I never got to meet
Stephen Watson (1954-2011), Cape Town poet, creative-writing teacher at UCT, and
critic. He was evidently deeply admired,
his early death deeply mourned. One of his students, the novelist Imraan
Coovadia, wrote in an obituary that as a teacher Watson was “almost unfailingly courteous, engaged, unexpected
in the direction of his thoughts, generous in his intelligence, and insistent
only on his humane temperament. He cared to be a human being before a poet, and
to be a poet before a professor.” He
could nevertheless be controversial in his literary criticism, even – as one
reader put it – “tetchy”.
These are qualities
evident at times in his Selected Essays (1997). In a long, rich but entangled review of that volume, Jean-Philippe Wade judged that Watson could be both pretentious
and naive, and was desperately locked in self-contradictory philosophical tussles
about the relationship between aesthetics and politics, between beauty and
activism. An aspect which Wade touched
on only briefly – though it seems to me central to the issue – was Watson’s
conception of the natural world. No one else has made much of this either, as
far as I know, apart from a brilliant essay by Hedley Twidle. and one on Watson’s Romanticism by Dirk Klopper. Yet “the presence of the
earth” – the title of Watson’s best-known volume – pervades his extensive
output of poetry. Indeed, that output is ripe for a more thorough and
comprehensive reassessment.
I was initially
interested in Watson’s poetic versions, in the collection Return of the Moon (1991), of /Xam Bushman testimonies drawn from
the famous Bleek-Lloyd Archive. I was intrigued by the efforts of several
poets, including Jack Cope, Antjie Krog and Alan James, to ‘poeticize’ those
records, and by the depictions of the natural world. As for Watson’s original
poetry, I find it often beautiful, though rather languid for my taste.
Typically, long lines loop back and forth through overlapping repetitions and
sometimes misty pronouncements. It’s also typically more than a little
embittered, even nihilistic. In a curiously diffident review of In This City, an explicitly Cape
Town-centred collection, Peter Wilhelm professes a twitchy reluctance to label
the poetry “bleak”, as if the beloved poet might feel insulted. In fact,
there’s no escaping it.
It was also in
relation to ‘Nature’ that I tackled Watson’s 1986 essay on Sydney Clouts, while
working up my own study of that slightly earlier Cape Town poet. Watson – going
through an early phase of leftist political advocacy that he later modified –
accused Clouts of being a self-absorbed displaced Romantic shielding himself
from the harsh political realities of apartheid. This was an accusation often
levelled at Eurocentric bourgeois poets, not without reason, though I argued
that Watson, for all his intelligence, sensitivity and vast reading, had got
this one all wrong.
Watson’s critique of
Clouts was all the more mystifying since his own poetry, as well as his later A Writer’s Diary (1997), seemed to
express some strong similarities. Over many years, Watson would head out of
town to sequester himself in the Cedarberg, north of Cape Town. He celebrated the experience of desert
solitudes, walking endlessly in those spectacularly scoured massifs and closely
observing the natural world around him – much as Clouts did around Table
Mountain. Like Clouts, he lamented the marginalisation of the natural by the
urban and the commercial, and found in the hills the closest to spirituality he
could manage in a tawdry, polluted, politically violent and secularised world.
But there seemed to be a near-despairing, obsessively analytical, even cynical
streak in Watson that couldn’t settle on any easy escapism. Take this stanza
from the poem “Cedars”:
That skyline of fired cedars, abstract against the light
that inks their splints against the dusk’s abstracted skin –
how many times, dead-eyed, they’ve suffered it at this hour:
the sky a tissue drained, leached for the star-pouring dark,
the skyline at a standstill, its sag formalized in black,
these cedars freezing in the horizon’s inch of formalin –
while feeling their flesh freeze over, grow abstract as bark,
their gaze weighted by the earth, weighted by a wordlessness.
Listen to the
accumulation of words of stuck-ness and enervation: fired, splints, dead-eyed, suffered, drained, leached, standstill, sag,
freezing, formalin, weighted. Though there are hints of beauty, and hints
of life in personifying the trees, they are overwhelmed by the poet’s feeling
of being “abstracted”, “abstract”, anaesthetised and weighed down by his own inarticulacy.
It’s a grim way of seeing one’s relation to poetry and the world – and an
ironically wordy manner of asserting either the trees’ or one’s own “wordlessness”.
I’ve quoted the
version published in the magazine Upstream
in 1985. When it reappeared in his Selected Poems, The Other City, fifteen years later, it was re-titled “Nature
morte” – nature dead – and he has recognised the unconvincing bathos of
personifying the cedars: now it is he
who suffers, his flesh freezing, his gaze that is weighted. A more honest
version, but still in the third person, still a bit removed from the confessional
“I”.
“Nature morte” was
included in a justly admired clutch of poems named “A Kromrivier Sequence”. Kromrivier
is the sector of the Cedarberg that Watson most frequented, and the locale for
a 1996 series of ruminations published in A
Writer’s Diary. If there was something a bit portentous in publishing one’s
“selected essays” at the age of only 45 – he was still a “young fogey”, in
Wade’s phrase – so there is too in airing one’s somewhat oracular diary
observations on sundry subjects. That said (we academics are often prone to
such parading), there is much in A
Writer’s Diary to provoke and intrigue. I’ll select just some
pronouncements concerning ‘Nature’ (the scare quotes are obligatory these days,
alerting us to the human-constructed quality of the notion of a ‘Nature’
somehow separate from ourselves).
“[A] retreat to the
natural world is also a return”, Watson writes on 9 May 1996. A return to what?
A pre-industrial way of life? That would usually be labelled “pastoral”, common
enough in mediaeval and Romantic periods, but much more fraught, if not
impossible, in the globalised post-colony. Still, as Watson notes,
the idea of pastoral has persisted, however attenuated or ironically
inflected, if only because it is based on a constellation of human needs that
can never be eradicated from the psyche ... At its best, pastoral is in fact a
critique, even a form of rebellion against the human condition as such (74).
As such? Meaning ... an
existential condition? Certainly pastoral can be wielded more narrowly – more
politically – as a critique of poisonous modern industrial urbanisation and
chemical-dependent farming. Among other English Romantics, Wordsworth enacted
exactly such objections two centuries ago at the onset of the Industrial
Revolution by glorifying the Lake District, its wild natures and its organic
farming. This is an ever more urgent ideal: James Rebanks is re-instating it in
practice today, as he relates in The
Shepherd’s Life (2019). The Cedarberg is a far less salubrious environment
than Rebanks’ green Lake District, as Watson depicts it:
In the Cedarberg, at this time of year, the bush and grasses stick to
the valley floor like salt and hair to a side of raw meat, curing it, darkening
it. There is no soil to soften the earth. Here it is all sand, littered shale,
ironstone, gravel pits ... cauterised by sun. (69)
Yet there are also “oases”:
a lone oak tree; a sheep fold; a water furrow.
“In such landscapes one of the more elemental human dramas is writ
large, vividly. One discerns the actual drama whereby culture is wrested from
nature.” It’s not a matter of human
culture escaping from, or civilising itself out
of nature; rather: “Almost nothing seems so authentic as that which still
carries in itself some traces of the non-human realm from which it has been
wrested” (77). So Watson’s search seems in part for whatever it is that might
count as “authentic” and elemental, and he was attracted to this bony, scratchy
landscape to find it.
Implicit here is the
feeling that Watson – and many of us – have lost touch with such elementals,
whether one is an impoverished township-dweller or a pampered, bookish
bourgeois. Not an uncommon thought, though Watson seems compelled to view it
through multiple lenses of irony and self-doubt. The ultimate consequence of
such divorce and distraction from the primordial realities of
life-in-an-environment is a comprehensive trashing of the planet by
industrialised commerce. Even in the Cedarberg, the effects of global warming
and desertification were – 25 years ago – so evident that Watson considered the
cedars themselves to be imperilled. He asks: “Why should this knowledge
distress me so? It is hardly news. Yet no matter how often it comes to mind, I
am left distraught, as if I’d just heard it for the first time”.
I can so identify
with that. Indeed, we need a new term
for “environmental or ecological grief”. Watson goes on:
For millennia it is the earth that has been the beginning and end of
humanity’s faith. Reverence for the earth and the fruitfulness (i.e. essential
goodness) of the earth is religion, at least in its beginnings. Any violation of the
planet thus introduces a profound disturbance into the very heart of that to
which humanity has always turned in order to confirm its faith and verify its
most essential hope. To eliminate a species or overrun one more area of
wilderness is to jeopardise the very possibility of hope itself. This is why we
are inclined to experience any injury to the environment as a form of
metaphysical mutilation as well. The destruction of the natural world, eroding
as it does that capacity for hope that defines humanity, also undermines the
very concept of humanity itself. (103)
Again, hardly
innovative thoughts, but ever worth hammering home. Oil-rich moguls, rightwing
politicians, and crime-lord traffickers in pangolins are unlikely to include
themselves in that “we”, though; and too many millions do not or cannot in
practice give a shit about such an idealised “humanity”. Yet for Watson, for
all his drift towards the cerebral, the problem was not abstract: it was daily
evident in what he saw in his native Cape Town, its appalling underbelly of
physical detritus and consequent damage to human inhabitants. This informs poem
after poem, exemplified by “After Reading The
End of Nature”. (The End of Nature
is a prophetic book by activist Bill McKibben, who is also still shouting the
odds 30 years on, to little visible effect even as his prognostications prove
grimly correct). The poem lingers over the effects of a welcome advent of rain
after a dry spell (written long before last year’s water crisis), how it washes
at the complex, compacted “filth” in the city’s gutters. Sure, it refills the
aquifers and dams:
But to know what’s known by now: that even if a rain should
fall, its lines self-cleansing, drawn through their own downpour,
this earth, its air machined and re-machined, can only grow
more heat-choked, orphaned in its sack of poisoned gases;
to know that this year, or the next, will only issue in
more heat, more pollution – and more pollution in that heat;
to know that time itself can only bring a rain acidified,
falling without the wateriness of water when it’s pure,
without that absolution that is in water, only when it’s pure...
Can anything be
clearer now: that we need civilisations and technologies that are
“self-cleansing”. Anything short of that – as both poets and scientists
constantly insist – is ultimately grief and suicide in a toxic stew of our own
creation.
******
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