “Never Expect Power Always” (62) which is the street name for the dysfunctional electricity corporation in Nigeria, the other side, the oil staff estates are always adorned with electricity. Ifowodo describes this: See where I live—a shack in the swamp But light shines on the oil staff estates. (62)

This is the reflection of a typical Nigerian society which privileges the rich far and above the ordinary man on the street. The rich live in well-structured areas enjoying all the basic infrastructures bordering on security, social amenities, health care, healthy environment, among others, while the poor are pushed into slums and ghettos where criminality and diseases are bred. The Nigerian society privileges the white expatriates well above their own nationals who may be able to deliver better service. This is a practice that must change if Nigeria must encourage its own nationals to take up the challenges of nationhood and development. The country can only develop if it looks inward and harnesses its own resources well enough for greater efficiencies. Again, the Niger Delta is also the oil lamp, being always on fire, due to the exploration, exploitation, violence, military operations among other armed struggles that have almost become a permanent feature of the oil-rich area. The Niger Delta is a largely explosive area which harbors all manner of agitations wild and tender. It is characterized by killings, kidnapping, oil theft, pipeline vandalization, underdevelopment, poverty, and diseases, among others. This has not only threatened the survival of people of the area, it has imbued the people with hopelessness, trepidation, and anger. Indeed the Niger Delta oscillates between calm and wild agitations. The Federal Government Amnesty program seems to be working; at least it has succeeded in calming the frayed nerves of the militants and the country is enjoying some respite. CONCLUSION Ifowodo’s The Oil Lamp variously chronicles the hardship, sufferings, and the cruelty meted to a people whose only sin is the wealth that nature has deposited in their land. The situation of the Niger Delta seems conformed to David Montgomery’s opinion when he says “the soil quality determines the rise and fall of empires” (1). Ifowodo’s The Oil Lamp also records how the environment becomes degraded in the massive exploitation and exploration

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that continue indiscriminately in the Niger Delta. It is a hideous and a dreadful picture of how a people’s livelihood and survival has become withdrawn from them. The book is a dirge lamenting the physical and the psychic dislocatedness of a people culturally situated and accustomed to the fecundity of littoral lifestyle. The collection represents a mournful withdrawal of an organic environment from a people by the pollution and the pollutants that the ravaging forces of capitalism have come to foist on the Niger Delta. It is an elegy of a people faced with hopelessness and wretchedness in spite of abundant natural resources. It is the requiem of a people bearing the brunt of a wasteful and reckless nation, a people constantly yearning and crying against oppression and burning for justice for the long years of depravity and neglect and for the blood of lost illustrious sons and daughters that have been mixed with oil and taken to lubricate capitalism across imperial metropoles. The Oil Lamp is the monody of a people and an environment caught in a survival fix. REFERENCES Adamson Joni, Mei Mei Evans, and Stein Rachel. 2002. The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics and Pedagogy. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Auty, Richard. 1983. “High-Cost Energy, Resources and the Third World Growth, Lessons from the Two Oil Shocks.” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, Vol. 4, No. 2: 73–86. Ayuba, Kadafa A. 2012. “Environmental Impacts of Oil Exploration in the Niger Delta of Nigeria.” Global Journal Science Frontier Research Environment and Earth Sciences, Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 19–27. Balouga, Jean. 2009. “The Niger Delta: Defusing the Bomb.” International Association for Energy Economics. First Quarter, 8–11. Basil, Sunday N. 2013. Obari, Gomba, and Ugiomoh, Frank. Environmental Challenges and Eco-Aesthetics in Nigeria’s Niger Delta. Third Text, Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 65–75. Routledge. Beck Ulrich. 2009. Critical Theory of World Risk Society: A Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Bertens, Hans. 2001. Literary Theory: The Basics. London and New York: Routledge. Bookchin, Murray. 1982. The Ecology of Freedom. Cheshire books. Briggs, K. T., S. H. Yoshida, and M. E. Gershwin. 1996. “The Influence of Petrochemicals and Stress on the Immune System of Seabirds.” Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 145–55. Brown, Stewart. 1995. “Daring the Beast Contemporary Nigeria Poetry.” In Abdulrazak Gurnah (Ed.), Essays on African Writing (Vol. 2, pp. 58–72). Oxford University Press. Clark-Berederemo, John P. A Reed in the Tide: A Selection of Poems. Longman. Egya, Sule E. 2013. “Eco-Human Engagement in Recent Nigerian Poetry in English.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Vol. 40, No. 1 (February), pp. 60–70.

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———. 2015. “Nature and Environmentalism of the Poor: Eco Poetry from the Niger Delta Region.” Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 1, No. 28 (September): 1–12. Fasua Tope. 2011. Crushed! Navigating Africa’s Tortuous Quest for Development: Myths and Realities. Keynes: Authorhouse. Heise, Ursula K. 2008. “Ecocriticism and the Transnational Turn in American Studies.” American Literary History, Vol. 20, No. 1/2 (Spring/Summer), pp. 381–404. Huggan, Graham and Tiffin Helen. 2010. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals and Environment. New York: Routledge. Ifowodo, Ogaga. 2005. The Oil Lamp. Eritrea: Africa World Press Inc. Martinez, Joan-Alier. 2002. The Environmentalism of the Poor: Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation. Cheltenham: Edward Edgar Publishing. Montegomery, David. 2007. “Soil Erosion and Agricultural Sustainability.” PNAS, Vol. 104, No. 33: 13268–13272. National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency. www​.nosdr​.gov​.ng 15/10/19. Nnimmo, Bassey. 1988. Intercepted. Ibadan: Kraft Books Limited. Ojaide, Tanure. 1996. Poetic Imagination in Black Africa: Essays on African Poetry. Durham: Carolina Academic Press, and the Carnivalesque (review). 1992 jhu/ journals/modern…38. 4. Newman html. 02–04. Okunoye, Oyeniyi. 2008. “Alterity, Marginality and the National Question in the Poetry of the Niger Delta.” EHESS Cahiers d’Études Africaines, Vol. 48, No. 191, pp. 413–436. Steyn, Phia. 2009. “Oil Exploration in Colonial Nigeria, c. 1903–58.” The Journal Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 37, No. 2249–274. Sachs, Jeffrey D. and Andrew M. Warner. 2001. “Natural Resources and Economic Development: The Curse of Natural Resources.” European Economic Review, Vol. 45, pp. 827–838. Cambridge. Tropical Research and Conservation Centre. www​.tro​pica​lcon​serv​atio​ncentre​.org​.24​ /11​/19.

Chapter 6

Passionate Specificity Ann Fisher-Wirth

Until my retirement in 2022, I directed the Interdisciplinary Minor in Environmental Studies at the University of Mississippi; I was also an English professor and a yoga teacher. One mandatory course for the minor is ENVS 101, Humanities and the Environment. When I taught it, it was actually as demanding as a 400-level class but listed at the 100 level so freshmen and sophomores could take it. In this class, we read a variety of books, which, in a given semester, might include Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, Lester R. Brown’s Full Planet, Empty Plates, David George Haskell’s The Forest Unseen, Richard Power’s novel The Overstory, Thich Nhat Hanh’s The World We Have: A Buddhist Approach to Peace and Ecology, and excerpts from Pope Francis’s Encyclical, Laudato Si’. Students also kept nature journals and reading journals, attended talks and/or films, took part in Earth Day activities, completed and presented research projects, and participated in field trips. Some of the students had declared a minor in Environmental Studies, but the course was open to anyone. Some were majoring in the natural sciences, mostly biology—but we also had students with a wide variety of other majors, including public policy, art, history, international studies, English, psychology, and anthropology. Some began the class with a firm knowledge of environmental issues and the environmental crisis. However, Mississippi is a conservative state, and environmental education is not part of many schools’ general curricula. As a result, many Mississippians have little awareness of or interest in environmental issues, and that includes some students when they would begin the course. What was so rewarding is that they quickly became involved. Our class emphasized discussion, and by mid-semester, every one of the nineteen students was passionately engaged. Witnessing this engagement with a course called “Humanities and the Environment,” it occurred to me: What a perfect group to help me consider how the environmental humanities 103

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can confront the implications of our dire climate emergency. So, we took some time in class to talk about it. Over 100 years ago, the novelist Joseph Conrad (1953) wrote, “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything” (107). And this, in general, is what my students cited as the power of the environmental humanities: to engage the senses, to make us more attentive to the world around us, to stimulate the heart and the imagination. “To a large population,” one biology major said, “sciences are meaningless without a story, an emotionally driven story, that is fact-based. By nature, science is devoid of sympathy. The humanities bring emotion and therefore empathy.” Another, also in biology, concurred. She harkened back to what Pope Francis (2015), in Laudato Si’, calls the “technocratic paradigm”—the dominant attitude in our culture that science can solve all problems and there can be a technological fix for everything. “The humanities supplement scientific understanding,” she said; “they incorporate questions of value, ethics, and history.” They present facts in a form that engages readers; whereas science gives statistics, “the humanities make instances real.” And because the instances are made real, people are made to care. One woman pointed out, though, that many people don’t care about the climate emergency, including plenty of students at the University of Mississippi. In Mississippi, President Trump easily won his bid for reelection, and carried the state, though now-president Biden won the election. It’s a Republican state, and one in which many elementary and high schools do not offer environmental education. Some public figures, of course, flatly refuse to accept the notion of climate change; they do not believe there’s any emergency. This ignorance of the issues is made possible by the fact that, in our technologically advanced first-world nation, until the coronavirus hit, we mostly were sheltered from environmental realities. Again and again, I have heard over the years, “The economy’s good.” Everything seems accessible, everything seems limitless. In my class, one student said, “Until now I didn’t even know what a food desert was. And I didn’t know that, growing up in the Mississippi Delta, I lived in one.” “So then, why do you care?” I asked my class. “It’s in our nature to care,” one said—“To care for the self and those you love.” Another, who had traveled to China and India, expanded this: “I live a comfortable life in a wealthy nation but lots don’t, so it would be reprehensible not to care.” And another took it beyond the human: “Because this is the world I live in. There is an intrinsic, healing value in our relationship with the environment. And art that expresses that awareness enables us to know and experience it.” On my campus, outside the Student Union, there is a huge catalpa tree, other names for which are Shawnee wood, cigar tree, and bean tree. In herbal

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medicine, teas and poultices are made from the bark and leaves, and used for various ailments, thought the roots are highly toxic. The Southern catalpa, Catalpa bignonioides, which is what we have in Mississippi, has heart-shaped leaves, frothy white flowers, and long, slender seedpods. It can grow up to fifty feet tall, and its lifespan is said to be between 50 and 150 years. I had seen and admired the tree on my campus for years. One day, passing by on my way to class, I heard a biology professor tell her students, who were standing around taking selfies with it, that it probably predated Columbus— that, instead of being possibly 150 years old, it was probably more than 500. Suddenly the tree, which I had loved, became truly numinous, and various bits of knowledge coalesced to become this prose poem: Catalpa This tree is older than Columbus. Ten years ago my honors students standing in a ring could barely get their arms around it. I took their picture—hands joined, cheeks against the rough wood. Mostly they loved it but one guy told my friend who supervised his lab, She made us hug a tree. It was the worst class ever. When I think of the tree as a sapling, my mind enters a great quiet. Before the Depression, the yellow fever, before the burning of Oxford, before the University Greys left their classrooms for the battlefield and died or were wounded to a man at Pickett’s Charge, and before Princess Hoka of the Chickasaws set out with her people on the Trail of Tears, this tree sank its roots deep and deeper into the nurturing ground. Generations moved about beneath its boughs, spoke and loved and died as it grew. And here it is, still, in the clattering present. Ten years ago I could walk around it, smell it, stroke the lichens on its bark. If I put my hand into the hollow in its trunk right near the ground, it was always cold, always comforting, no matter how brutal the summer, as if some dark, mysterious lungs kept serenely breathing. Now fences surround it, stakes hold up its branches. No longer do art majors loll on the benches and smoke at the little table under its big-leaf shade. A sign warns NO CLIMBING: KEEP OFF. Still, every spring, wet tender leaves unfurl on branches jagged as broken bones, and the tree bursts out in a froth of white petals. And every spring, the preachers line the sidewalk near the tree, and thrust their Bibles as we pass by. Repent and be saved, they say. Turn or burn. I want to tell them, Turn around, turn around, and look at the tree.

I’d like to think that this prose poem offers an example of a fruitful relationship between science and environmental humanities. The tree never would have claimed my attention so dramatically had I not overheard the scientific

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remark about its age, which triggered my musings on time and history, all that the tree has seen and all the ways in which the ground it inhabits has been altered. But the tree would not claim your attention, whoever and wherever you are, if you did not have the prose poem. It lives, and lives anew in language. It is seen. We humans are destroying the world. Anthropogenic change is causing what has come to be called the sixth mass extinction, in which, as the Pulitzer Prize–winning science writer Elizabeth Kolbert (2016) reports, “one third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion,” and the mass extinction rate for amphibians—“the most endangered class of animals”—may be “as much as forty-five thousand times higher than the background rate” (17–18). The earth is in a state of what, in a private conversation, the activist and writer Janisse Ray described to me as “global climate disruption,” with abnormal and unstable weather patterns, including violent storms. NASA reports that 2016 was the hottest year on record, followed by 2019, and The Guardian reports that this past July was the hottest month reported globally for the past 150 years. Aquifers are being depleted; rivers are running dry; desertification is spreading; clear-cutting, including the clear-cutting of rainforests, proceeds, with the consequent release of enormous amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; air is polluted; water is polluted; ocean dead zones are expanding; and the list goes on and on. Crop yields decrease as temperatures rise; as GeoEngineering and other sources report, photosynthesis stops at 104 degrees Fahrenheit. The consequences for human suffering are enormous. The World Health Organization reports that worldwide, around a billion people lack access to an improved water source, and 2.6 billion lack adequate sanitation [https://www​.who​.int​/heli​/risks​/water​/water​/en/]. As many as 25,000 people die from hunger every day, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations; that adds up to around 9.1 million people a year. Over 3 million children die of hunger and undernutrition (which makes children more vulnerable to illness) every year. It seems to me that the environmental arts and humanities play two major roles in confronting the implications of this. The first is simply that they enable us to articulate anxiety, shock, and sorrow. “Solastalgia,” a neologism coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht (2007), combines the words “solace” and “nostalgia,” and refers to the existential anguish felt at the knowledge of the loss and suffering caused by climate change. Much work being done in the arts these days is solastalgic—and this expression of grief is important, both in itself, and because such a “timely utterance,” in Wordsworth’s phrase, can give our thoughts “relief” and enable us once more to become “strong.” And despair leads only to inaction. Second, environmental arts and

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humanities engage with living beings, not just statistics. Toward the end of Walden, Henry David Thoreau (1854; 2004) writes of listening to a bird, “O the evening robin, at the end of a New England summer day! If I could ever find the twig he sits upon! I mean he; I mean the twig” (254) And because of the passionate specificity of this image, the bird and its song are alive for us 170 years later. “Soon it will be too late to shift course away from our failing trajectory, and time is running out,” write the authors of the article “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice” (Ripple et  al. 2020, 1028) “We must recognize, in our day-to-day lives and in our governing institutions, that Earth with all its life is our only home” (1028). When we stop denying the reality of ecological death, and when we become aware of the beauty and meaningfulness of earth and all its creatures, they reveal themselves as unutterably precious. Gus Speth, co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, has said, I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science we could address those problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that. [Interview with Steve Curwood]

But the environmental arts and humanities do.

REFERENCES Albrecht, Glenn, Gina-Maree Sartore, Linda Connor, Nick Higginbotham, Sonia Freeman, Brian Kelly, Helen Stain, et al. 2007. “Solastalgia: The Distress Caused by Environmental Change.” Australas Psychiatry 15, no 1 (February): 95–98. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/10398560701701288. Brown, Lester R. 2012. Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity. New York: W.W. Norton. Carson, Rachel. 1962. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Conrad, Joseph. 1953. Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’. In Joseph Conrad: Tales of Land and Sea. Garden City, New York: Hanover House. Fisher-Wirth, Ann. 2023. “Catalpa.” In Paradise Is Jagged. Terrapin Books. Francis. 2015. Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home. http://w2​.vatican​.va​/ content​/francesco​/en​/encyclicals​/documents​/papa​-francesco​_20150524​_enciclica​ -laudato​-si​.html. Haskell, David George. 2012. The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature. New York: Viking.

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Kenyon, Georgina. 2015. “Have You Ever Felt ‘Solastalgia’?” BBC, November 2. https://www​.bbc​.com​/future​/article​/20151030​-have​-you​-ever​-felt​-solastalgia. Kolbert, Elizabeth. 2016. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. New York: Henry Holt. Lynn, Audrey. “The Average Age of a Flowering Catalpa.” SFGate. https:// homeguides​.sfgate​.com​/average​-age​-flowering​-catalpa​-87247​.html. Nhat Hanh, Thich. 2004. The World We Have: A Buddhist Approach to Peace and Ecology. Berkeley: Parallax Press. Power, Richards. 2018. The Overstory. New York: W. W. Norton. Ripple, William J., Christopher Wolf, Thomas M. Newsome, Mauro Galetti, Mohammed Alamgir, Eileen Crist, Mahmoud I. Mahmoud, and William F. Laurance. 2017. “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice.” BioScience 67, no. 12 (December): 1026–28. Speth, Gus. 2015. “‘We Scientists Don’t Know How to Do That’ . . . What a Commentary!” Interview by Steve Curwood. WineWaterWatch, February 13, 2015. Audio, 14:28. https://winewaterwatch​.org​/2016​/05​/we​-scientists​-dont​-know​-how​ -to​-do​-that​-what​-a​-commentary/. Thoreau, Henry David. (1854) 2004. Walden; or, Life in the Woods. Reprint, New York: Houghton Mifflin. Citations refer to Houghton Mifflin edition.

Chapter 7

The Alchemy of Inside and Outside Feminism, Ecology, and the Self in Kamala Das Usha VT

Among the corpus of Indian Women’s writing in English, Kamala Das/ Surayya (1943–2009) holds a unique place. Her poetic voice stands out as individual and cannot be easily categorized. Her refusal to conform extends into every sphere of her literary output. She saw herself as an outcast from the mainstream, but through her writing she was able to resolve many of these contradictions she sees around her. The prime persona in her poems is herself, which she locates either in a physical environment or in relation to other personae. This chapter attempts to draw attention to her disregard of conventional hierarchies through her poetic voices and the placing of her poetic personae within their specific ecological environment which make her poetic output ecofeminist.1 It may be argued that the poetics of Kamala Das lends itself to ecofeminist reading mainly on account of the obsessive presence of some of the following elements. Though concerned with oppositions, such as nature–culture, male–female, body–soul, she does not treat them in absolute terms or as contradictory or mutually exclusive. She is able to absorb the seeming contradictions into a composite picture. She does not limit them into hierarchical power structures wherein one is superior to the other. She is deeply concerned with the social situation of women, and how their physical bodies have been reduced to being mere commodities or products for general consumption. Her poetry amply reflects her intense internal struggle against the reduction of the female into being a mere body and the patriarchal society’s victimization of women. Women held little space in the social system of her poetic environment that was solely male-centered. She makes consistent attempts to reveal various aspects of social inequality through her poetic characterizations. Nevertheless, in her poetry, one can also find an appreciation of the intrinsic 109

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value of everything in nature—a respect for the natural, a biocentric, rather than an anthropocentric, approach to the natural world. Often branded a confessional poet, one finds that her poems cannot be categorized as merely confessional. Her poems are autobiographical, yet fictional. Her autobiography is titled My Story, perhaps a confession of the fictionalized elements therein even while stating its autobiographical intent. Her inner world mingles freely with the outer in her writings as the land, the people, and the lives around her entwine with herself. She, as persona, cannot be seen as separate from the landscape, the buildings, or the natural world around her. Descriptions of nature and the outer world have always been abundant in Indian Poetry. Whether one is looking at the large body of Sanskrit poetry (often classified as marga or the classical, high tradition) or poetry in any of the regional (bhasha sahitya) or folk languages (categorized as desi, the folk or the little traditions), it is impossible not to see the various moods and cadences of nature reflected therein. Many of the early Indian writers in English wrote in a somewhat imitative vein—under the influence of the British Romantics— “Mathew Arnold in sari” (as Gordon Bottomley infamously critiqued them! [as quoted in Iyengar, 07]). But even in such cases, they quite often drew inspiration from the flora and fauna around them for their poetic utterances. Among the women writers the voices of Toru Dutt (1856–1877) and Sarojini Naidu (1879–1950) are laudable instances. In their poetry, the ubiquitous images of the European Rose or Lily were replaced by the Indian Lotus, and the essence of Indian culture began to gradually unfold itself through their verse when they wrote of koels (the Indian cuckoo) and Champak blossoms, referred to Krishna, the Dark God, or the snake charmers or the women in purdah. The contribution of Kamala Das/Surayya to the corpus to poetry written in English in India is no minor one. This has been amply borne out by the large number of contemporary critical readings of her work which have looked at various aspects of her poetry and poetics and the equally large number of learned dissertations and critical expositions of her work. It was only with the publication of the poetry of Kamala Das, later Surayya, that Indian poetry took an intensely serious personal tone, a self-reflexive language and earned a prominent place among world poetry in English. C.D. Narasimhaiah, a noted Indian critic and scholar, describes her poetry thus: She is perhaps the only Indian poet who owes little to Yeats or Eliot and trusted to her own resources and to her culture—thanks to a poet-mother and her indefatigable Keralite upbringing, it is possible she felt re-assured in the opulence lying all around her to kindle her imagination. (11)

The poetry of Kamala Das draws unhesitatingly from her matrilineal heritage, the land, the environment as well as the poetic personae and the personal voice.

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Born in 1943 in Malabar, now Kerala, a small state in the South of India, Kamala Das grew up in her matrilineal home and was influenced a great deal by the literary influences around her. Her maternal uncle Narayana Menon was a poet and her mother Balamaniamma a well-known poet in Malayalam. She was married in 1949 to Madhava Das, and consequently left Kerala and her matrilineal home to accompany her husband who was stationed in Calcutta, New Delhi, and Bombay. They returned to Kerala in 1981 on his retirement. Her first collection of poems Summer in Calcutta was published in 1965. This was followed by The Descendants (1967), The Old Play House and Other poems (1975), Tonight, This Savage Rite: The love poems of Kamala Das and Pritish Nandy (1979), The Anamalai Poems (1985). Her autobiography My Story (1975) evoked much criticism particularly in her home state Kerala, where the expressions of physicality and sensuality in her poetic utterances were treated as expressions of her waywardness. She later converted to Islam and rechristened herself Kamala Surayya. The poetic utterances of Kamala Das take on a very personal tone. The main protagonist of her poems is herself. The poetic voice is confessional. She makes no effort to be objective and scientific, although her descriptions are accurate, precise, and quite detailed in their content. She is clearly subjective in her approach and makes no effort to rationalize her emotions. Yet she does not really sentimentalize the self. In “Composition,” an early poem she writes: What I narrate are the ordinary events of an /ordinary life.

Yet as poet she transforms the commonplace of the ordinary into something splendorous. The ordinary events of her personal life comprise the corpus of her poetic world. The ordinary becomes the universal as her poetic persona becomes every woman. She is able to transform the personal into the political in a very unique manner using a very subjective tone. In her poetry the private world of herself is politicized giving uninhibited expression to “the full range of female experience” (Kaur “Prefactory note”). Society expectations for a woman were imposed on her rigorously when they told her to “Be wife they said. Be embroiderer, be cook,” and further they went on to prescribe other rules such as: Don’t sit/ On walls or peep in through our lace-draped windows Be Amy or be Kamala. Or better still be Madhavikutty. (“An Introduction”)

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Though the self of her poems is asked to “fit in” she finds that she cannot fold herself into the neat compartments she is asked to, for she is more than just Amy or Kamala or Madhavikutty (her penname in Malayalam is Madhavikutty, the wife of Madhava Das). Through her poetry, she breaks free from the monotonous stereotypes of everyday living in the life of an ordinary woman. She finds therein the freedom to be more than the ordinary woman. She realizes that she is more than all of that, for she is “every woman who seeks love.” She moves from the individual to the universal when she moves from pretending to be an ordinary woman and becomes instead a spokesperson for all Indian women. In her poems, she is direct and outspoken. Her poetic personae are located in the postcolonial India of the present with all its multiple complexities of language, power structures, and locale. In the poem “An Introduction,” she introduces her poetic persona, her linguistic competence, and complexity of her choice of language thus: I am Indian, very brown, . . . I speak three languages, write in/ Two, dream in one.

She is quite aware of the inherent contradictions therein, yet she is able to reconcile these contradictions within her poetic frame for she goes on to state her blatant distrust of accepted definitions and advice. Elsewhere she speaks of the marginalization she had experienced due to the dark color of her skin, in a cultural context where fair skin was given preference. Yet she does not allow any sense of inferiority to cloud her judgment. She prefers to keep to her own decisions and explains her poetic stance in the poem when she demands boldly The language I speak/Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses All mine, mine alone. It is half English, half/Indian, . . .

In these lines one can see the directness of the tone of her poetry, its refusal to conform to traditionally accepted metrical patterns and its subjective themes. But despite its preoccupation with the self, it deals with the outer world and the natural phenomena with respect and a certain sense of empathy. The human world is coterminous with the nonhuman schemata. The birds, the animals, the trees, the storm, and the rain are as much a part of her inner world as her emotions and opinions. In many of her poems, Kamala Das reverts to the world of her daily life. Stray incidents from her childhood, her school days, her teenage fantasies, her marital and extramarital exploits—imaginary or otherwise, her family

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life, her numerous relatives but mainly her grandmother are some of the major themes and personae of her poetry. Her grandmother and the matrilineal home in which she lived are living personae in her poems. They assume a living quality, “mixing memory with desire” to relive a yearning for a past now lost to her. In a short, but powerful and much anthologized, poem “My Grandmother’s House,” she describes the house and her attachment toward it thus: There is a house now far away where once I received love.

The house becomes representative of the plenitude of love she received when she lived there, which is lost to her in her present. She calls out in pain when she mourns her loss through the lines: you cannot believe, darling,/Can you, that I lived in such a house and Was proud, and loved . . . ? (The Old play House and other poems, 1973, 2004), p. 32

The house becomes a part of her past and the qualities of love and affection she associates with her grandmother make it a living entity with a capacity to love that she cannot find in her urban present. Here the persona of herself with a personal history becomes unified with her poetic subject. The other persona of the poem, the snakes, the books, the moon, and the windows of the house, as well as the darkness and the Dog become unified as symbols of her loss. There is no significant distinction between the human and the nonhuman. The inanimate windows and the darkness “like a brooding dog” assume living qualities, like the house, which reminds her, makes her proud of the fact that she was loved. Her matrilineal home, from which she was relocated by marriage, becomes the essence of the emotions nostalgically associated with her childhood and youth and she sees herself as a lost wanderer disinherited from her matrilineal past, begging at stranger’s doors now for her lost inheritance of love. These poems could also be treated as a sociocultural record of women within matriliny in Kerala.2 The landscapes of the land wherein the poems are located become an inevitable and integral part of her poetry. Her matrilineal home (the tharavad also called the nalukettu) appears and reappears in several poems. An interesting feature with regard to the tharavad is the life style practices wherein the natural environment extends into the house. There is a pond attached to every house as well as a large natural garden wherein a space is allotted to the worship of the elements and the nonhuman creatures like the snake are allowed a

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safe haven from human disturbances. They are not only left unharmed but are even venerated and there are specific areas in the compound of every house where shrubs and trees are allowed to grow wild and the natural habitat is left undisturbed. The house itself is an architectural marvel that allows for natural ventilation with large spaces within, open to the sky and low sloping roofs that are eco-friendly, and suitable to the local climatic conditions. It is therefore only inevitable that poet extends those ecofriendly approaches to her poetic subject matter. She speaks of her love of swimming, which “comes naturally to me” and the opportunities she had in the tharavad to indulge her passion: I had a house in Malabar/I did all my growing there In the bright summer months./ I swam about and floated, . . . (“The Suicide”)

The sensual pleasure of the swimming in the green pool with all its visual spectacle ends abruptly, when she is made aware of the growth of her body and her transformation into a young woman. The structure of the poem with its uneven rhythms broken at that juncture reflects the break in her sensibility as well. The sudden awareness of her growing body, which is a culturally imposed one, and its implications are reflected through a discontinuity from the natural world around her. Love is a major preoccupation in the poetry of Kamala Das. She mourns the loss of innocence and the forfeiting of relationships based on love in several of her poems. She writes of the various manifestations of love, male– female, maternal, filial, and so on. Yet it is the physical and sexual expression of love in her poems that has attracted much critical attention. As Bruce King remarks, her poetry has “created a climate for a more honest revelatory, confessional poetry by Indian women” (155). Her candid descriptions of the physicality of the human body in many poems have distressed many critics. Her blatant descriptions of the human body and the inherent sexuality of male–female relationships have brought her much unwarranted criticism. “Gift him what makes you woman,” she states in the poem “The Looking Glass” and goes on to describe what makes her woman the scent of /Long hair, the must of sweat between the breasts, The warm shock of menstrual blood, and all your/Endless female hungers. (“The Looking Glass” The Descendants)

The importance of celebrating the body is highlighted by ecofeminist writers like Carolyn Merchant when she obliterates the very difference between

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the self and the environment by referring to the body as the “primary environment.” Reclaiming the body is important work for ecofeminism, particularly since human (male) identity has been equated with the mind alone and the body has been variously raced animalized, feminized and naturalized in order to be seen as inferior and antagonistic to the progress of culture. (Gaard)

She celebrates the female body in all its multiple forms, breaking the taboo of silence relating to the female body with her honest descriptive writings. In the poetry of Kamala Das both the male and the female body are explored and celebrated. She does not discriminate or allow for mere female sexuality. Her poetic voice reflects ecofeminist qualities when in the same poem, for instance, the female persona invites the reader to admire his maleness “Notice the perfection/Of his limbs, . . . and even the jerky way he /Urinates.” But her approach to male–female relation is not merely physical or dualistic. While she is celebratory of the body, she does not glorify the body alone for its own sake. For her, the mind or the soul is as important as the body as she makes clear in the poem “Suicide”: Bereft of soul/My body shall be bare. Bereft of body/My soul shall be bare

Both her body and her mind are the subject matter of her poetic utterances. She is explicit and unashamed about her inner longings and her physical and “sexual hungers” in her poems inviting much adverse critical comment from conservative Indian critics, who decry her “endless female hungers.” The persona of her poetry would then need a body as well as the spirit and the environment that supports the whole to reflect her holistic vision. At other instances, she would rather look at the spirituality of the emotions by sublimating them as in the Radha-Krishna poems. In the poem “Substitute” for instance, the female narrator explains how she was lying beside him and thinking that she was loved, when his words break her illusion and she is brought down to earth with a crash. It is a physical thing, he said suddenly, End it, I cried, end it, and let us be free (Only the Soul knows how to sing, 97)

Love therefore was not to be seen in purely physical terms, yet there was to be no denial of the body or its sensuality in her poetic voice. Sudesh Mishra,

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for instance, links the quality of love in her poetic utterances to the bhakti tradition by saying that “the Radha krishna cult of love making, a genre of its own right within the tradition of bhakti verse, affords a unifying dialectic to her poetry” (353). So whether her idealized or Divine lover continues as Krishna or is transformed into “Ya Allah,” the spirit with which she addresses Him remains the same and the reader is transported to a uniquely feminine world. In one of her later Laurentian poems, she thanks Allah for “this gift of a man” who is now her sustenance And the sole raiment /For my nudity, both my body’s And my soul’s. (“The maples are Green Still”)

At the same time, many feminist critics are also suspicious of the authenticity of her “female” voice. Herein lies her unique position vis-à-vis the female voice in modern Indian Poetry in English. Though she has often been referred to as a feminist, she herself is unsure of the appropriateness of the label. In a more recent essay, she states, “When people hint that I am comely despite my age, I blush in gratitude and discover within myself that I am no feminist writer entitled to inaugurate a women’s meet” (http://www​.rediff​.com​/style​/sep​/16das​.htm). Yet the personae of her poetry reflect a very overt feminist stance. The oeuvre of her poetry is undoubtedly a woman’s world. The personal is the political as mirrored in her verse. Kamala Das has no hesitation in placing herself among the world of the home with its domestic rights and duties. And she is far from apologetic in her stance when she does so. For her the world of her home is in continuity with her public self. She does not look at them as binary oppositions. The environment around the personae of her poetry is very much a part of their selves or herself. At times the outer space is in sympathetic union with the inner self of the personae. At other times there is no marked empathy. She does not idealize the land or its many manifestations, nor does she alienate herself from it. The environment of the poetry is never in direct confrontation with the speaker/s. Ghanshyam, the dark one or the Lord Krishna, is like the koel, who has built its nest in the arbor of her heart, and My life until now a sleeping jungle Is at last astir with /Music (Tonight this Savage Rite, 18)

The use of the name Ghanshyam, one of the numerous pseudonyms for the Lord Krishna,

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whom she addresses as her Divine lover, is significant. The name may be translated as the dark one, heavy like the dusk or the dark cloud that heralds rain. The lover is equated to a phenomenon of nature the dark cloud heralding rain, the raindrops of course symbolizing fertility. Herein the self and the other, the lover and his love become one with the natural phenomena around the poetic persona. In the final analysis Kamala Das’s poetry as I have argued is steeped in ecofeminist concerns. Kamala is, of course, not a “nature poet” like the Romantics. She writes of herself however, not in the singular but in the plural. Kamala, the persona of her poems, becomes every woman. Kamala’s self becomes, the ecological self. Her poetry has celebrated the body with such zest that a critic like M.K. Naik states that “the total impression Kamala Das’s poetry provides is one of a bold ruthless honesty tearing passionately at conventional attitudes to reveal the quintessential woman within” (210). Through her poetic voice she was able to celebrate experience of being woman without apology or shame. Through her poetic lens, she looks at various oppositions like the male–female, nature–culture, and human–nonhuman and is able to arrive at an integrated and composite picture rather than a broken or discontinuous one. She does not gloss over differences or ignore them, but tries to look at them with an empathy that is non-dualistic and holistic. While Kamala Das looks at these dichotomies, she is also highly conscious of the dependency existent in heterosexual relations, their interdependent and hierarchical relationship as well as their need for individuality and separateness. In structure, theme, and oeuvre, the poetry of Kamala Das/Surayya lends itself to ecofeminist readings. Kamala Das has most often been read as a feminist—both in her poetry and in her prose writings. Although her poetry reflects a keen ecological sense, from the very title onward few critics have so far made an effort to look at her writings from an ecofeminist perspective. The green landscape of Kerala, her homeland, is the venue of a large number of her poems and the poetic personae reflect a sensitivity to nature and a close communion with it. But in other ways also this poet can be seen as ecofeminist. For instance, in her poetry Kamala Das is able to reconcile oppositions like male–female, nature– culture, and human–nonhuman, and look at them from a holistic perspective. She explores hierarchical relationships and attempts to reconcile oppositions amicably. The female body as an object of exploitation is one of her serious concerns. To her both the human and the nonhuman are equally important. In the final analysis, she comes through as a sensitive poet, unashamedly Indian and female. She writes about male, female, and other genders with sensitivity far beyond her times. She is able to break taboos and conventions of the acceptable quite casually and bring in a new and unique Indian feminine poetic voice into existence. She is able to juxtapose the inner world

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of herself with the world outside, whether human or nonhuman and mingle them into a composite whole with ease and fluidity. This attempt to look at her work as ecofeminist provides newer insights into the corpus of her poetry that becomes an “alchemy of the self.” NOTES 1. An earlier version of this chapter was published as “Poetry and Ecofeminism: Rereading Kamala Das” in Beyond Borders: The SAARC Journal, Vol. 5, No. 3–4, 2009. 2. Ref Robin Jeffrey Politics, Women and Well Being (1993), wherein the historian examines the sense of wellbeing experienced by the women in Kerala in their matrilineal home and the consequent benefit to the community at large and my own paper on “Matriliny and the Kerala Woman” South Indian Studies ed. S. Murali (Delhi: B.R Publications, 1998), pp. 51–58.

REFERENCES “Body Awareness Is By Itself a Weakness. Gender Awareness Is Worse” in Life/ Style Rediff on the Net. http://www​.rediff​.com​/style​/sep​/16das​.htm 25 April 2008. Das, Kamala. 1996. Only the Soul Knows How to Sing. Kottayam: DC Books. ———. 2000. “Laurentian Poems: Quebec, Canada.” Kavyabharati 12 (Special Issue Poetry of Indian Women), 12. Devy, G.N. 1993. After Amnesia: Tradition and change in Indian Literary Criticism. Orient Black Swan. Gaard, Greta. 1996. “Introduction.” ISLE 3, 1 (Summer): 3. Iyengar, K.R. Srinivasa. 1962. Indian Writing in English. Bombay: Asia Publishing House. Kaur, Iqbal, ed. 1995. Perspectives on Kamala Das’s Poetry. New Delhi: Intellectual Publishing House. King, Bruce. 1987. Modern Indian Poetry in English. Delhi: OUP. Merchant, Carolyn. 1989. The Death of Science: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. San Franscisco: Harper and Row. Mishra, Sudesh. 1995. Preparing Faces: Modernism and Indian poetry in English. Univ of South Pacific and CRNLE. Naik, M.K. 1982. A History of Indian English Literature. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. Narasimhaiah, C.D., ed. 1990. An Anthology of Commonwealth Poetry. Madras: Macmillan.

Chapter 8

Healing and Sweetening Ted Hughes and the Regeneration of Elmet Ann Skea

Ted Hughes was born and spent his early years in Mytholmroyd, a small town in the upper valley of the River Calder in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Once, this valley had been part of the Celtic kingdom of Elmet. Its rugged terrain and harsh climate had made it a haven for outlaws and brigands, but small communities of people settled there, rearing sheep on the bleak moorlands which were rich in grass, peat and water, but of little use for growing crops. A cottage industry of shearing, spinning, and weaving the wool grew up and, by the twelfth century, the nearby town of Halifax had become the center of a thriving wood-trade which underpinned 90 percent of British overseas trade. The self-sufficient, resilient, inventive, and determined character of the people was shaped by this history, and by the harsh geology and the climate of the area. Other factors, too, were important to their sense of independence, such as the Danelaw which had been established by ninth-century Norse invaders who came to control the Northern part of England from their center in York. Under Danelaw, 30–50 percent of the population of this area had legal status as free men within the local lord’s jurisdiction. “The longships got this far / And anchored in nose and chin,” Hughes wrote in his poetic sequence, Remains of Elmet, and, poking gentle fun at his fellow Yorkshiremen, he noted their characteristic wariness of strangers and their “far veiled gaze of quietly homicidal appraisal” (90). The well-known nineteenth-century novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, traveling in that area, wrote of “the peculiar force of character which the Yorkshiremen display” and, less fondly, of their “surly independence.” She also experienced their honest, plain-speaking way of expressing themselves: “dwellers among them must be prepared for certain uncomplimentary, though most likely true, observations, pithily expressed” (The Life of Charlotte Bronte, Vol.1, Ch.2). 119

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All of this was important in the growth of the region, and it contributed to the way in which the Industrial Revolution expanded rapidly in this area. In the 1800s, new mechanical inventions made the production of woolen cloth quicker and easier and, with its plentiful supply of water for driving the newly invented machinery, its coal supplies, and its sturdy hardworking and inventive people, this area became known as the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. Quarries, canals, railways, reservoirs, weirs, ponds, and mills were built, desecrating the natural environment. Increasingly, cottage industries were taken over by industrial-scale production and the people began to spend their lives working in the quarries and the mills. Working conditions were bad and often dangerous, wages were poor, poverty became endemic, and pollution was widespread. By the twentieth century, the wool trade in the area had been badly affected by overseas imports, and the industry was almost dead. “First Mill,” Hughes wrote as he charted the arc of change in the poems of Remains of Elmet, and “steep cobbles”—then “cenotaphs.” First football pitches and crown greens, then “the bottomless wound of the railway station / That bled this valley to death” (34). Women who had spun and woven cloth in their homes while their men tended the sheep, and sheep-farmers, whose “lives went into the enclosures / like manure” (33), began to slave away in the huge stone mills; steam and smoke from coal fires and furnaces polluted the air; machine oils and the dyes and chemicals used to treat wool polluted the waters; and the land “fell asleep” under the migraine “clatter” Of clog-irons and looms And gutter-water and clog-irons. (20)

In notes prefacing the second edition of the book (published as Elmet) Hughes described other factors, too, which contributed to the death of this region. In the eighteenth century, the down-to-earth character of the people predisposed them to plain, strict religions like the Methodism brought to this area by Charles Wesley. What Wesley saw as a “barbarous people” when he first preached to them, became his “most fanatic enthusiasts.” Chapels were built, and “the men who built chapels were the same who were building the mills.” However, when the local regimes . . . of Industry and Religion started to collapse in the 1930s, this architecture emerged into spectacular desolation—a grim sort of beauty. Ruin followed swiftly, as the mills began to close, the chapels to empty, and the high farms under the moor-edge, along the spring line, were one by one abandoned. (10)

The two world wars also contributed to this ruin and desolation.

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Hughes’s family, his parents and his grandparents, and the people who lived all around them lived through these changes. On his father’s side, the family had worked in the wool trade as weavers, carders, and dyers. “The Dyer’s vat pickled to ninety. Or killed quickly”: his grandfather, “Crag Jack,” who had been a fustian dyer, lived to be eighty (“Familiar,” THCP, 691). His mother’s brothers, Walter and Thomas, became mill owners but Walter was badly wounded during World War I (“Walt,” THCP, 770–73); and his father was one of only seventeen men from his Army Company to survive the WWI Gallipoli landings. the cataclysms had happened—to the population in the First World War (where a single bad ten minutes in no man’s land would wipe out [the men of] a street or even a village), to the industry (the shift to the east in textile manufacture), and to the Methodism (the new age). (Elmet, 11)

In the poems in Remains of Elmet, Hughes vividly demonstrates this change from the region’s early prosperity based on wool to the collapse of Industry and Religion which began in the 1930s. He also sees the way that nature survives and, as he did throughout his career, he uses his poetry to channel the powers of the natural energies toward healing and renewal. There is an alchemical and semi-religious aspect to the poems in Remains of Elmet, where Hughes describes the imprisonment of the creative energies of nature in matter (in the soil, in the buildings and in the people) and seeks to release it, just as the alchemist seeks to release the spiritual gold from the base matter of the human being. He first learned about alchemy through his early enthusiasm for work of the Irish poet, W.B. Yeats. In an interview with Ekbert Fass in 1970 he said: Yeats spellbound me for about six years. I got to know him not so much though his verse as though his other interests, folklore, and magic in particular. Then that strange atmosphere laid hold of me. I fancy if there is a jury of critics sitting over what I write . . . then Yeats is the judge. There are all sorts of things I could well do but because of him and principles I absorbed from him I cannot. (Faas, “The Unaccommodated Universe,” 22)

However, Hughes also read widely in Renaissance and early English alchemical texts, where the fundamental unity of all things and the transmutability of matter is the underlying principle. In these texts the alchemical process is often described in poems full of vivid imagery and rich, archaic symbols, one of the most important of which is the Uroborus, the tail-eating dragon which represents the timeless continuity of creation, destruction, and re-creation in Nature. “The rhythms and cycles of Nature contain the code and root of our handiwork.” So wrote the Alchemist, Janus Lacinius Therapus, The Calabrian,

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in 1546 (as qtd. in Grossinger, 69), and Nature, always, was of particular importance in Hughes’s work, not just as a subject but, more importantly, as the source of cyclical change and renewal. Alchemy, itself, can be understood on several levels. There is a concrete surface level derived from its association in ancient Egypt with the crafts of dyeing, metallurgy, brewing, and perfume making. Over the centuries the technical skills involved in these arts were refined and condensed, forming the basis of a body of knowledge from which grew the science of Chemistry. Along the way, the magical, spiritual and imaginative aspects, which were once an essential part of these ancient crafts, came to be regarded as subjective, irrational and “unscientific” and, consequently, unimportant. Allied to this view of Alchemy as a body of technological knowledge is its reputation for embodying a secret method of turning base material into gold. Those who have pursued this secret have found the alchemical texts incomplete, contradictory and confusing, being couched, as they are, in language full of metaphor and symbolism; but avarice and dreams of power have spurred them on, and magic and superstition have accompanied them. It is this level of Alchemy which has fostered allegations of witchcraft and occult power, and which has brought the art into disrepute. For Hughes, and for many of the Renaissance alchemists, Alchemy was an esoteric mystical doctrine in which the practical techniques of the alchemical art are an allegory for spiritual transubstantiation. At this level alchemy is the means by which the Divine creative spirit (the “gold” of the Soul) is gradually freed from the chaos of the human body (the “Raw Stuff”) so that a state of enlightenment and wholeness may be achieved. Hughes, however, saw the desecration of Nature wrought by human agency and began to use alchemy as a healing art in a broader, ecological way. Poetry as he once said, is meant to be magical: it is “one way of making things happen the way you want them to happen” (The Critical Forum). Before the stones of the ruined mills “can flower again,” he writes in his Elmet sequence, “They must fall into the only future, the earth” (14). Where, once, “lifelines poured into wage-packets,” “Five hundred sunbeams” now fall “on the horns of the flowers” (79). And the wild rock in its “homeland . . . among its pious offspring of root and leaf” becomes the cantor, leading the healing choir in the faith of Mother Nature, and singing for “its ancestors”— the rock which had been “cut” and “carted” and “fixed in its new place” until it “forgot its wild roots” (44). Meanwhile, the nettle venoms into place Like a cynical old woman in the food-queue. (14)

Heather “thickens a nectar / Keen as adder venom” (48); willowherb’s “vandal plumes” sprout in ruined buildings (79); and “Curlews in April / hang their harps over the misty valley” (28).

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In the opening poem of the Elmet sequence, using rhythms and sounds which capture the wildness of nature as it is commonly experienced on the moors, Hughes invokes the elemental energies of “The Mothers” (10). These “Mothers” were the earliest Celtic-British personification of the powers of the Great Mother Goddess, Nature. She is “the Mourning Mother / who eats her children,” in whose “faith” the rock sings (44). In the old British Kingdom of Elmet, the Celtic “Mothers” (the three goddesses of birth, fertility, and death) held sway, and ancient standing stones and rocky outcrops, like the Bridestones of Hughes’s poem of that name, still testify to the worship of Brig (Brigid), who was the mother goddess of the Brigantian people of Elmet. “The wedding stones,” he calls them: “Scorched-looking, unhewn—a hill-top chapel / Earth’s heart-bone laid bare” (64). Hughes’s “mothers” are also the alchemical Mothers: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. In the first published Elmet sequence, where the poems were accompanied by photographs, Hughes and the photographer, Fay Godwin, capture the interaction of light and matter, both physically in the words and photographs, and metaphorically in the effects which these accomplish. “Light falls through itself,” literally in Godwin’s black-and-white photograph of a few snow-covered blades of grass, and metaphorically in Hughes’s poem where it “Falls naked / Into poverty grass, poverty stone,” and “Poverty thin water.” Yet, in a barren windblown landscape, it creeps there, shivering and crying like a newborn child (113). Alchemically, these “These grasses of light,” the “stones of darkness,” and the “Water of light and darkness” with which both artists worked were not simply “words in any phrase,” as Hughes puts it (17), or the interplay of light and shadow fixed in a photographic image, they are the mother elements from which our world is formed and on which our survival depends. And they are the elements which, in this book, attempt to accomplish the regeneration of the land and free the spirits of its people. Everywhere in Remains of Elmet, especially in the two editions which include Godwin’s photographs, the land and the skies, the wind and the rain, work together with the light from the sun’s fires to heal the wounds created by human endeavors in this “cradle-grave” (10). The land exists under “a trance of light” (20). The moors “Are a stage for the performance of heaven.” Above them “the witch-brew boiling in the sky-vat spins electric terrors / In the eyes of sheep” (19) and “the world rolls in rain / Like a stone inside surf” (95). “Winds from fiery holes in heaven” make the players on a hillside village football field seem to bounce, like their blown ball: But the wingers leapt, they bicycled in air And the goalie flew horizontal. (68)

The theme of the “Mothers” is reinforced by Hughes’s dedication of this book to his own mother, Edith Farrar, and by the prefatory poem in which

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his mother lives on briefly for him through her brother The dreams, aspirations, achievements, and failures of the Calder Valley people which make up this book are their memories, precious “Archaeology of the mouth,” which Hughes tries to record before the “frayed, fraying hair-fineness” of the thread linking his spirit to theirs is finally broken (7). As with the singing rock, the spiritual element in Remains of Elmet is linked everywhere with music. It is there in the yarning of the old people, who are “attuned to each other, like the string of a harp” (89); in the “larksong just out of hearing” (10), in the “wobbling water-call” of the curlews (28) and the “soft-cries” of the birds, and in the drumming of the “witchdoctor” snipe “Drawing the new / needle of moon” down “gently / Into its eggs” (66). Most poignantly it is there in the “mad singing in the hills” (20) which became submerged by the slavery of Industry and Religion and War: and in the song of a cricket which “rigged up its music” in the wall of the Wesleyan chapel—an uncontrolled fragment of natural energy which the elders furiously try to silence, “Riving at the religious framework / With screwdrivers and chisels” (82). Above all, it is there in the poetic music which Hughes makes as he draws for us this realistic, and paradigmatic, picture of human strengths and human weaknesses. Hughes first consistent use of alchemy in his poetry was in Cave Birds: An Alchemical Cave Drama.1 There, he followed the alchemical procedure closely as a framework for the poems. In Remains of Elmet, which was published one year after Cave Birds, he abandoned any formal alchemical structure and used alchemy more fluently, relying on the magical powers of the poetry and the photographs to stir the imagination, and embedding the creative and healing energies of Nature in the poems. The alchemy of Cave Birds focused on an individual who was also an Everyman figure. It was intended to awaken us to our blindness to the desecration of Nature visible all around us and to the way our imagination, instincts and feelings have been eroded by the Socratic emphasis on rational, provable, “facts”—in education and in everyday life. Remains of Elmet focuses on a society and an environment where this blindness has been disastrous to the people and to the land; and the poetic sequence, River, which was published in 1983 again used the alchemy of nature, in poetry, and photography, as a means of imaginatively healing the polluted waterways of England.2 In 1958, Hughes was already aware of the work of biologist and conservationist Rachel Carson and wrote to Aurelia Plath, Sylvia’s mother, that he and Sylvia were reading her books about life in the sea, “which are wonderful . . . I started one yesterday and couldn’t put it down till I had finished it” (Letters, 127). As regular readers of The New Yorker, he and Sylvia also read Carson’s Silent Spring, when it was serialized there in 1962, and, later, he wrote that “to most of the world it came as an absolute shock,” but he despaired that “the

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colossal mass of evidence simply has not been marshalled and sent to the one front that counts: The ear of the public” (“The Environmental Revolution,” Your Environment, Vol. I, No. 3).3 As a fisherman—and a farmer, too—he saw the damage that chemical pollution brought to the land, the rivers, and the animals which lived there. He adopted organic farming, sat on influential committees, and wrote letters to politicians and to the newspapers. In 1957, he wrote to The Times about (amongst other things) the exploitation of fishing areas (3 Dec. 1957); and in a letter to environmental campaigner and farmer Mark Purdey, he wrote about finding a book called The Poisoned Womb: “Very detailed account of the effect of agricultural/industrial toxins on the reproductive system. Horrifying.” He also wrote to The Times after they had published an optimistic article about farmed otters being returned to English waterways, “pointing out that East Anglian otters were declining for a very good reason”—that being the continued use of deadly organochlorine toxins, which destroyed their immune systems (Hughes, Letters 7 Feb. 1987, 534). In 1969, Hughes and Daniel Weissbort were instrumental in helping their friend David Ross to find Your Environment, a quarterly magazine which called itself “Britain’s First Environmental Magazine” (British Library, Dewey 301.305). Hughes and Weissbort helped edit the first two issues, then became “Advising and Contributing Editors” until autumn 1972, when the prominent physicist and environmentalist Walter C. Patterson took over as sole editor. For the third issue (Volume I, No. 3, Summer 1970), Hughes contributed an essay on Max Nicholson’s The Environmental Revolution. The subject matter of Your Environment was “conservation, pollution, population pressure and containment,” and the stated object was “to help improve the way we all live.” Continuing topics in the magazine, which ran for three and a half years, were household issues such as non-returnable bottles, toxic detergents, packaging, and garden chemicals, a “Whitehall Diary” recording environmental issues discussed in parliament, the water supply, defoliants, transport, and science news. Daniel Weissbort remembered that the magazine was “a money loser,” but that it was “very much part of the ethos of the time” (Skea, conversation with Weissbort). Hughes did a great deal of practical work to help raise awareness of issues like river pollution. Some of his ecological activities were recorded in “Portrait of a poet as eco warrior” by Ed Douglas (The Observer, Sunday, November 4, 2007). In 1987, The Times published “First Things First,” an “ecological dialogue” (THCP, 730), and in a letter to Michael Hamburger he discussed this and aired his views on politics and pollution (Letters 12 Sept. 1987). Being a poet who believed in the power of the imagination to change things, Hughes was also instrumental in the founding of the Sacred Earth

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Drama Trust. The Trust was initiated after a conference organized in Assisi in 1986 by HRH the Duke of Edinburgh to “encourage people of all ages to become involved in environmental thinking and practice by first involving the creative spirit.” Sacred Earth Dramas (Faber, London, 1993), with an introduction by Ted Hughes, is a collection of winning plays written by children from around the world, who responded to a competition suggested by Hughes and sponsored by the Worldwide Fund for Nature and the Arts for Nature in 1990. The plays imaginatively and vividly re-tell mythological and religious stories from many different societies, but with particular relevance to the natural world. The genesis of the whole idea is described in Ted Hughes’s letter to Matthew Evans (Letters, Feb. 7, 1990), and is discussed more fully in my own paper “Ted Hughes, Ecology and the Arts” (Skea, in Global Perspectives . . . , Maiti and Chakraborty, 71–82). Hughes’s poem “The Black Rhino” (THCP, 763 and Note 1296) was written to help raise funds to save the Black Rhinoceros and was published in the Daily Telegraph (October 24, 1987). In 1991, “Lobby from under the Carpet” (THCP, 837) was published in Save the Earth (ed. J. Porritt, Turner, September 1991), a companion book for a broadcast associated with the 1992 U.N. Earth Summit in Brazil, where worldwide environmental policies were discussed. The poem was also published in The Times (April 9, 1992). Then, in 1992, Hughes provided an introduction to a book of photographs, Your World (HarperCollins 1992), the profits of which went to the United Nations Environment Programme. At the same time he contributed an article to The Observer Magazine (Nov. 29, 1992) to accompany some of the photographs from the book. The Iron Man, and The Iron Woman, which Hughes wrote for children, describe a desecrated, polluted land and provide a wonderfully imaginative mythic solution to the problem. The Iron Man was made into a musical by Peter Townshend, and in 1999 it was released by Warner Bros. as an animated film under the title The Iron Giant. It is still read, and loved, by young children’s English homes and schools. It is clear that Hughes worked hard raise awareness of ecological issues, but Cave Birds, Remains of Elmet and River are unique in that he created poetic narratives which were strongly influenced by alchemy, and also by his belief that narrative poetry, as he told Ekbert Faas, was a record of a shamanic journey, which involved “a visit to the spirit world . . . to bring back something badly needed, a cure, an answer, some sort of divine intervention in the community’s affairs” (Faas, 206). Remains of Elmet, uniquely until Birthday Letters, deals with Hughes’s own personal experiences and feelings. It seeks to heal the land and the people of the society in which he grew up, and to release the spirits of those he loved. It contains poems, too, which

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suggests that it was during those early years that Hughes received the call to be a shamanic poet. In Remains of Elmet, two poems in particular suggest this: “The Long Tunnel Ceiling” (76–77) and “Tick Tock Tick Toc” (120). For Hughes, as for the creature in his early poem “Wodwo” (THCP, 183), it was the attraction of water which drew him into the other-world of the imagination and the subconscious energies—the water which in Hughes’s home valley was present as the polluted Calder and the stagnant “gleam–ponderous,” serpentine Canal (76). The traditional worldwide mythological and folkloric association of rivers and serpents with natural life-forces and with the spirit world makes these polluted waters of the Calder Valley potently symbolic. Hughes’s use of this symbolism is characteristically founded in an imaginative evocation of reality. As a child, Hughes’s imagination drew him, like Alice, through the “heavy mirror” (76) of the water’s surface into the “Drowning Black” (74) underworld of the canal close to his home. There he fished with a home-made net made from “a mesh of kitchen curtains” (“The Canal’s Drowning Black,” 74). And there, Nature’s life-energies flourish as they have since life began: “Loach. Torpid, ginger-bearded, secretive / Prehistory of the canal’s masonry / with little cupid mouths” . . . , like “wild leopards—among bleached-depth fungus” (74)—in “their Paradise and mine.” Meanwhile, heavily loaded lorries from Rochdale, above his head, met Lorries from Bradford, and fought past each other Making that cave of air and water tremble— (74)

Underlying this vivid childhood scene, the suggestion of temptation in Paradise and the subsequent fall from innocence is very strong. The boy teeters on the slippery edge of the canal, fascinated by his own god–like power to make the fishy anemone–beards flower with the stamp of his foot. He is fascinated, too, by the eyes which make him the center of attention by watching his every move; and by the conflict between his knowledge and his imagination, which makes the sinuous creatures in the black depths below him seem “Five inches huge!” Eventually, overcome by his desires, he succumbs to temptation and uses his superior power and knowledge to coax these primitive creatures into his home-made net, and, so, into his world. There is, however, no sense of sin involved. The child’s actions are linked in the poem’s imagery with the naive, mischievous tricks of the Chinese Monkey–god, and the death of the fish serves to demonstrate to him the enormous difficulty of trying to move between the two worlds. These fish, too, with their “little cupid mouths,” are emissaries of the Mother Goddess, sent, like Cupid himself, to teach the child the power of desire, the foolishness of pride,

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and the need for patience and control. The final ritual of tossing the “pouting, failed, paled new moons” of the loach “one by one / Back into their Paradise and mine” (74) suggests Hughes’s acknowledgment of the Goddess’s power and his wry acceptance of this lesson. Whatever Hughes learned from this childhood experience, his belief that fish and their watery world connected him directly with the realm of Nature, and with his own subconscious energies, remained very strong. And, just as the cupid–lipped loach in “The Canal’s Drowning Black” aroused his desire, so the first large trout that he ever saw had special meaning for him. “The Long Tunnel Ceiling” (76–77) describes this first encounter; and, introducing the poem in a BBC Home Service, Schools broadcast (June 16, 1965), Hughes spoke of the trout as “the authentic aboriginal in that polluted valley” of the Calder, and “the holiest creature out there in its free unspoiled sacred world.” Explaining these views, he said: “I was too young to capture small ones in hillside streams so trout came to have magical meaning for me which I never managed to get over.” Consequently, the trout which leapt so suddenly into his dark “cavern of air and water” under the busy canal bridge seemed god-like and sacred—“An ingot! / Holy of holies! A treasure!”—a “seed of the wild god” now “flowering” just for him. Erupting from the black mirror-world into Hughes’s noisy place under the bridge, this great trout briefly shattered the interface between Hughes’s real and imaginary worlds, just as it broke the circle made by the bridge arch and its reflection. The poem’s imagery captures the cataclysmic breaking and re-making of Hughes’s trembling tunnel; and the strange confusions which occur with reflections, so that the canal waters appear “cradled” in the imaged ceiling and a rising trout appears as a falling brick. It captures, too, the careless beauty of the great fish, a “free lord” of these two worlds; and the shock, amazement and awe of the boy, whose imagination is fired with visions of the trout’s moorland home and the “shake-up of heaven and the hills” which has brought this “tigerish, dark, breathing lily” to him. Ultimately, in the poem, the trout becomes a symbol of Nature’s universal energies, which Hughes sees waiting, almost hidden, “between the tyres, under the tortured axles” of the industrial world of Elmet, to redress the disturbed natural balance; a warning of the power which the “wild god” has, to bring the structures of this world crashing down like a collapsing bridge; an intimation of the coming apocalypse which the boy thought “at last . . . had started.” Above all, for Hughes, the trout represents a creature which has the ability to move at will between worlds and, like a shaman’s animal guides, to take him imaginatively with it. His apprehension that this “holiest” of the creatures of Nature’s unspoiled, “sacred” world appeared especially for him,

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reinforces this and indicates, also, the source of Hughes’s belief that he had a special role to play in society. “Tick Tock Tick Tock” (120) is the second poem to suggest Hughes’s awareness that he was intended to play a special role in the regeneration of Elmet. In it, he refers to Peter Pan, a story by J.M. Barrie which was familiar to most children of Hughes’s generation and was made popular through a tradition of Christmas performances. Peter Pan is a little boy who never grows up. He lives on an island in a place called Neverland, together with other abandoned children, but they are constantly threatened by pirates whose leader is tracked by a crocodile who has swallowed an alarm clock. So, the ticking of the clock is a warning that danger is near. In “Tick Tock Tick Tock” (ROE, 120), Hughes looked back on his earlier life from the standpoint of the mature poet and saw himself as the crocodile in Peter Pan—a primitive creature, embodying the natural energies, and carrying the message of time and of danger. In Hughes’s poem, it is the people of Elmet who, like children, are blind to the damage happening all around them. The ticking of the clock moves relentlessly through the poem like the crocodile, portending danger and disaster, but “Everlasting play” pervades the Calder Valley, making it, like Peter Pan’s Neverland, a place where it is always “Summer Summer / Summer Summer,” and no one ever grows up. In a childhood reenactment of the story, “Somebody else played Peter Pan,” Hughes wrote. “I swallowed an alarm clock / And over the school playground’s macadam / Crawled from prehistory towards them.” “Macadam” was the term used to describe a commonly used surfacing tar, but literally “Mac” in some English dialects means “son of,” and Adam, of course, was our biblical progenitor. So, the school playground is linked with the innocence of the first Creation, the “school” becomes the school of life and the playground is part of the Calder Valley itself, in which the primitive energies have existed “from prehistory.” Set against the relentless passage of time, the poems in Remains of Elmet have shown, already, a world of human error and foolishness: the unenlightened world of the “imbecile innocent” (to borrow an apt phrase from Cave Birds (THCP, 423), which “incinerates itself happily / From a hundred mill chimneys” (120). Unlike those who “acted” Peter Pan (the word suggests the falsity of their role), Hughes, because of the different perspectives his closeness to Nature offered him, saw in retrospect, another reality. He was unable to change the course of events, but in Remains of Elmet he imaginatively recreates the land and its people; and works, with Nature, to heal the wounds. So, the damaged and scarred land which, in one of the first poems in the book, lies desolate and “Open to Huge Light” (17) becomes, “In April”

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(114), toward the end of the book, “A soft animal of peace” which “now lies openly sunning / Huge bones and space-weathered hide // Healing and sweetening.” Because Remains of Elmet is such a personal sequence of poems, Hughes also used his poetry to heal the spirits of the people, especially those of his own family. The book opens with the dedication: “Poems in Memory of Edith Farrar” (6), who was Hughes mother,4 and the prefatory poem (7) describes his elderly uncle, who is so like his mother that he has “my Mother’s face” and “hands, a little plumper, trembling more.” This elderly uncle, with his mother’s memory “still intact, still good / Under his baldness,” is “Keeping their last eighty years alive and attached to me, / Keeping their strange depths, alive and attached to me.” He has, Hughes wrote, “brought me my last inheritance,” which is “Archaeology of the mouth” but “on such a frayed, fraying hair-fineness” that one kick “And the dark river will fold it away.” It is through his own mother, and through the alchemical “mothers” of Nature with which Hughes works in the poems, that the first and the last poem of Remains of Elmet are linked. The final poem in the book “The Angel” (124) describes a dream rather like the one which Hughes told Faas he had “until a few years ago, dreamt at regular intervals since childhood.” Faas relates Hughes’s poetic interpretations of this recurrent dream to his awareness of the desecration and rejection of “Mother Nature,” and he sees Hughes’s poetry as his constant and “deliberate efforts to retrieve her desecrated remnants” (Faas, 121–22). “The Angel,” however, refers specifically to deceased members his own family, although in the ambiguity of his lines, the dream “Mother,” to whom he calls out in the poem, could equally be his own mother, Edith Farrar Hughes, or Mother Nature. “The Angel” recounts the same dream that Hughes had described in an earlier poem, “Ballad from a Fairy Tale” (THCP, 171–72). In both poems, he describes a vision of a disastrous, fiery event, like “a moon disintegrating” over “Black Halifax.” The swan/angel which emerges from the resulting phosphorescent crater lights the moors as it passes low over them towards him and then disappears “towards the West.” It is a “ghostly” and “brilliant” vision, but Hughes’s “mother’s answer,” when he cries out to her for an explanation, turns “the beauty suddenly to horror,” and defines the angel for him as an “omen”—a prophetic vision of dark and dreadful future events. So, horror, beauty, and energy are combined in one powerful symbol. The detail which links Hughes’s vision with everyday life, however, and which gave his mother’s words “doubled” significance, is his second sighting of the angel’s puzzling halo. This “enigmatic square of satin,” which ripples in the wind of the angel’s flight, he saw again years later in a square of satin in Sylvia Plath’s coffin, where he “reached out and touched it.”5 The location of the vision in the area around Hughes’s old home, his reference to members of his family, and his reluctance to spell out the associated

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words and events all suggest its great personal significance. When he rewrote the poem for Remains of Elmet, his mother had died and his “mother’s” words were now under his feet, “Joined with earth and engraved in rock”; and Sylvia, too, is buried in the hilltop graveyard in Heptonstall Cemetery. Mother Nature’s words are, metaphorically, “engraved in rock” everywhere in Elmet, and this is reflected in the poems and the photographs, but there are actual words engraved in rock at this place where Hughes’s wife and his mother are buried. Only metaphorically are his mother’s words “under his feet,” for on Edith Farrar’s upright tombstone there are only the names and dates of family members. On that of Sylvia Plath, however, is carved: Even amidst Fierce Flames The Golden Lotus can be planted

Such words assert, even in Sylvia’s death, the survival of the female lifeprinciple of re-creation and generation which the lotus represents. They can be found in a poem by the Ming Dynasty poet, Wu Ch’eng-en, which is clearly about alchemy and regeneration (The Adventures of Monkey translated by Arthur Waley, Ch. 2).6 And, whether or not these are the words to which Hughes refers in “The Angel,” this final poem in Remains of Elmet brings together the human mothers and the Mother Goddess, whose triple aspects of Bride, Mother, and Layer-out Hughes has elsewhere described as the different faces of the Angel of Death, who is also the Angel of Life (Faas, 166–67). The mothers and the angel, therefore, are symbolically linked by the powerful life/death force of which they are the instruments. Significantly, in “Heptonstall Cemetery” (122), the poem that immediately precedes “The Angel,” Hughes names the family dead who are buried in Heptonstall cemetery and at the same time, he resurrects them. In the cauldron of the elements , where the wind “slams across tops” and “spray cuts upwards,” Man and Nature are united and “all the horizons lift wings,” becoming a “A family of dark swans” which go “beating low through storm-silver” toward the Atlantic. The Atlantic is west of the Calder Valley, so these swans fly toward the Western Paradise which is also the Celtic Otherworld. Hughes’s swans, unlike the pure white swans of Aphrodite and Apollo, are “dark,” and it is appropriate that the newborn, newly fledged, souls should resemble cygnets. Most importantly, however, as birds of the Sun God and the Goddess, they are symbols of unity which heal the divisions between Heaven and Earth, Man and Nature, the corporeal and the spiritual. So, harmony is restored and a new beginning can be made. “The Angel,” however, serves as a coda to the Elmet poems and, by its similarity with other apocalyptic visions, like those in “The Revelation” in the Bible, it extends the scope of its prophecy to encompass society as a whole. In Remains of Elmet Hughes’s warnings are repeated strongly, and he uses this

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poetic and photographic re-creation of the fate of the Calder Valley not only as an example, but also as a powerful imaginative tool with which to stimulate us to awareness. Our errors which, like those of the people of Elmet, are of arrogance and blindness, of “braggart–browed complacency” (“Egghead,” THCP, 33), and of refusal and suppression of the natural energies, will, with the inevitability with which the ticking clock of Peter Pan’s crocodile marks the approach of danger, lead us to disaster. Hughes’s prophecies of disaster, however, are not untempered with hope. In his role of poet/shaman/alchemist, he not only poetically transforms the death of the Calder Valley and its people into a natural and spiritual re-birth, he also brings to us transforming imaginative energies which open our senses to the world around us and alert us to our own responsibility in maintaining the delicate, but essential, balance of Nature.

NOTES 1. The alchemy in the poems of Cave Birds is discussed in detail in Skea, Ann, Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest, University of New England Press, 1994. Now also available as an e-book at https://ann​.skea​.com​/PQIndex​.html. 2. The alchemy of River is embedded in the poems, which follow the annual cycle of Nature, and focus, in particular, on the life of the Salmon, a sacred animal to the Celts, but now a species seriously endangered by pollution. The poems of this sequence are sequence is explored in detail in Skea, Ann, Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest. 3. Hughes’s review of Max Nicholson’s book is reprinted in Scammell William (ed.), Winter Pollen, Faber, 1994, pp. 128–135. 4. In the second edition, Elmet, Hughes added his father, William Hughes, to the dedication (5) and the prefatory poem became the first poem in this book, titled “The Dark River” (13). 5. Hughes acknowledged this in a letter to me (November 3, 1984), and his sister, Olwyn Hughes, confirmed that this square of white satin was part of the furnishings of Sylvia Plath’s coffin. 6. Wu Ch’eng’s poem speaks of guarding “Spirit Breath and Soul”; and observing the “locked embrace” which keeps the “Golden Lotus” of the vital powers strong so that they may be put to new use in reincarnation as “Buddha or immortal.”

REFERENCES Hughes, Ted. CAave Birds, Faber, 1978. ———. Elmet, Faber, 1994. ———. Letters of Ted Hughes Reid, Christopher (ed.), Faber, 2007. Abbreviated to LTH in this paper. ———. Remains of Elmet, Faber, 1979.

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———. River, Faber, 1983. ———. The Critical Forum, ‘Introduction’, Norwich Tapes, 1978. Transcript at https://ann​.skea​.com​/CriticalForum​.htm. ———. The Iron Man, Faber, 1968. ———. The Iron Woman, Faber, 1993. ———. Your Environment, with Ross, David, Walter Pottinger and Daniel Weissbort, (eds.), British Library, Dewey 301.305. Faas, Ekbert, The Unaccommodated Universe, Black Sparrow, 1980. Grossinger, Richard (ed.), Alchemy, North Atlantic, 1979. ‘Notes & Queries’ webpages at https://ann​.skea​.com​/Notes​&Queries​.htm. Scammell, William (ed.), Winter Pollen, Faber, 1994. Skea, Ann. The Poetic Quest, University of New England, 1994. E-book at https:// ann​.skea​.com​/PQIndex​.html. ‘Ted Hughes, Ecology and the Arts’ in Matai, Krishanu and Chalkraborty, Soumyadeep (eds.), Global Perspectives on Eco-Aesthetic and Eco-Ethics, Lexington, 2020. Therapus, Janus Lacinius, quoted in Grossinger, Richard (ed.), North Atlantic, 1979. Wu Ch’eng, Arthur Waley (trans.) The Adventures of Monkey the publication details of my copy of this book are in Chinese and there are no page numbers.

Chapter 9

John Clare and the Horizon of Nature’s Mystery Mihai A. Stroe

The runlet in shallows bawls loud & in deeps Deceitfully sinks into silence and sleeps. (The Holiday Walk; Clare 1990, 171)

In John Clare’s poetics the key words and key horizons can in short be said to be the following: the Rousseauistic return back to Nature; the naturalist poet in a condition of “[w]ading through grass like rivers to the chin” (the sonnet Heavy Dew; Clare 1990, 479), grass here standing for an archetypal symbol of green Nature through which man aspires to advance eternally (eternal germination); the “freshness beautified & summer sounds,” which “to the ear [bring] in one continued flood / The luxury of joy that knows no bounds” (Field Cricket; Clare 1990, 471) (eternal exuberance); the contemplative poet as a dreamer struck by the magic of Nature: “dreamy is the light that dwells around” (Footpaths; Clare 1990, 468) (romantic oneiric visionariness); the pacific poet relishing the “calm peace” and “green delights” of Nature (A Walk; Clare 1990, 462–63), and dreaming of “lone islands” of “calm joy & humble hope [. . .] / To live in peace unhurt & hurting none” (Pastoral Liberty; Clare 1990, 455) (total absence of the Hobbesian homo homini lupus & bellum omnium contra omnes); the open-hearted and open-minded poet for whom “earth with Gods rich blessings overflow[s]” (Meadow Paths; Clare 1990, 454; a similar horizon is to be found in the early poetry of Gottfried Keller) (absence of the war between head & heart or between reason & emotion); the poet spellbound with Nature’s eternal periodic freshness that is mirrored in the ways time codifies its passage through man’s life: “the beautiful past like a midsummer dream / Looks green through the winter of age” (The Old Shepherd; Clare 1990, 196) (time as a dream; this theme seems to be an extension and generalization of the romantic theme of life as a 135

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dream). Thus, in sum, we find in Clare’s thought two antagonistic tendencies believed to be operative in all life: the expansion of the joy of life and the regression-contraction of the sadness of non-life; the latter is caused by the fact that man gradually realizes that earthly life is ephemeral and moves in the direction of life depletion (the time-passing effect), so he comes to understand the creation-destruction, anagenesis-catagenesis, ascension-descension, life-death dualisms. The rapturous, sometimes almost idyllic, vision of reality is therefore accompanied by a somber vision. Beyond ecstasy and the quest for ecstasy there lies a tormenting question growing out of the uncertainty-filled fear “that all were shadows of the mind / Picturing the joys it wished to find” (The Enthusiast, A Day Dream in Summer; Clare 1990, 237–38). From this (romantic) solipsistic question the horizon of mystery expands inscrutable. In the terms of Constantin Noica’s (1996) philosophy, this question sheds light onto all of Clare’s ontology. Considered as a whole, John Clare’s and William Blake’s works are the two extremes of English romantic poetry: the first, the pole of “green” joy, the “zenith” of “green delights”; the latter, the pole of weeping and of desperate joy, the “nadir” of sorrow—in Blake, we should be reminded in this sense, the experience of man’s Fall is much more intense in comparison with all the other English romantics, hence the immense sufferance emanating from the works, which is perhaps similar in its keenness only to that found in Mary Shelley’s roman a clef The Last Man (see Shelley 2004) and perhaps some of Thomas Chatterton’s productions. The point of convergence between Clare and Blake, however, is the fact that in both the horizon of mystery is present in various archetypal forms, being challenged by various archetypal uncertainties and doubts, which constitute as many veils obscuring the horizons of knowledge. This problem of the lack of fundamental/archetypal ontological knowledge reflects the cognitive state of affairs in the human world, a world affected also by another serious problem: alienation (from childhood). Thus, Clare says the following: “[o]ur first believings all are old / & faith itself untrue” (Childhood; Clare 1990, 97; this is a reference to the fall from purity / innocence), but man is “the monarch of the wood / Towered oer it to the sky / Where thou couldst sing of other spheres [. . .]” (To a Poet; Clare 1990, 107). For Clare man is “that masterpiece of mind” which “in his makers image live[s]” (On Visiting a Favourite Place; Clare 1990, 276), and which thus experiences “lifes voyage” (On Visiting a Favourite Place; Clare 1990, 277), that is, mystery itself. In this image created here by Clare is suggested the Blakean paradigm of the “Mental Traveler”: man journeying simultaneously through the cosmos, history, and his personal psycho-space in eternal disclosure, thus achieving a triple experience: knowledge of the synchronic cosmos, of man’s and the universe’s proto-history, and self-knowledge, therefore an integrative

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psycho-spatiotemporal experience. For Blake, knowledge of mystery means loss of innocence with the inevitable passage into experience which leads to revolution (an ontological quantum leap, an ontological complexification and re-stabilization). For Clare the function of mystery is deification—gnosis is deifying (much as in John Keats’s poetics, see Hyperion), so experience is not branded with sadness, but it is ennobled: “scenes [of mystery] will make the mind divine” (On Visiting a Favourite Place; Clare 1990, 277). Sorrow, however, is the mood in which secret, numinous, ambiguous feelings become manifest. Such is the atmosphere in The Old Mans Song, on the verge of mystery, despair, desuetude: & sorrow like a young storm creeps dark upon my brow [. . .] / & left me like a lame bird upon a withered bough / I look upon the past tis as black as winter days [. . .] / O would I had but know[n] of the wide worlds many ways / But futurity is blind [. . .] / Life is nothing but a blank & the sunny shining past / Is overspread with glooms [. . .] / While troubles daily thicken [. . .] / Life smiled upon me once [. . .] / Yet I never gave it thought that my happiness would end [. . .] / Such is life & such am I a wounded & a winter stricken flie. (The Old Mans Song; Clare 1990, 317)

THE BARRIER OF KNOWLEDGE AND THE VEIL OF ILLUSION At an extreme limit, experience seems to lead to a shutdown of knowledge: cognitive processes are barred out, life advancing into experience seems to build its own walls or barriers (in a sense, these are conscience “darknesses” or fragmentations), so that the worldly experience laden with the romantic Weltschmerz (“worldweariness,” the pain of the world) comes to cyclically fail (at every end of the cycle, or near it) in the desolation of darkness, and it is at precisely this moment that romantics like Clare feel the need to superpose a “superontology” of the existential plenum over the paradoxical “ontology” of nothingness, which Clare expresses through his metaphor of life as “a blank,” that is, life as the cosmic illusion, the void or veil of Maya. After this illusion becomes manifest, it disappears from memory, and this is how, over this irretrievable loss, desperation sets in, being triggered by the realization of the fact that memory experienced not a truth, but an illusion. Hence the need of the romantics for a “hyperontology” which is supposed to stabilize, to render permanent the illusory physical being, and their love of life’s irresistible expansion, their love of the supernatural inside the natural, or what we may call being’s Superbeing.

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The poem we previously quoted is thus almost a testament, which Clare seems to have continued in Ballad: Give me lifes ease when my leafs turning yellow / Leave me no more of cares mountains to climb / Give me lifes calm when my fruits getting mellow / Let no rude winds blow to shorten my prime / Let my last pleasures be just as Ive thought ’em / Let death [sic] supprise me with no ruffian call / But soft as the leaves on the breezes of autumn / [. . .] when by age life is wounded / & if the grave is unhaunted with pain / Long be the time ere the last trump is sounded / Long may I sleep ere I’m wakened again. (Ballad; Clare 1990, 342)

In this poem cum testament, we find a Clare who faces life’s mystery differently, with a feeling of renunciation, of resignation. Nature becomes for Clare the very phenomenology of the soul, as it were. Thus, everything is “leafy” and everything falls (see the creation-destruction cyclicity), death itself the poet wishes to be “soft as the leaves on the breezes of autumn.” The wind becomes the breath of life, which, if it consumes away (if it blows strong), it scatters the leaves away (life’s pulsations) and then life itself becomes nothing but “a blank,” or at least the anticipation of an ontic void, which seems to implacably emerge once life’s vital energy is spent. The poet is thus the “gnostic tree” (the biblical Tree of Knowledge) gradually losing its immense foliage—the seas of leaves—which becomes the past “overspread with glooms.” The “glooms” are the moments (the foliage) from which life, like the writing on a leaf that becomes blank, disappeared. We are dealing here, obviously, with the temporal paradox, which Clare intensely experienced. The metaphor of the leafage is thus not accidental. It is paradoxical that the end (death) should have “leaves” (moments): these are to be found on a different ontic plane, as atemporal fulgurations that lead to a new awakening to life, a new beginning (see Clare’s definition of life as a samsara-driven “repeated dream,” in the poem entitled What is Life?). Death is thus a sleep that leads the soul to “other spheres.” The new beginning can mean a new terrestrial life (see the perpetual wheel of samsara), or eternal life, the passage out of usual temporality and into universal, sacred time. Here, beyond the sleep of death, the mental journey does not cease. On the contrary, beyond the end there is an eternal beginning, as a hyper-living event or series of events, that is, precisely what romantics strive to find even during their earthly lifetime. As in Blake’s system, in Clare the mental journey is forever unfolding; although life is “wounded & a winter stricken flie,” it always regains “its first liberty” (Song; Clare 1990, 345). This is the auroral moment of conscience (the primordium of living beings) which never disappears, but which tends to be occulted by experience. The primordial aurora or freedom of conscience is what advances through “deaths dark sealed impenetrable cloud” (On a Skull; Clare 1990, 386). Clare’s

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formula here has affinities with expressions used in hermetism, and it proclaims the knowledge barrier where the phenomenon of death is concerned. The skull becomes the “[p]icture of our frail origin & end” (On a Skull; Clare 1990, 386), the image of life’s hidden nature and of the anticipation of the “blank” (the void, the lack of life) that follows it: man lives “in fear of waking wrapt around / In deaths dark sealed impenetrable cloud.” The skull that man contemplates is that which “[d]ost ever dream & speak without a sound,” which “[t]would make deaths self to shudder in his shroud,” its “shadows hangeth like a gloomy pall / With more or less of terror overall.” Clare comments on the significance of death (represented as the human skull) sketched above as follows: Life looking on this glass of time doth freeze / With fear at its own image which [sic] its sees / To think the living head with thoughts so full / Is but the flattered portrait of a skull. (On a Skull; Clare 1990, 386)

The topos of Mystery Is Always Gloomy: The very ground / In desolations garment doth appear—/ The lapse of age & mystery profound—/ We gaze on wrecks of ornamented stones / On tombs whose sculptures half erased appear / & rank weeds battening over human bones / Till even ones very shadow seems to feel a fear. (Crowland Abbey; Clare 1990, 394)

This landscape irresistibly reminds us of the mysterious world of ruins continually crumbling / disintegrating depicted by Piranesi, the famous Venetian engraver, who certainly had become an exemplary model for the romantics. [See Piranesi 2006; this is a beautiful edition, with Luigi Ficacci’s comments. For instance, see the engraving on page 54: “Ara antica” / “Ancient altar,” from the series titled Prima Parte di Architetture, e Prospettive inventate, ed incise da Gio. Batt.a Piranesi Architetto Veneziano dedicate al Sig. Nicola Giobbe. In Roma, MDCCXLIII. Nella Stamperia de’ Fratelli Pagliarini Mercanti Librari, e Stampatori. (The edition of the Brothers Pagliarini, Rome, 1743: the title engraved on the first page: First part of the architecture and perspectives: imagined and engraved by Gio. Batt.a Piranesi, Venetian architect: dedicated to Nicola Giobbe).] CALLING BACK TO MEMORY AND THE PROCESS OF SPIRITUALIZATION Ancient things form a space of mystery: the traces of the past are a manifestation of presentiality (the dynamics of presence) in the temporal extensions of archetypes. The dynamics of the present allow conscience to become somehow fixated, by returning to the traces of the past (which Piranesi depicted so

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well in their implacably tragic destiny). By this fixation or return onto what is still visible from the past (what manages, like a ray of light, to get through the channel or filter of time up to the living moment of the present), conscience meets the ontic mystery filled with the traces of the transcendental noumenal. Henry David Thoreau reflected on this theme in his famous journal; here is an example, in which the “transcendentalist senses” of the past and of the future are at work: I went some months ago to see a panorama of the Rhine. It was like a dream of the Middle Ages. I floated down its historic stream in something more than imagination, under bridges built by the Romans and repaired by later heroes, past cities and castles whose very names were music to me, made my ears tingle, and each of which was the subject of a legend. There seemed to come up from its waters and its vine-clad hills and valleys a hushed music as of crusaders departing for the Holy Land. There were Ehrenbreitstein and Rolandseck and Coblentz, which I knew only in history. I floated along through the moonlight of history under the spell of enchantment. It was as if I remembered a glorious dream, as if I had been transported to a heroic age and breathed an atmosphere of chivalry. Those times appeared far more poetic and heroic than these. Soon after I went to see the panorama of the Mississippi, and as I fitly worked my way upward in the light of to-day, and saw the steamboats wooding up, and looked up the Ohio and the Missouri, and saw its unpeopled cliffs, and counted the rising cities, and saw the Indians removing west across the stream, and heard the legends of Dubuque and of Wenona’s Cliff, still thinking more of the future than of the past or present, I saw that this was a Rhine stream of a different kind. (Journal; Thoreau 1906ii, 146–47)

Thus, re-experiencing the past by experiencing its traces, conscience seems to relive a (exemplary / primordial) proto-phenomenon: proto-creations, proto-events, temporally expansive dynamic states of proto-realities. This experience leads, inevitably for the situation after the spiritual decline, to a fear of mystery, especially because the revealed elements of mystery appear to conscience as being things that had always been already known (they appear to have been only occulted, forgotten by the mind due to the spiritual fall; see in Platonism the phenomenon called anamnesis, the calling back to memory). Thus, the image of human bones covered by weeds (reminding one of Piranesi’s style of ruins; Ital. vedute = “views”) is a (primordial or archetypal) proto-image of death. Its contemplation thus leads to a calling back to memory of an ancient “immemorial” time, an illud tempus, when a new archetype entered the sphere of the sacred (the world before the Fall): the phenomenon of death (as a consequence of the Fall of Creation from the sphere of the sacred), which becomes the first sign that the nature of reality is mysterious and that reality poses the ontological question of plenum (life) versus vacuum (non-life).

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Reality attests, therefore, to the existence of an archetypal ontic dualism (full versus void), and this implies the phenomenal (so also perceptual) possibility of a passage from the one to the other (see the science of thresholds, which is a foundation of romanticism). The passage from fullness to voidness (absence) is primordially a carrier of the transcendental noumenal: against this type of passage are gathered all human fears, because in it is mirrored best the capacity of being to transcend itself, to surpass itself by entering a reality which belongs to a different ontic plane: a “hyperontic” plane, a “superreality,” or an inferior plane, a “subreality.” The fact that being can be found in the divine “Superbeing” reflects the fundamental paradoxical nature of reality, regardless of what ontic level we are dealing with. A similar paradox is expressed also by the Trinity dogma, according to which God the Father is in God the Son, while God the Son is in God the Father, without either of the two “mixing” their “substance”; likewise, the creature is in God, even if it no longer perceives this fact, without God necessarily mixing his “substance” with the creature (if that were the case, then we would be dealing with a pantheistic worldview). On the other hand, the passage from absence to fullness is the expression of the love of being as the primordial joy of birth. In favor of this type of passage are gathered all human desires, because this type expresses the victory of being over non-being or nothingness. The conflict between the two types of passage reflects the dynamics of life, the passage itself being a universal of the nature of being, representing a movement of spirit. The temporal world is too a manifestation of a movement of spirit. For Clare, time is thus a dramatic passage from plenum to absence: “Time the prime minister of death” (Death; Clare 1990, 139), while death itself is the one “[t]o rap the babels down,” the one that “levels all things in his march / Nought can resist his mighty strength”: The rich the poor one common bed / Shall find in the unhonoured grave / Where weeds shall crown alike the head / Of tyrant & of slave. (Death; Clare 1990, 139)

This representation of death reminds us of Albion’s image after his fall, in Blake’s myth: The [. . .] Fallen Man stretch’d like a corse upon the oozy Rock, / Wash’d with the tides, pale, overgrown with weeds / That mov’d with horrible dreams; [. . .]. (Vala, VIII, 4–6; Blake 1976, 341)

There is in Clare a regret in front of death and in front of the mystery of oblivion:

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I would not that my being all should die / & pass away with every common lot / I would not that my humble dust should lie / In quite a strange & unfrequented spot / By all unheeded & by all forgot / With nothing save the heedless winds to sigh / & nothing but the dewy morn to weep / About my grave far hid from the worlds eye / I feign would have some friend to wander nigh / & find a path to where my ashes sleep. (Memory; Clare 1990, 395)

Yet, at times Clare shows some resistance against oblivion: Spare their memories like a thunder sky / Wrap them in living flames & never let them die. (Vasco Nuñez on his Enemies; Clare 1990, 204)

The sense of this mystery is deepened in another poem: When poets in times darkness hid / Shall lie like memory in a pyramid / For­ getting yet not all forgot though lost / Like a thread’s end in ravelled windings crost [. . .] / [. . .] for time protects the song / & nature is their soul to whom all clings [. . .] / The little robin [. . .] / Sings unto time a pastoral & gives / A music that lives on & ever lives [. . .]. (The Eternity of Nature; Clare 1990, 247–48)

In this poem the Pharaonic view of the poet brings us again to the conception about the ascensional nature of reality. The poet lies in the heart of the pyramid, he becomes in a sense a deified Sun-god, an apotheosized king who can rise to the heavens (see also Wordsworth’s Home at Grasmere; Wordsworth 2008, 174–99) and, at will, can descend (Chevalier & Gheerbrant 1996, 776–78). The pyramid, whose etymology seems to indicate the notion of “fire in the middle,” suggests the cosmic hill that was erected between the primordial waters at the time of the making of the world, and so it can be regarded as a metaphor for created existence (Chevalier & Gheerbrant 1996, 776–77). In Clare, there is an image of nature, with forests and trees described as “hills oer hills” (Forrest Trees; Clare 1990, 459), that reminds us indeed of the characteristic structure of a ziggurat and of Semiramis’s Hanging Gardens. This kind of poetic images seems to suggest that, in the ideal case, the true poet is initiated into the Great Mysteries of Osiris, thus becoming a keeper of the key of life (the ankh), a spiritual presence. By becoming more and more spiritualized, his or her life will grow “the wider and broader,” and “the higher he or she rises” (cf. A.D. Sertillanges, who associated the image of the inverted pyramid with the concept of spiritual evolution; apud Chevalier & Gheerbrant 1996, 777). The poet becomes a point of integration and convergence, an image of synthesis, like the inverted tree with roots in the sky and its top buried in the ground. He or she has the awareness of synthesis (Chevalier & Gheerbrant 1996, 777), and is the meeting place between the two worlds. In the first one, memory fades, in the

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second one memory is kept at a mysterious ontic level. [In this sense, the Book of Life mentioned in the Bible is said to contain the names (obtained by the rite of baptism) of all the living, and thus it is the book of memory / breath of life, the mysterious manifestation of the Conscience of the creating Logos; in the name of each living being it is thus assumed that the temporal personal history is spiritually “engraved,” and this history for each and every human being is assumed to contain the possibility to be a Christly destiny.] The overall symbolism of the pyramid is therefore the idea of “living growth”; the poet, having become a Sun-god, is the supreme expression of the “eternal limit of growth” (Chevalier & Gheerbrant 1996, 778). According to some accounts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, the top of the pyramid is “the Word as Demiurge,” the “first-born Power,” “proceeding from the Father and ruling all created things, totally perfect and fruitful” (Chevalier & Gheerbrant 1996, 778). Consequently, the poet, as an initiate, unites with the Logos—with Clare’s “Breathing Word”—just as the dead Pharaoh “awaited assimilation with the immortal god” inside “a chamber in the stone” (Chevalier & Gheerbrant 1996, 778). In this regard, Clare’s “Breathing Word” seems to correspond precisely to the idea of the “power of the word” or the “words of power” (heka or ur-heka; cf. Budge 1978i, 171, 514, 515; 1991, 110, 280), by which the Egyptian god Ptah is said to bring to life, to give life, by inspiriting the “name” of things, which thus became manifest as Ptah uttered their names (the god Ptah first conceived of the name in his heart, then his tongue repeated the name; cf. Daniel 1985, 260–61); in a parallel myth, it is stated that Ptah created the gods and kings out of metal (Cotterell & Storm 2005, 310), which corresponds to some degree with Blake’s metalomorphic view as expressed in his Prophetic Books (Vala, Milton, Jerusalem). In Clare, life’s mystery becomes deeper in front of “old tree oblivion,” for “blank oblivion reigns as earths sublime” (Obscurity; Clare 1990, 430). There seems to be an unfathomable relationship between life and oblivion. Both have the attributes of “blank” and “sublime.” Oblivion is an ancient tree which seems to bear life’s leaves; it is a kind of tree of gnosis accessible only to the spirit. Oblivion is an anti-memory, not in the sense that memory is destroyed, but in the sense that it passes or is engulfed into an “anti-chamber,” into another space from whence it cannot communicate. It enters the lower chamber of the sand-glass (see the metaphor in the poem What Is Life?), the matrix space, and thus it leaves behind a blank, an antimemory, which is sublime in nature, because it still carries traces of memory (there is no such thing as absolute oblivion, just as is suggested also by Piranesi’s engravings), and these traces exert an attraction over the other (lower) chamber of the sandglass via the narrow way (the jet of sand) through which memory is transmuted, distilled, “alchemized,” by the spiritualizing power of the Uranian sphere (the upper chamber, the heaven).

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Memory is transmuted into the “tree of happiness.” Thus, oblivion and happiness are two “trees” whose roots meet in the narrow way. Oblivion is the image of the fallen Earth (always tending to forget itself), while happiness is the image of Eternity, which transmutes or alchemizes oblivion (lost memory) through the filter or channel of the roots of archetypal memories (the eternal memories-lights, which cannot be forgotten or lost, being uncreated) into the earth of Paradise (Eden). That is why even the ash (“old tree oblivion [which] doth thy life condemn”; Obscurity; Clare 1990, 430) is sublime: it becomes, as alchemists say, the “matter” of new redeemed worlds. In Blake’s terms, the old tree is renewed. In relationship to mystery, time itself is “a child”: Mystery thou subtle essence—ages gain / New light from darkness—still thy blanks remain / & reason trys [to] chase old night from thee / When chaos fled thy parent took the key / Blank darkness—& the things age left behind / Are lockt for aye in thy unspeaking mind / Towers temples ruins on & under ground / So old—so dark—so mystic—so profound / Old time himself so old is like a child / & cant remember when their blocks were piled / Or caverns scooped & with a wondering eye / He seems to pause like other standers bye / Half thinking that the wonders left unknown / [sic] Was born in ages older than his own. (To Mystery; Clare 1990, 425)

Mystery is a “blank” to the created mind, a void (this is the ontological knowledge barrier), but life too is a “blank.” Moreover, we cannot speak of mystery without the phenomenon of life, in which the mystery of conscience “distills,” in an evolutionary sense. In this sonnet, therefore, Clare obviously goes in an apophatic direction: the “new light” is gained from darkness, from meeting “old night.” This is the revelatory medium, the space of mystery, of speaking silence. [This reminds us of one of Wittgenstein’s ideals: to keep silent in front of the ineffable and inexplicable; see also Heidegger’s silence in which all powers and relations are active, a state of affairs he may have observed in John Keats’s and Friedrich Hölderlin’s poetic heroes—for the case of Keats’s mythical heroes, this situation was called “Miltonic stationing”; cf. Bate 1963.] This is also the space of archetypal life, the matrix-womb of Creation, where the “subtle essence” silently speaks the infinitesimal primordial language (Ursprache) and communicates at the same time with the infinitesimal births thus generated. In another sonnet, Clare states his belief in the Christian Trinity: Truth old as heaven is & God is truth / [. . .] & when I ope the volume which began / Its essence & its mystery with man / I see that divine shadow mystery / & all the attributes of majesty / The high consception—power unspeakable / Where deity as three-almighty dwell / & rise above myself oer reasons shrine / & feel my origin as love divine / Older [sic] then earth ’bove worlds however

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high / An essence to be crushed but never die / [. . .]. (The Fountain of Hope; Clare 1990, 432)

The deity “dwells” in the “divine shadow mystery.” In this sense, we observe here affinities with Pseudo–Dionysius the Areopagite’s apophatic theology and with Böhme’s system. The moment when creation begins, these divine “shadows” (which mean the fact that the divinity was incognizable, that it had not yet started to reveal itself before beginning to create, because no one had existed besides it) start to disappear, as a reflex of the primordial fiat lux (“let there be light”), when knowledge begins to be given to the creature. But only man is given the supreme revelation of the divinity, because only man is created in the image and after the likeness of God (elohim is a plural form in Hebrew, hence the reference is to a multitude of divinities, which in the Christian doctrine is resolved as the Three Persons of the One God). We encounter in this poem, of course, also the image of a patibilis deus, a “crushed” or “broken” God, who suffers together with his Creation, just as Blake’s Tharmas suffers, the God of waters who is shattered, but cannot die: “Deathless for ever now I wander seeking oblivion” / “In torrents of despair: in vain; for if I plunge beneath,” / “Stifling I live: If dash’d in pieces from a rocky height,” / “I reunite in endless torment; would I had never risen” / “From death’s cold sleep [. . .] beneath the bottom of the raging Ocean. [. . .].” (Vala, IV, 12–16; Blake 1976, 298)

In Clare’s view, time seems to psychologically accelerate while paradoxically physically keeping its usual speed in its advance toward the “Omega Point,” toward the final meeting with God: “Time wandering onward keeps its usual pace / As seeming anxious of eternity†” (The Instinct of Hope; Clare 1990, 442), when “in immortal worlds the soul is living / Eternal as its maker & as free / To taste the unknowns of eternity” (Sunrise; Clare 1990, 440). [†In this sense, Blake says the following: “Time is the mercy of Eternity; without Time’s swiftness, / Which is the swiftest of all things, all were eternal torment.” Milton, 24, 72–73; Blake 1976, 510.] We are dealing here with a paradoxical and omnipotent God, who holds in his power the whole of Creation: Omnipotent & mighty known unknown† [. . .] / Thou badest the unpillared skies their arch expand / Thy breath is underneath them & they stand‡ / Thou badest the seas in tides to rise & fall / & earth to swell triumphant over all / Thy [sic] mercey coeternal with thy skill / Saw all was good & bids it flourish still. (The Deity; Clare 1990, 385)

[‡We observe here echoes from Cowper’s poem The Task: “The Lord of all, himself through all diffused / Sustains, and is the life of all that lives”;

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The Task, VI, 221–22, The Winter Walk at Noon; Cowper 1855, 185). The notion of God’s diffusion through all implies, of course, a pantheistic / cosmotheistic perspective, common for many romantics, including Clare himself.] As Clare says, “silence finds a tongue” and “time becomes a song” (Song; Clare 1972, 220). Thus, the mystery of time discloses itself as being a “hymn to the deity,” while the poet himself becomes “[t]he bard of immortality” (A Vision; Clare 1972, 225), the hymnal or singing conscience which “snatched the sun’s eternal ray / And wrote till earth was but a name” (A Vision; Clare 1972, 225). The poet as Sun-god thus co-witnesses Ptah’s path: from nothingness to everything, by the power of words, and from everything back to nothingness, by a reversed power of words. This is equivalent to the following equation: by magical words, Ptah brings from voidness into existence; and by the same, he can revert everything back into nothingness—by magic he utters into reality, by magic he un-utters into unreality. A different interpretation is, however, also possible (in A Vision it is not clear if Clare envisioned this meaning, especially given the expression “but a name,” which seems to imply a “trifle,” a “mere nothing”): the earthly is wholly spiritualized, transcending even Eden / Paradise, so that the hymn of the Earth and of the poet is an eternal ascension to the deity as Living Logos / Breathing Word. This meaning seems to indeed occur in the following verses: I sat with love by pasture stream / Aye beautys self was sitting bye / Till fields did more then edens seem. (Decay; Clare 1972, 205)

In this process of spiritualization, “[t]he very air seems deified”† (Sabbath Bells; Clare 1972, 181); and joy, which is the “inbred joy” (Summer Images; Clare 1972, 167), becomes “the art of true believing” (Decay; Clare 1972, 207), therefore a return to faith, to “life whose essence is its friends” (The Flitting; Clare 1972, 204). [†See also Keats’s poem Ode to Psyche: “holy were the [. . .] forest boughs, / Holy the air, the water, and the fire” (Keats 2001, 279). See additionally Wordsworth’s poem Resolution and Independence: “By our own spirits are we deified;” Wordsworth 2008, 262.]

TO BE AND NOT TO BE IN SIMULTANEITY Clare thus returns to the simplicity and authenticity of biblical feeling, and he ends by inviting us to Eternity, even though “[t]he sky hangs oer a broken dream” (Decay; Clare 1972, 206). This vision shows the intensity of the existential crisis Clare experienced:

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Through the valley depths of shade / Of night and dark obscurity / Where the path hath lost its way / Where the sun forgets the day / Where there’s nor life nor light to see [. . .] / Where stones will turn to flooding streams / Where plains will rise like ocean waves / Where life will fade like visioned dreams / And mountains darken into caves [. . .] / Through this sad non-identity / Where parents live and are forgot / And sisters live and know us not† [. . .] / In this strange death of life to be / To live in death and be the same / Without this life or home or name / At once to be and not to be / That was and is not—yet to see / Things pass like shadows—and the sky / Above, below, around us lie. / The land of shadows wilt thou trace / And look nor know each others face / The present mixed with reasons gone / And past and present all as one / Say maiden can thy life be led / To join the living and the dead / Then trace thy footsteps on with me / We’re wed to one eternity. (An invite to Eternity; Clare 1972, 223–224)

[†See also Vala: Urizen, exploring the ruin of the world of fallen spirit, finds his sons as fallen, blind and deaf spirits, who do not recognize him (Vala, VI, 101; Blake 1976, 314). In fact, the descriptions of ruins in Blake remind us indeed of the master of the vedute style, Piranesi.] We are dealing here, indeed, with a paradoxical and somber existential view of reality. The Hindu sadasat [cf. Mylius 1975, 515; the Sanskrit adjective sadasat means “being and nonbeing”; “good and evil”; “true and untrue”], the philosophical concept of being-nonbeing in simultaneity†, in one single reality, is what Clare expresses by the paradox of “[a]t once to be and not to be.” [†This is equivalent with the Buddhistic doctrine about śūnyatā, according to which existence is simultaneously void and solid, empty and real; cf. sanscr. śūnyá = “vacuity,” “waste”; -|~ “lack of”; philos. “nothing”; math. “null,” “zero”; śūnyatā = “vacuity,” “waste,” “desert”; lack; lack of thought; cf. Mylius 1975, 486.] This notion is the highest point in Clare’s poetics, representing also a decisive answer given to the ontological problem and crisis, and maybe to Shakespeare too. The passage into this gloomy paradoxical reality seems to be a Blakean journey through depths and shades, through pathless night†, where life ceases, fades into mystery, where mountains become caves, a death of life to be, a filtering of reality, a passage through the land of shadows, where past “melts” into the present, at the level of symbolic-archetypal energies, where the living and the dead experience the mystic union, the hieros gamos, that is, the aim of the “mighty plan”‡, of God who “is with us.” [†See the world of Urizen’s mental travel experience: “Los brooded on the darkness, nor saw Urizen with a Globe of fire / Lighting his dismal journey thro’ the pathless world of death”; Vala, VI, 83–84; Blake 1976, 314.] [‡See also Wordsworth’s idea of “Nature’s holy plan”; “To her fair works did nature link / The human soul,” says Wordsworth in the poem Lines written in Early Spring; Wordsworth 2008, 80.]

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Relevantly, John Clare’s sadasat / śūnyatā corresponds to Fr. Schlegel’s notion about the “infinite abundance in infinite unity” (“unendliche Fülle in unendlicher Einheit”), which describes the romantic ideal of the exquisite work of art; this concept is equivalent with the notion of “interfinitude” (for details, see Stroe 2004), by which we understand reality as finitude & infinitude existing in simultaneity, and which we identified as the most important foundation of romanticism. ACKNOWLEDGMENT The present study is an extended and modified version of the chapter entitled “Orizontul Misterului” [“The Horizon of Mystery”], included in the research entitled John Clare şi canonul romantic: metafizica naturii şi poetica logosului mitic [John Clare and the romantic canon: the metaphysics of nature and the poetics of the mythical logos], which was published in Romanian as an introduction to the critical bilingual edition: John Clare (2007) Poeme. Stroe MA, ed., trans., Iași: Institutul European. REFERENCES Bate WJ. 1963. John Keats. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Blake W. 1976. Complete Writings: With Variant Readings. Keynes G, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Budge EAW. 1978. An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary, 2 vols. New York: Dover Publications. [London: John Murray, 1920]. Budge EAW. 1991. A Hieroglyphic Vocabulary to the Book of the Dead. New York: Dover Publications. Chevalier J, Gheerbrant A. 1996. Dictionary of Symbols. Buchanan-Brown J, trans. London: Penguin Books. Clare J. 1972. Selected Poems and Prose. Robinson E, Summerfield G, eds. London: Oxford University Press. [1967]. Clare J. 1990. The Midsummer Cushion or Cottage Poems. Thornton RKR, Tibble A, eds. Ashington, Northumberland: Mid Northumberland Arts Group, Carcanet Press. [1979]. Coleridge ST. 2000. The Major Works. Jackson HJ, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cotterell A, Storm R. 2005. The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Mythology: An A–Z Guide to the Myths and Legends of the Ancient World. London: Hermes House, Anness Publishing Ltd. [2001]. Cowper W. 1855. The Task: A Poem in Six Books. Philadelphia, PA: Published by Uriah Hunt & Son.

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Daniel C. 1985. Cultura spirituală a Egiptului antic. București: Cartea Românească. Keats J. 2001. The Major Works. Cook E, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mylius K. 1975. Wörterbuch Sanskrit-Deutsch. Leipzig: VEB Verlag Enzyklopädie. Noica C. 1996. Sentimentul românesc al fiinţei. Bucureşti: Humanitas. Piranesi GP. 2006. The Etchings. Ficacci L, ed. Köln: Taschen. [Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 2000]. Shelley M. 2004. The Last Man. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics. Stroe MA. 2004. Romantismul german şi englez: știinţa arhetipurilor, ipoteza interfinitudinii şi numărul de aur. Iaşi: Institutul European. Thoreau HD (906) Journal, vol. 2: 1850–September 15, 1851. Torrey B, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin & Co. Wordsworth W. 2008. The Major Works. Gill S, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 10

How Ideology Has Driven Beauty from Ecocriticism The Allure of Oppositional Politics and Aesthetics Peter Quigley

In “The Summer Day,” Mary Oliver makes the case for the essential and profound need humans have for natural beauty. She states she’s not sure what prayer is, but “I do know how to pay attention . . . to fall down into the grass . . . how to be idle and blessed” (1992, 94). How has our interest in this topic been erased? The goal of this essay is to see how the left has targeted beauty and marginalized it in discussions about art and aesthetics. The second goal is to ask why. To get to these issues, we will have to look at some large cultural and political forces first. The psychologist James Hillman said as much in his 1998 essay, “The Practice of Beauty,” when he asks, “Could the causes of major social, political, and economic issues of our time also be found in the repression of beauty?” (Hillman 1998, 265). Hillman also observes that “We want the world because it is beautiful . . . below the ecological crisis lies the deeper crisis of love, that our love has left the world. That the world is loveless results directly from the repression of beauty” (264). I’m not sure about the issue of love, but certainly the love of beauty and the need and interest in finding things beautiful is associated with the creation, preservation, and protection of value. Even more than the creation of value, John Muir saw beauty as essential for life itself: “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread” (Muir Yosemite, 256). At the turn of the century, many articles in the humanities announced a “return to beauty” and ecocriticism seemed to be emerging right at that time and to partake of this newly gifted freedom. Lawrence Buell, in The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005), captured the assumptions of the emerging ecocritical field this way: “the prototypical human figure” is a “solitary 151

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human and the experience in question activates a primordial link between human and nonhuman” (2005, 23). Buell memorializes ecocriticism’s exciting break away from poststructuralism’s gravitational pull by those who had become exhausted and dispirited with those approaches. Critics, weary and strained like freeway travelers in urban snarl, moved, if not ran, away from Derridean “traces,” Foucauldian “epistemes,” and postmodern “aporias,” and literarily took to the hills, the coasts, the forests, the deserts in aesthetic, professional and spiritual retreat. The respite was short lived, however. Soon the field began to take on the politicized concerns dominating the rest of literary theory. But the Empire sent a tracking force to co-opt and bring to heel the escaping rebels. As a result, Buell reformulated the premise for ecocriticism: “the prototypical human figure is defined by social category and the environmental is artificially constructed” (2005, 23). Beauty, solitude, independence, wonder—these were no longer primary (or secondary) foundations or pivot points for appreciation, understanding or advocacy, but were displaced by the same theoretical cynicism and relativism that has dominated theory studies for decades: deconstruction of universal terms, suspicion, cynicism, “interrogation,” instrumentalist historicizing, accusations in all directions, dense theoretical jargon, jettisoning of the individual, of place, of beauty; all of this was due to the assumption that “power” was everywhere and needed a purging and our constant vigilance: theory’s shock troops against fascism. This attack on invisible power (which has been replaced with sexism and racism [whiteness]) was fueled by a galloping relativism teetering on nihilism, and then emboldened with a steady supply of varying concerns over a reified, untheorized “social justice.” So, “power” became racism and “relativism” settled into “social justice.” As I pointed out in my “Introduction” to the recently published Ecocritical Aesthetics, the word “justice,” which has morphed from concerns over “power” in literary theory, has also eclipsed a focus on beauty. The attack on generic “power” was attended by severe and corrosive injections of relativism. Only when universals had been dismantled, torn down, and purged was it then safe to abandon relativism and its focus on power for a more offensive phase focused on “justice.” Justice should easily be seen as one of the suspicious, classic Platonic universals requiring deconstruction, but this has been politely ignored. For some thinkers, this remains philosophically and logically an edgy problem. To be sure, concerns over justice have always been and rightly so a part of earlier conversations in the field, but as an adjunct to language and aesthetics. Justice now is part of a complete recasting of the field, a switching out of the DNA of previous critical approaches. Justice, or fairness, or rightness now has a very narrow and much more ideologically rigid meaning than it did in

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previous generations of scholarship. Justice did not organically grow out of a newly hatched ecocritical method but infiltrated ecocriticism via other fields of study and activism to gain station in the field: it hitched a ride. Discourse Theory, although part of the new wave of attacks on affirmation criticism, has been useful in demonstrating how one narrative can invade another narrative like a virus and take up residence there. As a measure of the way aesthetics and beauty have been eclipsed in literary studies look no further than the “ASLE Online Bibliography 2000–2010.” As a numerical indicator associated with ecocriticism, the contains twentyseven references to “justice” in titles and ninety-four appearances of the word “justice” in the abstracts; for “beauty,” I found six appearances in titles and twenty-four in abstracts, while “aesthetics” turns up only three times in titles. I strongly suspect that the upward arc for “social justice” in title and abstracts has steepened since 2010 and that the mention of beauty or aesthetics has diminished or has been eclipsed entirely. Similarly, Scott Slovic reported that In June 2015, the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) hosted at the University of Idaho what may well have been the world’s largest gathering of eco-critics to date. Some 900 scholars and writers from thirty countries gathered to talk about literature and the arts in relation to such topics as fracking, global climate change, animal subjectivity, environmental justice, queer ecologies, narrative ethics, acoustic ecologies, humor, the body, activist pedagogy and many other ideas. Amid the throng, aesthetics was almost nowhere to be found. Only four papers mentioned aesthetics in their titles. (2018, 12)

Reinforcing this view of a particular kind of theoretical dominance in ecocritical studies, especially where beauty and aesthetics are elided, Cheryl Glotfelty’s overview in the Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism is instructive: The new canon of theorists suggests that the emerging directions in ecocriticism include interrogating conceptions of the human to take fuller account of .  .  . hybridity, animality, queerness, and technology. Race, class, and gender stand out as important ecocritical categories in current practice, inflecting work in postcolonial ecocriticism, environmental justice, and globalization studies. (2014, x–xi)

As Ian Hunter put it in the 1992 Cultural Studies anthology, “the cultural studies movement conceives of itself as a critique of aesthetics. . . . The slogan of this project is to ‘politicize aesthetics’” (Hunter 1992, 347). All well and good, but where does beauty live in this list? It does not. Although Glotfelty suggests that the point regarding these theories is always to bring “environmental considerations” into the “discourse of literary

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criticism” (x), in onboarding “environmental considerations” (a tepid phrasing) beauty got left at the docks. Change is not by definition progress, and sometimes “new” or “post” are simply smoke and mirrors; what is renamed or eclipsed is not swept away by the sleight of rhetoric or by loud, threatening voices, nor by the judgments of editorial boards, gallery managers, or dissertation committees. Insisting on discussing beauty, therefore, is not a distraction or a reactionary gesture, as is often claimed, but a return of the repressed. In considering the importance and significance of beauty with regard to ecocritical discussions, I could not help but recall George Orwell’s comment in his review (1939) of Bertrand Russell’s Power: A New Social Analysis: “We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men (sic)” (1939, 205). In today’s critically and politically charged theory climate, those who advance the existence of anything akin to beauty may find themselves labeled naïve at the very least, if not fascist, authoritarian or any number of other labels drawn from a long list. In the following pages, I will outline how such tactics are part of a strategy in theory and ecocriticism to, as Simon Estok has said, allow for “closing some borders” (2010, 212) around ecocriticism. Like any border control, this involves determining who and what gets in—in this case into critical discourse—and who and what doesn’t. Name calling and intimidating terminology have become means to exclude voices. Beauty, I argue, sits in a refugee camp outside the borders of theory—and now sits outside ecotheory as well. In this essay, we will examine how such exclusionary tactics produce scholarship and scholars who police, exile, confess, and silence themselves in relation to the subject of beauty. Ecocriticism registered its willingness to dispense with these troubled waters surrounding beauty as it re-engaged with the possibilities of the material world, of reference versus reflexiveness, of beauty. But then, signaling the quick transition from immediacy and referential gestures into theory, Simon Estok brings up Aldo Leopold’s “much-admired plea to develop a ‘land ethic’ and to extend ethical consideration beyond humanity to the land” (2010, 208). Estok quotes Leopold’s famous position which, of course, claims that “a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise” (quoted in Estok 2010, 208–9). Estok says that “this sounds good, but it is philosophically ungrounded and scientifically naïve. It forces us to rehash the problems associated with the term ‘beauty’” (208–9; emphasis mine). Given the cascade of presumptuous jargon and opaque “ideas” that constitute much of critical theory, it is difficult to imagine why “beauty” would appear to be so daunting. Beauty is dismissed because it has “problems,” and it is “ungrounded” and “scientifically naïve.”

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The essential tension explored in this essay, then, is to ask whether beauty deceptively covers an ugly and unjust world and, therefore, must be revealed as a problem, or whether, due to its repression, beauty is unable to re-shape a broken and ugly reality. In my recent book, The Forbidden Subject: How Oppositional Aesthetics Banished Natural Beauty from the Arts, I tell the story of how beauty became marginalized and ultimately silenced in ecocritical discourse and in discussions about culture and art more broadly. In this essay, I carry the examination of this process deeper into the forces that have brought us to this point. As the Hillman quote above makes clear, the issue of beauty is not an effete distraction, but it is tied to everything. The forces of opposition and corrosion have targeted many aspects of western culture, but beauty has often been central in the attack. As a result, the concept has all but disappeared from our discussions about nature, landscape, and the environment. Why is beauty so threatening, and what is the force that drives it into silence? In the late nineteenth century, throughout the twentieth century into the twenty-first, a powerful, corrosive, and dangerous force was set loose specifically designed to target western culture. This destabilizing force came from different quarters and possessed different tools and weapons for the attack. Some of these elements are as follows: postcolonialism, dadaism, surrealism, the avant-garde, deconstruction, poststructuralism, abstract expressionism, postmodernism, some feminisms, nihilism, anarchism, leftism, Marxism, relativism, critical theory, and more. Even with stunning evidence—Tiananmen Square, the failure of the Paris riots of 1968, the Sokal affair, collapse of the USSR, collapse of the Berlin Wall, the vibrancy and hope of American capitalism and democracy—of the misguided direction of the political, intellectual, and aesthetic moves listed, the attack from the destructive, the disassociated and hysterically insecure quarters continues. The culminating impact has been persistent, and it currently threatens to overturn history’s greatest political and social experiment in freedom, the constitutional republic of the United States, as well as the associated Asian1 and European democracies. The target of the attack is aimed at the underlying assumptions undergirding western culture: truth, liberty, reason, freedom, family, (classic definition of) justice, beauty, the individual, and more. In Marxist terms, the attack has been on the superstructure elements of western culture since the economic argument failed. The cynical unsettling of these values, the dissolution of the family, the fragmentation of the sovereign individual, the assertion of a plethora of identities and genders, the ability to identify, or fantasize, that one is of a race, gender, or species of one’s choosing, the cynical jettisoning of beauty, all of this is meant to undermine independence and freedom and drive society toward dependency and a collectivist society where needs are defined and satisfied and policed and opposition is silenced and censored, or worse. Chris

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Rufo, in American Cultural Revolution, has recently anchored all this recent behavior to the Marxist, anti-capitalist energies of the Weathermen and other revolutionaries of the 1960s. In charting the long march through American educational institutions, Rufo finds the New Left had to abandon the radical economic critique and outflank the establishment by focusing on multiple fronts of attack and on relativism, especially in language. Since the left lost the economic battle after the collapse of the USSR, it regrouped around a new set of cultural issues. All of today’s leftist themes were born in the New Left’s approach. In the early 1970s, the United States, according to the Weather Underground’s publication, The Prairie Fire, was “founded on racism, sexism, slavery and genocide” (39). And the focuses for protest and resistance were to be “race politics, women’s liberation, and radical environmentalism” (38). All of these were encapsulated by the great negation, Marcuse’s Great Refusal of U.S. culture. Often, as in various Marxist or PoMo versions of all this, there is a promise of a gender fluid, nonhierarchical, just, passionless (regarding “toxic masculinity” anyway), and equitable society where identity is a choice for the moment or the day; something akin to John Lennon’s “Imagine” will just emerge: no heaven, no hell, no countries, no possessions, pass the bong. As a result, the WEF suggests we will have nothing and be happy. After the deconstruction of everything (or after the revolution), magically everyone will be “Livin’ life in peace.” How this placid La La Land of unicorn and rainbows comes about and gets policed and enforced is, of course, left, well, for folks to “imagine.” The left is always certain of present evils and things that need to be torn down and banned; where all of this is headed is something not discussed too often. History suggests that giving into this willful destruction of liberal norms (individualism, family, liberty, beauty, freedom) goes badly and instead of a unicorn culture one gets an iron fist. Ecocriticism emerged on the leading edge of a hundred-year juggernaut of angst, anger, ennui, reflexivity, acting out, and negativity regarding life in general and, often, beauty in particular. Ecocriticism also appears at the moment the “return to beauty” movement emerged in the late 1990s. Many in the terminally cynical academic elite were scandalized. Michael Bérubé exclaimed, “I will confess that my initial reaction to the Late-1998 Return to Beauty was sheer incredulity” (Bérubé 2005, 3). But shock quickly gave way to attack. As the return to beauty movement emerged in the late 1990s, the historical concerns raised about beauty reappeared: beauty was complicit with capitalism; it fueled the commodification of culture in marketing; beauty was the thinly veiled lust of colonialism, imperialism, and patriarchy, and it, therefore, should be degraded, contained, or erased. Beauty diminished, commodified, and held back women, the revolution, and progressiveness. It was antiquated and backward-looking. One has to ignore much to give credence

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to this theory. The 1960s, perhaps more than any time, it seems, thought things were “beautiful man.” In addition, the black movement claimed, “black is beautiful,” and E.F. Schumacher wrote a powerful little book on “Buddhist economics” proclaiming in the title that Small Is Beautiful. Nevertheless, the postmodern denial of a referent and its linguistic insistence on the structural binary in language all had the impact of cutting off beauty as a subject. This amounted to terrible distortions of lived experience. Before we go deeper regarding the social, cultural, political, and intellectual forces that have aligned to deny beauty a rightful place in our personal lives and intellectual pursuits, let’s take a quick look at some examples in art where beauty is imperiled. While Fitzgerald’s dismissive critique of the “American Dream” is well known, it is useful to re-examine his treatment of beauty for purposes of this discussion. With Fitzgerald, beauty has been totally coopted by the worst parts of American culture and human nature. The American dream is systemically evil, to borrow a contemporary phrase. It is pollution-prone and wasteful, deceptively marketed, brutally imbued with aggressive egoism and, finally, manifests a deadly and suicidal trajectory. Beauty is the lure and the lie to captivate an innocent, mid-Western boy’s imagination. Beauty, the novel shows, is inextricably associated with money. It is embodied in beautiful women like Daisy Buchannan and in things like fast cars, clothes, parties, and mansions. The central symbol in the novel, the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, is irresistible for Gatsby and pulls everything together: youth, love, spring, and hope, but also the evil allure of money which encapsulates and taints all of those other elements. This hall of soul-sucking mirrors though isn’t just the product of this fledging American democracy. This country just happens to be particularly apt at being an excellent vehicle for something deeply engrained, and flawed, in the western soul. Fitzgerald indicts American culture, but that indictment occurs in the context of something larger. This is a transhistorical indictment, since its essence reaches even further back, (before WWI which has caused much of the contemporary cynicism in the novel and modernism), to the moment of discovery by Dutch sailors: I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. (Fitzgerald 2018, 180)

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The beautiful land “flowered” into an “aesthetic contemplation” (code for beauty and unhealthy desire) for the sailors, as Daisy did for Gatsby when he embraced her beauty: “Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete” (44). In some respects, Gatsby (an innocent young man from the heartland) is a victim of the deluded American dream, seduced into playing the part of criminal, and shameless collector of riches. In another view, he is the victimizer, a colonial extension of the Dutch sailors: they lusted after the new world as Gatsby lusts after Daisy. Sexism, colonialism, uncontained desire to acquire and possess are all here integrated into nicely packed tropes of destruction. Foreshadowing environmental waste but also keying on spiritual destruction, Fitzgerald portrayed a world that was being dispossessed of its beauty and riches to supply a small, concentrated amount of light to what today we have labeled, in peevish jealousy, the “one percent.” Fitzgerald littered the novel with evidence of conspicuous consumption yielding massive personal, social, and environmental destruction. In the novel’s logic as in Marxism’s platitudes, the longing after possessions of status destroys all those who participate. The morning after a night of partying at Gatsby’s, Nick Carraway, the novel’s narrator, was walking with and listening to Gatsby: “He broke off and began to walk up and down a desolate path of fruit rinds and discarded favors and crushed flowers” (2018, 109). The result of a night of such consumption creates enormous devastation throughout the land as the physical and spiritual landscape is sucked clean of value: This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. (2018, 23)

Although spiritually demoralizing and unrelenting in its criticism of American culture, The Great Gatsby is taught over and over again. Why? In the years during and after WWI and then WWII, there developed a modernist tradition that thinks itself smarter and morally superior to day to day lives of people in western societies. That assumed superiority has taken the form of a smug, snarky, cynical criticism that sees the lifestyles of the western world as repugnant: in art as in the critical theory that followed, it is a self-hating, unhealthy posture.2 Much of “high” modernism (Eliot and anti-representational painting), arrogantly became inaccessible to most Americans. Alexander Nehamas put it this way: As the gap between high and low culture became ever wider, the beauty which mattered to intellectuals, when it mattered to them at all, came to seem different

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in kind from the beauty which mattered to the world at large, and, for that reason, irrelevant and empty. (2000, 393)

T.S. Eliot, while no Marxist (although The Waste Land was edited by Ezra Pound and the poem is dedicated to him), nevertheless was overcome at the prospects for civilization as the twentieth century dawned. His presentation of life in The Waste Land, for instance, provided a terrible vision of decay, emptiness, and filth. “April is the cruelest month” has many reverberations relating to the spiritual and cultural exhaustion of the times. In addition, the image is an environmental one, suggesting a weakened and sickly ecosystem, “breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land” (Eliot 29). April is “cruel” because it recalls, but cannot deliver, hope, and beauty, both of which are now shortcircuited due to the lifeless and soul deadening world that has emerged. This disaffection became the requisite posture for modern artists and most art. Although most modern and postmodern art can be seen as a rejection of traditional notions of beauty, there is in modernism, at least, the longing for beauty or a nostalgia associated with a lost beauty. The Great Gatsby is, in a somewhat contradictory manner, a beautiful aesthetic accomplishment about the lack of beauty in American culture: it is, therefore, modernist. Roger Scruton suggests, in Beauty (2009), that indeed Eliot’s poem “describes the modern city as a soulless desert” (Scruton 2009, 139). Scruton qualifies this sense of the poem by adding that its description of the city as soulless is done with “images and allusions that affirm what the city denies” (139). The modernist aesthetic, as soul crushing and deadening as it could be, according to Scruton, leaves a way out: “If we can grasp the emptiness of modern life, this is because art points to another way of being” (139). Therefore, although the mantra of the modern is to move away from the past, to “make it new,” Scruton suggests there was not yet present the desire for a transgressive or complete rupture with the tradition of excellence, culture, and beauty, a rupture that would be ushered in with the leveling forces of the postmodern. In fact, according to Scruton, if the forms and styles of the modern must change, this is not done “to repudiate the old tradition, but in order to restore it” (142). Alexander Berman made this a crucial aspect of his definition of modernism: “If modernism ever managed to throw off its scarps and tatters and the uneasy joints that bind it to the past, it would lose all its weight and depth, and the maelstrom of modern life would carry it helplessly away” (Berman 1988, 346). Interestingly enough, Berman states that only through the struggle of maintaining “the bonds that tie it to the modernities of the past” can modernism and modernist individuals like Eliot find the ability to create “meaning, dignity and beauty for themselves” (346; my emphasis). The hallmark of most counter culturalists has been to express dejection and cynicism while also claiming some moral high ground. One finds these

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thematics in reactions to World War I and World War II into Vietnam. W.D. Snodgrass, in “Returned to Frisco 1946,” documents how returning soldiers saw that first view of the homeland shoreline: “For that one moment we were dulled and shaken /By fear. What could still catch us by surprise?” (Snodgrass 2006, 16). Coming back to the homeland meant dealing with “authoritative lies” and having their lives planned. What had they fought for? Freedom of course. But a new sardonic sense of that word prevails in the poem. Snodgrass goes on to say they’d be free to get drunk and fight; they would have their meals served by women. A sordid picture of the modern life is sketched. They are not free; and the nature of life is apparently all too inescapable and predictable. Here one sees the men’s alleged total break with the culture that nurtured and gave birth to them: a complete severing of affiliation, of trust, of belief, as in Fitzgerald. Snodgrass handles imagery deftly, figuring the men as animals known for their breeding and eating proclivities: “We shouldered like pigs” (16). He uses other such imagery associating humans with rabbits and a seagull shrieking for garbage. At this point, the lives of the harried commuters depicted on the Bay Bridge are being equated with a shrieking seagull pursuing trash. The final image is powerful as it sums up the culture the soldier feels he is coming back to. As the ship cruises into the Bay, the soldier notes that off the port side the soldiers saw Alcatraz, covered in flowers. The Alcatraz image is immediately associated with the Golden Gate Bridge that now seems like a huge jail door closing behind them. Further development of the jailed and trapped imagery is connecting the Bridge as jail door to the “latched gate” of one’s backyard. The prison and the backyard are yoked together in the last stanza, and there is a veneer of beauty covering the prison and house in the suburbs: Once again, beauty is that which deceptively covers and cloaks an ugly reality. The final image completes the inescapable sense of dread and disgust that permeates the soldier’s return to his culture and country. His narrow and meager lifestyle, with his backyard and old affections, are all now simply part of a cultural prison. The prison door shuts as they sail into port just as the closed gate of his backyard will also lock him in. Herman Melville provides an example of what Peter Schjeldahl calls “stubborn grievance” and “unhappiness with life” that remains unreconciled and is even nurtured: Melville’s Ahab was convinced beauty is a deceitful ploy on the part of nature: something to detest, fear, and expose. Melville rightly captured this pathological condition in the character of Ahab who saw beauty as a deceitful cloak, shielding the evil in the world. Ahab stated that “Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within” (Melville 1966, 169–70). One can see the thread here. As noted, Fitzgerald as well suggested beauty was a deceitful ploy in U.S.

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culture covering a corrupt set of destructive desires; and Snodgrass suggested beauty was a veiled covering of a culture that traps its citizens in the prison house of commodities, mind numbing distractions, and violence. Beauty is the problem. Over the years, I have had brave students ask me why the materials we read were so depressing, dark, and often angry. I taught at a science and engineering college, so these students were unindoctrinated and tended to be happy. In good Marcusean fashion, I’d give some version of this answer: These art pieces provide critical insight into the malevolent ways of the world. I told them these cultural artifacts were meant help them wake up and see “beyond happy.” I explained they are being deceived by the imbecilic visions of happiness in commercials and movies and political ideologies. All of this is illusory happiness, I would go on in my professorial fashion, and was the clever design of capitalism, commercialization, marketing: so yeah, been there; done that. It took me thirty years to recover from what had been done to me through 1960s countercultural pressure and educational institutions. I became a conscripted spokesperson for what passed as sophisticated “critical” thinking. The position wasn’t gained through thinking, however, but through a petulant and often juvenile rejection of authority. But I was wrong. And I hope the students who pushed back on my reading list found beauty in the world and hope for a bright future. Stephen Hicks has it right about the works of modernism, its attitudes, and its proponents: We would not know from the world of modern art that average life expectancy has doubled since Edvard Munch screamed. We would not know that diseases that routinely killed hundreds of thousands of newborns each year have been eliminated. Nor would we know anything about the rising standards of living, the spread of democratic liberalism, and emerging markets. We are brutally aware of the horrible disasters of National Socialism and International Communism, and art has a role in keeping us aware of them. But we would never know from the world of art the equally important fact that those battles were won and brutality was defeated. (Hicks 2018, 264)

All forms of a leftist aesthetic, the modernist, postmodernist, Marxist aesthetic are all openly hostile about beauty albeit at differing levels. Hoping to offend, disrupt, and demoralize bourgeois culture in any way possible, the disaffected, hip, avant-garde, leftists on the margins (who increasingly find themselves in the center) have driven the disruptive, anti-representational, provocative, and nihilistic approaches against “beauty” and other perceived “normative” values (representation, borders, truth, genders, goodness, etc.). Within this analysis of society as an aesthetics of alienation rests the conclusion that the world is ugly and must be revealed as such, and it must be

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disrupted. Chris Rasmussen has identified the connection between leftist politics, Marcuse, and aesthetics: “If one accepts Marx’s analysis, then there can be no compromise and reality must be negated . . . and artists became combatants like everyone else” (Rasmussen, 4; my emphasis). Rasmussen draws further on Marx on this point. Since “all art reproduces its social reality,” it is by necessity that “in an age of ugliness and alienation, contemporary art must reflect those values. From these foundations, .  .  . anti-representational art would emerge” (6). In the art of the twentieth century, anti-representational art produces “ugly” art to reflect the ugly world around the artist and/or provides a withdrawal from the world of greed, industry, and war by refusing the referent: the image alone but not a representative image showing the “world.” The “medium becomes the message” and “the only permissible subject for a modernist painter was the flatness of the surface (canvas) on which the painting takes place . . . Modernism, then, was the quest for the pure self-referential art object” (Berman, 30). In a related manner, Barnett Newman in the “The Sublime Is Now” states that the impressionists “began the movement to destroy the established rhetoric of beauty by the insistence on a surface of ugly strokes” (Newman 1948). Newman then states bluntly, “The impulse of modern art was this desire to destroy beauty” (Newman 1948). The engine of modernism, which in many ways overlaps with the postmodern, is characterized, according to Richard Wolin, by its dedication to “shock, provocation, scandal, and rupture” (Wolin 1995, 21). Why? Roger Scruton provides the answer: Provocative gestures in art in the twentieth century represent affirmations that “the old invocations of home, peace, love and contentment are lies, and that art must henceforth devote itself to the real and unpleasant truth of our condition” (Scruton 2011, 140). David Horowitz famously made the transition from radical to conservative and has a unique perspective on this posture of the left: I saw that its genius lay not in reforms but in framing indictments. Resentment and retribution were the radical passions. In The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx had invoked a dictum of Goethe’s devil: “Everything that exists deserves to perish.” It was the progressive credo. To the Left, neither honored traditions nor present institutions reflected human nature or desire; the past was only a dead weight to be removed from their path. When the Left called for “liberation,” what it really wanted was to erase the human slate and begin again in the year zero of creation. (Horowitz 1997, 337)

Peter Schjeldahl said the following about denying access to beauty, beauty’s relevance, or its existence: “It is crazy not to celebrate whatever reconciles us to life. The craziness suggests either stubborn grievance—an unhappiness with life that turns people against notions of reconciliation to it—or benumbed insensibility. The two terms may be one” (Schjeldahl 1998,

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55–56). “A stubborn grievance” and an “unhappiness with life”: this aptly describes the left, which is often described as a stubborn, grievance culture which is obsessed with finding or creating problems. The left’s response to the collapse of the USSR is revealing on this issue. Since a frontal assault on capitalism via economic socialism had failed miserably, the “agenda of opposition” had to seek a new approach in order to continue to be “against everything.” This is when the left shifted from attacking capitalism to attacking culture. Frustrated at where the left found itself (they were threatened with being happy), Andrew Ross celebrated the new social movements of feminism, environmentalism, and others: “these new movements have transformed the agenda of opposition” from Marxist economic issues to a set of social issues that oppose an array of “institutions of oppression” (Ross, xiv). Since they lost the argument that the economy alienates and oppresses everyone, they shifted to a set of cultural issues to carry on the same goal of dismantling everything because, well, they know better than we do. Often the issues on the left represent the need to oppose something in the absence of any legitimate wrongs to oppose. One might see this in the current obsessions with gender and a multitude of finely differentiated sexual proclivities. Ed Abbey, John Muir, Wordsworth, the poet Mary Oliver, and so many others who have found beauty in nature, are considered unworthy by the hip left since they rejoice in beauty and they aren’t perpetually angry and miserable. To be on the oppositional team, appropriately ready, equipped, sensitized, and relevant, the artist, as Marcuse mentioned, “must be the most alienated member of society” (in Rasmussen 2006, 7). It is difficult to maintain this posture since capitalism produces a “harmonizing pluralism” where contradictory truths “peacefully coexist” (Rasmussen, 7). For Marcuse, capitalism “makes life too pleasurable, and the artist [has] trouble seeing why it should be resisted. Any decrease in alienation and suffering represents a reactionary intrusion to be challenged and negated” (Rasmussen, 7). If you’re happy or enjoying beauty, you are practicing bad faith. This aesthetics of rejection, cynicism, and difference has had a nasty impact on our ability to embrace beauty in the art world as well as diminishing our political, cultural, and personal lives. Stephen Hicks sums up a persistent theme throughout the twentieth century as follows: A preoccupation with urine and feces: Again, postmodernism continues a longstanding modernist tradition. After Duchamp’s urinal, Kunst ist Scheisse (“Art is shit”) became, fittingly, the motto of the Dada movement. In the 1960s Piero Manzoni canned, labelled, exhibited and sold ninety tins of his own excrement (in 2002, a British museum purchased can number 68 for about $40,000). Andres Serrano generated controversy in the 1980s with his “Piss Christ”, a crucifix submerged in a jar of the artist’s urine. In the 1990s Chris Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary” (1996) portrayed the Madonna as surrounded by

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disembodied genitalia and chunks of dried feces. In 2000, Yuan Cai and Jian Jun Xi paid homage to their master, Marcel Duchamp. “Fountain” is now at the Tate Museum in London, and during regular museum hours Yuan and Jian unzipped and proceeded to urinate on Duchamp’s urinal. (The museum’s directors were not pleased, but Duchamp would be proud of his spiritual children.) And there is G.G. Allin, the self-proclaimed performance artist who achieved his fifteen minutes by defecating on stage and flinging his feces into the audience. So again, we have reached a dead end: From Duchamp’s Piss on art at the beginning of the century to Allin’s Shit on you at the end—that is not a significant development over the course of a century. (Hicks 2018, 262–63)

In sum, counterculture reactions, especially nihilistic or revolutionary forms, go after that which is most dear to human beings and that is often beauty. These tactics are often meant to oppose “bourgeois aestheticism . . . bourgeois respectability . . . the beautiful illusion . . . the aura of reconciliation” (Berman 1988, 21). Such political dynamics, directly or indirectly, spell trouble for a thriving sense of beauty in a culture. The weight of such cynical art gave way in the 1960s and 1970s to a critical methodology that began to take on this same work. This urge to negate the world is also associated with the negation of any hope that adjustments, fixes, or any fiddling with the current system matter: it all has to go. A contemporary Marxist and literary theorist, Terry Eagleton, brings it all home with this statement regarding this agenda: “The true image of the future is the failure of the present” (Eagleton 2011, 79). Read that sentence slowly a couple of times and think about its consequences for art, for teaching, for cultural interpretation and cultural production, for institutions, for traditions, for speaking with friends about the news, for acting in civil society. Eagleton reinforces his priorities in another text by defining our purpose for reading. It is not to enjoy authors who “gush about sunsets” (Eagleton 2003, 107). We are to read to carry out political warfare and the undoing of the bourgeois, capitalist system. Yes, the 1960s are calling and wants to reinsert its politics. Myra Jehlen described this shift as follows. She suddenly felt that the job now for cultural critics is to constantly critique the aesthetic deception of what we read and “expose its misrepresentations and false ideals, to strip away the lie and expose the liar. But this is an ambiguous mission for a literary critic who becomes an adversary of the work he or she analyses” (Jehlen 1987, 5). Rita Felski attempts to push back on this view but in so doing offers strong voices that corroborate Jehlen. Hoping to discredit these views, Felski offers evidence that current trends demand that reading literature comes down to “ideology critique.” This means “reading them against the grain and denying the truth of art in favor of the truth of politics.” Felski offers more from this point of view suggesting this approach is what Soderholm calls “inquisitorial criticism” and what George Levine memorably describes as “seeing the text as a kind of enemy to be arrested” (in Felski, 30).

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One can see this same process unpacking itself in ecocriticism. In the “Introduction” to Writing for an Endangered World (2001), Buell separates himself from his previous interests in the “wild” and the “beautiful” by doing a job on the hymn, “America the Beautiful.” Buell’s approach makes one think of Jehlen, as beauty is here presented as a liar, obscuring, as Elaine Scarry will phrase it, “wrong social arrangements” (Scarry 1999, 58). Buell reports that even as a child, he considered the hymn “flatulently grandiose” (Buell 2001, 9). As is typical for this criticism, Buell establishes his cool and sophisticated credentials here. He is at pains to let us know, he’s not a corny patriot. Buell goes on to say that, as an Americanist, he was taught to read the hymn as a “mindless paean to westward expansion” (9). Usually, leftists laud the fact that our education challenges our preconceived assumptions: but not here. Buell moves on by locating the occasion for his latest reconsideration of the hymn: the 1998 spring dedication of the Thoreau Institute. Given what he has already said about his distaste for the piece, it is curious that he considers what comes next an example of being moved “to rethink the poem” (9). Noting the fact that Katharine Bates actually witnessed vistas at the top of Pike’s Peak that inspired her to author the poem, Buell, nevertheless, states that the poem, with its blushing admiration for the American landscape, commits a “felony” (9). A felony! Bates committed a crime by “reducing all America to a beautiful landscape painting” (10) without mentioning all the alleged crimes and shortcomings the country embodies. Here is today’s critical mindset: nothing affirmative or appreciative shall be spoken about the land, the country, or beauty. Also, the fact that Buell accuses Bates of reductionistic technique is the height of hypocrisy. Current attack-criticism reduces all of America to a systemically racist, colonizing, patriarchal behemoth. Bates’s poem is a transparent confession of joy, elevation, and pride, which becomes the homing signal for this kind of attack-criticism. Buell ends his treatment of this poem by adding one final label: “nature escape writing” (Buell 2001, 10). I have a friend from high school who just did a cross-country trip that she documented on social media; she was so moved by the grandeur of the American landscape (deserts, forests, lakes, coasts, rivers, wide open skies and spaces), she posted picture after picture. The title of her folder of pictures became “America the Beautiful.” Is she an inadvertent imperialist, a supporter of manifest destiny? Is she an irresponsible class warrior? An elitist escapist? A naïve consumer from “flyover country” of ideologically charged images? Or could it possibly be that the experience of beauty has more productive and positive attributes? As a counter, Elaine Scarry points out that the engagement with beauty creates what she calls the “pressure of the distributional” (Scarry 1999, 67). By “distributional,” she means that an individual, as the result of an encounter with beauty, extends that appreciation—that sense of uplifting, hope, care, and illumination—outward: “I voluntarily extend the

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consequences of that recognition” (67). Scarry clearly places such a voluntary action outside of any social or historical determinism. It would be timely to add to the Buell discussion an example of the politicized landscape he seemed to call for. To avoid committing a felony, art and criticism have adopted unrelenting negative postures as I have mentioned. I traced the movement from romantic to abstract painting and modernist expression generally in my book The Forbidden Subject. Therefore, I will here just want to take one example of current abstract work to demonstrate its corrosive calculus. Abstract expressionism and modernism contain a number of origins and rationales but central is the desire to destroy beauty. In the arts of the twentieth century, rejection of the world of conventional beauty of the bourgeoisie as well as withdrawal from the alleged greed, industrialization, and war was approached through a complete focus on art for the sake of art: the image alone but not a representative image showing the “world.” The “medium becomes the message”: “the only permissible subject for a modernist painter was the flatness of the surface (canvas) on which the painting takes place . . . Modernism, then, was the quest for the pure self-referential art object” (Berman, 30). In a related manner, Barnett Newman in the “The Sublime Is Now” states that the impressionists “began the movement to destroy the established rhetoric of beauty by the insistence on a surface of ugly strokes’ (Newman 1948). Newman then states bluntly, “The impulse of modern art was this desire to destroy beauty.” James Karman adds more context to this sentiment from a leading Dadaist: As Tristan Tzara said at the time, speaking for the Dadaists, “the Beautiful and the True in art do not exist . . . everything happens in a completely idiotic way” and “nothing is more delightful than to confuse and upset people.” (Karman, 52)

Today, the terrible calculus of the abstract is in full swing, still fully engaged with the assumption that the world is ugly. As one listens to Julie Mehretu discuss the content and purpose of her paintings, one thinks Buell would be pleased, since she states she cannot look at a landscape without thinking of injustice and violence: “There is no such thing as just landscape,” states Mehretu.3 Perhaps this sensibility comes as a result of her past experiences escaping a harsh regime in Ethiopia. As Calvin Tompkins conveyed in an article in The New Yorker, “Big Art, Big Money,” Julie and her family fled [Ethiopia] in 1977, when Julie was six and a half. A revolution three years earlier had produced a brutal Socialist dictatorship, and to escape it they moved to East Lansing, Michigan, where Julie’s father, Assefa, had been offered a position teaching economic geography at Michigan State, and Doree, her mother, found work in a Montessori school. (Tompkins 2010)

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A video on the website of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art depicts Mehretu in a beautiful, decommissioned church with flying buttresses and stained glass in New York. Mehretu is given access to the church where she produces two commissioned paintings for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The text on the video page says Mehretu “re-contextualizes the history of American landscape painting by merging its sublime imagery with the harsh realities not depicted” (Mehretu 2017). In this way, one can say that Mehretu is correcting the alleged “felony” produced by Bates, according to Buell. Incorporating blurred, smeared, disfigured, and digitized images from the Hudson School painter Albert Bierstadt, she is focused on foregrounding the country’s legacy of colonialism, abolition, racism and other injustices and violence; this politicized and violent landscape is the only way she can think about landscape she says. As a means of forming strategy she asks, “What does it mean to paint a landscape and try to be an artist in this political moment?” (Mehretu 2017). Albert Bierstadt’s wonderful painting, “Among the Sierra Nevada,” has been disfigured and digitized and lives below the smeared colors and black scribbles. In addition to images from Albert Bierstadt’s painting, she also embeds blurred, digitized, unrecognizable photographs of race riots, police violence, and emergency vehicles attending to scenes. In addition to the blurred and merged images, she layers on smeared colors and huge black scribbles all over the canvas as though indiscriminately applied by a giant felt pen. The rejection of the world in this way arrogantly places the emphasis and focus on the artist. If Mehretu didn’t explain all of what’s in the painting and its intent, one would never know any of this, certainly not by looking at the painting. Abstract representation becomes all about the painter since the flat canvas tells the audience nothing. Mehretu’s paintings are, according to Julia Halperin in Art News, “27 feet high and 32 feet wide—in other words, larger than Leonardo’s ‘Last Supper,’ or Raphael’s ‘The School of Athens.’ Together, they are bigger even than Michelangelo’s ‘The Last Judgement’” (Halperin 2017). Using a mechanical lift to power her up and down and left and right, the paintings were years in the making. Legions of graduate students in the humanities and arts have been trained to do little more than hoe in these fields. Their professors or practitioners in the field, as Richard Rorty comments, “can be identified by their dry, sardonic, knowingness. They are suspicious of romance and enthusiasm and lack all sense of awe” (Rorty qtd. in Bérubé, 30). Lisa Ruddick too offers her cry of protest against this approach to engagement with culture and cultural artifacts. In a 2016 article in the Chronicle, “What’s Wrong with Literary Studies,” Marc Parry featured Ruddick and others who are challenging current theory’s dedication to wall-to-wall cynicism and paranoia: Then, last year, came Lisa Ruddick’s essay “When Nothing Is Cool,” a hand grenade lobbed at her field. Ruddick, an expert on British literature at the

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University of Chicago, attacked literary studies for favoring an anti-humanist ideology that looks askance at inner life and, in her view, alienates scholars from their own moral intuitions. “I have spoken with many young academics who say that their theoretical training has left them benumbed,” she wrote in The Point magazine. “After a few years in the profession, they can hardly locate the part of themselves that can be moved by a poem or novel. It is as if their souls have gone into hiding, to await tenure or some other deliverance.” (Parry 2016)

If one is not on-board with the criticism of cynicism and paranoia, there are consequences. Marc Parry quotes Toril Moi, a Norwegian scholar from the University of Bergen transported to Duke, who suggests that there are labeling and name-calling consequences for stepping outside the approach of corrosiveness and pessimism: If you challenge the idea of suspicion as the only mode of reading, you are then immediately accused of being conservative in relation to . . . politics. . . . The current revolt is very much against the idea that we all can only read for one reason, namely political critique. (Moi quoted in Parry 2016)

Mind you, Moi is the author of Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1985) and other such publications. Moi and others want to retain their left-wing credentials, but also be free to write affirmatively, reading with a writer instead of always against. Why is it that reading affirmatively seems to be such a challenge? To be cool and have membership in the hip left, one must recall the admonition above from Marcuse: remain savagely oppositional and alienated or be considered deluded. Clearly the pressure to be on board with the disaffection and cynicism is strong. An example is needed to discuss this claim of the suppression of beauty in the name of just causes. A case in point: in a recent edition of the University of Michigan English Department’s 2017 Alumni Newsletter: On Beauty, the edition opens with the chair of the department, David Porter, recalling that “When I was in grad school, I found it odd that physicists often seemed more comfortable with the language of beauty than did my fellow literature students” (Porter 2017, 2). I was so excited to find this publication in what seemed to be otherwise a barren wasteland with no mention of beauty anywhere in the field. Many members of the UM English Department share short pieces focused on beauty. The first offering is from Associate Professor Gillian White, whose piece illustrates the consequences of seeing one’s individuality as a social category a la Buell. She begins with a passage from a John Ashbery poem: “you can’t say it that way anymore” (quoted in White 2017, 6). She confesses that Ashbery’s discomfiture with mentioning “beauty” in 1977 is something that resonates with her today. She doesn’t discuss beauty in the classroom. Interestingly and honestly enough, White confesses that this professional positioning is “utterly inadequate to my personal experience” (White 2017,

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6). Like countless Facebookers and Instagrammers, White also uses social media and posts pictures of “stunning light on sea coasts” (6). In addition, she admits that she includes her children in certain activities that she considers beautiful. She wants them to understand certain experiences as beautiful. She shares the following in the Newsletter: I took a photo of a manhole cover dusted in snow last winter whose contrasts of light and dark I could only justify as “beautiful.” Oh, but I am suspicious of those posts and tastes and the stories they tell about me. (6)

White, of course, is worried that she is marked by her “position in history” and that discussing beauty will “speak my privilege” (6). She worries that by speaking about beauty she activates an “apoliticism in the moment of loving something without knowing anything about its production and history” (7). Her justification could be summarized thus: “I will not say I like something or that something is beautiful unless I’m sure that I am not somehow, someway, supporting a hierarchical, demeaning, imperial, colonial, racist, sexist (this list could go on) position.” There’s a wide difference between being thoughtful, sensitive, insightful and being ideologically absurd; if this thinking were limited to Professor White, this wouldn’t be a problem but it is rampant. In addition, White feels increased guilt in using social media technology that “allows more and more people to be distracted and lulled to sleep as we pass the tipping point of global warming, as fascism re-blossoms, as we participate in economies and relations that produce human suffering on a global scale” (7). Rereading White’s short essay brings a real feeling of pain and loss. I feel Dr. White’s students are missing some of her best lessons. I was stunned that a newsletter like this, titled “On Beauty,” with a compelling photo on the cover of New Hampshire’s Lake Winnipesaukee and surrounding hills and forests, would lead with an essay that claims the topic is off limits. I turned to the last essay in the collection thinking this must be a minority report. The offering by Nick Harp fondly recalls a professor he had when a student at University of Michigan, Daniel Fader, who “reserved a moment in his . . . class to witness a poem’s beauty” (Harp 2017, 17). In his own classes, Nick Harp confesses that he is “anxious in my own teaching about doing what Professor Fader did, of making room for my students to apprehend . . . literary beauty.” Harp resists engaging with the topic in class because “I worry that I will seem insubstantial or effete . . . I hope I’ll have the guts to say the word. . . . Beautiful . . . in and out of my classes” (17). I hope he will as well. Moi and others were threatened with the label “conservative,” “reactionary,” or worse for supporting beauty and loving a book they had read. However, if the label “conservative” comes from supporting beauty as a cherished experience and is about validating the existence of an inner life, about the blessings of “conventional” structures such as home and family, then one

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might let the labels and accusations accrue. We must stop falling in line and as Orwell stated we must be willing to restate the obvious as “the first duty of intelligent men (sic)” (1939, 205). In the face of maddening politics, the insatiable desires of humans and their tribal tendencies; in the face of the terror and horror of war, treachery, disease, the inevitable debilitation of aging, the threats of the Anthropocene, or other natural disasters, and the silence of space, one should, as Robinson Jeffers suggests in “Love the Wild Swan”: Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan (1989, 410).

According to Jeffers, this focus on beauty, this “wild swan of a world,” is a life totally immersed, open, sense of one’s existence and self, reconciled to change and urgently connected to a vision of the world that is beautiful: it is all we have: And this is bitter counsel, but required and convenient; for, beyond the horror, When the imbecility, betrayal and disappointments become apparent, – what will you have, but to have Admired the beauty? (“Invasion” 1991, 132)4

NOTES 1. See “Democracy in Asia” https://thediplomat​.com​/2017​/09​/democracy​-in​-asia​ -a​-glass​-half​-full​-or​-half​-empty/. 2. The long running series “MASH” is an example in pop culture of this cynical and smug attitude. 3. See complete video: https://art21​.org​/watch​/extended​-play​/julie​-mehretu​-politicized​-landscapes​-short/. 4. Thanks to Stanford UP for granting permission to print this part of “Invasion,” by Robinson Jeffers.

REFERENCES Berman, Marshall. 1988. All That’s Solid Melts into Air. New York: Penguin Books. Bérubé, Michael (ed.). 2005. The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Buell, Lawrence. 1995. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge: Belknap Press. ———. 2001. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the US and Beyond. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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———. 2005. The Future of Environmental Criticism. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Eagleton, Terry. 2003. Literary Theory. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2011. Why Marx was Right. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Eliot, T.S. 1962. The Waste Land and Other Poems [1922]. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanavich. Elytis, Odysseus. 1979. Eklogi 1935–1977 [Election 1935–1977]. Athens: Akmon.” Estok, Simon C. 2009. “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 16 (2): 203–25. Felski, Rita. 2005. “The Role of Aesthetics in Cultural Studies,” in Michael Bérubé (ed.), The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies, 28–43. London: Blackwell. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. 2018. The Great Gatsby [1925]. New York: Scribner. Glotfelty, Cheryl. 2014. “Preface,” in Greg Garrard (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, ix–xii. Oxford UP. Halperin, Julia. 2017. “How Julie Mehretu Created Two of Contemporary Art’s Largest Paintings for SFMOMA,” Artnet News. https://news​.artnet​.com​/exhibitions​/ juliemehretu​-sfmoma​-commission​-debut​-1069271 (Accessed 3/2018). Harp, Nick. 2017. “On Beauty,” in Michael Byers (ed.), Alumni Newsletter. Ann Arbor, MI: Department of English, University of Michigan. https://lsa​.umich​.edu​ /content​/dam​/english​-assets​/english​-docs​/alumni​/newsletter​/Newsletter​-Fall​_2017​ .pdf (Accessed 2/2018). Hicks, Stephen. 2018. “Why Art Became Ugly,” in Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, 247–266. Roscoe, IL: Ockham’s Razor Publishing. Hillman, James. 1998. “The Practice of Beauty,” in Bill Beckley (ed.), Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics. New York: Allworth Press. Horowitz, David.1997. Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey. New York: Touchstone. Hunter, Ian. 1992. “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies,” in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paul Treichler (eds.), Cultural Studies, 347–372. New York: Routledge. Jeffers, Robinson. 1988–2000. The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Tim Hunt (ed.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1988, 1989, 1991, 2000. The annual reference corresponds to 1988 (Volume I); 1989 (Volume II); 1991 (Volume III); 2000 (Volume IV). Jehlen, Myra. 1987. Ideology and Classic American Literature. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (eds.). New York: Cambridge University Press. Karman, James. 2015. Robinson Jeffers: Poet and Prophet. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Mehretu, Julie. 2017. “Politicized Landscapes,” Art21. https://art21​.org​/watch​/ extended​-play/ julie​-mehr​etu-p​oliti​cized​-land​scape​s-sho​rt/ (Accessed 7/2018). Melville, Herman. 1966. Moby Dick: Norton Critical Edition. [1851]. Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford (eds.). New York: Norton. Muir, John. 2020. The Yosemite [1912]. Eugene, OR: Doublebit.

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Nehamas, Alexander. 2000. “The Return of the Beautiful: Morality, Pleasure, and the Value of Uncertainty,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58 (4): 393–403. ———. 2007. Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Newman, Barnett. 1948. “The Sublime Is Now,” Art Theory. http://theoria​.art​-zoo​ .com/ the-sublime-is-now-barnett-newman/ Originally published in Tiger’s Eye 1 (6): 51–53 (Accessed 4/2018). Oliver, Mary. 1992. “The Summer Day,” in New and Selected Poems, 94. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Orwell, George. 1939. “The Taming of Power,” The Adelphi 15 (4): 205–06. Parry, Marc. 2016. “What’s Wrong with Literary Studies?” The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www​.chronicle​.com​/article​/Whats​-Wrong​-With Literary/238480 (Accessed 2/2018). Porter, David. 2017. “On Beauty,” in Michael Byers (ed.), Alumni Newsletter. Ann Arbor, MI: Department of English, University of Michigan. https://lsa​.umich​.edu​ /content​/dam​/english​-assets​/english​-docs​/alumni​/newsletter​/Newsletter​-Fall​_2017​ .pdf (Accessed 2/2018). Rasmussen, Chris. 2006. “Ugly and Monstrous: Marxist Aesthetics,” James A. Rawley Graduate Conference in the Humanities.​http:/​/digitalcommons​.unl​.edu​/his​tory​ rawl​eyco​​nference/7 (Accessed 2/2018). Ross, Andrew. 1988. Universal Abandon: The Politics of Postmodernism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Rufo, Christopher. 2023. American Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. New York: Broadside Press. Schjeldahl, Peter. 1998. “Notes on Beauty,” in Bill Beckley (ed.), Uncontrollable Beauty: A New Aesthetics, 53–59. New York: Allworth Press. Scarry, Elaine. 1999. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Scruton, Roger. 2011. Beauty: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Slovic, Scott (ed.). 2018. Ecocritical Aesthetics: Language, Beauty, and the Environment. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Snodgrass, W.D. 2006. “Returned to Frisco 1946” [1961]. Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems. New York: BOA Editions. Tomkins, Calvin. 2010. “Big Art Big Monet: Julie Mehretu’s Mural for Goldman Sacks,” The New Yorker. https://www​.newyorker​.com​/magazine​/2010​/03​/29​/big​ -art​-big​-money (Accessed 4/2018). Tomkins, Calvin. 2010. “Big Art Big Money: Julie Mehretu’s ‘Mural’ for Goldman Sacks,” The New Yorker. https://www​.newyorker​.com​/magazine​/2010​/03​/29​/big​ -art​-big​-money (Accessed 4/2018). White, Gillian. 2017. “On Beauty,” in Michael Byers (ed.), Alumni Newsletter. Ann Arbor, MI: Department of English, University of Michigan. https://lsa​.umich​.edu​ /content​/dam​/english​-assets​/english​-docs​/alumni​/newsletter​/Newsletter​-Fall​_2017​ .pdf (Accessed 2/2018). Wolin, Richard. 1995. Labyrinths. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

Chapter 11

Eco-Phenomenology in Comparative Literature Salvatore Quasimodo and Odysseus Elytis’ Eco-Poetics Nikoleta Zampaki

In Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s book entitled The Structure of Behavior it is referred that the interconnectedness between Nature and Body is perceived in terms of chiasm which includes partial systems and processes (partial chiasms). Merleau-Ponty rejects an ontological aspect of Nature which is only been characterized by its inter-embodiment and it is often represented as human, mind, or history.1 The holistic re-mapping of the relationship between Nature and Body, as articulated in Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology, is expressed in terms of the flesh of the world. Both Nature and the Body’s flesh are dynamic through space and time constantly. In Merleau-Ponty’s essay entitled “Flesh of the World-Flesh of the Body” (1960) the flesh of the world is synonymous with the world’s Being, called from now and on as universal flesh.2 Based on this statement the flesh of the world is a constant and dynamic expression of Nature and Body respectively. It also shapes a constant narration for all natural and bodily processes during their evolution. The perception of the world through the embodied experience and senses is not restricted only to the human or the world itself, as the perception is extended into the dimension of depth, through which we envisage and access the world’s Being. Eco-Phenomenology emerges in the context of natural processes and their transformations which are perceived through subjective embodied experiences, senses, and mind. According to David Abram,3 the flesh is initially shaped by partial chiasms which are all in a symbiotic order. The nature of flesh (flesh of the flesh) is different from the four elements (e.g., water, air, fire and soil), which are studied by the Greek Philosopher Empedocles. Flesh 173

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is the core of all these elements including their substance ontologically. The flesh of both Nature and Body is shaped through symbiotic processes which are held constantly in time and space. This kind of flesh is the stylistics of becoming, including its substance, form, structure, and so on, and it could be considered as the anima mundi of the world. The multiple and voiced aspects of the flesh of the world remaps the phenomenological terrain and enlightens the complex structure between humans as bodies and Nature as Body which include the first ones. Salvatore Quasimodo and Odysseus Elytis’ embodied experience of Nature is not articulated only in terms of representations (images and structure of the natural world) as Nature is not a product (naturans), but is perceived mentally as naturata. The chiasm between the natural and bodily processes is ‘monitored’ by the flesh of the world as the main and constant dynamics which operates the whole world’s Being. Here the subjective experience4 is an embodied and lived one. The flesh of the world is central to the establishment of a new ontological narration (e.g., an eco-phenomenological one- of our case study) whose primary dimension is the depth of the experience across space and time. Nature and Body in Quasimodo and Elytis’ perception are a great chiasm of symbiotic processes which are the continuous entities of the whole Being. The dimension of depth functions in coherence with the processes of organic and inorganic life-forms as all are ascribed to dense complexities: the nature of Nature, the Body of Nature, the Body as Nature, the Body as Body, and so forth. The eco-phenomenological remark in both Quasimodo and Elytis’ biocosmic perception deploys a new narration about the chiasms between Nature and Body where the whole world is full of transitions and transformations through time and space. Quasimodo’s poem entitled “Ed è subito sera” (“And suddenly it’s evening”) refers to a specific time of a day when the subject imposes to himself some existential statements about human loneliness, mentioning the bright side. Human life is perceived through three successive steps which are the “emergence, apogee, and decline.”5 The rays of light are the sentiment of the human life’s ones. This sublimity is followed by darkness and impending death. During the absolute moment of light and life, the poetic subject is a victim as his sublimity is found under the sun. The word “sera”6 refers to the darkness and the universality is adumbrated by the opening “orguno,”7 which refers to an individual anxiety. The polar balance of the fragment’s rhythms and sounds manifests the tragic human condition.8 In Elytis’ poem entitled “Klima tis apousias” (“Climate of absence”) and specifically in the third part of it, the poetic subject is in a state of isolation as he is in contact with Nature. The isolation is ascribed to a sense of care which is provided by the air (“And here his aristocratic isolation / And here his airy care.”9). The poetic subject feels that nothing else would be done in space as

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he does not believe in anything due to his current situation. The reference to a crystal is a metaphor of the subjective ‘frozen’ feelings (“And the feeling is one crystal”10). The crystal’s Body cannot be accessed due to its compactness and fragile embodiment. The chiasm between the sense of isolation and crystal is articulated as a state of clearness, solidity, and stability toward the airy and fluid one in which the poetic subject imposes himself. Quasimodo and Elytis’ passages are in dialogue as Quasimodo sets his poetic subject within a ‘fluid’ existential state as his faith is a hopeful one in the end while Elytis’s poetic subject rethinks his existential case where the chiasm between Nature and a partial natural Body (crystal) outlines the subjective consciousness through the intermediary with the Nature’s Body. An intermediary between Nature and Body is central in Quasimodo’s poem entitled “Acquamorta” (“Deadwater”). In this poem the poetic subject describes the light reflections on the water as well as its ripples in the hydrosphere, perceived as a natural Body. The water is unclear, but it is a “slumber of marshes.”11 The unclear water is a metaphor of a ‘grotesque’ spatiality where the poetic subject is entering into. The various and different colors of the light’s ripples are white and green (“ora bianca ora verde nei baleni”12), and they are in chiasm with an unknown and loved person (“sei simile al mio cuore”13). The chiasm between the colored arrays of light and the loved person is considered to be an artistic/poetic manifestation of love. To articulate the factual and cultural situatedness of subjectivity, the poetic ego compares the flesh of the subjective body with those of the colored light’s arrays which have resulted from the natural phenomenon of reflection. The white and green colors could be analyzed in terms of the “prismatic ecology” which is first introduced by Jeffrey J. Cohen.14 The multi-spectrum and the colors’ materiality affect the subjective mentality and embodied experience. The color is a natural phenomenon as well as entails materiality. An ecological narration is expanded through the harmonious and non-harmonious aspects of colors while approaching the concepts of Nature and Body.15 The world’s Being’s harmony causes an intimate sensation, identifying with the color metamorphoses which impact a vigor.16 In this direction, Carlo Bo’s argument about Quasimodo’s intention is to achieve a paradisiacal condition of Being: (“dietro un’ improvvisa felicità della terra appare in intenzioni sofferte le vert paradis di un’ età perduta per sempre”17). The subjective vision is a locus of the co-existence of variable visible stimuli. Hydrosphere as part of nature’s Body is a bio-multiple space where many dimensions (e.g. depth) co-exist and produce chiasms.18 The colors are ‘transformed’ into a ‘call’ for lightness of which the poetic subject is responding to them. The flesh of Nature includes the poplar and acorns (“Il pioppo ingrigia d’ intorno ed il leccio; / le foglie e le ghiande si chetano dentro”19), considered as partial bodies. The scenery around subject is shaped by evolutionary interplays between

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the agencies (“e ogrnuna ha i suoi cerchi d’ un unico centro / sfrangiati dal cupo ronzar del libeccio”20). The subjective memory is in progress as the hydrosphere is a spatiality which is endorsed with the past and affects the subjective current emotional world (“Cosí, come su acqua allarga / il ricordo I suoi anelli, mio cuore”21). The loved person is a female who is parentally affiliated with the water (“si muove da un punto e poi muore: / cosí t’è sorella acquamorta”22). The water is an anthropomorphized persona who is dead and at the same time alive as a sister of the female person. This transcendental scenery where the female figure is alive could be theorized as a death zone where a poetic subject accesses and lives in. The change between good and bad emotions offers a deep bound among them and the reference to the parental affiliation is an alternative expression of chiasm as a result of the deep and strong affinities between bodies in Nature. Thus, the flesh of the Body of the female figure is liquid due to its correlation with the water. The female figure could be a divine or enigmatic subjectivity who can ‘dive’ from the world’s bottom to the surface. The revelation of a hydro-woman compiles a positive quality toward the whole scenery. Subjective love is a sign of an eroticism which functions in pairs with colors and light. This ontological utopia is a zone of tentative emotions as life and death are perplexed into a hydro-spectrum. The idea of finality of Nature is a regulative a priori concept only concerning with the subjective experience.23 The female figure includes all the characteristics of a ‘visionary’ woman which is touchable due to its liquid substance and at the same time is untouchable. The result is that the death zone is a utopia, a transcendental place of emotional intoxication and passionate eruption of subjective vision. In response to Quasimodo’s death zone and female figure, Elytis in his third part of the poem titled “Aegeon” a female figure is in dialogue with the poetic subject transcendentally. In the passage’s opening and ending we see the same word (“Roaring”24) the chiasm between the natural and bodily processes encloses the poetic subject and ascribes him to the flesh’s sphere. Love is an anthropomorphized Being and the chiasm among sea (water) and sand is perceived in terms of an inner and deep interplay between Nature and Body’s flesh. We can trace two partial bodies (water and sand/earth) which are in chiasm with the kiss as it is found on the lips (partial part of the human Body25). Moreover, the sea is foamed and the waves are constantly in concordance with Nature and Body’s rhythms. Inside the sea there are shells whose acoustic patterns are in correlation with the Nature’s ones which define the subjective wide bio-acoustics of the seascape (“Foamed response to the shells’ ears”26). The relationship between the shells’ acoustic patterns and the world itself does not imply a distinction, but it conveys the evolutionary acoustics of

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Nature. Here the poetic subject emphasized on the acoustics of Nature in two levels: the first one describes the shells as locus of sea’s sounds semantically and the second one describes the shells’ ears as the locus of Nature’s acoustics metaphorically. It is obvious that the flesh of the world is a multi-voiced27 becoming as the subjective consciousness is transparently the locus of attaching the real with the transcendental agents. The shells are related with the concepts of soundscape and acoustic ecology, as they overlap the physical and cultural environment as mediated ones with the sound. Hearing the voice of the Other on the inside has conditions enumerated: firstly, a spatial closeness that is palpable—close enough to hear the sound of the Other is an emotional articulation of feeling (sentir)—close enough to feel the Other. These conditions being met, the voices of Others and vibrations into the Other (poetic subject) are literally heard in us, within us, perceived as an echo. There is a reversibility between hearing ourselves and hearing the echo of the Other in us. It also brings us a close and deep hearing of the Other. Hearing ourselves and hearing the Others are reversible chiasms, which means that individuality and intersubjectivity are held in union. The shells’ sound is original and the poetic subject is an operator of the spoken word and creates sensible speech with mixtures of sound and thought immediately. The result is to mingle the human voice with the voices of more-than-human world: the various voices of Nature. The voice of the poetic subject is depersonalized as a sacred language and we stress upon its passivity. Based on the mediation the poetic subject imposes to himself some questions in order to find a female figure who is blond and burned by the sun. The burning from the sun is not perceived as a bad state in which the sun destroys or even vanishes its interlocutor. Here the female figure’s burning skin is shaped by chiasm among Nature and Body and specifically from the chiasm among the sun as natural body and the human body (female’s flesh). The poetic language is transformed into the sea’s roaring by verifying the validity and warranty of the chiasms’ continuity during time and space. The roaring is the Nature’s echo and at the same time a confirmation to the subjective consciousness that the flesh of the world is present constantly. Love is the persona who unifies the murmuring due to the sounds that are extracted by the whole seascape. This mutual accord transforms the aesthetic experience ontologically and there is a teleology of transcending the human sphere and postulates the truth of the moment which is hidden into a promise: a verification of the chiasmatic processes which are held within the flesh of the world constantly. The synthesis occurs from mutual reversibility raised from different senses and the sentient. The experience of Body as a perpetual unit is both a synthetic and analytical one and coincides in both Quasimodo and Elytis’ biocosmic perceptions. The perceptions are understood in terms of an intertwining circle

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in the world, structuring both the subjective and objective world’s Being. The flesh of the world is an articulation of chiasm across time and space as the subjective experience is in the medium of living in and out of them. In Quasimodo’s poem entitled “Dolore di cose che ignore” (“Grief on things that I do not know”) the poetic subject refers to the thickness, whiteness, and blackness of the roots which are perplexed in form and shape in order to investigate the nice smell of worms and ferments: (“Fitta di bianche e di nere radici / di lievito odora e lombrichi, / tagliata dall’ acque la terra”28). The fauna that is referred to in the above passage is a deployment of the flesh’s becoming. In the “Introduction”29 of the book title Texts, Animals, Environments: Zoopoetics and Ecopoetics, we read the term of the “zoopoetics,” which describes the narration of studying the fauna in pairs with the human and nonhuman life-forms. Zoopoetics is also studying the representations of fauna and its active participation in the production of a cultural text. Here the reference to the “lombrichi” (enzymes) is not selected by chance as they are basic proteins, acting like biocatalysts.30 The subjective identity is extracted by variable chiasms and conveys a dynamic motion and evolution. Water and earth are the main sources of nurturing and vitality and they could not be considered only in terms of two substances, but also provide us knowledge about various life-forms and their substances. In the poem’s next lines, the subjective emotional world is full of grief and the poetic subject manifests that all the natural processes are not part of him, but they are autonomous in space. All life-forms are in a constant interplay by keeping their autonomy and characteristics in space. The flesh of the worms and enzymes are in direct contact with the flesh of sod, full of grass (“con l’ erba, sul cuore una zolla”31), and we can understand that all the bodies are part of the Nature’s flesh. In Elytis’ poem titled “Ethries” (“Cloudless”) and specifically in the fourteenth part of it, the poetic subject refers to some colored birds and his dew toward the whole natural scenery during the summer. The air and sea are the natural bodies which flesh ‘hosts’ the birds and the poetic subject which are embodied into them. Thus, the subjective ‘donation,’ which is referred in the end of the poem, encloses the mass, which will be transformed into bright donators of the sea (“pelagus”32). The donors of the sea are a transcendental fact which fits the real one. This chiasm presupposes an ontological depth to understand the flesh of the world which is expanded in-between air and earth’s bodies. According to Elytis’ account in his Open Papers, we read that the transparency33 is the medium for accessing the wholeness’ fragments: (“I am waiting each year for this thing which is full of reversibility, and total transparency”). In both Quasimodo and Elytis’ passages the exploration of sense-experience leads them to conclude that the Body inheres in and it is synchronized

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with its sensible world. There is a fundamental ontological relationship between the perceiver and the perceived. The ability to touch and be touched, see and be seen provide us with an openness to the perceived world which is a sensible one. This case study’s passages are samples of a visible expression of the body (inside) and insofar it renders visibility again (outside). The representations of natural settings are not simply abstract and not observable since they reflect capabilities, movements, and bodily anticipations that make perception possible. An eco-phenomenological approach in the aforementioned poets’ works leads to the re-invention of the self and its transformations within the embodied experience, highlighting the strong affinities between the human and more-than-human world. The development of a transpersonal ecological consciousness postulates an identification of subjectivity as it is connected with the co-evolution with Others. The matter of the ‘re-birth’ and transformations of Nature presupposes a new kind of flesh’s ontological ‘re-birth’. Specifically, Quasimodo’s writing explores more the words’ meaning as the words tend to be more apocalyptic in existential connotations.34 Elytis’ intention is to ‘change’ the world through words, and offers a new poetic universe in which the poetic norms can ‘operate’ the flesh of the world. Here we can mention that there is a mechanism of personalization which is synonymous with the transformation of the ego into any object or abstract meaning and vice versa, aiming to create an individual “mythological form.”35 In Elytis’ biocosmic perception the relocation from natural sceneries into the culture is deployed within décriture.36 Fragments are that way to pave the unknown and reach it, while through fragments an individual can understand ontologically the Being. Nevertheless, even if Quasimodo and Elytis’ accounts are centered on the flesh of the world, there is a mutual and coherent dialogue between presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, transcendentalism and the reality eventually presented a challenge to the consideration of a new ontology of the in-itself and the for-itself. This kind of ontology is an esoteric one and it accommodates the subjects, objects and the mode of existence attached to the flesh of the world. In conclusion, Quasimodo and Elytis’ stylistics adapts to the natural agencies and at the same time ‘overcomes’ them as a way to approach the multispectrality and complexity of the world’s Being.

NOTES 1. Merleau-Ponty 1983, 3. 2. Ibid, 298–299. 3. Abram 1997, 65–66.

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4. Brown, Toadvine 2003, xi–xxi. 5. Rossi 1960, 5. 6. Mandelbaum 1954, 134. 7. Ibid, 134. 8. Rossi 1960, 6. 9. Elytis 2018, 18. [The English translation is mine.] 10. Ibid, 18. [The English translation is mine.] 11. Ibid, 141. 12. Mandelbaum 1954, 140. 13. Ibid, 140. 14. Cohen 2013, xx. 15. Oppermann 2018, 158. 16. Jones 1961, 64. 17. Bo 1939, 216. 18. McKibben 2006, xv. 19. Mandelbaum 1954, 140. 20. Ibid, 140. 21. Ibid, 140. 22. Ibid, 140. 23. Kant 1929, 58. 24. Elytis 2018, 15. [The English translation is mine.] 25. Ibid, 15. [The English translation is mine.] 26. Ibid, 15. [The English translation is mine.] 27. Barbaras 2006, 83. 28. Mandelbaum 1954, 144. 29. Middelhoff, et al., 2019, 14. 30. Dickinson 2016, 19. 31. Mandelbaum 1954, 144. 32. Elytis 2018, 94. [The English translation is mine.] 33. Elytis 2004, 44–45. [The English translation is mine.] 34. Orsini 1952, 50. 35. Elytis 1979, 195. 36. Koutrianou 2002, 227.

REFERENCES Abram, David. 1997. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a Morethan-Human World. New York: Vintage. Barbaras, Renaud. 2006. Desire and Distance: Introduction to a Phenomenology of Perception. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bo, Carlo. 1939. Otto Studi. Firenze: Vallecchi. Brown, Charles S. and Toadvine, Ted (eds.). 2003. Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself. Albany: Suny Press.

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Cohen, Jeffrey J. 2013. Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dickinson, Adam. 2016. “Energy Humanities and Metabolic Poetics.” Reviews in Cultural Theory 6:3, 17–21. Elytis, Odysseus. 1979. Eklogi 1935–1977 [Election 1935–1977]. Athens: Akmon. Elytis, Odysseus. 2004. Anoikta Hartia [Open Papers]. Athens: Ikaros. Elytis, Odysseus. 2018. Prosanatolismoi [Orientations]. Athens: Ikaros. Jones, J. Frederick. 1961. “The Poetry of Salvatore Quasimodo.” Italian Studies 16:1, 60–77. Kant, Immanuel. 1929. Critique of Pure Reason. N. Kemp Smith (transl.). London: Macmillan. Koutrianou, Elena. 2002. Me axona to fos. H diamorfosi kai I kristallosi tis poiitikis tou Odyssea Elyti [Having light as an axis. The configuration and crystallization of Odysseus Elytis’ poetics]. Athens: Idrima Kosta kai Elenis Ourani. Mandelbaum, Allen (ed., & transl.). (1954). The Selected Writings of Salvatore Quasimodo. New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahi. McKibben, Bill. 2006. The End of Nature. New York: Random House. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1983. The Structure of Behavior. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Middelhoff, Frederike, Schönbeck, Sebastian, Borgards, Roland, and Gersdorf, Catrin (eds.). (2019). Texts, Animals, Environments: Zoopoetics and Ecopoetics. Berlin: Rombach Druck- und Verlagshaus. Orsini, Virgilio. 1952. “Salvatore Quasimodo and Lyrical Hermetism.” East and West 3:1, 48–50. Oppermann, Serpil. 2018. “Nature’s Colors: A Prismatic Materiality in the Natural / Cultural Realms.” In P. Quigley and S. Slovic (eds.), Ecocritical Aesthetics: Language, Beauty, and the Environment, 157–171. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rossi, R. Louis. 1960. “Salvatore Quasimodo: A Presentation.” Chicago Review 14:1, 1–23.

Chapter 12

Of the Forest Ecology, Culture, and History Debarati Bandyopadhyay

In the Bengali author Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyaya’s novel, Aranyak (1939), translated as Of the Forest by Rimli Bhattacharya in 2002, we learn of the fictionalized chronicling of the author’s experience of what he perceived as living in exile in a remote, hostile yet magnificently beautiful forest, far away from the culture and civilization of the urban area of Calcutta, in India under British rule. The author’s fictional surrogate, Satyacharan, was initially repelled by the uncouth nature and people of the forest. When he had to go from Calcutta to the forest, Satyacharan felt that he had been exiled from the only place worth living in. In his memory at this stage, Calcutta’s map was charted in terms of “libraries” and “theatres” (Aranyak, 10). In contrast, in the forest, he felt that “it was far better to stay on half-starving in Calcutta than stifle to death here” (Aranyak, 10). Later, however, he gradually began to dislike the twin compulsion to destroy the wilderness to make profitable settlements for his employer on the cleared-off forest-land and witness the degradation of the terrain. When he was, after some years, able to return to Calcutta permanently, the uncivilized locale of Satyacharan’s erstwhile exile prompted him to look back at the lost forestland with a loving nostalgia that found representation in the words of Aranyak. In the Introduction to her translation of Aranyak: Of the Forest, Rimli Bhattacharya writes: “The montages of terrain and people that compose Aranyak are recovered from lived experience” (xvi). She also notes in the Introduction that “[v]ignettes that become Aranyak are scattered through Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyaya’s diaries or field notes” (xiv). Bibhutibhushan had worked as assistant manager of the Jungle Mahal owned by the Khelatchandra Ghosh estate of Calcutta from January 1924 to 1928. His task was to survey about 30,000 bighas or more than 12,000 acres of forest land in North Bihar, to lease the land out, clear the area of trees and shrubs, and help 183

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make settlements there. In “Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay: Geographical Imagination and Imaginary Geography,” Bikash Chakravarty informed us: The exact location of Jungle Mahal presubmably lay somewhere to the northeast of Bhagalpur town, partly in the then Purnea district on the elevated strip of land formed of the char-soil close to the confluence of the Ganga and Koshi.  .  .  . Bibhutibhusan frequently camped out in Jungle Mahal . . . [and] chanced upon some of the most charming precincts in the woods, met scores of interesting characters and recorded them in his diary. A large number of such encounters along with a general topographical outline of the place form part of the book written about a decade later. (184–85)

After 1928, when his tenure at Jungle Mahal was over, Bibhutibhushan came back to Calcutta and settled down in the familiar urban area. But he continued to visit Singbhum in South Bihar voluntarily, in the 1930s too. In Aranyak, he conflates the topography of North and South Bihar. In the Prologue to Aranyak, we read of Satyacharan, working permanently in Calcutta after his return from the forestland far away: I was sitting on the Maidan, close by the side of the Fort after a whole day of backbreaking work at the office. Near me was an almond tree. I sat quietly letting my gaze travel beyond the tree towards the Fort area when my eyes fell on the undulating land beside the moat: suddenly, it seemed to be evening and I was standing by the waters of Saraswati Kundi on the northern borders of Lobtulia. The next instant, the sound of a car horn on the road to the Palashi gates shattered my delusion. . . . Submerged without respite in the hubbub and the frenetic activity of the city, when I think now of the forestlands of Lobtulia-baihar or Ajmabad . . . I feel as though it had been a dream of a world filled with beauty. (1–2)

If it is remembered that the Fort mentioned here is Fort William in Calcutta, a place that exists as a prominent part of the city’s map even today, and also that it indicated, in India under the British rule, the initial stage of the domination of the British over the Indians since 1757, then Satyacharan’s exhaustion after a hard day’s work at an office designed to serve the British empire, and his act of taking resort to imagination which helps him to return to the naturally beautiful terrain of the remote forests for a moment, point towards the contrast that is not merely between the soul-killing drudgery of the present and a healthy life far away and long ago, but also between a disturbing, colonized, urban life and the lost ecological balance of the life he misses, a life from which he had also learnt how imperialism had repeatedly destroyed India’s indigenous people and the land.

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At work, in the forests, gradually the wild beauty of the forest had begun to hold sway over his mind. The poverty and suffering of the local inhabitants began to make him conscious of the precarious nature of the ecological balance in the place. He had been appointed the manager of the privately owned estate so that he could maximize its profit by settling cleared-off forest-land for cultivation among all those who would be able to pay rent for such land-holdings. He initially thought that it was in order to offer the means of livelihood to the large, poor sections of the population seeking land for cultivation that it was necessary for him to clear larger and larger tracts of this forest-land. But gradually, he also understood that it would mean the felling of ancient trees and causing irreparable harm to nature. Long after his return to Calcutta, when his life in the forest could only form an evergreen memory, he recorded his view of the erstwhile, largely unaltered map of the place (or, the way it had been before his managerial intervention) as: The forest and hills had been thus for many centuries. So must this forest have been when the Aryans had . . . entered the land of the five rivers [north-western India]; when Buddha had silently left his home. . . . Through all these episodes of history the peak and the forest of Mahalikharoop had stood exactly thus. . . . In some long ago past, there was an ocean here, right where I was now sitting. An ancient ocean whose waves must have fallen upon this sandy shore from the Cambrian age—what has since been transformed into a huge mountain. I sat in the forest and dreamt the dream of that blue ocean from the past. (Aranyak, 83–84)

Satyacharan, in his “dream” remembered that the geographical features of the place have remained unchanged for millennia. His references to geological ages remind us of the formation of the Himalayas in the place of an ancient ocean. This suggests that nature of that prehistoric period, now lost, and available only in terms of geological knowledge, is overlaid with a terrain that had remained stable for a few thousand years. But, it is this terrain that Satyacharan was made to alter and deface. The palimpsest that he understood as representing the maps of the successive historical periods lay in his imagination and his understanding of the history of the terrain. It was Satyacharan’s duty to lease out the forestland quickly to all solvent applicants. But he was reticent and slow in doing this because he knew that it would mean not only the clearing off of trees but also the formation of ugly slums: “The quiet forests, the kundi, the range of hills and everything would be transformed into human settlements .  .  . ugly lean-tos” (Aranyak, 114). Against the formation of this slum, Satyacharan staked his job by retarding the process of leasing out the land, and, with Jugalprasad, an enthusiastic nature-loving neighbor, planting as many trees and flowering shrubs as possible around the distractingly beautiful center of the forestland. Satyacharan

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remembered: “A lot of money went into the project” (Aranyak, 112) and the readers understand that he was making a sort of reparation to the place, to the best of his ability. Through both kinds of activities, Satyacharan had given expression to his ecocentric consciousness, and his attempt was to keep this particular type of ecology intact for as long as possible. Satyacharan’s sentiment was expressed succinctly in the following words: “Such vast tracts of forestland . . . comprised a rich national resource. Had it been any other country, they would have made this into a national park” (Aranyak, 114). In the context of Satyacharan’s experience, it is neither the real surveyor’s map that he had wielded at his workplace, nor even the memory of the topography of the degraded forestland where he had worked for years that created the features of the map in his memory. Rather, the flora and fauna, the forest and riverine land inhabited by tribal people spread over thousands of acres now irrevocably lost in slums, were mapped in his memory and recorded in words. Another episode that had also remained etched in Satyacharan’s memory forever was the picnic of a group of upper class urban people at the core of his beloved forest. I rode my horse deeper into the jungle and came to the banks of the kundi: I found a party of eight or ten Bengali gentlemen had spread out cotton rugs by the wild jhau and were chatting away in a relaxed fashion. Half a dozen young women were cooking nearby and another half a dozen children were running around, playing. . . . The elderly man with them was a retired deputy magistrate, with the title of a Rai Bahadur. . . . I noticed they cared very little for what was beautiful about the place. . . . They left behind a clutter of empty tins of condensed milk and jam. To my eyes, they had seemed completely out of place in the jungles of Lobtulia. (Aranyak, 187–89)

In direct contrast to the idea of ecologically destructive casual visitor to a place, we have had the idea of citizens living in harmony with nature for long periods with the avowed idea of helping in its regeneration. In “Reinhabiting California,” published in The Ecologist in 1977 (incidentally, about fifty years after Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay had experienced the forest in Bihar and set Satyacharan to express his concern with the ecology in Aranyak) Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann had described such existence. They wrote first about the ideal way of living: “Living-in-place means following the necessities and pleasures of life as they are uniquely presented by a particular site, and evolving ways to ensure long-term occupancy of that site” (399). The fact that this is highly significant for not only human survival, but the sustenance of the ecology of the place becomes evident from their description: A society which practises living-in-place keeps a balance with its region of support through links between human lives, other living things, and the processes of the planet—seasons, weather, water cycles—as revealed by the place itself. It is

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the opposite of a society which “makes a living” through short-term destructive exploitation of land and life. (399)

They extolled it as “an age-old way of existence” (399). However, if only the human inhabitants of a certain place had always continued to live in this way there would never have been any ecological imbalance and environmental destruction. But, since man has destroyed or degraded the environment and ecology in most places available to him on earth, an idea of an eco-ethical way of life was needed to help nature regain its strength in the twentieth century. Berg and Dasmann wrote about the problem and a solution as well: “Reinhabitation means learning to live-in-place in an area that has been disrupted and injured through past exploitation. It involves . . . becoming aware of the particular ecological relationships that operate within and around it” (399). Satyacharan in Aranyak became aware of his own role in disrupting and injuring the forest. And he also began to try to retard this process and to replant trees to re-create the forest, in his own small, tentative way. This active effort on his part to restore the ecological balance of the place in miniature reminds us of the necessity of “situating” oneself in one’s own place for proper eco-ethical behavior, as derived from Donna J. Haraway’s idea: “I would like to insist on the embodied nature of all vision, and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere” (188). In other words, Haraway asks for a narrator who is actively concerned with the place and the situation being described, and not a mere onlooker whose gaze is objective and the narration indifferent and remote. Richard Kerridge had once written that we must always remember that “an ecologist studies forms of life not in isolation but as parts of a system, an economy that sustains them and that they constitute” (130). Gary Paul Nabhan, concerned with “riddles regarding relationships among cultural diversity, community stability, and the conservation of biological diversity in natural habitats,” had written in Cultures of Habitat: On Nature, Culture, and Story (1997) about his “interest in human communities that have a long history of interaction with one particular kind of terrain and its wildlife” (2–3). While Dasmann had preferred to call such communities the “ecosystem people,” Nabhan had sought to bridge the gap between the ecosystem and human culture in his formulation of the concept of “cultures of habitat” to discuss the local place and ecology-based lives of traditional societies. In discussions of the ethics of living in a place and working towards the preservation of its natural distinctions, Nabhan’s ideas have proved to be essential. After citing Dasmann’s “ecosystem people,” he wrote: “The term ecosystem comes from the scientific tradition of identifying discrete but somewhat arbitrary units of the natural world as though each functioned like an organic machine. In contrast, the term habitat

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is etymologically related to habit, inhabit, and habitable” (3). I feel that it is to a large extent true of the scientific discipline that it thinks of an area in terms of its ecosystem which is often like a distinct unit, though within the natural world. Nabhan’s idea of “cultures of habitat,” in contrast, seems to have the advantage of combining the sense of a place, living there and the necessary human attempt to keep it habitable for all, thereby pointing toward both an ecology and an eco-ethical way of living in a place. This idea is accentuated by Nabhan’s description of the term “culture [that] may likewise be preferable to the value-neutral people; culture implies that we learn from our elders and neighbors a way of living in a place that is more refined or better adapted than our genes alone can offer” (4). In view of this observation, when we learn that Nabhan had, as he says, with the help of David Hancocks, realized that “where human populations had stayed in the same place for the greatest duration, fewer plants and animals had become endangered species; in parts of the country where massive in-migrations and exoduses were taking place, more had become endangered” (2), it signifies that if there is a long-standing culture of living and loving a place then it is possible that it helps both human and all other forms of life to coexist and flourish there. And the relationship between this culture of eco-ethical living in a place and literature and art lies in Nabhan’s observation that a “stable human community may have both generic and orally transmitted cultural adaptations to place that often escape the eye” (4). I understand from this that the traditional narratives of a place-based community of years offer insights into human survival and adaptive practices suitable in the ecology of that particular state of culture and nature. In Aranyak, Satyacharan had come across a class of forest people who had lived in the place for quite a few thousand years. These people were the original inhabitants of the forest and mountains of this part of India and Satyacharan’s description of his growing acquaintance with them reveals the necessity of an intricate readjustment at the level of his and our understanding of both nature and culture because their lifestyle had raised questions about these. In the latter half of Aranyak, after coming across some rudely fashioned stone columns in the outlying areas of the forest, Satyacharan had learnt that they signified the boundary of the indigenous or adivasi kingdom. He also learnt that the kingdom did not exist any longer because of British rules and oppression. But, learning that the descendants of the adivasi royal family continued to live in the area, he decided to pay them a visit, largely out of curiosity. However, Satyacharan’s idea of a royal existence was rudely shocked because of what he found out: The royal capital was a small place comprising not more than a score of households—little mud huts, roofed with rough tiles, the walls neatly plastered with mud: snakes, lotuses, creepers and other images had been etched on the walls.

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Buddhu Singh called out and a girl of sixteen or seventeen years came running out of the house. . . . “Where is the Raja?” asked Buddhu Singh. “Who is this girl?” I wanted to know from Buddhu Singh. “The daughter of the Raja’s grandson,” said he . . . “Her name is Bhanmati,” said he . . . The Princess Bhanmati. . . . However, the garments she wore would not have been considered modest in civilized society. . . . From far she pointed out a big bakain tree. . . . Grazing cattle! I almost jumped out of my skin . . . Raja Dobru Panna Birbardi, grazing cattle! (Aranyak, 150–51)

However, Satyacharan’s first impression was soon replaced with his understanding of the legacy of the thousands of years that the spectacle in front of him represented, when he learnt from Buddhu Singh that the old shepherd’s forefathers were kings of the entire forest and mountain region—up to the Himalayas in the north, and Chhotanagpur in the south, the Kushi river on the east and Mungher in the west. . . . These people fought the Mughal army . . . now there is nothing left. Whatever was left was all gone in the Santal Revolt of 1862. The leader of the Santal Revolt is still alive—he is the present Raja. (Aranyak, 149) If we remember that the struggle of the tribal people against the Mughals in earlier centuries and more recently especially, the Santal revolt against the British rule had been largely due to the respective government’s policies of indiscriminate exploitation of the land and the indigenous races living in these areas, then the contrasting age-old eco-ethical way of living known to these tribes as the only viable option would appear to be less shocking than it was to Satyacharan at the beginning. Such a tribal society might be described to have, technologies . . . [that] remained stagnant over tens of thousands of years. These are obviously all conditions favouring prudent use of resources over the territory of each tribe. . . . The most notable of such traditions are sacred groves where only limited, regulated use by members of a local community is permitted. (Gadgil, 145–46)

We are reminded of the Na’vi on Pandora and their sentient, sacred tree in James Cameron’s film Avatar (2009). In Aranyak, Satyacharan, visiting the tribal burial ground at the behest of Raja Dobru Panna, had had a similar realization: Then, when we had climbed a considerable height we came across an immense banyan tree whose innumerable branches had dropped down like pillars. . . . The tree was spread over an area covering a bigha of land.

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“Please be kind enough to take off your shoes,” said Raja Dobru Panna. In the shadow of the banyan tree were huge upright slabs of stone . . . This was their royal ancestral burial ground . . . As I stood there beneath the spreading banyan, I was filled with a sensation that was quite new. . . The place had an indescribable mystery and solemnity. (Aranyak, 156–57)

However, in spite of the tribal people’s heroic, yet futile, attempt to resist the successive imperial powers’ exploitation and degradation of the land and their lives, these sacred places and ecologically harmonious cultures, even in remote areas of India, were not kept out of the economy, that is, the commercial circuit. Sometime later, when the tribal king died, Satyacharan learnt that all the natural means of survival of these tribal people were to be confiscated. He envisaged a scene in the near future in which these forests and mountains would be turned into copper mines and the natural way of life would be replaced with slum-culture: Chimneys of the copper factories, trolley lines, rows of bustees for the coolies, drains overflowing with dirty water, discarded heaps of ash spewed from engines, clusters of shops, tea-joints, cheap films—Jawani Hawa, Sher Shamsher, Pronoyer Jer . . . country liquor shacks . . . The three-o-clock whistle sounds from the factory. Bhanmati has gone out, a basket on her head, to peddle coaldust in the bazaar. C-o-a-l for sale, c-o-a-l, four paisa a bucket. (Aranyak, 244)

Bibhutibhushan’s description of the degraded ecology of the place that Satyacharan had visited could be termed prophetic because this is precisely what is happening in India today in tribal areas where there are forests and hills, rich in their mineral deposits. However, in so far as this vision also refers to places which have usually, for some reason, remained out of the urban and commercial circuits for extensive periods of time, it reminds me of an idea in the world of town planning and architecture known as “terrain vague.” Strictly speaking, this idea was first generated to signify urban areas which could not be utilized immediately for some reason. However, on my part, with an extension of this idea to describe a place that is outside the usual commercial circuit, I believe that application of the idea of terrain vague to Aranyak might prove to be fruitful. In formulating his idea of terrain vague, Ignasi de Sola-Morales Rubio sought to highlight the fact that the dynamics of simultaneous “absence” and “promise” is fundamental to an understanding of this complex notion (120). He was discussing images of urban areas captured in photographs, but his concept of terrain vague has transcended the boundaries imposed by architecture, photography, and town planning as separate, though related disciplines

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and at present, appears to have attained the position of a philosophy of space that has induced a substantial amount of academic and intellectual deliberation. It offers a significant prospect in ecocritical considerations as well. The romantic imagination, which still survives in our contemporary sensibility, feeds on memories and expectations. Strangers in our own land, strangers in our own city, we inhabitants of the metropolis feel the spaces not dominated by architecture as reflections of our own insecurity, of our vague wanderings through limitless spaces that . . . constitute both a physical expression of our own fear and . . . our expectation of the other, the alternative, the utopian, the future. (Sola-Morales, 121)

Speculation about the possibilities latent in the concept of terrain vague is neither unnecessary nor foolishly romantic. It has long-term ecological and sociocultural significance. I believe that it is necessary to explore the nature of such space to make better sense of our experience of a certain vacant space and apprehensions precisely because of the indeterminate nature of the significance of the expression. Luc Levesque had presented the idea of terrain vague as an interstitial condition in a positive sense, to get out of the simple dualistic and antithetical conceptualization of such an area in terms of either order or disorder. He sought to define it in terms of latent possibilities: Etymologically, interstitial denotes something found “in between” things. Referring to the notion of interval, it also means “a space of time.” Thus the interstitial embraces . . . notions [of] openness, porosity, breach . . . relationship . . . process, transformation and location.

Following Levesque, I shall try to focus on terrain vague as a spatially and temporally interstitial condition. Such an approach helps us to critique the nature of human agency that give rise to a degrading and degraded ecological existence, in terms of chronology and deviant ways of utilization of space on the one hand, and on the other, points towards an open, unused space and (again, in terms of chronology) a future replete with possibilities of emergence of new life and fresh perspectives on existence. In Aranyak, Satyacharan’s understanding of the past, present, and future of Raja Dobru Panna’s tribe vis-à-vis the trajectory of Indian history as well as world history indicates that the land that he envisaged as degraded due to mining had earlier represented other, more eco-ethical ways of living, too. If we remember that Bibhutibhushan was amalgamating his experiences of two successive decades (the 1920s and 1930s) and two parts of Bihar with vastly different features of economy and topography (in one part the fertile soil produced by river and in another vast forest and hills and mountains predominate) with a practical, hardcore knowledge of the commercial world in Calcutta during the British Raj, then it becomes evident that he was creating

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a palimpsest in terms of both space and time in which a culture of ecological degradation and commercial exploitation of people and nature has a shared existence with Satyacharan’s ecologically sensitive and regenerative vision. It is in this sense that the terrain delineated in Aranyak can be thought of in terms of the ecological possibilities and interstitial existence described in the idea of “terrain vague.” In this context, it is also necessary to remember the idea of heterotropia by Foucault: The heterotropia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible. . . . Perhaps the oldest example of these heterotropias that take the form of contradictory sites is the garden. . . . The traditional gardens of the Persians was a sacred space that was supposed to bring together inside its rectangle four parts representing the four parts of the world, with a space still more sacred . . . like the navel of the world at its center . . . and all the vegetation of the garden was supposed to come together in this space, in this sort of microcosm. . . . The garden has been a sort of happy, universalizing heterotropia since the beginning of antiquity (our modern zoological gardens spring from that source). (25–26)

When in the course of his somewhat more intimate acquaintance with the tribal royal family, Satyacharan, in Aranyak, learned that they were immensely proud of older royal palace-fort which was actually a big natural cave and their thousands of years old family burial ground which covered a side of a hill, he compared their legacy with the Egyptian pyramids on the one hand and the position of Aryans in India vis-à-vis that of these non-Aryan indigenous Indians over the centuries, on the other. But no less mysterious and innately dignified [than the Egyptian Valley of the Kings] was this burial ground of kings belonging to the indigenous, nonAryan people. . . . Their burial ground lacked the pretension, the polish and the splendour of the works of the wealthy Egyptian Pharaohs, for they had been poor people. . . . As I stood on the hilltop . . . I could glimpse quite another world . . . I saw the nomadic Aryans cross over the north-west mountain ranges and come down like a torrent into an ancient India ruled by primitive non-Aryan tribes. . . . The history of the vanquished non-Aryan races was not written down anywhere, or perhaps, it was written only in such secret mountain caves in the darkness of forests, in the lines of calcified skeletal remains. (Aranyak, 157)

Satyacharan acknowledged the tragedy in the lives of these non-Aryan races and yet in his gesture of strewing flowers over their burial ground as a

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representative of the Aryan culture, he also accepted, what we might call the latent heterotropic significance of that ancient place. I asked Bhanmati to pick some flowers that I could place on her great-grandfather’s grave. . . . Then she and I arranged them over the grave of Raja Dobru Panna. Just then, a flock of sillis took off with a fluttering of wings from the topmost branch of the banyan tree and flew above us with their haunting cry. It was as though well pleased with my gesture, all the ancestors of Raja Dobru, ignored and unsung, abused and forgotten, were applauding us in chorus. For, perhaps, this was the first time that a descendant of the Aryans had honoured the royal burial ground of a non-Aryan race. (Aranyak, 200–201)

History, forgotten and sought to be rewritten by Bibhutibhushan in fiction, combined with his acknowledgement of the indigenous people’s eco-ethics to create Aranyak. The predominantly Western ecocritical perspectives have helped us to understand, so far, some of the finer eco-ethical views presented by Bibhutibhushan in Aranyak. However, these ecocritical standpoints teach us to look at a place as shaped or marred by the human agents in that locality, as part of the ecosystem in operation there. In India, there remains, however, the ancient Tamil idea of tinai, in which the geographical region, the nonhuman as well as the human life there and the felt presence of the sacred flow into one another seamlessly, presenting a holistic view of existence. Swarnalatha Rangarajan summarized the features of the tinai: TiNai theory is associated with the place-based poetry of Sangam literature, the earliest literature of Tamils (300 BCE–200 CE). . . . The Tolkappiam, an ancient Sangam text on Tamil grammar and poetics, mentions five tiNais: namely, Marutam (wetlands), Kurinji (forested hills), Mullai (pastoral tracts), Neytal (the littoral tracts) and Palai (the desert lands or the parched lands), which are identified by trees and deities specific to the ecological niche. (74)

Nirmal Selvamony, the foremost tinai scholar, highlighted the correspondence between such a worldview and the ideals of existence in the tribal society. It reminded me of the hills and forests of the terrain that Satyacharan, in Aranyak, came to traverse and revere, along with Dobru Panna and Bhanmati, the representatives of an ancient, pre-Aryan tribal culture. There is a close correspondence between the nature of the oikos and the world view of that oikos. The organic world view of the tribal (and tinai) societies derives from the maximally integrated interrelation among the members of the oikos. This integration is in fact, a continuity of being, an ontic continuity which results in identification. The being of a member of the oikos is seen to be flowing

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into the being of the other resulting in an organismic being in which human being, nature and the spirit are members. . . . If nature is anthropomorphized and sacralised, human is naturised and sacralised and the spirit being is both anthropomorphized and naturised. (Selvamony, xx; emphasis added)

In Aranyak, there are, among many, two prominent instances that remind us of the integration in existence that the tinai theory espoused. In Bibhutibhushan’s novel, soon after Satyacharan learned to recognize the sanctity of the royal cemetery and the massive presence of the banyan tree, he also recorded: On the way we passed by an upright stone, daubed with vermilion. Around it were marigold and sandhyamani flowers, obviously planted by a human hand. Yet another big stone stood before us, and that too, was daubed with vermilion. It was a sacred space, dedicated long, long ago, I was told, to the ancestral god of the royal family . . . “Tarbaro is a powerful god,” said Raja Dobru. “Were it not for him, the hunters in their greed for hide and horns would have surely decimated the wild buffaloes. It is he who preserves the herds. Just before they are about to plunge into a trap, he stands before the herd, his arms spread out—so many have seen him.” No one in the civilized world reveres this god of an ancient forest people, no one knows of him. Yet, as I sat in the shadow of the hills, in the exquisite beauty and mystery of the forest abounding with wild animals, I felt it all to be true. (Aranyak, 158)

As in Selvamony’s idea of tinai with nature, life, and spirit flowing into one another, in Bibhutibhushan’s work of fiction too, the place inspired Satyacharan to feel the spirit of the deity as the savior of life in the jungles. And yet, Satyacharan also remembered his feeling of dismay later in the fiercely commercial section of Calcutta, where the memory of the powerful forest deity would appear to be just that—an ineffective memory. Much later, when I had come back to Calcutta, I saw once in Burrabazar in the frightful heat of Jaistha, a cartman from the western regions whip his two bullocks mercilessly with a leather thong. Alas Tarbaro! I thought that day, this is not the forestland of Chhotanagpur or Madhya Pradesh; how will your kindly hands save these tortured beasts? This is twentieth-century Calcutta, of Aryan lineage. Here, you are as helpless as the defeated Raja Dobru. (Aranyak, 158–59)

Satyacharan stood between a vanishing world of ecological harmony and the civilization that had emerged in the industrial and commercial era. The compulsions of the latter subjected him to a life of drudgery in Calcutta, whose “culture” he was fond of, though. And yet, his sense of human responsibility prodded him to feel guilty, twice over, about the hills and jungle and the tribal

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folks there: first, for his own individual complicity in the destruction of the forest; and second, the collective sense of the crime of belonging to the imperial culture and civilization that had, since the time of the Aryans, sought to destroy the tribal space and eco-ethical life, and had succeeded in doing so quite comprehensively, during the British rule, in his own times. Aranyak emerges as a complex and layered eco-ethical reading of nature, history, and culture in India. It is more so, due to the presence of the nuanced way in which his literary creation is justified by Bibhutibhushan himself even though he was merely a vulnerable subject of the British empire. In the process of initiating the readers into the world of his fictional surrogate’s reminiscences in Aranyak, he wrote: Southwards in Dharampur district, the crops have failed: Dhaturia had come to the sparsely populated wildish villages around Lobtulia to keep body and soul together . . . I’d seen such a smile of pleasure on his face when he got to eat some molasses with the fried grains of what they called cheena-grass in these parts. . . . [T]he sal forests have been set on fire to clear the ground. . . . I have . . . listened to strange tales told by hunters of the forest . . . they had seen the immense frame of the wild buffalo god . . . It is of these people that I shall speak. Our earth has many paths where civilized men seldom tread. Along those paths the strange cross-currents of life trickle their way through obscure pebbly channels. Such currents I had known and the memory of knowing them remains with me. But these memories do not give me pleasure; they are filled with sorrow. By my hands was destroyed an unfettered playground of nature. I know too, that for this act the forest gods will never forgive me. I have heard that to confess a crime in one’s own words lightens somewhat the burden of the crime. Therefore, this story. (Aranyak, 2–3; translator’s emphasis)

Literature is expected to, and often works as a speculum to reflect the signs of a malady that besets the human world. It can warn and inspire. These find an integrated existence, when mediated by the author’s imagination. In studying Aranyak, it is the holistic eco-ethical imagination that we celebrate. Satyacharan envisaged a god who was neither Tarbaro, nor any Hindu, Muslim, Judaic, or Christian entity being worshipped. This god is the creator and nurturer of nature in one’s fond imagination, and that is all. Through Satyacharan, Bibhutibhushan succeeded in instilling an idea of harmony in nature, human life, and the universal spirit fostering an ethics of sustenance that reminds us repeatedly of both the tinai theory and the contemporary ecocritical lessons that we have learnt. In the middle of the forest, what Satyacharan felt, ought to continue to inspire eco-philosophers and ecocritics alike: I have dreamt of a god. The clouds, the evening, the forest, the chorus of the foxes, the water flowers in Saraswati kundi, Manchi, Raju Parey, Bhanmati, Mahalikharoop, the poor Gond family, the sky—all of this—had once been

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germinating like seeds in his imagination.  .  .  . [H]is benediction now seeped into all life in the universe: the rain-soaked evening was his gesture, his voice was in freedom, the voice which awakens the innermost core of man. A god who need not be feared . . . —his love and his blessings equally inexhaustible. For the lowliest and the most unimportant was reserved the greatest share of the invisible blessings and compassion of such a generous god. The god of whom I dreamt was not an ancient judge, a lawgiver, wise and far seeing or one couched merely in the obscure philosophical jargon of omniscience and immortality. Many a dusk in the open fields of Narha-baihar or Ajmabad, many a mass of blood-red clouds, many moonlit fields have made me feel that he was love and romance, poetry and beauty, art and intellect. He loves with all his might, creates with the power of his art and exhausts himself in a constant giving for the love of his creatures. (Aranyak, 209)

REFERENCES Bandyopadhayaya, Bibhutibhushan. 2002. Aranyak: Of the Forest. Tr. Rimli Bhattacharya. Calcutta: Seagull. Bhattacharya, Rimli. 2002. Introduction. Aranyak: Of the Forest. Tr. Rimli Bhattacharya. Calcutta: Seagull. Berg, Peter and Raymond Dasmann. 1977. “Reinhabiting California.” The Ecologist 7.1: 399–401. Chakravarty, Bikash. 2003. “Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay: Geographical Imagination and Imaginary Geography.” Indian Literature 47.6 (Nov.–Dec.): 178–191. Foucault, Michel. 1986. “Of Other Spaces.” Tr. Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16.1 (Spring): 22–27. Gadgil, Madhav. 1991. “The Indian Heritage of a Conservation Ethic.” In Ethical Perspectives on Environmental Issues in India, edited by George A. James, 141–159. New Delhi: A.P.H. Publishing Corporation. Haraway, Donna J. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association. Kerridge, Richard. 2001. “Ecological Hardy.” In Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, edited by Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace, 126–142. Charlottesville and London: U P of Virginia. Levesque, Luc. “The ‘Terrain Vague as Material’: Some Observations.” Text(e)s. Web. 3 Jan. 2011. http://www​.amarrages​.com​/textes​_terrain​.html. Nabhan, Gary Paul. 1997. Cultures of Habitat: On Nature, Culture, and Story. Washington, DC: Counterpoint. Rangarajan, Swarnalatha. 2018. Ecocriticism: Big Ideas and Practical Strategies. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, Selvamony, Nirmal. 2007. “Introduction.” In Essays in Ecocriticism, edited by Nirmaldasan Nirmal Selvamony and Rayson K. Alex, xi–xxxi. New Delhi: OSLEIndia Chennai and Sarup. Sola-Morales Rubio, Ignasi de. 1995. “Terrain Vague.” Anyplace, edited by Cynthia Davidson, 118–123. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Chapter 13

A World of Many Minds Toward a Post Green Vision of the Future Jack Hunter

Recent developments in the study of nonhuman intelligence in nature—­ especially in the emerging field of plant “neurobiology”—are demonstrating that plants are much more than simply “green objects.”1 With the capacity to learn, remember and communicate, plants clearly also possess an interior world of subjective consciousness. This is likely just the tip of the iceberg, however, with plants representing just one type of expression of mind among innumerable other modes and manifestations. As the human world wakes up to the importance of plants, trees, and biodiversity in general for the immediate health of the global system, and new forest planting projects are initiated internationally to tackle the problems associated with climate change, we will soon realize that the process of re-greening and re-wilding is also, simultaneously, a process of re-minding and re-animating the environment. This will necessarily involve the creation of spaces for nonhuman minds to flourish. If we fail to recognize this going forward, and continue to treat plants simply as green objects, then a truly ecological future will not be possible. Drawing on insights and examples from contemporary scientific ecology and biology, perspectives from indigenous worldviews and ontologies, and insights from paranormal research, this chapter suggests a vision of a “post green” future that sees plants and trees (among a whole range of other-than-human beings), not merely as green tools for ecological restoration and human flourishing, but as subjective minds and persons in their own right, who human beings must learn to understand and co-operate with. BIOMASS AND BIODIVERSITY The following is a fairly standard scientific definition of the concept of biomass: 197

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Biomass refers to the mass of living organisms, including plants, animals, and microorganisms, or, from a biochemical perspective, cellulose, lignin, sugars, fats, and proteins. Biomass includes both the above- and below-ground tissues of plants, for example, leaves, twigs, branches, boles, as well as roots of trees and rhizomes of grasses. Biomass is often reported as a mass per unit area (g m−2 or Mg ha−1) and usually as dry weight (water removed by drying). Unless otherwise specified, biomass usually includes only living material. (Houghton 2008)

Biomass is a crucial component of the carbon cycle on Earth, capturing and storing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through organic processes, such as photosynthesis in plants and trees. Indeed, it is this capacity of biomass to sequestrate carbon from the air—where there is currently too much—that underlies global tree planting initiatives—such as the UN’s “Plant for the Planet” billion tree campaign—which have been increasing in number in recent years.2 In the United Kingdom, Woodland Carbon Code projects are “estimated to sequester 5.7 million tons of carbon dioxide over their lifetime” (Forestry Research 2021). But the concept of biomass essentially reduces life on Earth to its constituent parts—to the weight of physical material produced through biological processes. Furthermore, this perspective considers the value of woodland biomass in terms of its ability to rectify anthropogenic problems, and not for its own intrinsic value. This conceptual collapsing of life into a single seething mass of biochemical components ignores the true complexity and diversity of organisms and other forms of life that exist within that mélange, with little regard for their subtler aspects. This biodiversity is crucial—indeed, ecosystems have been shown to develop in the direction of increased biodiversity through the process of succession—always moving toward greater complexity. Could this be an indication that with life we are dealing with something much more than just matter? Psychodiversity Writing in the 1970s, the author Stuart Holroyd, who had been a member of the “angry young men” literary group of the 1950s, was prescient in recognizing that the world is full of alien intelligence. He explained, however, that We should [.  .  .] make a distinction between alien intelligence and intelligent aliens. [.  .  .] That alien intelligence exists is indisputable [.  .  .] and although whether intelligent aliens exist or not in some other part of the cosmos is another question, the demonstrable existence of such intelligence at least opens one’s mind to the idea of the existence of intelligent aliens. (Holroyd 1979, 10)

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The sheer fact of the existence of diverse forms of intelligence on Earth, so Holroyd’s argument goes, makes it more probable that other forms of intelligence might also exist in other parts of the universe. More recently, in his book Intelligence in Nature (2006), anthropologist Jeremy Narby points out that definitions of intelligence have tended to be anthropocentric in their scope—defined in terms of human capacities such as problem solving, tool use, symbolic thought, and learned culture (Narby 2006, 43). This tendency has created a blind spot in Western scientific approaches to the natural world, which has effectively prevented the observation and study of such capacities in nonhumans. Thankfully this is beginning to change. Research is increasingly demonstrating that members of nonhuman species also possess similar attributes. These similarities are all the more impressive when found in species that are very distantly removed from us on the phylogenetic tree. Tool use (long regarded as a hallmark for the emergence of “modern humans” in palaeoanthropology), for example, has been observed among a diverse range of marine animals, including “fish, cephalopods, mammals, crabs, urchins and possibly gastropods” (Mann & Patterson 2013). Evidence of socially learned culture (teachings passed on from one generation to another), has been found among “humans plus a handful of species of birds, one or two whales, and two species of fish” (Laland & Hoppitt 2003, 151). Bats have been observed to possess marked differences in “song cultures” between populations, and “chatter about food, sleep, sex and other bats” (Willmer 2020). Observations such as these suggest that characteristic behaviors we have associated with intelligence and culture in humans are much more widely distributed throughout nature than we have often wanted to admit. The seething mass of life referred to as biomass, then, is simultaneously a vast ocean of minds, thoughts and ideas. Plants The research that is currently taking place in the burgeoning fields of plant learning, plant communication, and plant neurobiology is at the very cutting edge of the Western scientific enterprise, and is demonstrating that, at the very least, plants have a lot more going on than the standard view of them has permitted us to imagine. Plant intelligence researchers Mancuso and Viola explain that The study of plant intelligence points up a very interesting aspect of research on intelligence in general: how difficult it is for us humans to understand living systems that think differently from us. Indeed, we only seem able to appreciate intelligences very similar to ours. (Mancuso & Viola 2015, 146)

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In spite of the dependence of the animal kingdom upon plant life on Earth—it is plants, after all, who draw down energy from the sun making it usable by animals, and who maintain stable atmospheric conditions for us to breath— humankind has had a tendency (at least in the dominant Western culture) to disregard plants as unconscious objects—devoid of subjectivity and personhood—which we have a right to dominate and bend to our will. In their book Brilliant Green (2015), Mancuso and Viola call for a radical shift in the way that we think about plants. They argue that a compelling body of research shows that higher-order plants really are “intelligent”: able to receive signals from their environment, process the information, and devise solutions adaptive to their own survival. What’s more they manifest a kind of “swarm intelligence” that enables them to behave not as an individual but as a multitude. (Mancuso & Viola 2015, 5)

Plant behavioral ecologist Monica Gagliano’s recent research has further demonstrated that plants are capable of both learning and remembering (Gagliano et al. 2014), that they have the capacity to hear sounds (Gagliano et al. 2017), and that they might also use sound for communication (Gagliano 2013). These findings have helped to solidify the newly emerging field of “plant neurobiology” (Brenner et al. 2006), a field of research that was (much as with parapsychology’s relationship with academic psychology), considered “fringe” research by mainstream biology, until recently. Indeed, plants exhibit all manner of behaviors that were previously assumed to be hallmarks of the so-called “higher animals.” Forester Peter Wohlleben’s hugely popular book The Hidden Life of Trees (2016), for example, collects together evidence suggesting that trees are in fact social beings who—like human beings—live in communities. They look after their young and elderly by sharing out nutrients among themselves (even the stumps of long fallen trees have been observed to be supported with nutrients by the rest of the community) and communicate with one another through complex chemical signaling and mycorrhizal networks. There are controversies over Peter Wohlleben’s book and its implications, however, which highlight some of the key points of contention in this field of research: In parts of the book, Wohlleben’s description of these ecological relationships is uncontroversial. Drawing on scientific literature dealing with plant physiology and ecology, he unveils some of the remarkable adaptations of trees and their dependence on other species for nutrition and reproduction. [. . .] But to convey this difference between the planted forest and the natural forest, Wohlleben slips into language that is strongly anthropomorphic and teleological. Not only are trees like us in having an emotional and social life, but they seem capable of

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planning ahead to promote the optimum environment to guarantee their longevity. (Kingsland 2018)

Mainstream materialist science has a problem with the idea of teleology in nature (Sheldrake 2012), but increasing numbers of scientific studies are beginning to push the envelope of our appreciation of nonhuman cognitive (and related) capacities, so that the idea of plants actively forming communities and manipulating the environment for their own (and others’) benefit is not quite so improbable. A recent study published in the journal of the Royal Society by Andrew Adamatzky, for example, shows just how far these capacities might extend beyond our expectations by suggesting that fungi—among their many other remarkable capabilities—seem to be able to communicate with one another in a surprisingly similar manner to human beings—using a language made up of “words”: We found that distributions of lengths of spike trains, measured in a number of spikes, follow the distribution of word lengths in human languages. We found that the size of fungal lexicon can be up to 50 words; however, the core lexicon of most frequently used words does not exceed 15–20 words. (Adamatzky 2022)

As already suggested, this is likely just the tip of the iceberg. The growing awareness of the sheer psychodiversity (the variety of forms of mind) expressed by life on Earth is immense, and opens up an important space in the scientific discourse for the consideration of other, perhaps even more subtle, manifestations of mind. Paranormal Plant Minds Monica Gagliano’s recent book Thus Spoke the Plant (2018) documents and details how her own interactions with plant consciousness—initiated through dreams, ritual dieting and vision quests—have guided her mainstream scientific research on plant intelligence into novel, even revolutionary, new domains. These communications hint at a future mode of scientific research in collaborative dialogue with plants, rather than treating them as agency-less research subjects. By incorporating her visionary interactions with plant intelligence as part of her research design, Gagliano’s work effectively blurs the distinctions between what we might call the paranormal, shamanism, and the science of plant intelligence, and suggests that subtler modes of interaction with nonhuman consciousness might be possible through ritual and altered states of consciousness. The findings emerging from Gagliano and her colleagues’ envelopepushing investigations also call for a re-appraisal of the controversial work of polygrapher Cleve Backster (1924–2013), and his own studies of plant consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s. Backster’s interest began in 1966

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when he first recorded polygraph (lie-detector) readings indicative of emotional arousal in house plants, which he noticed after watering a Dracaena massangeara pot-plant in his office, to which he had attached electrodes and a galvanometer (Tompkins & Bird 2002, 4). Backster was so intrigued by his findings that he went on to develop numerous other innovative experiments to test for further emotional states in plants, culminating in 1968 with the publication of his influential paper “Evidence of Primary Perception in Plant Life” in the International Journal of Parapsychology (Backster 1968). In the paper Backster summarizes his methods and findings, and presents what he calls his “primary perception” hypothesis: The author proposes that there exists a yet undefined primary perception in plant life [. . .] and that this perception facility in plants can be shown to function independently of human involvement [. . .] this perception facility may be part of a primary sensory system capable of functioning at cell level. (Backster 1968, 333–45)

As if to make matters yet more complex, Backster also claimed that his experiments provided clear evidence of mind-to-mind (telepathic) communication between humans and plants. Backster’s plants seemed to be able to react to his thoughts, emotions, and intentions, often even before they had been expressed in the physical world. Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird (2002) provide a thorough overview of the pioneering work of researchers at the borderlands of parapsychology and plant physiology in the 1960s and 1970s in their book The Secret Life of Plants. It would seem that the psi effects that have been documented in parapsychological laboratories since the 1950s are not limited to human beings, and may—like intelligence—be much more widely distributed throughout nature, providing opportunities for complex, subtle, interconnections within and between ecosystems. This may also go some way toward explaining how exactly plants are able to act with “a kind of ‘swarm intelligence’ that enables them to behave not as an individual but as a multitude” (Mancuso & Viola, 2015, 5). Could it be possible that research in plant neurobiology, the experiments in plant memory and communication of Monica Gagliano, the parapsychological polygraph experiments of Cleve Backster, and the long shamanistic traditions of plant communication are all pointing toward a single truth—that plants are radically more conscious than we have given them credit for in materialist science? Other-than-Human Persons and Ultra-terrestrials Any attempt at making sense of psychodiversity will also have to be inclusive of what are often called “other-than-human” persons in anthropological

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literature. The concept was first used by the anthropologist Alfred Irving Hallowell (1892–1974) in the context of his research into Ojibwa cosmology, where animacy and personhood are properties that extend far beyond the human. Famously, Hallowell gave the example of rocks, which in the Ojibwa language are grammatically animate and as such are treated as “persons” and “relations.” Kenneth Morrison explains that for the Ojibwa: “other-than-human persons” share with human beings powerful abilities, including intelligence, knowledge, wisdom, the ability to discern right from wrong, and also the ability to speak, and therefore to influence other persons. In Ojibwa thought, persons are not defined by human physical shape, and so the Ojibwa do not project anthropomorphic attributes onto the world. (Morrison 2000, 25)

While the term “nonhuman” is frequently taken to include the biological lifeforms, geological processes, and other physical factors that constitute the living planet around us, the concept of the “other-than-human” also expands out to consider what might be referred to as “meta-empirical,” “spiritual,” “daimonic” or “paranormal” forms of life and consciousness—spirits and modalities of mind beyond what we can easily categorizes (cf. Hunter, 2022), but no less a part of natural history than sparrows and blue whales (Hunter, 2019). This is the sense in which one of the founders of psychical research, the Cambridge classicist F.W.H. Myers (1843–1901), first coined the term “supernormal” (which later mutated into “paranormal”) in order to shift the dialogue around “psychical phenomena” into the realm of the natural. He explained how the “word supernatural is open to grave objections” because it assumes that there is something outside nature. Now there is no reason to suppose that the psychical phenomena with which we deal are less a part of nature [. . .] they are above to norm [. . .] rather than outside [. . .] nature. (Myers, cited in Kripal, 2010, 67)

It is interesting to note that pioneering paranormal researchers such as Charles Fort (1874–1932) and John Keel (1930–2009)—who followed in Myers’s ­ footsteps, spending their lives and careers investigating the ­anomalous—­eventually came to consider the possibility that there might be a greater intelligence underlying the many diverse manifestations of paranormal phenomena that they documented. John Keel wrote, for example, that It is quite possible—even probable—that the Earth is really a living organism, and that it in turn is a part of an even larger organism, that whole constellations are alive, transmitting and receiving energy to and from other celestial energy sources. Up and down the energy scale the whole macrocosm is functioning on

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levels of reality that will always be totally beyond our comprehension. We are a part of it all, just as the microbe swimming on the microscope slide is unknowingly a part of our dismal reality, and, like the microbe, we lack the perceptive equipment necessary to view the larger whole. Even if we could view it, we could not understand it. (Keel 2013, 248)

Keel’s idea essentially represents a sort of paranormal Gaia-hypothesis, which in turn gave rise to another useful concept for considering the psychodiversity of our living planet—the notion of the ultraterrestrial. The idea emerged in response to the dominant view in UFOlogy that UFOs/UAPs are extra-terrestrial in origin—coming from another planet in physical outer space (Mizrach 2015). Keel pointed out that many of the stranger UFO encounters did not seem to support this hypothesis, suggesting instead that they (along with other paranormal entities) originate from the earth—ultra- rather than extra- terrestrial—and have likely been here much longer than humankind, existing on different frequencies of nature: At this moment you are surrounded by all kinds of energy, much of it manmade, vibrating on every frequency from the ultrahigh frequencies [to] the very low frequencies. [. . .] There are other forms of energy tied in as well [forms of energy] on such high frequencies they cannot be detected with even the most sophisticated scientific instruments. [. . .] If you could peer into this super spectrum, you would undoubtedly see some frightening things—strange shapes and eerie ghostlike forms moving through a sea of electrical energy like fish in some alien sea. (Keel, 2013, 17)

They are ultra-terrestrials. For Keel, then, the cosmos was very much alive— overflowing with life, in fact. The Earth is no exception—inhabited by beings on all manner of different frequencies, but no less indigenous to the planet than human beings. This is what Keel called “Our Haunted Planet.” There are resonances here with what agroecology researcher Julia Wright has called “subtle ecologies”—“a non-material dimension [that exists alongside materially based ecological] systems” (Wright, 2021, xxix). Sensitivity to, and awareness of, these frequently invisible ecosystems is often deeply ingrained in indigenous cosmologies (Foster 2019). Toward a Post Green Cosmology: A World of Many Minds Nicholas Campion defines a cosmology as “[t]he ways in which human beings locate themselves in relation to the cosmos, seen as the totality of everything.” The ways that we position ourselves in relation to the world around us have “huge significance for almost every aspect of human behavior (Campion 2012, 10). Anthropologist Roy Rappaport suggested, for

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example, that cosmological models have the potential to be either adaptive or maladaptive—some cosmologies lead to sustainable and regenerative approaches to the world, while others lead to extractive and destructive behaviors, ultimately leading to social and ecological collapse. Rappaport explains: Nature is seen by humans through a screen of beliefs, knowledge, and ­purposes, and it is in terms of their images of nature, rather than of the “actual structure” of nature, that they act. Yet it is upon nature itself that they do act, and it is nature itself that acts upon them, nurturing or destroying them. ­(Rappaport 1979, 97)

Given that the dominant worldviews on the planet have led to the ecological crisis we are currently undergoing, it seems reasonable to suggest that we look for alternative models for engagement with the world. Historian Lynn White Jr. (1907–1987) famously and influentially put forward the suggestion that the roots of the current ecological crisis ultimately lie in religion, and religious ideas about the place of human beings in the cosmos. In particular, White Jr. argued that “in its Western form Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen” (1967, 1205). It is this anthropocentrism that White Jr. saw as underlying Western society’s fractured relationship with the natural world. Christianity, so the argument goes, justified the extraction and consumption of natural resources for the benefit of human beings—“no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man’s purposes” (ibid.). He goes on to further explain how the anthropocentrism at the heart of Christianity eventually came to (often violently) dominate over nature-based pre-Christian paganism. He referred to this as the “greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture” (ibid.). He continues: In Antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit. These spirits were accessible to [humans], but were very unlike [them]; centaurs, fauns, and mermaids show their ambivalence. Before one cut a tree, mined a mountain, or dammed a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation and to keep it placated. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects. (White Jr. 1967, 1205)

It was this shift away from seeing the world as living and feeling, so White Jr. argued, that laid the foundations for the emergence of the capitalist and industrial approach to resource consumption that has had such a devastating effect on the world’s ecological systems. From this perspective, it would seem that a shift in worldview—a return to seeing the world as a living system

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(as even the science is now increasingly suggesting)—might go some way toward making a difference to our behaviors in the world. Donna Harraway’s suggestion is to transform the Anthropocene into the Chthulucene, evoking deep mythic and archetypal images associated with the chthonic, the earthy, and the organic as models for understanding our relationship with the living world. She conjures an image of the future inspired by: the diverse earth-wide tentacular powers and forces and collected things with names like Naga, Gaia, Tangaroa (burst from water-full Papa), Terra, Haniyasuhime, Spider Woman, Pachamama, Oya, Gorgo, Raven, A’akuluujjusi, and many many more. “My” Chthulucene, even burdened with its problematic Greek-ish tendrils, entangles myriad temporalities and spatialities and myriad intra-active entities-in- assemblages—including the more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman, and human-as-humus. (Harraway 2015, 160)

The Chthulucene will be an epoch characterized by a radical re-engagement with the nonhuman and a concerted effort to shake away and re-evaluate the cultural and ontological blinkers that have characterized the Anthropocene right into the present moment. There are, of course, already existing cosmological models that do see the world as a dynamic living system, and it is to some of these that we now turn for the final part of this chapter, to see what indications they give of a “post green” cosmology. Animism, Relational Ontology, and Perspectivism “Animism” is by now a popular and widely used term. It derives from the Latin anima, meaning soul and was first employed as a scholarly category by the pioneering anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917). Tylor used it to refer to the widespread, cross-cultural “belief in spiritual beings.” His analysis of the ethnographic literature of the time had led him to understand animism as the very earliest expression of religious thought, from which all later branches of religion have ultimately stemmed. Tylor further reasoned that animism was essentially erroneous, with origins in the misinterpretation of dreams and other altered states of consciousness. He reasoned that When the sleeper awakens from a dream, he believes he has really somehow been away, or that other people have come to him. As it is well known by experience that men’s bodies do not go on these excursions, the natural explanation is that every man’s living self or soul is his phantom or image, which can go out of his body and see and be seen itself in dreams. (Tylor 1930, 88)

Tylor’s anthropology was closely wedded to a form of social evolutionism known as developmentalism that was particularly popular during the latter

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half of the nineteenth century (Stocking Jr. 1982, 97–100). This view saw animism as a “primitive” mentality, superseded by scientific rationalism, which, if found in the present day, was said to be a “survival.” Embedded in the early conceptualization of animism, then, were a range of colonial and Euro-centric biases and assumptions, which were actively used as a point of differentiation between the European, rationalist colonial worldview and the many indigenous worldviews found in the colonies. Professor of African Studies Harry Olúdáre Garuba (1958–2020), explained that animist understandings of the natural and social world functioned within discourses of colonial modernity as the aberration, the past-in-the-present, to be disciplined so as to create civilised worlds and subjects. [. . .] In other words, animism has functioned as the metaphoric receptacle for everything that is a negation of the modern. (Garuba 2013, 45)

Over the past twenty years or so, however, animism as an etic category has been re-conceptualized in the academy as a feature of worldviews centered around notions of “personhood,” “relationship,” and “reciprocity.” Religious Studies scholar Graham Harvey, for instance, influentially re-defined animists as “people who recognize that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others.” He goes on to explain that Animism is lived out in various ways that are all about learning to act respectfully (carefully and constructively) towards and among other persons. Persons are beings, rather than objects, who are animated and social towards others (even if they are not always sociable). Animism [. . .] is more accurately understood as being concerned with learning how to be a good person in respectful relationships with other persons. (Harvey 2005, xi)

Relationships, rather than notions of survivals and “primitive mentality,” are now understood as central components of animistic cosmologies, constituting what have come to be referred to as “relational ontologies.” As Potowatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer explains, in order to live sustainably from an indigenous perspective, it is necessary to live in good relationships with the other-than-human persons that make up the ecosystems that sustain them: In such cultures, people have a responsibility not only to be grateful for the gifts provided by Mother Earth, they are also responsible for playing a positive and active role in the well-being of the land. They are called not to be passive consumers, but to sustain the land that sustains them. (Kimmerer 2011, 257)

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Animistic worldviews encourage us to participate in an “intersubjective cosmos” (Morrison 2000). Anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998) has highlighted another important element of animist relational ontologies, which he has labeled “perspectivism.” He explains that in Amerindian cosmological models the world is often thought to be “inhabited by different sorts of subjects or persons, human and non-human, which apprehend reality from distinct points of view.” He elaborates: Typically [. . .] humans see humans as humans, animals as animals and spirits (if they see them) as spirits; however animals (predators) and spirits see humans and animals (as prey) to the same extent that animals (as prey) see humans as spirits or as animals (predators). [. . .] By the same token animals and spirits see themselves as humans: they perceive themselves as (or become) anthropomorphic beings when they are in their own houses or villages and they experience their own habits and characteristics as a form of culture [. . .] they see their food as human food [. . .] they see their bodily attributes as body decorations or cultural instruments, they see their social system as organised in the same way as human institutions are. (Viveiros de Castro, 1998, in Lambek 2006, 307–8)

From an animist, relational, and perspectivist point of view, then, we are living in a world of many minds, in which it should come as little surprise that plants, animals, and other nonhumans possess interior subjectivities. Panpsychism Not the action of mind upon matter, but the action of mind-matter upon mattermind. (Fort 2008)

The quotation above is taken from the writings of Charles Fort (1874–1932), a collector of anomalies at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century. In order to make sense of the anomalies he had amassed—including everything from fish falling from the sky to proto-UFO encounters (Fort 2008)—Fort’s thinking took him in some very novel directions. He rejected many of his own theories about the anomalous things he catalogued—preferring to keep thinking, rather than settle on any particular model—but scattered among his many mind-bending ideas are some truly binary-collapsing concepts that preempted later developments in science and philosophy. He had an intuition, for example, that whatever the ultimate nature of these anomalies might be, they would not be understood using the “cognitive grids of the pairs mental/material, real/ unreal, subjective/objective” (Kripal 2014, 259). This binary collapsing tendency is also evidenced in Fort’s notion of “the action of mind-matter upon matter-mind,” which points in the direction of what has come to be called panpsychism—a solution to the so-called “mind–body” problem that has been

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gaining increasing momentum in recent years. As transpersonal psychologist Les Lancaster summarizes: Panpsychists [. . .] hold that mind is a property of the whole physical world, and is not limited only to brains [. . .] If mind is a property of the natural world, then [. . .] consciousness, is to be explained in terms of properties of the natural world as a whole, and not simply as a product of the brain. (Lancaster 2004, 6)

Panpsychism argues that matter and consciousness are not separate or distinct, but have in fact co-evolved, so that they are fundamentally interconnected. Mind, from this perspective, is thought to be distributed widely throughout the natural world (Velmans 2007). Going a little further, philosopher Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes explains that panpsychism refers to the doctrine that minds exist fundamentally throughout all of actuality—from humans, hawks, honeybees and trees, down to bacteria, mycelia, molecules, and the subatomic below these. All of matter includes minds. (Sjöstedt-Hughes 2022, 1)

Panpsychism encourages us to take a different look at matter, and the physical things in the world around us that are constituted from it, which may possess a subjective dimension and agency that has been forgotten in the dominant ontology of Western science. CONCLUSION The post green vision that emerges from the tangle of strands discussed in this chapter is one that sees minds, and expressions of minds, as fundamental. It is a mind-based cosmology. Taken together, panpsychism, animism, relational ontology and perspectivism, as well as insights from paranormal research, would seem to point in the direction of a complex cosmology—a cosmos of many minds interacting. Just as ecological systems tend toward maximum biodiversity, so might consciousness tend toward maximum psychodiversity. But there are other factors at work as well, which prevent these processes from occurring. The Earth’s biodiversity is currently experiencing a radical upheaval. Up to as much as 60 percent of animal species have been driven to extinction in the past half-century, according to the World Wildlife Fund (2018), and the plant world is not faring much better. A recent longitudinal study published in the journal Nature reveals that we have been losing somewhere in the region of three species of seed-bearing plants every year since 1900 (Humphreys et al. 2019). But as we have seen, the biodiversity crisis is not simply an issue of decreasing biomass; it is also a psychodiversity crisis:

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When you have pronounced cultural differences [between animal groups], losing populations is tragic because you’re losing these animal cultures that have been built up over many years [. . .] they may hold local solutions to specific problems or unique mating preferences not found anywhere. (Knörnschild in Willmer 2020)

Cultivating and nurturing human and nonhuman minds, then—allowing the full expression of the visible and invisible—should be the responsibility of each and every one of us, and will become a central feature of a post green cosmology for the future. Animistic, relational, perspectivist, panpsychist, and paranormal understandings of the world all provide frameworks for conceptualizing our relationship with the nonhuman world that surrounds and sustains us. Pioneering ecopsychologist Theodore Roszak suggested, for example, that animism’s emphasis on the formation of “right relationships” with other-than-human and nonhuman persons might have “a proven ecological utility,” in that “it disciplines the relationship of humans to their environment, imposing an ethical restraint upon exploitation and abuse” (Roszak 1993, 84). The possibilities of relational ontologies for framing environmental conservation efforts have also become an important subject for scholarly discussion. Andrew Paul, Robin Roth, and Saw Sha Bwe Moo, for example, argue that In order to transform conservation biology through Indigenous perspectives, it is essential to pay attention to the relational world in which many Indigenous Peoples live. Doing so helps support a conservation practice attentive to the interdependence of all life in ways that uphold Indigenous Peoples’ rights of selfdetermination, cultural identity, and social relations with their ancestral lands. We argue that attending to these relations is essential to building community-based conservation collaborations. (Paul et al. 2021)

These worldviews suggest that the living world is much more than biomass— it is a supernormal world teeming with all manner of different minds, in which we all participate on a daily basis. It is up to us to work out how we are going to negotiate our relationships with the other-than-human world around us, but what is clear is that a new (or perhaps very old) inclusive approach to minds in nature is needed to take us into the future. NOTES 1. Parts of this chapter are expanded sections of the introduction to my 2019 edited book Greening the Paranormal: Exploring the Ecology of Extraordinary Experience. 2. https://www​.unep​.org​/resources​/publication​/plant​-planet​-billion​-tree​-campaign.

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REFERENCES Adamatzky, A. 2022. ‘Language of fungi derived from their electrical spiking activity.’ https://doi​.org​/10​.1098​/rsos​.211926 Brenner, E.D., Stahlber, R., Mancuso., S., Vivanco, J., Baluska, F. & Van Volkenburgh, E. 2006. ‘Plant neurobiology: An integrated view of plant signalling.’ TRENDS in Plant Science, Vol. 11, No. 8, 413–419. Campion, N. 2012. Astrology and Cosmology in the World Religions. New York: New York University Press. Espirito Santo, D. & Hunter, J. 2021. Mattering the Invisible: Technologies, Bodies and the Realm of the Spectral. Oxford: Berghahn. Forestry Research 2021. ‘Forestry facts & figures 2021: A summary of statistics about woodland and forestry in the UK.’ Available Online: https://cdn​.forestresearch​.gov​ .uk​/2021​/09​/frfs021​_zgb9htp​.pdf [Accessed 29/06/2022]. Foster, L. 2019. ‘The invisible ecosystem: A native American perspective.’ In J. Hunter (ed.), Greening the Paranormal: Exploring the Ecology of Extraordinary Experience. Milton Keynes: August Night Press. Gagliano, M. 2013. ‘Green symphonies: A call for studies on acoustic communication in plants.’ Behavioural Ecology, Vol. 24, No. 4, 789–796. Gagliano, M. 2018. Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. Gagliano, M., Grimonprez, M., Depczynski, M. & Renton, M. 2017. ‘Tuned in: Plant roots use sound to locate water.’ Oecologia, Vol. 184, No. 1, 151–160. Gagliano, M., Renton, M., Depczynski, M. & Mancuso, S. 2014. ‘Experience teaches plants to learn faster and forget slower in environments where it matters.’ Oecologia, Vol. 175, No. 1, 63–72. Garuba, H. 2013. ‘On animism, modernity/colonialism and the African order of knowledge: Provisional relections.’ In L. Green (ed.), Contested Ecologies: Dialogues in the South on Nature and Knowledge, 41–52. Cape Town: HSRC Press. Hallowell, A.I. 1960. ‘Ojibwa ontology, behavior and world view.’ In G. Harvey (ed.), (2002) Readings in Indigenous religions, 17–50. London: Continuum. Harraway, D. 2015. ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Cthulhucene: Making Kin.’ Environmental Humanities, Vol. 6, 159–165. Harvey, G. 2005. Animism: Respecting the Living World. London: Hurst & Company. Holroyd, S. 1979. Alien Intelligence. Newton Abbot: David & Charles. Houghton, R.A. 2008. ‘Biomass.’ In S.E. Jørgensen & B.D. Fath (eds.), Encyclopedia of Ecology, 448–453. Elsevier. Humphreys, A.M., Govaerts, R., Ficinski, S.Z., Lughadha, E.N. & Vorontsova, M.S. 2019. ‘Global dataset shows geography and life form predict modern plant extinction and rediscovery.’ Nature Ecology and Evolution, Vol. 3, 1043–1047. Hunter, J. 2019. Greening the Paranormal: Exploring the Ecology of Extraordinary Experience. Milton Keynes: August Night Press. Hunter, J. 2022. Deep Weird: The Varieties of High Strangeness Experience. Milton Keynes: August Night Press.

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Kimmerer, R.W. 2011. ‘Restoration and reciprocity: The contributions of traditional ecological knowledge.’ In D. Egan, E.E. Hjerpe & J. Abrams (eds.), Human Dimensions of Ecological Restoration: Integrating Science, Nature and Culture, 257–276. Washington, DC: Island Press. Kingsland, S.E. 2018. ‘Facts or fairy tales? Peter Wohlleben and the hidden life of trees.’ Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, Vol. 99, No. 4. Kohn, E. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kripal, J.J. 2010. Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kripal, J.J. 2014. Comparing Religions: Coming to Terms. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Laland, K.N., & Hoppitt, W. 2003. “Do animals have culture?” Evolutionary Anthropology, Vol. 12, No. 3, 150–159. Lancaster, B.L. 2004. Approaches to Consciousness: The Marriage of Science and Mysticism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mancuso, S. & Viola, A. 2015. Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence. London: Island Press. Mann, J., & Patterson, E.M. 2013. “Tool use by aquatic animals.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society – Biological Sciences 368 (1630): 1–11. Mizrach, S. 2015. ‘The para-anthropology of UFO abductions: The case for the ultraterrestrial hypothesis.’ In J. Hunter (ed.), Strange Dimensions: A Paranthropology Anthology, 299–336. Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant: Psychoid Books. Morrison, K.M. 2000. ‘The cosmos as intersubjective: Native American other-thanhuman persons.’ In G. Harvey (ed.), Indigenous Religions: A Companion. New York: Cassell. Narby, J. 2006. Intelligence in Nature: An Inquiry into Knowledge. New York: Tarcherperigee. Paul, A., Roth, R. & Moo, S.S.B. 2021. ‘Relational ontology and more-than-human agency in Indigenous Karen conservation practice.’ Pacific Conservation Biology, Vol. 27, No. 4, 376–390. Roszak, T. 1993. The Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology. New York: Bantam. Sewall, L. & Fleischner, T.L. 2019. ‘Why ecopsychology needs natural history.’ Ecopsychology, Vol. 11, No. 2, 78–80. Sheldrake, R. 2012. The Science Delusion. London: Coronet. Sjöstedt-Hughes, P. 2022. Modes of Sentience: Psychedelics, Metaphysics, Panpsychism. Falmouth: Psychedelic Press. Taylor, B. 2020. “Plants as persons: Perceptions of the natural world in the North European mesolithic.” Time and Mind: Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture, Vol. 13, No. 3, 307–330. Tylor, E. B. 1930. Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilization. London: C. A. Watts & Co. Ltd. Velmans, M. 2007. “The co-evolution of matter and consciousness.” Synthesis Philosophica, Vol. 22, No. 44, 273–282.

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Viveiros de Castro, E. 1998. ‘Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism.’ In M. Lambek (ed.), (2002). A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion, 306–326. Oxford: Blackwell. Willmer, G. 2020. ‘Bats have different song cultures and chatter about food, sleep, sex and other bats.’ Available Online: https://horizon​.scienceblog​.com​/1492​/bats​-have​ -different​-song​-cultures​-and​-chatter​-about​-food​-sleep​-sex​-and​-other​-bats/​?fbclid​ =IwA​R3LR​CZiK​88y7​C1poeTM​_11Q​jV1d​m1zV​qaiy​zZ1q​Y4xe​YmcxDQ​_Y9CBNEvo [Accessed 20/11/2020]. Wohlleben, P. 2016. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World. London: William Collins. Wright, J. 2021. Subtle Agroecologies: Farming with the Hidden Half of Nature. Abingdon: CRC Press. WWF. 2018. ‘Our living planet report.’ Available Online: https://wwf​.panda​.org​/knowledge​_hub​/all​_publications​/living​_planet​_report​_2018/ [Accessed 23/01/2020].

Index

adivasi, 187 Anthropocene, 2, 47, 54–56, 170, 205, 206 Aranyak, 183, 184, 186, 187, 190–96 Bandyopadhyaya, Bibhutibhushan, 183, 184, 186, 190, 191, 193–95 biocentric, 3 biomass, 197, 198, 210 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 47 Chthulucene, 206 Clare, John, 10, 135–39, 141–47 COVID-19, 1, 18, 49, 50, 57, 58 Crutzen, Paul, 56 Das, Kamala, 109–11, 114–17 deep ecology, 7, 97 Descartes, Rene, 7, 10, 44 ecocentric, 3, 186 ecocriticism, 5, 46, 54, 77, 152–54, 156 eco-phenomenology, 12, 173 ecosystem people, 187 Elytis, Odysseus, 173–75, 177–79 environmentalism of the poor, 79 Global South, 18

Harari, Yuval Noah, 2 Heidegger, 12 Hughes, Ted, 119–31 Marcuse, Herbert, 8, 17–37 My Grandmother’s House, 113 My Story, 110–12 neurobiology, 197, 199, 200 Niger Delta, 79–92, 94–96, 98–100 The Oil Lamp, 77, 84, 100 Pamuk, Orhan, 66–69 Panpsychism, 208, 209 Pipe wars, 98 Post Green, 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 10, 13, 72, 197, 204, 209 prismatic ecology, 175 psychodiversity, 198, 202 Quasimodo, Salvatore, 174–77, 179 Rig Veda, 6 rubbishmetropolis, 63, 64, 70, 71 Saro-Wiwa, Ken, 43, 83, 95, 97 Sen, Amartya, 7

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Silent Spring, 103, 124 sixth mass extinction, 2 Solastalgia, 106 Stormer, Eugene, 56

Index

Tinai, 193, 194 transmetropolis, 63, 74

About the Contributors

Murali Sivaramakrishnan is poet, painter, professor, and literary critic. He is the author of The Mantra of Vision (1997), Learning to Think Like Myself (2010), Communication and Clarification: Essays on English in the Indian Classroom (2014), Strategies and Methods: Relocating Textual Meaning (2018), Sri Aurobindo or the Poetics of Hope (2012), and a number of critical essays and seven volumes of poetry. As artist and poet, he is a committed environmentalist. His paintings have gone on display at several major exhibitions. He has also held several solo exhibitions of his work. He was a Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Teen Murti, New Delhi, and an Associate of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. He is member and coordinator of research of the Herman Hesse Society of India. Dr. S. Murali is the founder President of ASLE India. Murali’s Nature and Human Nature: Literature, Ecology, Meaning (2009) is a pioneering work on Indian ecocriticism. Its sequel, Ecological Criticism for Our Times: Literature, Nature and Critical Inquiry (2011)—ASLE India’s second book— has also received high accolades. He was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Travel Grant to teach and do research in the University of Nevada at Reno (2006), and was invited to read his poems as part of the inauguration of the International Conference on Poetic Ecologies, held in the Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, in May 2008. In 2018 he was invited to present plenary lecture at the ASLE Brazil Conference in the Federal University of Amazonas, Manaus, Brazil. The other books he has authored include: South Indian Studies (Ed) (1998); Figuring the Female: Women’s Discourse, Art and Literature (2005), Tradition and Terrain: Aesthetic Continuities (both co-authored with Dr. Usha V.T.); Under the Greenwood Tree: Reading for Pleasure and Comprehension 217

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(Ed); Image and Culture: The Dynamics of Literary, Aesthetic and Cultural Representation (2011); Inter-Readings: Text, Context, Significance. Ed. (2012); Sri Aurobindo’s Aesthetics and Poetics: New Directions (2014); and Roads to Nowhere (2019). Awards include the Life-Time Achievement Award for Poetry by GIEWEC, Guild of Indian English Writers, Editors and Critics, 2014; and IMRF Excellence Award, 2015. Poetry volumes: Night Heron (1998); Conversations with Children (2005); Earth Signs (2006); The East-Facing Shop (2010); Selected Poems (2014), Silverfish (2016); and Notebook of a Naturalist (2020). Animesh Roy (PhD) is an Assistant Professor and Head at the Department of English, St. Xavier’s College, Simdega, in Jharkhand. His doctoral research was in the area of Literature and Postcolonial Ecologies. His areas of research interest include environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, medical humanities, indigenous studies, gender studies, communication studies, and North–South discourses. His recent publications include “Provincializing Ecocriticism: Postcolonial Ecocritical Thoughts and Environmental-Historical Difference” (Rowman and Littlefield), “From Clinical to Ecocultural: Literature, Health, and Ethnoecomedicine” (Bloomsbury), Ecology, Literature, and Culture: An Anthology of Recent Studies (Atlantic Books, 2021), and An Ibero-American Perspective on Narratives of Pandemics (Lexington Books, 2023). Dr. Roy has been serving as a resource person (UG & PG) in some the universities of West Bengal. He is also closely associated with research bodies like ASLE, ASLE Brazil, and Postcolonial Studies Association. Oluseye Abiodun Babatunde teaches English and Communication courses at the Federal Polytechnic Ilaro. His PhD is in ecocriticism. He has been an Associate Lecturer in Lagos State University, Ambrose Ali University Moshood Abiola Polytechnic, Abeokuta and Lagos State Polytechnic, among others. He is a poet and an essayist. Dr Oluseye has published many papers in reputable national and international Journals. He has also attended many national and international conferences where he has presented different papers. Dr. Oluseye is a member of many professional bodies, some of which include Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE), African Literature Association (ALA), Canadian Association of Commonwealth Literature, and Lagos Studies Association, among others. Debarati Bandyopadhyay, Professor of English, Visva-Bharati (a Central University), West Bengal, India, has been serving Rabindranath Tagore’s institution for the past twenty-five years. She has been a Post-Doctoral Fellow for two years (2010–2011) at Rabindranath Tagore Centre for Human

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Development Studies, sponsored by the University Grants Commission (UGC), jointly under Calcutta University and the Institute of Development Studies, Kolkata, an International Visiting Fellow at Essex University, UK in 2017, a Visiting Fellow at Glasgow University under an AHRC-sponsored project and an Invited Visiting Scholar at the Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies under Edinburgh Napier University in 2018. She has been the former Head of the Department from 2014 to 2017 and the UGC-nominated Coordinator of the DRS SAP Phase II Departmental Research Project on “Rabindranath Tagore: East-West Confluence” (2015–2020), and Adjunct Professor at the Women’s Studies Centre, Visva-Bharati. She is the Vice-President of MELOW. Her publications include monographs on Rabindranath Tagore: A Life of Intimacy with Nature (Rupa, 2019) and Bimal Kar (Sahitya Akademi, 2022). Her areas of interest include Ecocriticism, New Nature Writing, the Long Nineteenth Century, and Rabindranath Tagore. Ann Fisher-Wirth’s seventh book of poems is Paradise Is Jagged (Terrapin Books, 2023). Her sixth is The Bones of Winter Birds (Terrapin Books, 2019), and her fifth, a poetry/photography collaboration with Maude Schuyler Clay, is Mississippi (Wings Press, 2018). With Laura-Gray Street, Ann coedited The Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity UP, 2013; 3rd printing 2020), and is at work on The Ecopoetry Anthology: Volume II, forthcoming in 2025. With Wilfried Raussert, Ann collaborated on the poetry/photography project “In the chalice of your thoughts” that will be exhibited at the Guadalajara Book Festival in November 2023 and published as a book with facing Spanish translations. Ann is a senior fellow of the Black Earth Institute, an organization dedicated to social and environmental justice, the arts, and matters of the spirit. She has had senior Fulbrights to Switzerland and Sweden, and numerous poetry residencies in the United States and in France. Her work has won the Rita Dove Poetry Prize, a Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, three Mississippi Arts Commission Poetry Fellowships, and a Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Prize. In 2023 she received the Governor’s Award for Excellence in Literature and Poetry from the Mississippi Arts Commission. She retired after thirty-four years from the University of Mississippi in 2022, where she taught in the MFA (Poetry) program and directed the Interdisciplinary Minor in Environmental Studies. For many years she also taught yoga at Southern Star in Oxford, Mississippi. Peter I-min Huang (黃逸民), PhD, is a Professor Emeritus of English at Tamkang University, Taiwan. Huang’s areas of interest are English and Chinese Literature, ecofeminism, ecopoetry, postcolonial ecocriticism, indigenous studies, science fiction, and climate fiction. He is a founding member of ASLE-Taiwan. In the past positions of chair of the English Department (two

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terms, 2007–2011), he served as the conference organizing chairperson for The Fourth Tamkang International Conference on Ecological Discourse (May 23–24, 2008) and The Fifth Tamkang International Conference on Ecological Discourse (December 17–18, 2010). Huang’s journal articles include publications in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Neohelicon: Journal of Poyang Lake, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, and Foreign Literature Studies. He has published book chapters in Transgender India: Understanding Third Gender Identities and Experiences (Springer 2022), Ecofeminist Science Fiction: International Perspectives on Gender, Ecology, and Literature (Routledge 2021), Transecology: Transgender Perspectives on Environment and Nature (Routledge 2020), Literature and Ecofeminism: Intersectional and International Voices (Routledge 2018), Ecocriticism in Taiwan: Identity, Environment, and the Arts (Lexington 2016), and East Asian Ecocriticisms: A Critical Reader (Palgrave Macmillan 2013). Huang is the author of Linda Hogan and Contemporary Taiwanese Writers: An Ecocritical Study of Indigeneities and Environment (Lexington 2016) and the co-editor with Xinmin Liu of Embodied Healing, Embedded Memories: New Ecological Perspectives from East Asia (Lexington 2021). Jack Hunter, PhD, is an anthropologist exploring the borderlands of religion, folklore, ecology and the paranormal. He is a tutor with the Sophia Centre for the Study of Cosmology in Culture, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, teaching on the MA in Ecology and Spirituality and the MA in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology. He is an Honorary Research Fellow with the Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre, and teaches on the Alef Trust’s MSc in Consciousness, Spirituality, and Transpersonal Psychology. He is the author of Ecology and Spirituality: A Brief Introduction (2023), Manifesting Spirits: An Anthropological Study of Mediumship and the Paranormal (2020), and Spirits, Gods and Magic: An Introduction to the Anthropology of the Supernatural (2020). He is the editor of Greening the Paranormal: Exploring the Ecology of Extraordinary Experience (2019) and Deep Weird: The Varieties of High Strangeness Experience (2023). He lives in the hills of mid-Wales with his family. Peter Quigley has held professorships in the United States and Europe and enjoyed two consecutive Fulbright appointments to the University of Bergen, Norway. In 2019, Dr. Quigley published The Forbidden Subject: How Oppositional Aesthetics Banished Natural Beauty from the Arts. Before that book, Quigley published Housing the Environmental Imagination: Beauty Politics and Refuge in American Nature Writing (2012). He also edited two collections of articles: Coyote in the Maze: Tracking Edward Abbey in a World of Words

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(1998) and, with Scott Slovic, Ecocritical Aesthetics: Language, Beauty, and the Environment (2018). In addition, he has published articles on environmental issues, aesthetics, Eliot, Snyder, and Robinson Jeffers. Quigley was President of the Robinson Jeffers Association from 2005 to 2008. Most recently, Quigley retired (2021) from his position as professor of English at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. Previously, he was Associate Vice President for the University of Hawaii system of colleges. He has held senior leadership administrative appointments in Embry Riddle (AZ) and Minnesota State as well. Quigley has a PhD from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and a BA and MA from California State University. He lives on the Big Island of Hawaii with his wife Polly, his sons Daniel and Dylan, and his Golden Retriever, Hawi. Charles Reitz is a radical social and political philosopher, a leading voice in the resurgence of discussions of Herbert Marcuse, socialist humanism, and ecology. His books The Revolutionary Ecological Legacy of Herbert Marcuse (2022) and Ecology and Revolution: Herbert Marcuse and the Challenge of a New World System Today (2019) argue the necessity of a new world system, the workforce as a resource with strategic power, education as sensuous living labor’s enlightenment with regard to the human material condition, and social labor’s ethical beauty as commonwealth. Reitz has retired from community college teaching in 2006. K. Satchidanandan is an Indian poet and critic, writing in Malayalam and English. A pioneer of modern poetry in Malayalam, a bilingual literary critic, playwright, editor, columnist, and translator, he is the former editor of Indian Literature journal and the former secretary of Sahitya Akademi. He is also social advocate for secular anti-caste views, supporting causes like environment, human rights and free software, and is a well-known speaker on issues concerning contemporary Indian literature. He is the festival director of Kerala Literature Festival. Ann Skea is an independent scholar, author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE Press, 1994). Her Ted Hughes webpages, at: http://ann​.skea​.com​ /THHome​.htm, are archived by the British Library and her extensive writing about Hughes’s work is internationally published. She first met Ted Hughes in 1992, and in 1995 he invited her to stay at Moortown Farm to help him collate his archive of manuscripts, a task he ultimately completed himself, having found things he thought lost and things he “wanted no-one else to see.” She and Hughes remained friends and met and corresponded until his death in 1998. In 2016 she was elected as an Associate Scholar of Pembroke College, Cambridge University.

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About the Contributors

Mihai A. Stroe is Professor of Literature at Bucharest University, the English Department, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures. In 2003 he received a summa cum laude PhD in philology from Bucharest University, and in 2013 a habilitation in philology from the University of Jassy. He is a specialist in English, American, and German literature, romanticism, paradigm theory in literature, science and religion, cultural anthropology. His publications include, besides many articles published in national and international academic journals, Romantism ul german si englez (2004; German and English Romanticism: The Science of Archetypes, the Hypothesis of Interfinitude and the Golden Section); William Blake Vala (2006), Milton (2006), Jerusalem (2021); John Clare, Poeme (2007). He is a laureate of the “Theodor-Körner” Prize for the Promotion of Science and Art (Vienna, 2001), and a recipient of a Fulbright Advanced Research Grant (Yale University, 2007; under the scientific supervision of Prof. Harold Bloom and Prof. Paul Fry). He is Editor-in-Chief of Creativity, New York. Usha VT was Professor and head at the Centre for Women’s Studies, Pondicherry Central University, Pondicherry, India, from 2002 to 2017. Prior to this, she taught English language and literature in various colleges in Kerala (from 1984 to 2002). Dr. Usha is a scholar and teacher of considerable repute. Her publications include books and scholarly articles in the field of feminist theory, women’s discourse, women, and media. Usha VT did her postgraduation in English Literature and later went on to specialize in British poetry for her PhD. Eventually, in the late 1990s, her postdoctoral research at the Centre for Development Studies moved toward the emerging areas of women and media. Under her eminent guidance and direction, the Centre for Women’s Studies in Pondicherry University has produced a large number of dissertations and research papers. She has traveled widely in India and abroad and lectured and made presentations in several academic forums as well as nonacademic bodies. She has organized a large number of seminars and workshops particularly relating to gender and Women’s Studies. Dr. Usha has been an Associate of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. She was an active member of the Curriculum Development Committee for Women’s Studies of the University Grants Commission. She was member of the Board of Studies for Women’s Studies in many universities and has also served in the capacity of member of advisory committees in many universities. Now, as an independent scholar her current interests include feminist theory, gender and the environment, women and media, Indian women’s discourses, violence against women, women’s issues after COVID-19, and so on. After availing retirement voluntarily from the Pondicherry University in December 2016, she has settled in her hometown, Trivandrum, where she has been working with the Kerala State Women’s Development Corporation

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in an advisory capacity to facilitate the gender sensitization program of the police department all over Kerala. She was an invited expert in a committee for the gender audit of Anganwadi textbooks. Usha VT is also member of the executive committee of Asle India. Kerim Can Yazgünoğlu, PhD, is Associate Professor of English literature at Niğde Ömer Halisdemir University, specializing in contemporary British novel, climate change fictions, ecocriticism, posthumanism, green cultural studies, and gender studies. He obtained his PhD in English Literature from Hacettepe University, Ankara/Turkey in 2018. He has written on such topics as ecogender, the posthuman body, nonhuman animals, climate change, postnatural environments, ecofeminism, postecology, and ecoaesthetics. Recently, he has contributed to the edited volumes Turkish Ecocriticism: From Neolithic to Contemporary Timescapes (Lexington Books, 2020), Posthuman Pathogenesis: Contagion in Literature Arts, and Media (Routledge, 2022), and The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature (Routledge, 2023). Yazgünoğlu has also published his Turkish monograph, İklimkurgu: İklim Değişikliği, Antroposen’in Poetikası ve Ekoeleştirel İzler ([Climate Fiction: Climate Change, the Poetics of the Anthropocene, and Ecocritical Traces], Çizgi Kitabevi, 2022). Nikoleta Zampaki is a Post-doc Researcher at the Faculty of Philology of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece. She was an Instructor at the Utah University in the United States. Her disciplines are Environmental Humanities, Posthumanities, Digital Humanities, and Comparative Literature. She is an editor and reviewer at many journals overseas, Associate and Managing Editor at the Journal of Ecohumanism, and current member of Education Team of NASA, V.I.N.E.-Glenn Research Center. She has also participated in many conferences, and she is a multilingual student working on English, French, Romanian, Russian, Chinese, Hungarian, Maori, and Turkish. She is also co-editor with her Supervisor, Assistant Professor of Theory of Literature at the same Faculty and University of hers, Dr. Peggy Karpouzou, of the book series “Posthumanities and Citizenship Futures” at Rowman & Littlefield, and “Environmental Humanities” at TP London based in the UK.