Romantic Circles Blog

It seems worth noting, in the vein of our recent Coraline post, some of the Romantic ties to Watchmen, the superhero movie that has been quite visible since its debut earlier this month. The film is based on the 1986 comic book series by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Its trailer is below:

Though familiar with the work in its comic book form, this blogger has not yet seen the film. Reviews are mixed. Roger Ebert spoke well of it, while The New York Times’ A.O. Scott is somewhat more nonplussed. Alan Moore, the writer of the source comic book, has disowned the film sight unseen.

One of the story’s central characters in both media is Adrian Veidt, aka Ozymandias. In his superhero incarnation, Ozymandias is a superior physical and mental specimen, having traced the path of Alexander the Great’s conquest and learned the spiritual and physical disciplines native to those areas. After a law passed banning superheroes in the 1970s, Veidt publicly revealed his secret identity, and turned his alter ego into a successful line of products and services. As the murder mystery that launches the film unfolds (from here there are spoilers, for those so concerned), Veidt is exposed by the film’s other heroes as the mastermind behind a vast conspiracy to simultaneously undermine the former superhero community and to unite a world on the brink of nuclear war around a common — though manufactured — enemy for the good of mankind.

In the comic book, Moore makes little reference to Shelley’s eponymous poem until the end of the penultimate issue (titled “Look On My Works, Ye Mighty…”) when Veidt’s plot is revealed. In the final panel, the epigraph is a slightly longer quotation from Shelley that includes this post’s title, with proper attribution. Much of the rest of the time, Ozymandias’s Egyptian connections are given the spotlight, rather than Shelley, perhaps hoping to keep association with works that would cause despair latent in the reader’s mind rather than explicit.

Tales of the Black Freighter

Elsewhere in the comic (and absent from the movie in its theatrical form, by all accounts) is the metatextual and fictional Tales of the Black Freighter comic book, which seems to be influenced by Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner as much as by its acknowledged sources, 1950s EC comics and Brecht’s pirate ship from Threepenny Opera. The panels of the comic-within-a-comic are interpolated such that the twin tragic endings come at much the same time. In the story, (much of which is told in the sixth issue, “Fearful Symmetry,” which ends with a longer Blake epigraph) a sailor whose shipmates have been slaughtered by the pirate crew of the Black Freighter makes a raft of their bodies to try to get back to his hometown to warn them of the coming pirate plague. His time on the sea is punctuated by the killing and eating of a seagull, his hallucinated conversations with his dead crewmembers, and an encounter with a giant shark reminiscent of John Singleton Copley’s Romantic-era Watson and the Shark. When he arrives, he finds to his horror that he’s misunderstood; there has been no pirate invasion of his hometown, and he himself is the real monster.

Moore’s work beyond Watchmen is no stranger to Romantic figures either: Blake is referenced in Moore’s V for Vendetta, and appears as a character in his From Hell. Moore also wrote and performed a full length spoken-word piece about Blake at the Tate Gallery in 2001 called Angel Passage (it was released on CD in 2002, but is now out of print). Another spoken word piece, Highbury Working, features a mediation on a late-in-life Coleridge’s opium dream of Sara Hutchinson (which is also on CD, and out of print).

New audio files are available at Romantic Circles’ Poets on Poets series: Andrew Kozma reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” Part IV; Jennifer Kwon Dobbs reading Charlotte Turner Smiths’s “Sonnet LXX” and ”Sonnet LXXVII” [from Elegiac Sonnets]; Elizabeth Volpe reading William Blake’s “The Human Abstract”; and Anne Shaw reading Blake’s “The Tyger.” As always, you can play or download the MP3 files directly from the Poets on Poets page–

http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/poets/toc.html

–or subscribe to the podcasts via iTunes (search for “Romantic Circles”) or directly from our page.

The Poets on Poets series is edited and produced by Tilar Mazzeo with the assistance of Doug Guerra and Matt O’Donnell.

Returning from the flurry of the start of the semester, I want to consider the close of Coleridge’s “The Raven” (much as Tim has now brought to a close his wonderful readings of “The Rime”).  When we last left our bird, he’d returned to the oak—now “grown a tall oak tree”—and brought along with him a “She.”  The pair built themselves “a nest in the topmost bough, / And young ones they had, and were happy enow.”  But avian tragedy ensues in full, dramatic measure:

But soon came a Woodman in leathern guise,
His brow, like a pent-house, hung over his eyes.
He’d an axe in his hand, not a word he spoke,
But with many a hem! and a sturdy stroke,
At length he brought down the poor Raven’s own oak.
His young ones were killed; for they could not depart,
And their mother did die of a broken heart.

Many a reader of Thoreau’s Walden will halt (“Pause, Dweller!”) at the text’s mention of the Woodman’s brow, pendulous “like a pent-house.” Coleridge may have adapted this simile of a slant-roofed forehead from Dryden’s description of “pent-house eye-brows” (King Arthur III.i.30).  But the relation to dwelling, in this context of a woodman cutting down a tree that will be transformed into a ship, suggests more than appearance.  The Woodman uncannily conveys lean-to houseness with him in his human bearing and attitudes: human ecology (conceptualized dwelling, houseness, the [un]heimlich) trumps and destroys an avian ecosystem and its dwellers.  The Woodman’s “guise” moreover suggests something less than authentic, as if he were playing a role as an actor or agent of transformative dwelling: my dwelling from yours.  So the poem’s vision of eco-nomy seems to go.  The Raven’s “own oak,” dwelt in but not of course “owned” in human terms of commerce and property rights, is “brought down,” and the young birds, unable yet to fly, are “killed” by the Woodman’s action.  This scene is obviously conveyed with a good deal of anthropomorphism.  Even the word “own” smacks of human possession.  And then there’s the sentimental mother raven’s death from “a broken heart.”  Pathetic fallacy, anyone?

Yet I can’t help but recall a memory from my youth.  Goose hunting one early morning on a reedy lake in Washington state (USA), I listened to a lone goose forlornly calling as he or she circled and circled round our boat.  My father and I both surmised that the bird was calling for its missing mate, who likely had been shot down by some other hunter.  Was that goose’s heart “broken”?  Who can say?  That it called and called, and that its vocalizations conveyed a sense of mournful loss—well, those were my burdensome impressions then (and, however sentimental and erroneous, no doubt later played a part in my becoming a vegetarian).  Emotional suffering is not the sole domain of humankind.

Now comes the transformation, perhaps along the lines of what Ashton Nichols heralds as “urbanature,” whereby nature is converted not into Hegelian-Emersonian culture but into that nature forged by human animals as another—“green” or not-so-green–portion of the world.  Beavers use trees to make dams; humans use them to build houses and ships (and poems):

The boughs from the trunk the woodman did sever;
And they floated it down on the course of the river.
They sawed it in planks, and its bark they did strip,
And with this tree and others they made a good ship.

Now for the ironic close, whereby human mastery is thwarted.  Poetic justice or just bad luck?  Or is this finale best read allegorically, for instance regarding late eighteenth-century British politics?  Certainly the poem (composed circa 1798) alludes to many a past shipwreck, and also eerily foreshadows, at least to my eyes, the wreck of John Wordsworth’s ship in 1805:

The ship, it was launched; but in sight of the land
Such a storm there did rise as no ship would withstand.
It bulged on a rock, and the waves rush’d in fast;
Round and round flew the Raven, and cawed to the blast.
He heard the last shriek of the perishing souls–
See! see! o’er the topmast the mad water rolls!

Right glad was the Raven, and off he went fleet,

And Death riding home on a cloud he did meet,
And he thank’d him again and again for this treat:

They had taken his all, and REVENGE IT WAS SWEET

All the mariners drown in the shipwreck, and the ship itself vanishes beneath the waves.  With this disaster comes the poem’s anthropomorphic, almost surreal, zinger: the raven feels “right glad” and indeed grateful for this shipwreck–so much so that he repeatedly thanks a home-bound, dwelling-aimed “Death” on his pale cloud.  “They,” human landlubbers and mariners alike, “had taken his all,” his young ones and wife, and so “revenge” tasted “sweet.”  A bird feel (and taste) revenge? Surely this point is where the poem slips off the rails of all verisimilitude, if it ever rode them at all.  And of course all along the poem has operated as a fable with stock figures: “Woodman,” “Raven,” “Oak,” etc.  Yet if Coleridge and Wordsworth could elsewhere ponder emotional-neuronal connections and correspondences between humans and animals (notably birds) regarding joy or happiness, why not less appealing emotions, as well?  Who is to say that revenge has no animal analog or source?  Outlandish as this fable becomes in terms of the distraught Raven’s tracking of the oak’s journey and material transformation, and of the bird’s own grief and anger—outlandish as these things are, they give me pause.  For that out-land of distinction, of distance, is a “natural” separation we rely on very much: our difference from birds and all animals, even the most “intelligent” of animals.  There’s much here to ponder, “though inland far we be.”

Like Coleridge’s “Rime,” his “Raven” risks being too simply reduced to an eco-morality tale, where destructive human actions are justly decried.  The poem soon becomes a plea for habitat preservation–or to be destroyed at our peril. But of course the poem doesn’t make this moral so easy, anymore than does “The Rime.”  The bird does not quite exact his revenge (he doesn’t cause the storm), but he fully enjoys the ship’s and mariners’ destruction.  Morality play then becomes revenge play. Revenge seems to be a feeling that is outlandishly our own: a form of feeling policed and cathartically controlled since at least Homer’s Iliad.  Revenge is socially toxic, transforming men into beasts (of war), and it is thus also quintessentially “human.”  Along with grief and sex, the feeling of vengeance is one of the key driving forces behind art—at least behind ancient-heroic art.  In Coleridge’s forged fable vengeance is not like an animal emotion, it IS one.  The fable arguably views all emotions as natural, with the difference between animal and human a matter more of degree than kind, however much we may prefer to see it differently.  Our houses, our furniture and culture, come from other animals’ dwellings or dwelling places, as parts of a larger, global transformation not of nature into culture so much as of dwelling into dwelling, with a dash of the unheimlich, of an unhomely, uncanny sense of loss and lurking revenge, to discomfort us under our roofs and penthouse brows.  (More to come.)

Hi again.

School starts soon (quarter system). I returned from the retreats. And I’m finishing an essay called “Ecologocentrism: Unworking Animals,” for SubStance.

All feeble excuses for my not yet posting my final thoughts on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

They’re about the sheer “thereness” of existence, its density—what “world” subsumes and half erases. And its relation to intimacy.

I’ve been getting some excellent feedback on my first draft of The Ecological Thought.

The SubStance essay is a study of Solaris, the incredible science fiction story of a psychologist’s encounter with a radically other mind.

It claims that just as Derrida argues that logocentrism underlies Western philosophy’s attempt to ground meaning in an essential form, I hold that ecologocentrism underpins most environmentalist philosophy, preventing access to the full scope of interconnectedness.

Thinking, even environmentalist thinking, has set up “Nature” as a reified thing in the distance, “over there,” under the sidewalk, on the other side where the grass is always greener, preferably in the mountains, in the wild.  This “Nature” accords with Walter Benjamin’s proposition about the aura: it is a function of distance.  Benjamin uses an image from “Nature”—or from the picturesque?  But that is my and his point—to describe the aura: “We define the aura . . . as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close [the object] may be.  If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch.”

So here we are. We’ve discovered the oozing, slimy core of the poem, an ooze with a face—not a primordial ooze, a naturephilosopher’s Urschleim (what a fantastic word—protoplasm is good too I guess), life-to-be. Instead, this slime is caught between categories of life and death, life-in-death, and it induces a horror deeper than revulsion over matter in the wrong place—Life-in-Death is a person. We are not in the realms of vitalism—which is idealism’s ground zero.

Patricia Yaeger’s excellent essay in the recent issue of PMLA shows how close to ecology contemporary art is, even when ecology is not explicitly its subject matter. Ooze is what contemporary art makes us face. Even when it’s not ecological in content, or in form. It’s ecological in its substance, and in its subject (position). (For more on this, see the Mission Statement a couple of posts back.)

It’s paint-ooze. Sound-ooze (timbre-ooze more precisely). Word-ooze (L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry and its Quine-esque exploitation of mention not use). Art as pollution. The unformed (Georges Bataille: l’informe).

Piles of “stuff” without frames, or the inverse, empty frames, that both say “I am art.” Or, weirder, “Am I art?” Or “I am not art.” “This is not an artistic sentence” (Public Image Limited did a song called “This Is Not a Love Song”). “This sentence is outside the aesthetic dimension.” “The Night-mare Life-in-Death I am.”

The ooze is “there is…” or “it is….” When we say “It is raining,” what is the “it” that is raining? Lévinas calls it a murmuring or a splashing. The oozing of the there is. Freud: drives are silent. I think of the ichor melting out of the mouth of the little girl in The Exorcist.

I think of the photographs of Cindy Sherman. There’s one—blast it, I can’t find it online, but you can find it in Rosalind Kraus’s book Cindy Sherman 1975–1993 (New York, Rizzoli, 1993), page 156. It’s a face half-buried in splattered gore, staring out with wild eyes. Or if you want the candy-flavored version, try Pierre et Gilles’ photographs, such as their one of the band Deee-Lite. The band members grin, growing out of roses, their heads sparkling like sugared plastic.

I think of the music of La Monte Young—alas, so hard to find. The Well Tuned Piano is a masterpiece, a worthy successor to The Well Tempered Clavier. It’s about creating sounds by tuning a piano to play exquisitely refined layers of harmonics that seem to reach up and down into infinity. These sounds are literally the potential in the matter out of which pianos are made (wood and string and metal), and the spaces you play them in. That’s what timbre means. After you listen to all five plus hours, you will become aware of the muddy compromise that is the “equal temperament” of modern pianos (and thus of other instruments generally). This comparison may be a little loaded, but it’s like eating an apricot you pick straight off an apricot tree after years of eating ones that have flown on planes to reach your mouth. (Clue: they taste of roses.)

True materialism would discover multiple dimensions of materiality. It would be the love of matter.

Timbre—timber—hyle (Greek: matter, timber). Materialism in music. Rime: frosty encrustation, timbre of frozen water, sugar-coating, making things glitter, glossy. Rime, slime. Life in Death. The marginal gloss. “Blue, glossy green, and velvet black / They coiled and swam” (4.279–280). Colored ink. Like lines of illuminated text. Gloss—the speaking of speaking. Speaking in tongues. “I bit my arm, I sucked the blood, / And cried” (3.160–161).

The ancient Mariner’s world—although we’ve ruled “worlds” in a strict sense out of court—is already this realm of sheer existence, of timbre. A place of glittering eyes and skinny hands, leprosy faces and grinning skulls. This is a world of synethiaphobia and synethiaphilia—phobic fascination and friendly investigation of intimacy. Intimacy with objects and abjects. Proximity to others. Scopo-rhino-oto-taxo-geuma-psyche-philia. “Perversion” as utter passivity in the face of feminized appearance. There’s no good reason to admire those coiling glistening water snakes, floating like shorn Medusa’s hair.

All those organs without bodies: a glittering eye, a skinny hand, looks and locks and skin as white as leprosy, slimy things with slimy legs, serpentine swimming, the curse in a dead man’s eye. It’s not a holistic world. It’s a frothing mass of performances, gestures, behaviors that express certain genetic codes. Performance all the way down (see my earlier post on Judith Butler). A world of gyrating prosthetic limbs. You have to drink your own blood in order to speak. You wear a dead albatross. You use oars and masts, because you can’t swim.

This is not your usual Birkenstock wearing, tree-hugging environmentalism, then. More like tree-licking. Queer ecology.

Recursive commodity fetishism. Life in Death. Fetishism looped back into itself. The glow of the glow of value. A paradoxical judo, tripping up the system with its own energy, not stepping outside it. Irony that doesn’t involve distance. Irony and intimacy. Irony as intimacy. Knowing “knowingness.” A mass produced feudal text that talks about itself. A brand new product, an antiqued commodity, encrusted with metal studs like a medieval Bible or a studded collar. A Gothic object, a Goth ecology. The gloss of gloss—a glossy gloss. Strange strangers. Sparkling slime. Artificial intelligence. (Not an oxymoron, like “military intelligence.”) Romantic irony: a poem that knows it’s a poem. A talking book about a walking book. “To him my tale I teach” (7.590).

Slime: it’s slimy because it’s made of enzymes, little subroutines produced by and productive of DNA sequencing. Primordial slime as a computational process. Amino acids that generate amino acids that act on other amino acids…no outside, all the codes implicit in the chemicals. Watching the water snakes as dreaming: watching the Id machine gyrate. Kris, the psychologist in Solaris, watching the surface of the sentient planet-ocean that “dreams” by sending forth horrifying simulations of the astronauts’ guiltiest secrets. He is watching a giant brain. Electrochemical processes giving rise to words and ideas. “There’s a killer on the road / His brain is squirmin like a toad” (The Doors).

(Here’s the final scene from Solaris. Watch the wafting fronds and the boiling sentient ocean. Kris has decided to descend to the surface of the planet and live out his life communicating via the planet’s simulations, which in the novel are called Phi-Creatures. Rather wonderfully, Phi (Φ) is the Lacanian symbol for the object in its existential density. I have an essay on this movie and ecology coming out in SubStance, probably some time later this year.)

“Nature loving” is supposedly chaste (impossible formula! like courtly love, or Neoplatonic love), and is thus slave to masculine heteronormativity, a performance that erases the trace of performance. “Leave no trace” was an environmentalist movement about picking up after you when you go hiking—but there’s another dimension to this injunction. Masculinity performs no-performance, erasing its trace. If you look like you are “acting” masculine, you aren’t. Masculine is Natural. Natural is masculine.

(In my recent project The Ecological Thought I’ve often capitalized Nature to return to it some kind of trace, some distinctive mark.)

Organicism: an artistic form in which form fits content like an invisible glove, leaving no trace. Most environmentalisms—including modern systems theories—are organicist. World fits mind and mind fits world (as Wordsowrth asserted). Blake: “You shall not bring me down to believe such fitting & fitted … & please your lordship.” His marginal gloss on Wordsworth’s The Excursion (the Prospectus to The Recluse).

Organicism must therefore partake of environmentalist chastity. A performance of no-performance. Un-perversion. A desire that erases its trace as soon as it appears. Desire as erasure, erasure-desire. The curtain rises on a pregiven world, always greater than the sum of its parts (holism). But slime is not organic: it’s a computational process. Things only look like they fit, because we are not perceiving them on an evolutionary or geological time scale. If you move a Sphex wasp away from the hole she is inspecting (as a suitable storage place for the caterpillar she has caught), she will perform the same behavior, meaninglessly, at the next hole. Nature looks natural because it keeps going, and going, and going…like the undead! And because we keep on looking away, keeping our distance, framing it, sizing it up.

Blake heard the voice of authority in organicism. We must articulate a nonauthoritarian ecology. Authoritarian organicism gains its power through a naturalizing of sexual difference. Nature is unmarked (“leave no trace”). It is established by exclusion, then exclusion of exclusion. We must retrace it to the end, return the gloss, the slime, the rime, to the book of Nature. Ecology must unthink “ecologocentrism.”

Perhaps we could give ecologocentrism the slip by saying that Nature is beyond concept. Beyond concept, Nature is. Wordless Nature. But no. Thus a negative theology of the environment must always fall prey, finally, to the deadly logos it wishes to transcend. Thinking you can escape metaphysics by outlining a hyperessential being beyond being only repeats the problem. Nature is not unnatural. A negative theology of the environment is the ultimate chastity—it refuses even to name the non-name, refuses even to non-name it.

Vegetarianism—how could I bash it? I started my career researching it, and eating it! But it’s interesting, the linguistic fallout from vegetarianism. All that meat, all those mangled bodies. The subject position from which vegetarian arguments are made is too often fascinated carnivorous carno-phobia. Violent non-violence.

Shelley’s vegetarianism was certainly this: abstaining from meat, yes, and also from un-fair-traded spices, indeed. Yet the obsession with obsession; the equation of madness with crime, crime with disease; longing for a society without a symptom—for a society without people, in effect. A society without a trace. A death-driven obsession that Shelley himself brilliantly dissects in Alastor, the hardest poem I’ve ever read, with all its contradictory messages and levels.

“Leave no trace” as a translation of “Let it be.” Heidegger in his hide: the stupefied, plangent hush of his prose tells of a huntsman waiting for Being, with a gun or binoculars. Even if the gun is only the gun of the fascinated gaze. The “meditative” quiet of the forest where you can hear the “sharp, subtle sounds of animals jumping forth…and [you] can shoot at them.” Let it be! Pull! Bang! What a fantastic sight! Shhh, quiet, I’m trying to kill this rabbit. Quietly, meditatively, I insert my knife gently and smoothly into its neck, mindfully and meditatively I slit its throat…In the rabbit’s blood I can smell the quiet of the fields, the “toilsome tread” of the paws on their daily round, the search for something to nibble…this rabbit corpse is a moving environmental poem, like a pair of old shoes in a Van Gogh painting…mmm…

If in the process of being “ecological” we only extend our phobias of psychic, sexual and social intimacy, then we will have paid a terrible price. We will have created a cleaner, easy-wipe version of the reality that got us into this mess in the first place. There will still be pollution. It will accumulate based on the injunction to leave no trace. There will be normals and pathologicals. Efficiently functioning phobia.

While we strive to make production less toxic, less dangerous, less deadly, thinking needs to slow down and become entangled in its own slime.

“It is an ancient Mariner” (1.1); “The Night-mare Life-in-Death was she” (3.193); “ ‘There was a ship,’ quoth he” (1.10). Is the ship the Mariner first mentions to the Wedding Guest not his own ship, but her ship, the death ship? It would work in the structure we are elucidating here. The ship is presented in its sheer existence. Something about the terror, the urgency, with which the Mariner collars the Guest, as if the ship were all too present in his mind, causes the Guest to recoil. The Guest catches a glimpse of Life-in-Death in “his glittering eye” (1.13).

Her face, beautiful and eaten away. She lets bacteria feast on her flesh. Lévinas asserts that the ultimate demonstration of our utter responsibility for the other is maternity, which is a condition of allowing the other to eat you, from the inside, the ultimate host-parasite relationship. Life-in-Death is a perverse mother of us all, a leper woman who just comes alongside us on a floating ship, like the Mariner, the figure of the homeless man stopping one of three by the Bridegroom’s door. Two indigents: Lévinas argues that the face is always the face of indigence, always evoking a crushing responsibility on our part. Life-in-Death is utterly destitute, wedded to Death. She is a zero-degree conatus, less than a minimal will to live, more like a letting-the-other-feast-on-me.

Indeed, the mother of us all was “mitochondrial Eve,” a bacterium that hid out in protozoan single-celled organisms to survive the global ecological disaster called oxygen. And like DNA, Life-in-Death plays games of chance. And like DNA, and life forms in general, it becomes impossible to tell who is living off of whom. Is she Life-Despite-Death? Like weeds growing up after a bomb explodes? Or Life-as-Death, as tick-tock compulsion to repeat, meiosis? The liveliness of death? The deathliness of life? Coleridge’s pithy ballad form makes it wonderfully hard to tell.

If we are to survive the twenty-first century, we ecosocialists will need to revise our ideas of passivity, weakness, the uncanny, vulnerability, and gentleness.

A face that is far from a face of strength and power, far from a face at all. Red lips and free looks, and utter abjection within beauty, abjection as beauty, beauty as abjection. Language breaks down trying to evoke her. She’s like the woman sniper at the end of Full Metal Jacket, the horrifying shot of her writhing slowly on the floor whispering “Shoot me…shoot me.” Isn’t this why Life-in-Death is frightening? Not because she’s some Disney witch queen, but because she isn’t. “Her skin was white as leprosy”—isn’t it a shudder of compassion we feel here? Of course, it isn’t mediated through the usual condescending channels, and thus may feel more like revulsion.

Consider the Abrahamic traditions of caring for indigents and lepers.

The Mariner is an anti-Jesus (not perhaps an Antichrist), weighed down with the Albatross-cross, the weight of “it.” Now he’s faced with the frontal horror of it in the flesh, persecuting figures—yet even for these he is still responsible.

In one sense Life-in-Death is an allegorical figure, always not who she appears to be. But in another, can we ignore how vividly, uniquely realized she is? Would an allegorical reading (which would start by calling her “Life-in-Death,” the Mariner’s name) begin to tear us away from her collapsing face? Can we coexist with her and not suffer an allegorical-allergic reaction? Can we stay close to her even if our blood “thicks” with “cold”? If we can’t stay, isn’t our messing about in environmental boats just a boy’s game in an ultimately safe, antiseptic, order of the Same? A game of violently bootstrapping ourselves into Being? Into a world that, for all its sublime grandeur, is already paved with the concrete of essence? A place where we could feel at home, comfortable with all our gadgets handy, the golf course down the street, Nature over yonder, animals tolerated, even respected perhaps, sporting around our dwelling?* Where resoluteness in the face of death cocooned us against the vulnerability of life? Where we would finally have sanitized and smoothed over the queerness of the strange stranger, with her uncivilized and unnatural presence, her horrifying gentleness?

Our poem has gone overboard.

*I am quoting Shelley:

No longer now
He slays the beast that sports around his dwelling,
And horribly devours his mangled flesh.

(The Dæmon of the World, 2. )

Reading Derek Ratcliffe’s wonderful ornithological, corvi-cultural study, The Raven, returns me to a closing query of my previous entry: “What sort of animal meaning . . . does [the raven] present in Coleridge’s “The Raven”? Ratcliffe quotes one R. Bosworth Smith:

A bird whose literary history begins with Cain, with Noah, and with Elijah, and
who gave his name to the Midianite chieftain Oreb; whose every action and cry
was observed and noted down, alike by the descendents of Romulus and the ancestors of
Rolf the Ganger; who occurs in every second play of Shakespeare; who forms the subject
of the most eerie poem of Edgar Alan Poe, and enlivens the pages of the Roderick
Random of Smollett, of the Rookwood of Ainsworth, of the Barnaby Rudge of Dickens,
is a bird whose historical and literary pre-eminence is unapproached. (cited Ratcliffe 9)

Indeed the raven has served “to point many a moral and adorn many a tale,” in part because this bird has seemed to many to be “the bird most like ourselves” (D. Kennedy and A.B. Walker, “The Great Transformer”), a prophet, omen-bearer, watcher, and so forth. But how much do these age-old associations and allegorical uses relate to the bird’s own being and behavior, as an animetaphor that is as much an instigator as a product of cultural markings?

Back to Coleridge’s fabulous animal poem. Following the playful forgery-oriented opening, the text describes how,

Underneath an old oak tree
There was of swine a huge company
That grunted as they crunched the mast:
For that was ripe, and fell full fast.
Then they trotted away, for the wind grew high:
One acorn they left, and no more might you spy.
Next came a Raven, that liked not such folly:
He belonged, they did say, to the witch Melancholy!

Ratcliffe points to the raven’s associations with death and darkness, likely owed to its black plumage, vocal mimicry, intelligence, and “sepulchral voice” (10). No surprise, with or without kicking Edgar Alan Poe, that Coleridge’s speaker should pointedly mention the folk associations with “melancholy” and the supernatural. Indeed there’s little here to surprise. A herd of swine feasts on acorns beneath a bountiful oak. When the pigs depart, an opportunistic solitary raven sees an opportunity and visits the now vacated spot in search of remaining spoils. Ravens are of course opportunists, and their diet includes not just carrion but also, on occasion, various seeds and berries, including acorns. So there’s some ornithological verisimilitude afoot here, despite the folklorish associations (from which the narrator distances himself and the bird).

The speaker continues his tale of this lone scavenger:
Blacker was he than blackest jet,
Flew low in the rain, and his feathers not wet.
He picked up the acorn and buried it straight
By the side of a river both deep and great.

Coleridge knows his ravens (better, certainly, than I on this point); ravens do indeed make use of food caching: “Fat, fatty meat, egg, bones, bread, dates and dung are materials which have been seen to be hidden, usually in holes or beneath stones, but sometimes in small excavations dug by the birds themselves” (Ratcliffe 95). And if ever there was a bird likely to recall the location of that cache, it is the raven (see Ratcliffe 251).

Where then did the Raven Go?
He went high and low,

Over hill, over dale, did the black Raven go.

Many Autumns, many Springs
Travelled he with wandering wings:
Many summers, many Winters—
I can’t tell half his adventures.

The narrator espies his own perceptual limit: his inability to “tell half” of what the raven has experienced (via its/his anthropomorphized “adventures”). Those “wandering wings” carry the bird beyond any human’s ken. Indeed those wings return a different raven, a descendant of the acorn-cache-maker and unwitting tree planter:

At length he came back, and with him a She
And the acorn was grown to a tall oak tree.

Hardly the same raven—whose lifespan would likely not exceed twelve years–and yet to the human fabulist it is that same “he.” It is a species or family line (raven crest) that returns, rather than an individual—eh? (That or a very fast-growing oak!)

But is all this literalism, all this reliance upon and reference to ornithology, beside the point, despite the fact that, up to this line, Coleridge’s animal poem seems to portray its raven subject quite accurately? Do such textual-biological correspondences figure in this text, as one part of its animetaphorical meaning? Or are they beyond it and extraneous to it? Let me close with an inspiring closing statement from Tim Morton’s Ecology without Nature: “Hanging out in the distance may be the surest way of relating to the nonhuman” (205). More to come.

Kurt Fosso

Synethiaphobia: that’s my Greek invention for “phobia of intimacy,” the basic feeling of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. “I fear thee ancient Mariner! / I fear thy skinny hand! (4.224–225). Nothing excites synethiaphobia more than the horrifying vulnerability of Life-in-Death. Coleridge hits the synethiaphobic bullseye in part 3.

Pleasingly, synethiaphobia contains the word ethos, which here implies being-with, ethics at the profoundest level.

The ecological thought is, I claim, anti-synethiaphobic. In Lévinas‘s language, not “allergic” to the other.

Synethiaphobia constructs boundaries between here and there, between inside and outside. Therefore, a non-synethiophobic (truly ecological) reality would not constitute a “world.” Yikes! For worlds have horizons, and thus a here and a there, an inside and an outside.

From this point of view, a lot of ecological ideology has basically been barking up the wrong tree, so to speak. (For simplicity’s sake I’ll abbreviate these forms of ideology as “environmentalism,” so be aware that this word has a special usage in my posts from now on.)

Now let’s have a think about Life-in-Death, with Judith Butler. Butler makes a case for the beginnings of a queer theory of ecology, because she shows how gender performance produces an inside vs. an outside—and those terms are fundamental for thinking the environment (what’s “around” us):

The boundary of the body as well as the distinction between internal and external is established through the ejection and transvaluation of something originally part of identity into a defiling otherness. As Iris Young has suggested in her use of Kristeva to understand sexism, homophobia, and racism, the repudiation of bodies for their sex, sexuality, and/or color is an “expulsion” followed by a “repulsion” that founds and consolidates culturally hegemonic identities along sex/race/sexuality axes of differentiation. Young’s appropriation of Kristeva shows how the operation of repulsion can consolidate “identities” founded on the instituting of the “Other” or a set of Others through exclusion and domination. What constitutes through division the “inner” and “outer” worlds of the subject is a border and boundary tenuously sustained for the purposes of social regulation and control. The boundary between the inner and outer is confounded by those excremental passages in which the inner effectively becomes outer, and this excreting function becomes, as it were, the model by which other forms of identity-differentiation are accomplished … For inner and outer worlds to remain utterly distinct, the entire surface of the body would have to achieve an impossible impermeability. This sealing of its surfaces would constitute the seamless boundary of the subject; but this enclosure would invariably be exploded by precisely that excremental filth that it fears.

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, in Vincent Leitch, ed., The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2001), 2495.

Butler is talking about gender, but she might as well be talking about the environment. If we apply her argument to ecology, we notice two things. First, human society has defined itself by excluding dirt and pollution. In an age of ecological panic and scientifically measurable risk (Ulrich Beck’s risk society), we find ourselves unable fully to endorse this exclusion, or even to believe in the world that the exclusion produces. This is literally to do with thinking about where you waste goes (excremental and otherwise).

Secondly, and perhaps even more disturbingly (because we’re now talking about ideological fantasy, and its grip on social reality), this exclusion of pollution also goes for our performance/construction of “Nature” itself. Nature is defined as pristine, wild, immediate, pure—and masculine…yes that’s right! Nature is not Woman! (More on this soon.)

In order to have subjects and objects, you have to have abjects to vomit, to spit, to excrete. Butler is using Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory of abjection, expounded in Powers of Horror.

Any theory of the environment that claims to subvert the subject–object distinction, if it doesn’t address the issue of the abject, will become simply an idealized or “new and improved” brand of Nature, which already excludes the abject.

Therefore, while we “clean up” the planet, theory should be doing precisely the opposite: lingering with defilement and pollution.

This is basically the idea of “dark ecology,” something I explore differently in Chapter 3 of Ecology without Nature.

The ecological thought and queer theory are intimate. It is not that ecological thinking would benefit from an injection of queer theory from the “outside.” It’s that, fully and properly, the ecological thought is queer theory: queer ecology.

In turn, queer theory—and queerness, for that matter—is not an ephiphenomenal blip on the most recent page of human cultural history. Nor is it a late addition to 4.5 billion years of evolution. A quick read of The Origin of Species and even more so, The Descent of Man, will convince you that life forms themselves are queer all the way down. Then if you really want to whack-a-mole the idea that humans have genders, but animals just have “sex,” there’s no need to read Donna Haraway’s work on primates (though it would help). You can pick up a copy of almost anything Richard Dawkins has done. It’s probably bad taste in some circles to say you’ve been reading Richard Dawkins but there you go, I’m a bad taste sort of a guy.

Just describing my summer reading…continental philosophy and hardcore reductionist empiricism! What a combination! Darwin is beautifully written and very easy—he designed the books to be sold in railway stations. If you really want a deconstructive good time, take a look at Dawkins’s The Extended Phenotype. It will change your sense of reality. You will no longer be able to hold holistic concepts such as “world” and “ecosystem” and you will come away with a refreshed sense of how life forms are planet Earth and how almost everything you experience is the phenomenal display of the genetic code (you think genes stop at the boundaries of the flesh?).

You want anti-essentialist performativity? Just read Darwin. Then to cap it off, study DNA—if you like, all life forms (phenotypes) are performances of DNA (the genotype). This isn’t like phenotext and genotext (Kristeva)—it is phenotext and genotext! Because genotext consists of the social and biological (and Kristeva adds “ecological”) forces that determine the text—which, at a certain level, is DNA itself. This includes the phenomena of sexual display, the engine of sexual selection. Sexual display, as opposed to the “survival of the fittest” (a phrase anxiously inserted into Darwin’s text at the behest of Wallace, who wasn’t too keen on the idea of non-utilitarian notions of evolution), accounts for a whole lot of why life forms look and act the way they do. There is no good reason for my skin color and reddish facial hair—it’s just that a few million years ago, someone thought it was sexy. It’s likely that a whole lot of how our reality looks (from houses to Coca Cola bottles) has to do with sexuality (well, duh), which has to do with performativity. No, I’m not citing Freud or Butler. I’m paraphrasing Darwin.

DNA itself is of course a text—in the strong poststructuralist sense. My uncle recently retired from his biochemistry research job. One of his discoveries was about ERV-3. (You can find it in Virology 196 at sciencedirect.com or PubMed if your university has that database). Your DNA contains 98% chimp DNA (we know that), 35% daffodil DNA (Wordsworth eat your heart out), and on and on—but it doesn’t stop there. The DNA also contains viral and plasmid insertions so that it’s impossible, even at that level, to identify which part of the code is “host” and which part is “parasite” (paging Hillis Miller…). ERV-3, otherwise known as Endogenous Retrovirus 3, does interesting things. For one, it appears to code for a protein that enhances the immunosuppressive properties of the placental barrier. So it appears that you are reading this because a virus in your genes helped your mom’s placenta to operate properly. What an amazing mixture of boundaries, insides, outsides, and permeabilities, all the way down…

DNA has no flavor. There is no human-flavored DNA. There is no daffodil-flavored DNA. There is also no male-flavored DNA.

Deconstruction and queer theory have nothing to fear from biology—come on in, the water’s lovely!

So I guess what I’m saying is that queerness is installed in reality at the ontic level, at the level of substance. It’s not a sheer style of higher primate phenotypes, primates who are at the tip of a tiny arm growing out of one of the spokes on the wheel of life, which is mostly made up of “asexual” bacteria and amoebae. Any claim that nonhumans have “natural” binary sex is editing out about almost every single life form.

So how are we to read Coleridge in light of all this? Or is he just a historical artifact now, interesting in his wrongness? Is there any utopian energy still bound up in the text of The Rime? I believe there is, and that this energy has to do with intimacy, and the fear of intimacy, with other life forms, with life forms as other. (That includes you.) This “other“ is decisively not an object, but a subject—though this word may be inadequate to describe the depths of the “person.”

We could debate whether or not Coleridge is depicting a world, whose world it is, whether it’s coherent, etc. But I don’t think these questions are as powerful as the one that still seems to beckon from our own political future. This is the question of how to be-with the other life forms on this Earth.

If the terms of the debate are about whose “world” it is anyway, then I can’t get involved, because to do so would be to accept the terms—that we are living within worlds or systems that are bounded by horizons, holistically integrated, etc. Otherwise the poem becomes an interesting relic from an age when those thoughts could still be held without bad faith. Which is okay. Perhaps then I would interpret the poem as a good example of how not to do the ecological thought. But I think the poem speaks to us now, about things we are only just beginning to think.

“The Night-mare Life-in-Death was she” (3.193). An interesting syntactical inversion of “It is an Ancient Mariner” (1.1). While the Mariner’s existence precedes his identity (so to speak), here we have the reverse. It is as if the Mariner’s fantasy about Life-in-Death impedes her existence. Synethiaphobia gets in the way of intimacy. The Mariner sees her as fantasy realized, as a horrifying creature from his inner space. Woe betide anyone who appears to externalize someone’s fantasy. In this mode, love is always mortifying. Life-in-Death is a “Nightmare”—a horse that rides the night. (Another animal motif—a dream-horse, a horse-dream.) She’s a Spenserian allegorical figure, a cipher. She appears only to incarnate the Mariner’s deepest fears and wishes. Notice the tense change: “Who thicks man’s blood with cold” (3.194) The Mariner forgets that he is telling a tale, so “ghastly” is the fantasy that sill seems to stick to him, as intimately as his “skinny hand, so brown” (4.228).

Can we, dare we, read against the grain here, against the overwhelming tide of fantasy and identification? Can we push back through identity to sheer existence? To intimacy with this strangest of strangers?

~TO BE CONTINUED~

Hi Everyone.

Very kindly, Ron asked me to post a synopsis of my doings here. Writing it was very helpful.

I’m quite jazzed from having just come out of a theory class where I was teaching Althusser, so you may recognize some things Lacanian in here. But I hope I’ve made the language fairly obvious.

It was one of those happy classes when you allow yourself to think, hey, this critique thing might just be possible…

If you still want to find out more, go to my blog Ecology without Nature.

Here we go:

The ecological thought—mission statement
Timothy Morton

Think of a Rorschach blot: as well as looking like a cloud or a person, it is just a meaningless stain. Aside from content and form, texts are blobs of others’ enjoyment, literally—they are made of ink—and less literally, but still fantasy is a part of reality. Therefore reading is fundamentally coexistence with others. To read a poem is a political act, a nonviolent one. At the very least, there is an appreciation, with no particular reason, of another’s enjoyment. I would argue that (at least closely analytical) reading goes beyond mere toleration, towards a more difficult, disturbing, and potentially traumatic encounter with enjoyment—which is always “of the other,” even when it’s your own.

Reading a text is a profoundly ecological act, because ecology, at bottom, is coexistence (with others, of course), which implies interdependence. What I call the ecological thought is the thinking of this coexistence and interdependence to the fullest possible extent of which we are capable. If we are going to make it through the next few decades, we will have explored deeply the implications of coexistence.

Some of these implications are highly disturbing to “environmentalist” ideology: that we are not living in a “world”; that there is no Nature; that holism is untenable; that personhood is a form of artificial intelligence; that ecology is queer down to the genomic level, and so on. These highly counterintuitive conclusions are forced on us by the ecological thought itself, which is thinking coexistence, coexistence as thinking.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is about reading as coexistence beyond mere toleration. On many levels, it presents ecological coexistence as a theme. At its most profound, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner forces us to coexist with coexistence itself, with the meaningless distortion of the real. It is a poem whose reading helps us to think the ecological thought. My blogging here is a contribution to this project. I am finishing a book called The Ecological Thought in which I explore these issues in a different way.

Hi, hey, hulloo, hello, and hail…

Kurt Fosso’s recent posting got me thinking about the gloss of the Rime. There may be several ways of reading Coleridge’s frequent glosses and frames. There’s the possibility of a sort of “naive-sophisticated” frame—maybe we should call it Level 1—where the frame says, in effect, “What you are about to read is made up.” (This may be Mike Wiley’s hypothesis about the raven poem—hi Mike!) Then there’s a Level 2 frame, which uses the effect of Level 1 in a paradoxical way, to disinhibit the reader: “Don’t worry, this is just a fiction.” Then I guess there’s Level 3, where Levels 1 and 2 are used to create an “impossible” subject position that combines utter literalness and aesthetic distance. Level 3 frames are popular in horror movies, where the director or other spokesperson says “Warning! This is going to be horrific,” and then it is. This seems to combine Level 2 and Level 1 frames. Something like Level 2 (if not 3) happens in “Kubla Khan” when STC says “Don’t worry, this isn’t really a poem, just a psychological curiosity, a sort of brain scan.” Weave a circle round the poem thrice, as it were…

Question: are animals and irony always on opposite poles? Wouldn’t this reproduce the human–nonhuman boundary? Animals = authenticity, irony = humanity…?

I’m not sure exactly how the gloss works yet regarding our ecological theme, but I have some ideas, thanks to Kurt, which I’ll try to post.

On the subject of animal-poems, animal-as-poem, etc., there’s Ted Hughes’s “The Thought-Fox,” which makes a big deal of this metaphor. Heideggerian readers can knock themselves out on line 1: “I imagine this midnight moment’s forest.”

I started another blog dealing with philosophical, scientific, political, and aesthetic issues on ecology. It’s called Ecology without Nature. All comers welcome. It features a link to a talk I gave recently on cognition and poetry (and their environmental implications).

As I thought about where we are with this reading of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, I started to think about the poem’s use of the word “ghastly.”

Here’s our dictionary again:

OED “ghastly,” a. 1. a. In early use: Causing terror, terrible (obs.). In mod. use (cf. 2): Suggestive of the kind of horror evoked by the sight of death or carnage; horrible, frightful, shocking.
b. colloq. Said hyperbolically of persons or things objectionable on various grounds: Shocking, ‘frightful’.
2. a. (Influenced by GHOST: cf. quot. 1711.) Like a spectre, or a dead body; death-like, pale, wan. Of light: Lurid.
b. of a smile, a grin. [Hello, I say to myself...]
c. said of immaterial things.
3. Full of fear, inspired by fear. Obs.

If ecology doesn’t speak about ghosts, it loses a crucial dimension of reality. The psychic dimension is not an optional component.

If at bottom the ecological thought is the (traumatic) encounter with the strange stranger, then ecology is uncanny all the way down. This intuition is confirmed by a brief study of Freud’s essay “The Uncanny,” in which he makes potent references to experiences of being in an environment—lost in winding streets, lost in a forest. (Robert Smith eat your heart out.)

Where Coleridge’s poem reaches its most “supernatural,” in its excess over the natural, is precisely where we find the ecological. Recursively, the Mariner talks of his telling:

“Oh shrieve me, shrieve me, holy man!”
The Hermit crossed his brow.
“Say quick,” quoth he, “I bid thee say—
What manner of man art thou?”

Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched
With a woful agony,
Which forced me to begin my tale;
And then it left me free.

Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.

I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.
(Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 7.574–590)

It is precisely when the Mariner talks of his uncanny compulsion to repeat that we glimpse the ecological dimension of his tale’s very form. This form comes again and again, like a viral code. Isn’t that the disturbing thing about nature—that it keeps on going, and going, and going, like the Energizer Bunny?

Yet what we habitually call “nature” seems to be sandwiched between a bottom level that is pure automatic self-replication (the genome); and a top level that is also curiously repetitive—the psychic. It is as if when we speak of “nature” we edit out these viral levels. Both levels are “ghastly,” since this word names both flesh and immaterial things. This ghastliness is both alive and dead at once—I’m tempted to say undead. A “ghastly” light is lurid—death-colored and wan, or glowing with too much life.

The tale itself is a “selfish meme” that takes over the poor body of the Mariner. Isn’t that the minimum definition of a psyche—an alien force that possesses us, makes us do its bidding? Isn’t the psyche itself a kind of partial object that takes the body over and dominates it?

And isn’t this the truth of the “selfish gene,” too—that life forms and their environments (which they co-create and co-sustain) are basically vehicles for gene propagation? So from the gene’s and from the psyche’s points of view, we are the same—we are zombies, living dead.

So the tale, portrayed here as a kind of vomit that grips the Mariner from the inside until he ejects it—or even as viral DNA whose vector is the Mariner’s speech—marvelously combines both genomic and “memetic” levels.

This would be true of the title of the tale itself. “Rime” is rhyme, and hoar-frost (OED, “rime,” n1.1, n.2.a.). Like rime, viruses are basically gigantic, monstrous crystals. The moon in the sky in part 4 “bemocked the sultry main / Like April hoar-frost spread” (4.267–268). It is as if, like a crystal, the viral structure appears to repeat at different levels of the text.

(Actually, “rime” n.3 is Old English for number, or reckoning. We are dealing with iteration, with mathematical structures—crystals and rhymes, and viruses. And thus with the possibility of iterations that don’t stop—with infinity. See the Infinite Interlude.)

A “ghastly” tale indeed (7.584), a tale of animated bodies, a “ghastly crew” (5.340). These are not souls that consist of some ethereal substance from beyond “this side” of reality. Instead, we witness souls as ghasts, as specters—as a disturbing distortion of this side itself. The “Christian soul” which the sailors perversely impute to the Albatross is the second of these “ghasts”—the first being the Mariner himself.

Wordsworth criticized the poem for having a wholly passive protagonist. Yet it is this very passivity that shows us the zero degree of ecological being, which is irreducibly a being-with. And a bisection of living tissue by these monstrous, replicating hosts—genome and psyche.

The ghastly intimate, yet external—extimate—quality of the tale appears in the face of Life-in-Death, “that woman” from the “spectre-bark” (3.189, 3.202). She emerges from a distance, not out of a beyond, for she exists on this side of reality. That’s what’s so disturbing about her. As the Mariner watches the “speck” of the “spectre” ship growing ever closer, it’s like looking down a microscope at an “animalcule” that gets ever bigger as the magnification increases; peering with irresistible fascination at a squirming life form, its cilia wafting “Like restless gossameres” (3.184). The death ship is already within the Mariner’s field of vision. It does not appear out of nowhere, but is simply there when the Mariner looks westwards. There like he is: “It is an ancient Mariner” (1.1).

On one level, then, the “spectre” ship and its crew are the gaze of science, looking back at us from the point of view of the object of science itself. This code becomes very explicit in Frankenstein. It’s not the content, but the authoritarian coldness, of scientific discourse, which the ecological thought must melt. Life-in-Death “thicks man’s blood with cold” (3.194).

Life-in-Death is not a figure of horrifying power, but of horrifying vulnerability. She is both psyche, pure appearance—red lips, yellow locks and all—and infected flesh—“Her skin was white as leprosy” (3.192)—naturally we expect skin as white as snow, or something. She is an animated doll, and fantasy realized in the external realm, a nightmare. It would not be hard to dismiss her as a misogynistic cartoon of Phallic Woman.

Yet this dismissal would miss her vulnerability, her passivity (yes, her cartoon-like, puppet-like appearance), which is precisely what is so disturbing about her. After all, she is casting dice for the souls of the crew, which implies that she might lose. Life-in-Death is a bacterial Cinderella, and isn’t Cinderella’s passivity also what disturbs?Like the Mariner himself, then, whom the Wedding Guest starts to dread with his “skinny hand” and deathly appearance (4.224–227).

Life-in-Death is a being from our inner space, yet also from external, extra-psychic space. It is as if the poem is daring us to eject her, to vomit at the sight of her. She is no petrifying Medusa.

Life-in-Death’s very face appears eaten away by disease. Not that we know for sure that the face is indeed diseased. Very skillfully, and economically, Coleridge superimposes pure feminine appearance (“As white as”) and the self-replicating, asexual subroutines of deadly infection (“As white as leprosy”). Above all, Life-in-Death is a face, a face in all its terrifying carnality. This is the face of undead life, of life as undead. The face of a psyche, and the face of viral replication. Not a cute Disney “animal” face. A strange stranger face.

What a gift this face is for the ecological thought!

Can we possibly listen to this face, talk with it, coexist with it? In a softer key, part 4 encourages us to think about lingering with disgusting beings. Can we linger here, at the palpitating heart of the nightmare?

What we need to examine is the pornographic “cold” with which Life-in-Death “thicks man’s blood” (3.194)—it is precisely the reaction of the masculine subject to this exposed, vulnerable being that is the problem. This is a poem about phobia and intimacy, intimacy-phobia.

The ecological thought consists in a progressive coming to terms with abjection, disgust and grief. And with the zero degree of life as monstrous, random replication.

In fact, rather wonderfully, the theoretical framework of the ecological thought replicates the “top” and “bottom” levels of “life”—the viral and the psychic. It’s a strange brew of life sciences and Lévinas, Dawkins and Derrida.

With its witches’ oils (part 2) and its water snakes (part 4), the Rime approaches, then backs away from, the frontal horror of Life-in-Death. Let’s linger with her face some more, in the next installment. For the encounter with the strange stranger is exactly this encounter with a nightmarish, inconsistent, incomplete being that gives the lie to metaphysical terms such as “organism,” “life form,” “mind,” and “person.”