No 135 - George Monbiot, feral environmentalist

 

 

I read the British environmentalist George Monbiot’s book on global warming, Heat: How to stop the planet burning, when it came out in 2008. I was impressed then, and am impressed on re-reading it now. And I’m appalled – but not surprised – that the situation he addressed hasn’t changed much in the interim. Indeed, it is arguably considerably worse. I’ve also been absorbing some of his more recent work: his books Feral: Rewilding the land, sea and human life (2013), Out of the Wreckage: A new politics for an age of crisis (2018), and Regenesis: Feeding the world without devouring the planet (2022). I encounter his regular column for the Guardian newspaper, too. He has managed both to generate a considerable following, and to make himself persona non grata in many circles and in some whole countries. He must be touching a few raw nerves, which is often a telling sign and a useful thing. Of course his leftie politics annoys conservative Tories and the like intensely, and some respond with genuine viciousness to his being a vegan. Why they should care at all beats me, but you’d think he’d actually threatened to hang their pet poodle.

Without always agreeing with him, I’ve liked what he says, and liked the way he says it. I’ll not get embroiled in argument here, but I thought, like a proper Fair-Minded Person, I should look up some of the criticism he has attracted. So I Googled away. The first one I read – call them Critic No.1 – lambastes Monbiot at length for his arguments in Regenesis that the meat-eating industry is a massive factor in impoverishing soils and causing damaging climate change. They grudgingly liked the opening chapters, in which Monbiot, down on his knees in his local communal orchard, expounds on the astonishing multispecies conglomerate that healthy soil is. (It’s wondrous.)  But the critic then claims that Monbiot knows jack-rabbit about soil science, and accuses him of using only ‘activist’ papers to support his case. Neither is remotely true, and the critic’s argument, whatever valid points it might contain, is so badly written, patently self-contradictory, and tedious that I would have thrown it down in frustration could one do such a thing with an internet site. No surprise, somehow, that the critic declines to reveal their identity, but boasts that they founded a food-processing company. In other words, they are beholden to precisely the industry Monbiot worries about.

Critic No.2 claims that Monbiot a) is a deluded ‘Romantic’, b) sees everything in ‘black and white’, and c) is just a shallow rabble-rouser. All three assertions are patently wrong, not to mention egregiously ad hominem – and come from someone who works for the energy industry but can’t write for toffee. I gave up. No doubt there are cogent criticisms, but these weren’t them. Back to the books, then, and why I believe them worth reading.

There are several things that I like about Monbiot’s work. First, he does write well. He is fluent, crystal clear, at times even lyrical. To be attractive and persuasive apparently riles the hard-core polemicists of the energy industry no end. To actually love life, to think that natural health and biodiversity is important, is apparently what attracts the dreadful epithet ‘Romantic’. Critic No.2 seems to think Monbiot wants us all revert to some pristine and primitive state of Nature, whereas what Monbiot actually advocates is much more pragmatic and nuanced. In Feral he does propose ‘rewilding’ select environments in order to save ecosystems from total collapse (and thus help to save ourselves), and he recommends appropriate reintroduction of long-extirpated keystone species like wolves, salmon and beavers. But he explicitly recognises we cannot simplistically return environments to some arbitrary previous era. Rewilding is “not an attempt to restore them to any prior state, but to permit ecological processes to resume” (8). He adds: “While I would argue against mass rewilding of high-grade farmland because of the threat to global food supplies, we lose little by allowing nature to persist in small fallow corners” (124). Arguably, “corners” are not enough, but would be a start. The above critics wholly miss the subtleties and careful qualifications.

A second thing I like about Monbiot is that he founds his arguments not just on the scientific facts and figures, which are always somewhat tentative or partial, subject to change as new evidence emerges, but also on personal experiences. Unlike his critics, who evince no evident love for anything beyond their position behind a desk covered in spreadsheets, Monbiot has trained and worked as a biologist and travels widely – Kenya, the Americas, the Philippines, Wales – and talks to real people, about whom he writes with fondness and insight, but by no means uncritically. My favourite of his books, Feral, is replete with such hands-on experiences. It’s all but an autobiography. In short, in contrast to defensive industrialists, who tend to throw about empty business-speak backed up with a blinding plethora of figures, Monbiot is human and humane, implying that unless improvements are felt by and implemented by committed individuals, we’ll not get far. Perhaps contradictorily, he also suggests elsewhere that individual acts – cycling to work, installing a solar panel – are effectively pointless, since only (inter)nationally-implemented policies will have the massive impact required. I only half agree: we’re in this pickle because over time millions of people have made millions of micro-decisions (to buy an SUV, to eat meat every day, etc etc). Millions of individual counter-decisions will have to be made, whether forced to by legislation or not. Might as well start.

Monbiot is keenly aware that no solution is going to suit every person or situation. He is the very opposite of ‘black-and-white’. He is neither an outright back-to-nature romantic, though there is that element; nor a technology-will-fix everything fanatic, though he finds certain new inventions exciting. He has persistently advocated moves to green energy and to less mechanistic, poison-dependent farming, but he openly admits that there are down-sides to both. In Heat, he made reasoned calculations as to how much energy could in fact be supplied by wind and solar generation, and came up way short of humanity’s needs. Something more is required. Despite considerable advances in technology having since been made in some quarters, this remains largely true. Moreover – as a sobering Al Jazeera documentary, “The dark side of green energy”, confirms – the new technologies remain dependent on extractive industries, notably of rare metals, which are themselves environmentally damaging. Lithium mining is one notable culprit. Nor have we worked out how to store or recycle any of this new stuff, from battery acids to nuclear waste to windmill rotor blades, which don’t last long and now lie discarded in huge ‘cemeteries’ across Europe. Monbiot loves the idea of ‘going local’ in food production and consumption, loves the communal orchard he helps maintain – but suggests that in some situations the amount of energy expended and pollution generated in a localised economy can actually be worse than that spawned by multinational trade in food, because of the great efficiencies of scale the big businesses can get.

I like also that Monbiot is always on a learning curve. He’s full of revelations, many of them revelations to himself. Some discoveries are beautiful, like the richness of functional soil that he both formally researches and sensually experiences in the beginning of Regenesis. Other revelations are dismaying, like just how dysfunctional the United Kingdom’s environmental policies, safeguards and enforcement are. Monbiot – and his associate researchers, whose contribution he generously acknowledges – is a deep researcher. He’s very good at uncovering the layers of obfuscation and misinformation so much denialist literature draws on. Not that this is always hard to do, as I discovered when presented with one superficially persuasive article someone recommended. I simply looked up the author, and found the intelligent-sounding Institute he belonged to, which turned out to be a bunch of people partly funded by Exxon, not one of whom was a biologist or climatologist, several of whom were on the boards of oil companies, and whose self-published papers all drew on one another. The appearance of scientific cogency and breadth of reference was rather easily exposed as a sham. Monbiot can’t read everything, but he does seek out those regarded as the best in the fields concerned, and the most authoritative summaries available, and then draws reasonable inferences. He knows how science works, and its limits. What science overall is good at is weeding out the rubbish or the inaccuracies as better evidence becomes available. So Monbiot is very prepared to admit that he was once wrong about certain things, often amusingly at his own expense. In a recent Guardian column, for example, he self-deprecatingly relates how he once thought installing a wood-burning heating system in his house was so much more natural and organic and hip than fossil fuel-based systems – only to belatedly discover that burning wood is far more toxic and environmentally unsound than heating your house with gas. (This has been confirmed by numerous studies which find that wood-burning in London is a serious source of pollution and health hazards, and bans are looking likely – imagine Lahore and Lagos.) I’m sure many of us find ourselves caught in these kinds of paradoxes.

It appeals to this retired literature professor, of course, that Monbiot reads, and illuminates his texts with literary allusions. It’s a rare scientist and activist who will reference a nineteenth-century novel (gawd, even half our university literature students won’t!). Heat’s chapters are all headed by startlingly apt epigraphs drawn from Goethe’s epic poem Faust, or from its cousin, Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus – the implication being that humanity has made a ‘Faustian pact’ with the fossil-fuel industry. We have chosen to sup with what appeared to be a fantastic boon to mankind (and in many ways it has been) but that has emerged as more of a deceitful devil liable to drag us all down into an unanticipated hell. Feral likewise draws on apposite quotations from the poets. The critics wholly ignore this dimension, homing in on alleged misreadings of figures or statistics. But there’s a crucial point here: Monbiot knows that most humans operate fundamentally at the level of the visceral imagination, not of the abstract – and only imagination is going to help us now. I don’t always agree with his readings. In Regenesis he places a lot of blame for our current food crisis on the myth embedded in pastoral poetry – the image of a safe, friendly, bucolic countryside of pretty meadows and complaisant cows. This, he argues, has covered up the reality of lethal animal-food industries and their attendant pollutions. For some, perhaps – but historically the pastoral has also always been wielded as a critique of urbanisation and over-dependence on sophisticated technology. The underlying insight, though – that humans tend to behave in accordance with tropes, myths and stories, rather than empirical evidence or figures printed in newspapers – surely holds. I therefore like Monbiot’s point, which governs the structure of the more politically-orientated book, Out of the Wreckage, that we have habitually operated according to one set of stories – that we are the centre of the universe, we are technological masters, nature is there for the taking, and so on – but now need another kind of story and a different set of metaphors to live by, if we’re going to survive the mess we have landed up in.

Finally, then, I like the fact that – like other favourite activist-writers of mine such as Rebecca Solnit and Naomi Klein – Monbiot is always determinedly upbeat, and always looking for solutions. His critics somehow fail to see this. I saw him interviewed recently on BBC’s “Hard Talk” by Stephen Sackur, who accused Monbiot (or relayed the accusation) that he was “always focussing on the negative”. Monbiot answered testily, “Have you actually read the book [Regenesis]? Two thirds of it is about solutions!” He is full of ideas, few of them entirely his own: they are usually gleaned and developed from people who are actually already doing stuff, whether it’s getting high farm yields without fertilisers, or generating meat in laboratories, or rewilding a corner of devastated land, or building homes more efficiently. He is not alone in either his critiques or his enthusiasms. There is no pie-in-the-sky stuff here, unlike the more bizarre notions of ‘geoengineering’ tossed about by the technocrats, from artificial carbon storage to pumping more pollutants into the atmosphere (with heaven knows what unforeseen consequences) to wrapping the poles in tin foil or migrating to Mars. Not all Monbiot’s suggestions might work, and he doesn’t claim any one is a silver bullet. But many strategies in combination, as a patchwork of appropriate ventures tailored to local conditions, he shows how extensive and helpful changes might be made. At times I think he is way too sanguine about evoking the altruistic and cooperative sides of human behaviour on a sufficiently large scale – but that kind of hopefulness is infinitely preferable to his critics’ apparent insistence that the mess can somehow be sorted by doubling down on the very strategies that have caused the mess in the first place.

At the very least, Monbiot gets you thinking about creative responses that are already to hand, and is often quite fun to boot. Read him.

*****

No 134 - Garden stories

 

A friend recently admitted, slightly bashfully, that he “sometimes” reads my blog. He pinched his brow and added plaintively: “It gets – quite academic.” And he’s a scientist; I expected better of him. “Stories from your garden,” he recommended.

Okay, so I may have been getting a bit heavy of late. Garden? I am the world’s Number One Un-gardener: I barely keep control of some small patches of grass, which bear a distant and shaggy resemblance to the concept of “lawn”. The rest has just gone wild. I love it. I do derive the most intense pleasures from these environs, and it certainly is full of stories, most of them unfolding quite unseen.

For example: a few weeks ago, going down a familiar path just below my cottage, I noticed a flare of strange white stuff stop a prominent frond of vegetation. It definitely hadn’t been there the day before. Some thin plastic snagged in the wind? Some dense spider-web gleaming in the afternoon sun? I took a closer look: unexpectedly a white orb swivelled at me, the pinhead of a black pupil. I scampered for my camera. Only that week my neighbours and I had been lamenting that we hadn’t seen chameleons literally for years. This diminutive chap was very shy and kept putting the twig he was on between himself and the lens. The white stuff was in fact the skin he was shedding, sheets of it fleering away, translucent in the light. He was very little – a Dwarf chameleon, I’m guessing –  and seemed very vulnerable to marauding birds, so I transferred him respectfully to denser shrubbery. Never to be seen again. But it felt like a gift for the new year; I was on a high for a week. Maybe 2023 would turn out all right after all.

As for the birds! Being on the edge of a patch of indigenous forest entails rich bird-life, from the high cyclical cries of displaying Crowned eagles to the Yellow-bellied sunbird that attacks his reflection in my bakkie’s wing mirrors and spatters the doors with infuriated poop. (Birdbrain.) I converted an old TV dish into an Avian Restaurant (AR), positioned just so that I can view it from my favourite armchair. For a bit I had a small cement water-dish on it, but a fierce wind blew it right off, so I half-sunk it in earth a few metres away under the trees, where it’s regularly visited by forest denizens glad for a toot on a thirsty night.

The AR hasn’t proved immensely popular; maybe it’s too exposed for the little’uns, apart from some insouciant Yellow-vented bulbuls. But it is visited regularly by a pair of Crowned hornbills, who have become relatively tame and have an especial fondness for cat biscuits. If the table is bare, the male, who is bolder than his wife, will come and sit at the top of the concrete steps and stare fixedly at the glass sliding door until Someone comes out with some hors d’oeuvres.

At times they are shovelled out of the way by a pair of comparatively immense White-necked ravens. For all their burliness, the ravens are very cagey, and will make several close passes over the AR before feeling safe enough to land. Any slight movement, even inside the house, sends them lifting off and sailing down the scarp over the treetops. They are magnificent, gleaming as if carved from striated and polished anthracite. This male is missing a wing primary feather, so I know him from any others – though they are virtually the only pair left in this locale, where a decade ago a hundred or more would come in their season and play on the escarpment’s updrafts. What has happened to them all? These two also like cat food, but now and then their patrols are rewarded by chunks of roast chicken corpse. Once I left three fairly large bits on the AR. Mister Anthracite puttered about for ages, claws clattering on the metal, figuring out how he could get away with all three at once. He was very reluctant to leave any behind, in case someone else got it. He tried this way and that, picking chunks up and manoeuvring them, eating some fragments as he went. You could practically see the mental and geometric cogs turning, and eventually he worked out a configuration by which he could cram all three bits into his bill and fly off with them.

The glass sliding-door through which I view the AR can also be a hazard. The other day a White-eye came belting through the house from the kitchen and smacked into the sliding-door from the inside. At first I thought it was just stunned and would recover, but it died in my hands. I put it out on the AR – a kind of Sky Burial – and within twenty minutes Mister Anthracite had arrived to pluck it up and away.

And literally the following day, as I was parked on the aforementioned Favourite Armchair, there was a tremendous crack, loud as a gunshot, that set the neighbourhood dogs all a-barking. A Turtle dove had smacked into the glass with terrific force and fallen onto the concrete plinth just outside, the contents of its crop exploded across the door. With a lurch of dismay, I got up to see to it, though it was clear it had died on impact – at which point a Black sparrowhawk swooped down, wings elegantly outspread, to collect it. No doubt it had been chasing the dove in the first place. Unfortunately, the sparrowhawk saw my simultaneous movement through the glass and sheered away. So first I felt sorry for the dove, then sorry that the hawk had been deprived of his lunch. I laid the dead dove out on the AR, hoping the hawk would return, but it didn’t – but within the hour Mister Anthracite was there, plucking a few feathers off the body as if to lighten the load, then swooping away, only a little inconvenienced by so bulky a cargo.

More comfortingly: for the past three years a happily-married pair of Lesser striped swallows have been building a holiday house – or is it a maternity ward? – of laboriously regurgitated mud pellets under the eave of my kitchen porch. But they didn’t seem inclined to do anything more, and would leave as usual for more equatorial climes during our winter. But this year they added a fluted additional entrance, and I grew paternally hopeful. For weeks I’ve been putting up with avoiding this usual ingress to the cottage, and going the long way round, while they worked away at their adobe-abode, wobbling on my washing line and chatting in their inimitable chirpy-squeaky little warbles. They are just too adorable. It’s got so I can stand at the kitchen door a mere arm’s length away and converse without them startling. (Such sentimentality, I’m told, is a sign of impending senile dementia. I don’t care.) There was one alarming interlude when White-rumped swifts, whose summer arrival otherwise excites me, were harassing the swallows, even attacking at the nest’s entrance, and then for a week or more they all vanished. I thought it was tickets for the swallows for yet another season. But they came back, and became increasingly house-proud, laying in décor on hire-purchase from FurnCity and all. I thought the female must be sitting, and listened out daily for the avian equivalent of pattering feet. Not a peep.

Then suddenly one morning ten days ago there was a whole lot of chittering and chattering and excitable flapping, and all at once there were not two striped swallows, but FIVE. The three fledglings, hitherto totally undetected, were already as big as the parents, lacking only the two long tail-feathers of the adults, and still being fed, each in turn. I felt so illogically proud of them. Now they seem to have a proper nine-to-five sort of routine, leaving the porch shortly after dawn and generally only returning at last light to somehow cram themselves into the nest, with much flittering back and forth and quarrelsome chatter about who’s going to sleep next to whom.

I know that when they head north to wherever they hang out for our winter (I like to think, the vicinity of my eastern Zimbabwe home), I will miss them terribly. At least I won’t have to carry the shopping so far. Until next season.

******

No 133 - Jill Wylie's "Search" reissued

Search was originally published by Echoing Green Press, a sequel to Jill Wylie's now classic search-dog account, Call: Life with a Basenji. Having run out of stock, it has now been reprinted, updated, and redesigned to match her other books (Call, Wildwoods: the making of a wildlife sanctuary, Barefoot & Pawprint: A Kenya childhood). They can all be purchased singly or as a lovely set (at a discount). 

If you're interested in Dobermans (with tails), search-and-rescue adventures, wildlife rehabilitation, or just the life of an extraordinarily compassionate and courageous woman in Rhodesia-Zimbabwe, Search is for you. Jill will take you from laughter to tears to astonishment in a few short pages.

To order, contact Dan Wylie on d.wylie@ru.ac.za, or visit www.netsoka.co.za

Below is the opening page or two of Search:

********
 

“It works!”

The glad cry must have been heard clear across our valley this green

and golden day. Up on the bluff old man baboon replied with his deep,

“Wah-hoo!” Beside me Jack said, “Hmm!” which in engineering terms

means it could probably be fixed, given the right tools, while our young

son, Danny, capered like a colt, calling encouragements.

We were gathered on the lawn with its long views of the Imbeza

Valley in Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands, great umbrella thorn trees

guarding the thin river, occasional houses peeping between flowering

Jacarandas and Flamboyants, vagrant Australian gums towering over

the indigenous miombo woodland and, up in the far reaches, the dark

green of commercial pine plantations claiming the steep hills.

“It” was an everyday, everydog sort of tail belonging to a small

Dobermann puppy, and therein lay the question: Dobermanns had

always been docked, even root-docked, ever since Herr Luis

Dobermann of Apolda began to develop his new breed way back in the

1890s. What’s more, he seems to have used an interesting mixture of the

old type German Pointer, the Rottweiler, one or more varieties of the

Vorsthhund Pointer and the Weimeraner—all traditionally docked

breeds.1 Now, after all these years and generations, here was a

Dobermann with a tail as long as she was born with. Would it work?

With no instruction manual, no long-tailed mother to advise, would it

somehow remember, dredge up from latent genetic memory how to get

up and talk as a good tail should?

Until this day there’d seemed little hope of that. The whole thing was

far too long for a start. The last inch of it dragged along behind like

half-forgotten history, through dust, puppy puddles, across floors,

leaving a fascinating trail like a lizard’s. When the puppy slept it was

left wherever it happened to fall instead of arranging itself beside her

and was frequently trodden on when she turned around.

Every now and then we stood her before a mirror and wagged her

tail for her between thumb and forefinger so she could see what she was

supposed to do with it. To no avail until just now. She shifted on her

bony little buttocks, smoothed her forehead self-consciously and slowly

raised the end of her tail, the tip quivering with the effort. She turned

her gaze from our faces to look at it and with her head cocked

comically, watched it fall back to earth.

I swept her up in my arms. “You clever little thing!” I laughed. “Now

we’re getting somewhere!” and prayed she’d keep it up, more ways than

one, because there was a Plan to all this and a tail was absolutely

essential.

******

No 132 - William Blake's therianthropes

For obscure reasons – some slightly masochistic yen for intellectual puzzlement – I decided to return to William Blake. Not the (relatively) straightforward world of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and The Songs of Innocence and Experience, which had comprised my teaching syllabus in a bygone era. No, I decided to revisit Jerusalem, his last (1827) great sprawling work of spiritual enlightenment, narrating the difficult but ultimate attainment of what he called the “Poetic Genius”. Exactly 100 plates of dense text, laboriously etched back-to-front on copper sheets, printed (just one copy) and intricately hand-coloured.  I’m not sure there’s a human being on this planet who fully understands it. The contortions some critics tie themselves into, just trying to formulate a method of approach to reading it, can be quite amusing. Jerusalem feels like a concatenation of interlocking wormholes governed by chaos theory. Between passages or lines of startling clarity and verve swarm a multitude of invented ‘characters’ pursuing obscure and turbulent agendas across a wild stage that flails between the cosmic and the homely geography of England. Blake claimed that every dot and letter was in its proper and appointed place, but you can forgive those of his contemporaries (and many later readers) who have regarded much of it as just plain bonkers.

            Anyway, I hauled out my set of wonderful facsimile volumes of Blake’s Illuminated Books, put out by the Tate Gallery. Full-colour reproductions of the complete plates, amplified by all the learned notes the aficionado could desire. What has struck me forcibly on this revisiting is not so much the text, though, as some of the vividly coloured, intricately lined, and wildly inventive illustrations. In anyone’s artistic universe they have to register as quite extraordinary.

            Several illustrations in particular. 

            On the very title page, announcing “Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion”, appear a number of winged-but-humanoid figures. Now we’re familiar with dove-winged angels and bat-winged devils from centuries of Christian iconography; one such conventional figure appears on the left, and indeed elsewhere in innumerable variations throughout Blake’s works. The other figures are more interesting. At the top, a locust’s wings appear attached to a human body that shows just one slender foot and perhaps the suggestion of a face; or almost certainly it’s a soul emerging from a chrysalis, a fairly conventional symbol of emergence into freedom, which of course is what the whole poem is about. On the right, human arms seem to hold a sea-whelk within an arched arrangement of fleshy wings or flanges, adorned with a moon-symbol. And the figure at the bottom, stretched out in an attitude at once relaxed, vulnerable and ecstatic, seems to emanate almost seamlessly from a blend of colourful butterfly’s wings, leaves, and some strange veined sea-creature. What are these human-nonhuman composites doing there?

 

Because there are more.

On Plate 11 appears a human woman with a long, drooping swan’s neck, head, and wings. Depressed, or just dipping to feed on the floating material suggested before her? Note the fish just behind her, as well as down the right-hand margin of the page. (There’s a minor variant, in forbidding dark red, on Plate 71.) Explanatory theories abound, none very convincing. The neighbouring text appears to offer no clues at all.

Another bird-related composite appears on Plate 78: a naked human figure, thoughtfully posed à la Rodin’s ‘Thinker’ – topped by a slightly comical chicken’s head. Some commentators have tried to suggest it was meant to be an eagle, or it’s a cockerel with a comb but a raptor’s bill. But it seems to me quite plainly a chicken, waking up and about to announce the dawn. Which is both homely and unusual since, unlike many other non-human creatures, chickens don’t feature much anywhere in Blake’s works. But there it is.

There are plant-related composites, too. The first page of Chapter Two, Plate 28, is adorned with entwined lovers emerging from or nestled within a lotus flower, itself floating on water – which in turn appears populated by little snail-like creatures, starfish, and scallops, at least one appearing to have a human arm, scattered down the right-hand margin. The motif is echoed at the head of Chapter Three, Plate 53, with a pensive or sad female figure placed on a sunflower and enveloped in strange wings (or, I’d like to think, elephant’s ears), adorned again with stars and moons.

A notably vigorous, even rough-sketched picture boils at the bottom of Plate 75. A male and a female human figure are all but indistinguishably co-existent with a nest of toothy and horned snakes, or perhaps a multi-headed snake – happily so, to judge by the cuddling going on between the woman and one of the several serpentine heads. Now snakes occur often in Blake, sometimes wriggling in miniature along the bottom of a page, sometimes threatening to envelop a human in its coils – like the conventional Satan in Eden – but at other points quite benignly. (Remember that in the “Proverbs of Hell” Blake cheekily took the Devil as his heroic exemplar of rebellious energy.) (And we have to distinguish the serpent from the humble or beneficent earthworm, like the one coiled around the buxom female figure on Plate 63.)

The several-headed serpent recurs in my favourite Jerusalem illustration, the chariot scene on Plate 46. It’s as fiery, precise, suggestive and strange as anything in Blake’s whole oeuvre, and again most of the explanations seem tortuous and partial at best. Critics are obsessed with locating sources for these images, as if Blake can’t be credited with just making stuff up. The human-headed bulls or draft-oxen in this scene seem strongly modelled on ancient Assyrian friezes and monumental statuary, reproductions of which Blake would have seen. But the bulls’ coiling horns ending in delicate human hands, and the way the three-headed serpent curls to form the chariot’s wheel, seem to be Blake’s own touch. Not to mention the little harpy-like riders – surely those faces are meerkats’!? Being harnessed to a chariot or a plough is a regular motif of mental entrapment or limitation for Blake, but it’s by no means clear that that’s the import of this blazing portrayal. Though the presumably father-and-daughter passengers (identity controversial) do look rather miserable, don’t they?

            (This isn’t the place to go down wormholes of explanation – but ... here’s a thought...)

            As my erstwhile student Jyoti Singh showed at length in her PhD thesis, animals abound symbolically in Blake’s work: lions and tigers, eagles and sheep, spiders and flies. He drew constantly and eclectically on these creatures’ established symbolic capital, as well as investing them with his own idiosyncratic meanings. He also closely observed the natural world in its own right: this is clear from the multiple quirky but naturalistic little marginal drawings to his big poems: flying birds, spiderwebs and seashells, fish eating other fish, caterpillars, frogs and snails. The same applies to plant-life: dozens of allusions to roses and sunflowers, vines and briars, and frequent depictions of human figures emerging from or merging into the twinings of creepers or roots.

            Which brings me back to my central question: What does Blake intend with these multispecies human-nonhuman hybridisations?

            The editor of the Tate facsimile of Jerusalem, Morton D Paley, says he ‘cannot but see Blake’s depiction of beasts as other than monstrous’ – expressions of the dark, inhibiting sides of the human psyche. While this seems true of some deployments, I’m not convinced this is so true of the Jerusalem examples. What if we were to regard them quite differently, which is to say positively, as expressions of a spiritual continuum of human and nonhuman? The hybrid depictions do not appear at such a scale and regularity in any previous poem; here Blake intends something new that transcends the struggle for independent creativity that burdens the earlier epics, from Urizen to The Four Zoas. What if, in a word, we regard these hybrids as therianthropes?

            Therianthropy, a word that entered our vocabulary only around 1901, is defined crudely as the transformation of animal into human, or vice versa. Here in Southern Africa we’re familiar with the phenomenon from San rock art, with shamans (it’s thought) taking on animal characteristics for spiritual and/or hunting purposes. Blake likely didn’t know about the San art (though he did know of the then “British Kaffraria”, which is precisely where I live). But therianthropic myths and tales and related artworks abound in almost all the world’s cultures, and Blake knew of many, from the animal-headed gods of ancient Egypt to Greek myths of metamorphosis, from Irish and Nordic folktales to the gargoyles leering from mediaeval churches and the teeming beasts of Hindu mythology. What in ancient times was a genuinely spiritual sense of human-nonhuman continuity has in the West been largely debased to the entertaining tinsel of Mickey Mouse and Nemo. But given that Jerusalem is Blake’s great triumphal struggle of spiritual completion, it makes sense to me that these particular examples can be legitimately termed therianthropic.

This gels with Blake’s expression of ‘ecological’ continuities at other levels. The purely symbolic or heraldic animal apparitions of his early work became, as I mentioned, amplified with more naturalistic observation. This was notably deepened during a stay in a rural cottage near Felpham on the coast, quite a change from his accustomed London. While there, he wrote another daunting epic, Milton. Alongside wrestling with the theology of the author of Paradise Lost, Blake wrote some arresting passages about spiritualised natural beauty. Here’s just one:

 

The Lark sitting upon his earthy bed: just as the morn

Appears, listens silent: then springing from the waving Corn-field! loud

He leads the Choir of Day ...

His little throat labours with inspiration, every feather

On throat & breast & wings vibrates with the effluence Divine ...

 

Though Blake didn’t lose sight of the predatory aspects of ‘nature’, he saw all of it as ultimately ‘Human’, that is to say, infused with a sacred spirit, if only one opens one’s eyes to it. Even the

 

little winged fly, smaller than a grain of sand?

It has a heart like thee; a brain open to heaven & hell,

Withinside wondrous & expansive ....

 

Hence, I propose, all the little critters enlivening Jerusalem’s pages. They, just as much as the great illuminated therianthropes, are manifestations of our continuity with the nonhuman. We are obliged by the limitations in our vision and artistic means to capture this indefinable continuum in little flashes, like the illustration on Jerusalem’s Plate 54 in which stars rising from human heads seem to mutate into bats and then swarming insects, or the sweet footer   depicting a joyous child riding a serpent with reins like a horse. And right towards the end, in the final ecstatic visionary phase, Blake puts it succinctly in words.

 

                                    And I heard Jehovah speak

Terrific from his Holy Place & saw the Words of the Mutual Covenant Divine

On Chariots of gold & jewels with Living Creatures starry & flaming

With every Colour. Lion. Tyger. Horse. Elephant. Eagle. Dove. Fly. Worm.

And the all wondrous Serpent clothed in gems ...

All Human Forms identified even Tree Metal Earth & Stone, all

Human Forms identified. living going forth & returning wearied

Into the Planetary lives of Years Months Days & Hours reposing

And then Awaking into his Bosom in the Life of Immortality.

 

A totally bizarre kind of modified Christian ecology. And right there is the chariot of Plate 46, I reckon.

 

No doubt someone in the vast industry of Blake criticism has said this kind of thing before, but I’ve yet to see mention of therianthropes. Just putting it out there ...

*****

Images: Wikicommons

Blog 131 - Baptiste Morizot's "Ways of Being Alive"

 

The French philosophers I’ve routinely encountered in literary studies – to wit, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari – have oscillated between the dizzyingly stimulating and the infuriatingly unintelligible. In the emergent thread within ecological-literary academe dubbed Critical Animal Studies, Derrida’s essay “The Animal that Therefore I Am (and more to follow)” has assumed a prominent space. In between quite lucid and polemical statements (like condemning the conceptual divide between ‘human’ and ‘animal’ as a “crime”), he can be bafflingly elusive, addicted to endlessly involuted puns. Mostly the essay convinces me that Derrida didn’t understand cats. Likewise, I attempted at times to apply Deleuze and Guattari’s fashionable concept of “becoming-animal”, frankly without feeling I fully understood what they (or I) were doing. But then I’ve always been a rubbish philosopher/theorist. I respond rather to their poetics, their intriguing metaphorical ventures, their colourful word-play – precisely what, in the eyes of some of my academic colleagues, disqualifies them from being philosophers at all.

Baptiste Morizot – though he refers glancingly to all these predecessors in his book Ways of Being Alive (Polity Press) – is, thankfully, eminently lucid. Of a younger generation (he is 40-ish), he is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Aix-en-Marseille. He has several other books to his name, which I’ve not yet read, but which are evidently related in theme to Ways of Being Alive. This title, though a fair translation of the original French Manières d’être vivant, sounds unhappily a bit like a popular self-help manual. Though it is concerned with trying to outline a way of living better – that is, in more fruitful conjunction with the non-human fellow-denizens of our world – it is much more than a set of rules to live by. It is too nuanced and complex, too ambiguous, too lyrical for that.

It seems there’s something of a trend towards, not quite denying “red-in-tooth-and-claw” Darwinism in our conceptualisation of nature, but counter-balancing that view by focussing on mutualisms, symbioses, collaborations. One branch of this trend is concerned to blur if not altogether disburse the putative division between ourselves and other creatures. Most of the skills and abilities we usually boast of as uniquely human are, it turns out, shared by many other animals, from gorillas to ants; we are far closer to one another than we are different. Moreover, we are scarcely divisible from the environment we so gaily swashbuckle through as if we own it. After all, each one of us is mostly water (Morizot has a charming chapter suggesting that we still pass on and carry saline elements of the ancient seas in which once lived our most distant ancestors – sponges.) A leading light in this field, Donna Haraway, likes to point out that of all the cells that astonishingly combine to form a person, only about 10% contain human DNA: the rest is microbial, bacterial, viral – non-human elements all busy constructing and combining and repurposing one another through “horizontal gene transfer” (elaborated in David Quammen’s rather annoyingly chatty book, The Tangled Tree). On this view, the human “self” is something of an illusion, a useful fiction that has unfortunately run amok on the planet. Similarly, there is no clear line between “culture” and “nature”: “nature” is not “out there”, a mere resource void of intrinsic meaning – the stance that has permitted us to exploit and wreck the biosphere so shamelessly. Rather, “nature” is within us, too. Hence Haraway writes instead of “natureculture”; others of “biohumanism”, or “posthumanism”. Haraway contributes to a wonderful collection of essays edited by Anna Tsing entitled (echoing Morizot), Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, which ranges from microbes to lichens, ants to salmon and (again echoing Morizot) wolves.

A related trend is also emerging: the fantastic symbiotic relationships amongst plants (without whose presence, incidentally, we would simply cease to exist – would never have existed). A slew of new books includes Merlin Sheldrake’s delightful Entangled Life (about fungi), Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, and, pre-eminently, Richard Powers’ astounding novel about humans and their trees, The Overstory. So it’s perhaps not surprising to find Powers contributing a Foreword to Ways of Being Alive. Of Morizot’s work Powers writes:

The view from the heights of this book is vertiginous and exhilarating. Morizot explores life at all gauges, from the cell to the entire biosphere. He peers through the longest lens of time, backwards across billions of years and forwards into an endlessly unfolding future. His words reawaken consciousness to all its possibilities. For Morizot, “the best analogy for understanding the evolutionary nature of the biosphere is that of a poetic fire: a creative fire”.

For some, that might smack too much of a wannabe spirituality, of discredited gods, or a primum mobile, or ether, or a Herbert Spencer-like Creative Principle. But it’s an analogy, not a statement of religious fact. Though Morizot does entertain certain refurbished notions of animism (again, he is far from alone in this), and though he wants in a sense to re-sacralise our relations with the biosphere, he is not trying to entrench a pre-determining dogma. It is impossible, he says in an endnote, to altogether evade metaphor and analogy, even in the sciences (our own scientist-poet Douglas Livingstone knew this). Rather, the writer-philosopher participates in the enigmatic creative forces of the biosphere by being poetic, by applying the surprising recombinations and penetrative engagement of poetry in the very attentiveness of language. Morizot’s own rich lyricism enacts, beyond either logic or earthy pragmatics, a search for a “complete style of attention”. John Felstiner, in his book Can Poetry Save the Earth?, calls it “poetry’s exact enlivening touch for nature’s common surprises.”

Not that either philosophical logic or worldly practicality is missing from Ways of Being Alive. Morizot supports his arguments with references to a wide range of philosophers, from Kant to Nietzsche, Dewey to Rawls, Spinoza to Latour. On the other count, his perspectives are deeply informed by in-the-field, tramping-through-the-snow work, tracking wolves through the mountains of central France. The reintroduction of wolves here is one of those small-scale success stories of “rewilding”, to use the favourite term of George Monbiot (another compatible, if more sociological, thinker-writer). Having been raised alongside many wild animals by my naturalist mother, this is the most fascinating aspect of the book for me. And particularly intriguing is an episode of communicating with certain wolves by mimicking their howls. And they reply! Or do they? What could be going through a wolf’s mind at that moment? We can’t know exactly, of course, but something is going on. As my mother demonstrated a thousand times, communication between species happens, can be nurtured and invented. It is a hint that animals can be “intercessors” between us and the world, a kind of doorway to recognise our still deeper “affiliations to plants and bacteria, which lie further back in our common genealogy”. They are like “ferrymen or smugglers”, connecting us in mutual respect, however mysteriously. They embody a sensory connection lost to too many urbanised moderns, the product in large part of “a dualist philosophical anthropology, which runs from Judeo-Christianity to Freudianism … the hierarchical dualism that contrasts humans with animals”. Indeed, many of us don’t even recognise that we’re desperate for deeper connectivity, one which nevertheless respects the difference of the Other. Morizot uses the task of tracking of the wolves through the forests as an example (I’m reminded a little of Louis Liebenberg’s work in The Art of Tracking: The origins of science). Here’s a particularly arresting passage, exemplifying a “human openness to the outside”:

To deploy together all the vibrating antennae of sensation, perception, interpretation, deduction, intuition, imagination. We need the incandescent alloy of a vibratory sensitivity to others in their otherness, a participant perception, an interpretive and imaginative activity of great boldness and caution, a rigorous and wild activity of deduction, a creation of hypotheses that is dishevelled in its heuristics and perfectly reasonable in its conclusions, a general openness to signs, an investigative use of the sensing and walking human body … We can try, although we often get it wrong, to translate [their wealth of meanings] a bit.

Wonderful, and suitably humble. And it’s now almost axiomatic that there are tangible ecological benefits to the reintroduction of an apex predator. Morizot (like Monbiot in his book Feral) cites the oft-aired case of wolves being returned to Yellowstone Park in the US, with dramatic impacts on the whole ecology. (I did once talk to a Finnish wolf-researcher, mind you, who judged the original assessment of that impact “a bit premature”. It would also incidentally be fascinating to compare Morizot’s book with Mark Rowlands’ The Philosopher and the Wolf and Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams.) In any event, as with the reinvigoration of bison populations in Poland, bears in Greece, wild boar in Italy, human-interface problems can accrue. We’re all too familiar with this sort of thing in southern Africa, with jackals in Karoo sheep country and leopards in the Western Cape, not to mention elephants in Botswana. One of the outfits Morizot works with is called CanOvis – dog/sheep – who try to intercede, work out liveable solutions, that can benefit both wolves and the sheep-farmers on whose flocks the canines inevitably prey.

The French wolf situation is in effect a case-study, a real-world synecdoche, for a global crisis. The dynamic of human domination – with firearms, gin-traps, poisons, axes, ploughs, fences – by way of protecting crops and livestock, has everywhere resulted in catastrophic declines in the populations of almost all classes of other worldly inhabitants. What we do with, and say about, other animals (and plants and insects, fish and fungi) has to be evaluated against the fact that today, Morizot laments, “we are creating from scratch a mute and absurd cosmos which is very uncomfortable to live in, on an existential, individual and collective scale. … [W]e are generating global warming and a biodiversity crisis that concretely threaten Earth’s capacity to provide human beings with habitable conditions.” Not only potentially uninhabitable for us; the catastrophe means that an infinitely variable and unpredictable gamut of evolutionary possibility has been snuffed out.

I’ve mentioned in passing a bunch of other related books partly to emphasise that Morizot is increasingly not alone in his broad thinking. This might also make him seem a bit less than entirely original. After all, as early as 1798 William Blake was lamenting that some people saw a tree as merely “a green thing that stands in the way” instead of a flourishing world of delight. Prophets and scholars of anthropogenic environmental meltdown have scarcely been lacking over the last century– thousands of them, from Thoreau to Naomi Klein, Rachel Carson to Greta Thunberg, Aldo Leopold to Bill McKibben – culminating in terrifying books such as James Hansen’s Storms of my Grandfathers and David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth. Compared to the latter rather swingeing compilation of alarming statistics, Ways of Being Alive is infinitely more subtle and sensually engaged. If the underlying message is similar, it is nevertheless one that needs to be said again – and again and again. Morizot does so with unusual density, complexity and beauty. He is, novelist Alain Damasio writes in an Afterword to the book, a bit of a “mongrel”, a “failed novelist” who forges a peculiarly elegant prose from philosophical ideas, enriched by his living those ideas through in pawprints and scats.

Is there a way out or through, in Morizot’s vision? One route, as I mentioned earlier, is an appeal to the values suffusing ancient animism. This is not to recommend an impossible return to some atavistic primitivism, rather something newly invented to suit our times. But the values remain pertinent, “namely complex social relations of reciprocity, exchange and predation which are not peace-loving or pacific … but are political in a still enigmatic sense, and call for forms of pacification and conciliation, of mutualist and considerate cohabitation.” Interestingly, Morizot evokes our familiar African concept of ubuntu as an analogy. To achieve this, we each need to become “diplomats of interdependence”, the “guardians” of a “community of interdependencies”. In this diplomatic mode, the fossilised shibboleths and stereotypes are left behind for a kind of space of creative ambiguity. A capacity to entertain mysteriousness itself seems paradoxically key. In Morizot’s wolf work, the more he learns and hears from all sides, through tracking, howling, thermal imaging at night, swapping anecdotes with shepherds, the more exceptions, enigmas, ambiguities emerge:

Dogs, wolves, sheep, the shapes merge into one metamorphic dialogue: you are my ancestor against whom I fight; you are my old prey that I defend at the risk of my own life; I am your descendant who sometimes plays with you, and whom I kill when you get close to my protégés who were still my booty only yesterday; I am your ancestor, who desires you and deceives you.

As this might indicate, “becoming-diplomat” means discarding the hard lines we so often and instinctively draw between Them and Us. It means recognising that each discerned entity is in fact many identities and impulses woven together. There are many "ways of being alive". Each contact, each situation, each meeting requires an open attentiveness that will allow for an individuated and appropriate response. (This is, I would say, rather Zen.) There’s an underpinning of necessary idealism in this strategy, but Morizot is not naïve about it. It makes negotiation harder, not easier, but also ever more vital. (He likes Donna Haraway’s felicitous phrase, “staying with the trouble”.) He knows all too well that his notion of “adjusted consideration” towards animals, rivers, forests is regarded by “the men in suits who rule the world” – the executives of global Petro-government who signally failed last week to achieve anything of life-saving substance at COP27 – as childish and irrational tosh. Let’s face it, profit-driven neoliberals are unlikely to be persuaded by this kind of thinking. But we have to try. In his Epilogue, which manages to be simultaneously grim and ebullient, Morizot concludes:

Why should we treat the living world with consideration? Well, because it is this world that made our bodies and our minds, capable of emotions, joy, meaning. It is the living world that sculpted all our faculties, including the most emancipatory, in a constitutive interweaving with other life forms. It is the living world that keeps us upright in the face of death, by its continuous and joyful infusion of life (this is called, among other things, “breathing”). Unplug this connection to the living world, and it’s all over.

*****

Blog No 130 - "Thicket": Harry Owen's new poems

For the information of imperfectly-educated readers, Harry Owen is an immigrant to South Africa from darkest England, erstwhile Poet Laureate of Cheshire, and quite likely the most genial promoter of poetry south of Seamus Heaney. Entering the so-called sunset years has not prevented him forging a second marriage, lodging in Grahamstown/Makhanda, and falling deeply in love with the thorny and shaggy wildness of the Eastern Cape. He has published several volumes of fine and affecting poetry, both his own (notably Non-Dog, The Cull and All Weathers) and anthologies of others’ (For Rhino in a Shrinking World and Poems of the Grahamstown Diaspora). As one of his many ventures to insert poetry into everyone’s lives, he ran for several years a monthly poetry-reading evening, dubbed Reddits. A wonderful free-for-all space in which greying locals recited Robbie Burns alongside township rappers, established poets intoned alongside students trying out. Somehow Harry would keep things under control, with always just the right word of encouragement, solemnity or jokiness.

Sadly for us, Harry and his wife have emigrated to another country – that is, Stellenbosch – a “land of plastic grass/ and birdlessness”. This has been a serious emotional wrench for him, as several poems in this new volume, Thicket, attest. Reddits readings continue, but they’re not quite the same. Come back, Harry, all is forgiven! In fact, he was back recently, to launch this collection, coinciding with a whole “Thicket Festival” happening in nearby Bathurst. The Eastern Cape’s Albany Thicket is not just a generic term: it has become a scientifically-recognised biome in its own right, with its own unique assemblage of biodiversity, of endemic species of bird and tree, mouse and mole. Harry Owen’s loving observations of the region’s landscapes, flora and fauna, and especially of birds, forms the core of this collection. Individual poems focus on the cicada, cobras, bougainvillea, a mantis, even a moth called the Cycad looper.

The richness is perhaps best summed up in “Amakhala Venn” (Amakhala being a nearby game reserve with which Harry formed a special bond). There, startling colours clash and overlap, as in a Venn diagram, and one gains hints of “the way the world once was, the way it yearns to be.” This is ‘Nature’. the matriarch, “mama, mother”, a world of “watchful calm” in which “the guileless impulse of animals” offers a stance less torturous than the human.

But Harry does not succumb to a vacuous Romanticism. Whatever soul-food quiet nature might provide, it doesn’t come cheaply or unalloyed: Harry acknowledges the existence of the electrified fence; and “how would we feel/ without it? Be honest now.” The thickets may be where snakes cavort and mate in wild independence, but it is also subject to hardship, as in the poem “Drought”, and it’s full of spines one has to grasp. Not an easy world. That call for honesty is another persistent feature of Harry’s life-view, and it goes along with his accessibility; there is no modernist or postmodernist trickery here, no portentous obscurity.

One can feel a little more at ease in one’s garden, perhaps. A number of these poems are set in or derived from, the Owens’ property in Makhanda, happily endowed with some shadowing trees rich with life. One can glean some sense of ease here, as in the poem “Sapiens”:

Dusk is drifting in and the air feels

autumnal, chilled, as now you stand,

peeing, under a sneezewood tree

in the garden where a black-headed

oriole joins you in joyful retreat.

Two dogs play, “wise beyond words”. But even here unease intrudes. For example, in “Scraping the Leaves” Harry, mid-contemplation, compares us humans to an olive thrush scratching frenetically through a leaf-pile:

Are we so very different? All through life

we scatter someone else’s stale debris

around us, hurling dry twigs to the air.

We flail to survive, and habit’s the long-

established way of doing it. But fed,

safe, watered – must we still insist on scraping?

These destructive habits, which we dignify or excuse as “normality”, may be just “that damaged smear of life we’ve become accustomed to”, like a smoker’s hack, “wasting us all away.”  Quite a few poems have an air of elegiac mourning for non-human lives lost, and sometimes an edge of rancour at human-induced damage. Moreover, Mother Nature is liable to get her own back, not least likely via plagues such as Covid-19. Harry echoes the great eco-poet Douglas Livingstone in “La Corona”: “The earth comes fighting back, and who can blame her?” He is not as misanthropic or vengeful as some, mostly feeling just “a deep sadness, regret. Frustration.” Few if any South African poets since Livingstone are writing with such ecologically-informed accuracy and engagement, even activism (his edited collection For Rhino in a Shrinking World is just an extension of in-the-field engagement with famous wildlife vet William Fowlds). ‘Nature’ is not some detachable entity ‘out there’, but an intertwining of processes and presences that helps make us who we are.

Humans don’t always treat one another much better than they do the natural world, the rhinos “dead,/ orangutans cremated for palm oil,/ and our rancid oceans choke[d] on plastic”. Harry reserves a particular brand of outright condemnation for the depredations of corrupt politicians and officials. In “Slough Revisited”, a poem modelled on satirically jaunty rhymes by John Betjeman, the grubby trash of Grahamstown is explicitly targeted, its “sick municipality” full of “parasites whose serpent tongues/ keep singing their mendacious songs”.  But the poem is also a call to a different kind of solidarity and self-sufficiency, and a call to “vote them out”.

That’s unusually political for Harry, but it also speaks to the variety of verse forms and subjects Harry can persuasively tackle, from visits to England to generous tributes to fellow poets, including the late Mary Oliver and Chris Mann. Such seriousness is offset by touches of characteristic humour. He takes self-deprecating delight in noting that a “nightbird”, calling mysteriously in the dark, in fact turned out to be a fruit bat.

The coastline also features regularly. Harry and Chrissie would retreat periodically to a house at Chintsa, near East London. There, the ever-present, “uniquely various” sea casts the poet into meditative states. The beach provides long walks on which to observe the agamas and the oyster-catchers, the shells and the wind-patterns on sand, its hidden rocks and incoming storms. On that beach, too, Harry found himself rather surprisingly suffering a “cardiac event” – a heart attack. Superb care in East London saved his life, the period of hospitalisation being the subject of a prose piece that opens Thicket. If he had not faced up to his mortality before, boy, now he certainly had to. Grappling with ageing, the fragility of the body and of being, the imminence of death, is one strong theme of this collection. Questions around what he has achieved, why he exists at all, who he has become, circle back repeatedly.

As one might expect of this energetic but humble being, at once enterprising and self-effacing, he fails, or perhaps refuses, to come to definite conclusions. In “Mantis” – a poem perhaps owing something to Ruth Miller’s poem of the same title – the insect, with the “cursive scrawl” of its thorax and its “voracious perspicacity”, trapped against glass, throws the poet into analogous confusion: “Are you trapped, lost? Or are you here by choice?/You twist your head and glare at me./ We are alone. What is it I do not know?” The attitudes are highly variable, moody: now he feels we are as “essential” as any other organism, at another point entirely “inconsequential”. He can feel himself “blessed”, even as he questions, “But who am I?/ Who have I ever been?”

A question that sets one up for further creativity, and a question for each and every one of us. A searching, vivid, open-ended volume of poems for any and all of us.

****

Thicket is available from Minimal Press, www.minimalpressbooks.co.za 

Blog 129 - Cormac McCarthy's "Suttree" and non-human life

 

American writer Cormac McCarthy is probably best known to the general public through the films made of his novels No Country for Old Men (Javier Bardem with that dreadful hairstyle and stun-gun), or All the Pretty Horses (Matt Damon dashing on horseback), or The Road (Viggo Mortensen in quite possibly the bleakest futuristic story ever told). What can’t be filmed is McCarthy’s language – extraordinarily rich, even overwrought, laced with resonant archaisms, grammatical oddities and invented colloquialisms. Blood Meridian, probably the most influential of his novels (at least two South African writers have consciously tried to mimic its inimitable style), is exemplary in this regard. You’ll never see the Sonoran desert, or indeed any desert, the same way again, or think of the aesthetics of violence the same way either.

But my favourite McCarthy novel is Suttree (1979), acknowledged by some readers as his masterpiece. Unusually for him, it’s set in a city – 1950s Knoxville, Tennessee – and unusually for him his main character is quite likeable, compassionate despite being radically dislocated. I’d hazard that if the novel has a central theme, it’s the persistence of compassion, of a certain ragged and rugged community loyalty, in the face of unpromising, even apocalyptic, circumstances. Ex-jailbird Cornelius Suttree is surviving by fishing the sludgy backwaters of Knoxville’s river. He occupies a decaying houseboat on the edge of McAnally Flats, an impoverished slum of broken architectures, car wrecks, weeds, washed-up vagrants and the aged, often black, cast-offs of the American city. The area’s name, with its echo of anal, matches the “cloaca maxima” of the oil- and slaughterhouse-polluted river; the place is neck-deep in trash, meticulously observed. Suttree walks about a lot, mostly abstains from systemic drunkenness and endemic criminality, drifts in and out of solvency and, within his means, dispenses help and money to his fellows, in a gritty and unsentimental way.

McCarthy’s extensive descriptions of landscapes generally have lent themselves to ecologically-orientated readings, or “ecocriticism” – not least of all those in Suttree. Ecocriticism, as a school of approaches aimed at bringing to light and interrogating human relations with the natural world, has proliferated into various sub-branches. One increasingly popular branch aims to dislodge the human or anthropocentric perspective in favour of an ecocentric one. It wants to knock humanity off its alleged pedestal of dominant uniqueness and to view it rather as just one amongst a multitude of other creatures, all networked together in an infinite variety of ways. A burgeoning sub-school of so-called Critical Animal Studies asserts that other animals are equally unique and valid centres of consciousness and agency, and their roles need to be acknowledged in our readings (and writing) of literary works. Even more recent is Critical Plant Studies: maybe plants have a proto-consciousness, too, or at least are responsive to network ‘signals’ of some sort. In any event, there they are, and we are wholly dependent on them.

Now Animal and Plant studies are being enveloped by “multispecies” perspectives. So far, this has been pursued more in ethnography and anthropology, but is making its way into literary studies, too. It draws partly on Darwinian and post-Darwinian evolutionary theories; in this view we are just a twig on the great “tree of life”, which envisions species branching endlessly away from one another in a riot of inadvertent creativity. More recent microbiological science complicates this picture. Intra-cellular mitochondrial studies by Lynn Margulis and her acolytes have gradually persuaded biologists that across the “vertical” twiglets of the evolutionary tree, viruses and bacteria can cross from species to species, hijacking cells and turning them to unexpected uses via so-called “horizontal gene transfer”. It’s suddenly now a very “tangled tree”, to borrow the title of David Quammen’s rather irritatingly chatty book on the subject. This holds true of our own bodies. It has long been known that we share 96% of our genes with the great apes, 70% with bananas. Leading ecocritical thinker Donna Haraway is fond of reminding us that only about 10% of our body’s cells contain uniquely human DNA: the vast majority is commanded by bacterial, microbial, viral material. Not to mention a plethora of parasites, from worms to skin mites. We are, each one of us, already a multispecies entity. It all makes deciding what our allegedly unique “self” really is, or even, in some extreme views, if it exists at all. At any rate, that we do live in a multispecies world is an indisputable fact. That our very existence depends upon a multispecies network is also a fact. Attitudes towards those facts, however, can vary and conflict.

Is all this relevant to Suttree? I think so. Of course, others have latched onto ecocritical readings of McCarthy long before Ol’ Slow-boat Wylie here chugged up the river. But no discussions I’ve seen so far go into Suttree’s multi-species dimension. Scholars highlight the novel’s environment of historically layered trash and industrial pollution; some of the animal presences; America’s obsession with the car as the primary manifestation of Cartesian rationalism and environment-destroying technology; and the social-justice consequences of ecological degradation. All well and good, but still rather anthropocentric. Yet it seems to me that a multispecies reading of Suttree is unavoidable, in fact essential to its main themes. The novel is saturated with non-human presences, from weeds to bees, from pigeons to catfish, from cats to honeysuckle, from newts to moulds. This riot of life has its own history, on a geological scale. Here is a typical passage from the very first page:

Old stone walls unplumbed by weathers, lodged in their striae fossil bones, limestone scarabs rucked in the floor of this once inland sea. Thin dark trees through yon iron palings where the dead keep their own small metropolis … the deathware stained with carrion. … Past these corrugated warehouse walls down little sandy streets where blownout autos sulk on pedestals of cinderblock. Through warrens of sumac and pokeweed and withered honeysuckle giving onto the scored clay banks of the railway. Grey vines coiled leftward in this northern hemisphere, what winds them shapes the dogwhelk’s shell. Weeds sprouted from cinder and brick. A steamshovel reared in solitary abandonment against the night sky. Cross here. By frograils and fishplates where engines cough like lions in the dark of the yard. To a darker town, past lamps stoned blind, past smoking oblique shacks and china dogs and painted tires where dirty flowers grow.

So much is going on here. Primordial fossils lie alongside the recent dead. Vines, shells (and everything else, it’s implied) obey the same implacable laws of nature. Even the machinery partakes of the animal. All is subject to a “slow cataclysm of neglect”, though natural life paradoxically flourishes. In this “encampment of the damned”, shaped by “wave on wave of the violent and insane”, only “ruder forms survive”. Suttree himself, who is both rude and somewhat educated, seems almost indestructible.

Some of the ecocentric thinking I outlined earlier is rather utopian in tenor. Though the predatory dimension of Nature may be paid some lip service, there’s an underlying hopefulness: If only humans were no longer seeing themselves at the top of the pile and as ultimately privileged, but rather as networked in some sort of ecological equality with multiple others, somehow a better, more respectful world will emerge. Somehow anthropogenic damage to our environment will be mitigated. I like the thought but am not convinced. It seems to me that this idea in itself emerges from conditions of coddled privilege. What happens to multispecies co-existence in conditions of extreme poverty, where there are few margins for error, little education, and thin soil for compassion? Suttree seems to encapsulate just such a world, where emotional engagement with the non-human world is something of a luxury, if it happens at all. These are trash(ed)-humans who are emphatically not at the top of the pile. Similar conditions may be observed in locations across the globe, from the Cape Flats to Mumbai, Lagos to Sao Paolo. This is not an environment in which ideas of beautiful nature, of conservation, or of animal rights, can easily establish.

Take the animals of Suttree, most of which are either untamed or victims. Though the odd character has a pet cat or companionable dog or a bunch of goats, love or caring is rare compared to normalised negligent violence. It’s not so much ‘cruelty’, as that implies a certain deliberate malice; here, the violence is shorn of almost all emotion. The pig slaughterhouse across the river is impersonal; people eat the pork without qualm. Meat hanging in a local market is described as objectively grotesque, but not because Suttree himself expresses any disgust. He kills and guts his catches in apparent complete detachment; just once or twice comes a hint that the fish flopping in the bottom of his skiff might register or feel what they’re going through. At one point Suttree casually throws a stone at a tethered goat, without malice or obvious intent. He also slings mud and stones at a defiant cat angling to steal one of his fish. Another fisherman, an “Indian”, specialises in hunting turtles; the slaughter of one is described in excruciating but entirely dispassionate detail. Harrogate, an unhinged if inventive teenaged criminal whom Suttree half-adopts, poisons bats with strychnine and tries to pass them off as rabid, for a bounty. Suttree does insist on freeing a dog stuck in a neighbour’s slops-barrel, whereas the neighbour is inclined just to leave it. But it’s not clear whether Suttree is concerned to help the dog or the neighbour; there’s no apparent solicitude for the liberated hound.

On the Flats, the fragile contingency of all lives is exposed, those of humans no less than of weeds. In this sense there is a kind of Darwinian democracy at work – or a ‘critterocracy’. Repeatedly these humans are not so much reduced to the animal, as ‘levelled up’ with them. In dozens of instances people are compared to animals: a man is “owlfaced”, youths are energetic as horses, Harrogate is known as the “city mouse”, Suttree himself is like a wandering dog. These examples of simile might be dismissed as merely colourful comparisons, some demeaning and even in today’s perspective downright racist. But there are too many to be merely occasional, and in other instances McCarthy seems to want to meld them more organically: “Suttree looked towards the river and tested the air with his nose in a gesture of some earlier antecedent.” A primordial animality lives within him – a textual analogue to horizontal gene transfer, you might say.

In one brief but significant interlude, Suttree takes an aimless hike up into Tennessee’s forested and snow-topped mountains. Inadequately clad and ill-provisioned, he drives himself to the point of hallucinatory starvation. He experiences something of old-school ‘pure appreciation of nature’, relayed in lyrical terms, an apprehension of “incredible loveliness”:

Old distaff Celt’s blood in some back chamber of his brain moved him to discourse with the birches, with the oaks. A cool green fire kept breaking in the woods and he could hear the footsteps of the dead. Everything had fallen from him. He scarce could tell where his being ended or the world began nor did he care.

Here is something like the transcendence of arrogant self-hood that our ecocentric theorists would valorise, but for Suttree it scarcely acts as a life-changing epiphany. He just doesn’t care. It’s too close to hunger-induced derangement, in which he sees “with a madman’s clarity the perishability of his flesh.” A certain wisdom in that, but it’s hard to read McCarthy as wanting us to regard the lovely Thoreau-like vision seriously. It's as ephemeral as any other stance. Suttree can’t survive ‘in Nature’, however beautiful. His starving hallucinations, often nightmarishly multispecies in appearance, will be repeated and amplified later when he falls ill with typhoid (another organism, of course).

In a contrastive interlude Suttree, having befriended a successful prostitute, finds himself in money, an apartment in Knoxville’s city centre, a smart(ish) suit, and even a swanky car. But he becomes even more directionless and disillusioned; this environment is sterile, artificial and faithless. Non-human life is notably absent. Even McCarthy’s prose becomes grey and flat. It all falls apart, and Suttree is soon right back where he was. In effect, McCarthy’s eco-lyricism, precision of observation, awareness of deep history, and lushness of language are reserved for the McAnally Flats. His are the aesthetics of destruction and neglect, a kind of beauty of the apocalyptic – indeed of successive apocalyptic upheavals. At the end of the novel, another one looms: the Flats and their destitute inhabitants, from burdock and rats to people and moths, are being flattened for the sake of an expressway, a concrete-and-girder altar to America’s obsession with the car. The reader suffers a genuine sense of loss: for all its entangled horrors and poverty, McCarthy has rendered the place strangely loveable, partly because of its very precariousness.

In the end Suttree has to leave the Flats, hitch-hiking away through the new and dusty roadworks. In an echo of his own scratchy philanthropy, a boy spontaneously brings him some water. In the closing paragraphs, real and symbolic and hallucinatory animals again define the tenuousness of his being:

Behind him the city lay smoking, the sad purlieus of the dead immured with the bones of friends and forebears. Off to the right side the white concrete of the expressway gleamed in the sun where the ramp curved out into empty air and hung truncate with iron rods bristling among the vectors of nowhere. When he looked back the waterboy was gone. An enormous lank hound had come out of the meadow by the river like a hound from the depths and was sniffing at the spot where Suttree had stood.

            Somewhere in the gray wood by the river is the huntsman and in the brooming corn and in the castellated press of cities. His work lies all wheres and his hounds tire not. I have seen them in a dream, slaverous and wild and their eyes crazed with ravening for souls in this world. Fly them.

*****