Romantic Circles Blog

The invitation to do this blog made me discover several things. One—I love blogging! Two—how great to discuss things with others in slow motion, with careful reading and quiet writing, from the comfort of my introverted indoor space. Kurt and Ash, Ron and Steve, and our readers and commenters, thank you all so much.

Another thing I learnt, as I struggled with blogging form: We owe it to non-humanities people to express our ideas in a way with which they can engage.

Ecological criticism is one mode in which we can do this, easily.

That doesn’t mean dumbing down our arguments. It simply means being able to say them in a language that isn’t an insider discourse. I very nearly said “jargon”—yikes!

I’m averse to “the jargon of authenticity.” Ecocriticism is full of it. I want to make it safe to think ecology and think theory together, simultaneously.

I know what Kurt means. Yet, even though the right might use a “there is no nature” argument to support “drill, baby, drill,” we still owe it to people to tell them what we think is true. I don’t think there is a nature. I don’t think there ever was a nature. Capitalism didn’t destroy it. You can’t destroy something that doesn’t exist. But capitalism certainly seems to be waging an unrelening war against lifeforms and the biosphere.

I believe we can explain this to people in a way that is as profound and disturbing as the best deconstruction, but in a way that non-scholars will get.

I also think we should be in the business of setting the scientific experimental agenda. Here’s one for starters, with profound ecological consequences:

Is consciousness intentional?

You can read more about that one in The Ecological Thought when it comes out in 2009.

Who would like to start a web page where humanities scholars suggest experiments that don’t automatically assume ideological things about reality?

“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. )

In Ecology without Nature I argued that it was the very idea of Nature itself that posed an obstacle to ecological thinking and praxis. Nature has recently received various upgrades, for example in the form of ecophenomenology, which insists that we are embedded (like Iraq War reporters) in a lifeworld. This language comes from Heidegger.

If the ecological thought is to tunnel back behind Heidegger, it must encounter the thinking of Emmanuel Lévinas.

Lévinas argues that below Being, beyond essence, closer than breathing, is the proximity of the really other other, the strange stranger in the language of The Ecological Thought. Unnameable as such, yet still palpable as an excess or “lapse” within the ontological order of things, is “the face,” Lévinas’s word for the strange stranger as we encounter her, or him, or it. Our very being is both subtended and interrupted by the face of the other, who stands destitute before us and before whom we too are destitute. Sadder and wiser.

In Otherwise than Being, Lévinas declares that the face is “the collapse of phenomenality,” in that it is “too weak” and “less than a phenomenon” (88). The face of the neighbor causes “the human” to “shudder” (87). The asymmetrical contact between us and the face causes us to revert “from grasping to being grasped, like in the ambiguity of a kiss” (80). More passive than inertia, this contact is “an inversion of the conatus [Spinoza's word for the will to live] of esse” (75). It is “not an extrapolation of the finite, or the invisible taken to be behind the visible” (154). It is on this side, “a hither side of the here” (180). This would be an encounter that did not take place within a lifeworld. A non-holistic reality where my obligation subverts the creation of worlds, with their insides and outsides, their included and excluded. Where identity was not—where personhood and phenomenality were less than you expected.

Is this not the shuddering of the Wedding Guest before the Mariner?

But is it not also the shuddering of the Mariner before Life-in-Death, a face consumed with leprosy?

And might it contain an encounter with the sheer existence existing things—“a thousand thousand slimy things” as the Mariner says (4.238)? This existence, which includes the Mariner’s own “liv[ing] on” (4.238). Might this ecological “element” in which we are immersed also be visible in the disturbed and disturbing face of the other? And is the ecological thought therefore a coexistence with coexistence itself (and with coexistents, as it were)? Lévinas grants this possibility when he asserts that the “absurd” there is (his phrase for sheer existence) can be “a modality of being-for-the-other” (164). In fact, you need the “weight” of this existence for alterity to go beyond essence (164). Lévinas himself opens the possibility that the there is with its incessant “splashing” (140) might be the face itself, as if the face were glimpsed obliquely, that nothing truly separates background from foreground, just a “strange distortion” (Shelley).

Something like this happens in The Triumph of Life, when in an Arcimboldo moment, a root twists into the face of Rousseau. And it happens in Frankenstein, when a creature made of pieces of animals and human corpses rises up to embrace its terrified maker.

Isn’t this the horror of Life-in-Death? The gentleness and ambiguity of her threat to essence? Her existence is ambiguity in all its fullness. She does nothing, really. She merely appears; she casts dice; she speaks, and whistles. Her face rots away. She floats on the sea, space of nomads, pirates, traders, gamblers, not tied to the State, beyond the law. She is as passive as the Mariner. It is finally her passivity that disturbs. We behold her; we are beholden to her.

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.”

We hailed it in God’s name.

(Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1.66)

We made it! And, as you probably guessed, we’re going to look at the various significances of “hailing,” not to mention “in God’s name.” This means getting busy with Heidegger and Lévinas.

Note that the Albatross is still an “it.” (See my previous posts for analysis.)

On the shelf above my computer a printout from the Oxford English Dictionary has been sitting since February 2005. It’s a printout concerning the word “Hello.” Yes, I’ve been meaning to think this through for three and a half years! Thank you, Romantic Circles!

Here’s the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary: “An exclamation to call attention; also expressing some degree of surprise, as on meeting any one unexpectedly.”

The dictionary continues:

A. as int. a. Also as a greeting. [Earliest citation 1883. Earliest citations are given in brackets below.]

b. Used as an answer to a telephone call. [1892]

B. as n. [1897]

Hence hello v., to shout hello!” [1895]

Things have changed somewhat in the new online edition. For a start, citations have been pushed back to around the time of the second version of our poem! The sense of “hello” as a greeting was emerging while Coleridge was refashioning The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

A. int.

1. Used as a greeting. Also in extended use. [1827]

2. Used to attract attention. [1833] [In the Althusserian sense: as when a police officer in an British comedy says “Allo, allo, allo! What's all this then?”] [“Hi” has something of this resonance]

3. Used to express surprise or to register an unexpected turn of events. [1838]

4. Used to answer a telephone call. [1877]

5. colloq. (orig. U.S.). Used to imply (sometimes disbelievingly or sarcastically) that the person addressed is not paying attention, has not understood something, or has said something nonsensical or foolish. [1985] [Let's call this one the Californian hello]

B. n. An utterance of “hello”; a greeting. [1854]

Notice how the definitions are assigned discrete numbers (five of them), as if the new dictionary were giving up on trying to explore the meaning of the word deeply. The telephone-answering “hello” is now sense A.4. rather than sense A.b. The sense that was given a place at the top of the hierarchy in the second edition (“An exclamation to call attention…”) is now assigned position A.2., and the dictionary gives no overall sense. Notice also the frequent “Used to”s—it’s as if the dictionary is backing off defining words.

Is this a function of our neighbor-(in)tolerant, postmodern-totalitarian world? I would like to see whether these features—replacing metaphorical hierarchy with metonymic lists, giving up on an “umbrella” definition at the top of a hierarchy, and referring to English as if it were spoken by some exotic subject of anthropological research (all the “used to”s)—are widespread in the new dictionary. Isn’t this seeming backing-away from hierarchy, from saying what you think, urgently recursive in the case of “hello,” the very word we insert so casually into every interaction to welcome, to start communicating, to hail the other?

Don’t we lose the richness of the second edition’s definition—this is no lament for a lost presence, but in a way, for a lost absence, for a lost sense of the unexpected: “An exclamation to call attention; also expressing some degree of surprise, as on meeting any one unexpectedly.” The very phrasing here enacts the surprise it’s describing. There’s the pause that turns out to be a slightly negative “moreover“; a tentative approach to the existence of an other; the final encounter with “any one.”

We shall shortly find these issues key to the ecological thought that emerges like a viral code in the lines we are interpreting.

I would like to restore to this most tritely well known part of Coleridge’s masterpiece the full weight, the gravitational field, of the profound ambivalence that marks the seemingly casual appearance of the Albatross. I believe that if we don’t account for this gravitational density, we won’t be reading the poem ecologically. It would be far too easy to claim either that the bird stands for Nature, or for Supernature. This is the black hole of the poem. The Mariner just shoots the Albatross, for no stated reason. No meaning escapes from this part. We need to respect the black holiness if we’re going read it properly. So to work.

Hel-lo! It looks like “hello” is bound up with the history of telephonics. Strangely, though, it seems telephonic before telephones, as it were. If you express surprise “on meeting any one unexpectedly,” it’s as if you are not yet talking with them, but are signaling that talking may or may not happen. It’s a word that brings into language the proximity of an other.

It’s a phatic utterance, in the language of the structuralist Roman Jakobson. It draws attention to the medium in which the message is transmitted. When you use it sarcastically, in the Californian manner, it’s as if you are pointing out some imaginary communications breakdown. I visualize someone knocking on a glass helmet, or holding a telephone away from one’s mouth and shouting “Hel-lo!”

(Phatic messages are the essence of what I call ambient poetics, which is the cornerstone of Ecology without Nature. All messages are environmental, because they encode their medium into their form. All art is, to this extent, ecological. Ecology will soon become a term like race, gender, and class, with which it is inextricably entwined in any case—a term you look for even when the supposed content of a text is not environmental per se.)

“Hello” is an etymological variant of “hallo,” which derives from “hollo” (the word in our poem), “hullo,” “hillo,” and “holla.”

Here are the definitions for the oldest variant, “hollo.”

A. int. A call to excite attention, also a shout of encouragement or exultation. [1588]

B. n. A shout of hollo! a loud shout; esp. a cry in hunting [1598] [c.f. “hey,” as in The Tempest, when Prospero and Ariel pretend to be commanding hunting dogs—“Hey Mountain, hey!” IV.1]

[“Hi” coincides with this:

?c1475 Hunt. Hare 136 Thei cryed, ‘Hy, hy!’ all at ones ‘Kyll! kyll! for kockes bownes!’ 1747 Gentl. Mag. 39 Hold, hold, 'tis a double; hark hey! bowler hye! If a thousand gainsay it, a thousand shall lye. 1847 ALB. SMITH Chr. Tadpole xxx. (1879) 267 ‘Hi!’ cried the brigand, giving the mule a bang with the butt-end of his musket. ‘Hi!’ 1886 FENN This Man's Wife II. ii, It was not a thrilling word..it was only a summonsan arrest. Hi! 1894 In Alpine Valley I. 47 Here, hi! have a cigar? 1897 Daily News 2 Oct. 3/3 A good lunch, and then hi! for the Crystal Palace.]

Hmm, hunting…hel-lo.

It is indeed in sense B. that the dictionary cites our poem:

1598 TOFTE Alba (1880) 79 But when th’ acquainted Hollow he doth heare..He leaues his flight, and backward turnes againe. 1670 Caveat to Conventiclers 4 He was no sooner seated, but he gave a lowd Hollow through the Air. 1697 tr. C’tess D’Aunoy’s Trav. (1706) 9 They set forth lowder Hollows than before, and wished me a good Journey. 1798 COLERIDGE Anc. Mar. I. xviii, The Albatross…every day for food or play, Came to the Marinere’s hollo! 1823 BYRON Age of Bronze xiii, The hounds will gather to their huntsman’s hollo.

So the conventional way to read the passage on the Albatross would be to see a progressive degradation in communication. First the bird is “hailed…in God’s name”; then it “came to the Mariners’ hollo,” like a hunting dog; then, like a hunted bird, it’s shot. It goes from lofty, almost angelic being to hunted animal in the space of a few verses. We descend from hail, to hello, to hi! Or even to oi [1936]!

It would be very easy, in this reading, to conclude that the telephonic hello had turned us away from Being, had turned us all into hunting dogs. Too easy perhaps.

Even the “hunting dog” sense of “hollo” has its ambivalence, between a call to play, and a call to return to the master. Unless play were always a simulation of hunting. Surely the bird comes “for food or play,” not to retrieve other dead birds! It is no hawk. In a sense the sailors themselves are playing, pretending that the bird is a kind of hawk. A pet. Like pretending that a rather ungainly golden retriever were a wolf. Of course the Albatross is “wild,” not “domestic.” But it’s not hawk-wild, not majestic-wild. It’s ungainly, it’s disturbingly wild. It’s “abject-wild” (more of this in a moment). Its hugeness is wonderfully captured in Mervyn Peake’s illustration of the Albatross hung about the Mariner’s neck at the end of Part 2.

Now it seems as if there is a hesitation within the word “hello” itself, a hesitation that addresses (welcomes?) the matter at hand. For you can say “hello” and be speaking to yourself—“hello, how curious…”—as if the expression of wonder at an unexpected encounter (with an other) provoked a self-reflexive version of the Californian “hel-lo”—perhaps a less sarcastic, more gentle version. As if the strange stranger (because that’s what we’re talking about) provoked a self-reflection that was decidedly not a closed loop, but an opening. Or, better, as if the self-reflection noticed that an opening was already there, as if one had cut oneself and one was looking at the wound. “Hello” is the sound of someone noticing a wound. A gentle wound, perhaps, just a “lapse in being” as Lévinas puts it. Curiouser and curiouser (Alice in Wonderland style).

Then there is the tentative “hello?” that someone utters in a dark room when they are not sure whether anyone is there or not. It’s like the echolocation of a bat or the sonar of a dolphin. This can also be a test of the medium of transmission itself, like a “ping” command to a url when you’re not sure your internet is working. This hello says “I am here” and “This is here,” at once. Interesting, therefore, that Jakobson suggested that bird cries were phatic in this sense. When a parrot parrots a human word, it’s not saying that word, it’s saying hello. There’s a wonderful ambivalence just within this hello, as if it meant “Is this a medium? Or not?” “Is this thing on?” (The saying of which might activate the realm of meaning, might indeed magically “switch it on” as it were). This is an illocutionary hello that does something in the saying of it, in its very ambivalence. “Is this on?” becomes “This is on!”

This hello, too, has its ambivalence. It appears to begin communication (that’s what Jakobson says the phatic function is for—to demarcate communication from non-communication). It’s a minimal mark, a sort of on switch. But doesn’t the on switch imply the existence of an electrical circuit, a house, a shared existence, a being together? The existence of at least one (more) person? As if the darkness itself of the dark room, the Lévinasian “night” of sheer existence, were already populated, were already a communicative field, an electrical circuit. There is already information-space. Space is already warped by language. The “third” is already in the other, waiting in the darkness, even when there’s no-one.

This (co)existence subtends and subverts easy communication, with its inside–outside system. “Hello” implies a pre-existing boundary between information and noise. An unspeakable coexistence.

And there is the “hello!” that summons, like a hunting dog, the other.

When you say hello on the phone, are you saying it in the first, second, or third sense? What kind of mixture?

When you “hail” something “in God’s name,” are you welcoming a predictable stranger into an already well established domain? Is the bird an ambassador from God’s domain, as it were, or are the sailors ambassadors for God, welcoming a foreigner to their “far countree”? The ecological irony here would be that the sailors are definitely in the albatross’s world, a hostile ecosystem. This welcome “in God’s name” would then be a colonial greeting to someone who already lived there. The bird should beware, in that case. It is already dead.

Is the hailing therefore already a kind of hunting-dog hulloo? Summoning a predictable object or tool (living or inanimate, already dead) to a predictable place? As when a car mechanic you called on your cellphone arrives on the deserted highway? “Hello! Thank God you’re here!” (Again, I find Coleridge’s poem weirdly predictive.)

For Heidegger poetry is a hailing (Heil—we can’t but help hear the resonances, hel-lo!). This hailing appears to take place in, and/or to establish, a medium, a world. There is a sheen of otherness, a shimmering of the veil as he puts it, in the theater of the Same. The curtain swishes back (hello) to reveal a world.

Now hailing positively implies a lifeworld. A Norse one at that. Like “life” and “world” themselves, “hail” has an Old English root. To salute, to wish welcome, to “hail” is a metonymy of the noun “hail,” which means a mixture of “Health, safety, welfare. In northern ME. taking the place of the native Eng. hele, HEAL” (OED, “hail,” n2.1). The origin of the word is Old Norse, “heill health, prosperity, good luck” (OED). “Heal” or “hele” is an amalgam of health, good fortune, spiritual well-being—there’s an integrated world, a horizon of meaning, a mind-body manifold that ecophenomenologists can only dream of.

Perhaps the lifeworld already had some tatters in it by the time “hail” acquired its nautical sense [1546], the sense we still use when we hail a taxi (v2.3, 4 and 4b—the latter being the one we use when we ask “where do you hail from?”). Now we’re beginning to pick up a telephonic register—a calling or summoning from afar.

(Irony: when Heidegger says that poetry makes the absence of things present, brings the farness of things near, is he not thus distorting hele and hail and heal-thiness towards its modern, telephonic sense? Take a look at Avital Ronell’s incredible The Telephone Book.)

Perhaps, however formal the hello tries to be, however much the ambassadors have prepared the party to receive their guest, there is always the trace of a radical uncertainty, effaced in the pomp and circumstance of welcome, and all the more visible in its effacement. Thus “in God’s name” strives to efface this uncertainty, to underwrite the encounter with God’s name (I can’t help thinking of the welcome to Munchkin Land in The Wizard of Oz!). It interpellates the Albatross into a theistic symbolic order, and thus functions like the police officer’s “Allo, allo, allo!”—an expression of predictable surprise, of a crime caught in the gaze of the law. Something fishy is going on in the ice.

This deep ambivalence serves in part to undo the work of “As if it had been a Christian soul.” It is as if the sailors can’t tell, or don’t want to tell, whether the bird is metaphorically or literally an emissary from God, or actually is God, emerging through the fog. To “hail it in God’s name” in this sense might be to think of it as God itself, or himself, or herself, God in person, as person: to ascribe the name of God to the Albatross itself.

For there is yet another hello—the abject hello, the hello we say when we see someone who’s already there, whom we do not like, or who does not like us. “Oh, it’s you.” Isn’t there something like this in the first line, “It is an ancient Mariner” (1.1)? He never gave us a chance to say hello. He was already there. Even though we don’t technically like or dislike him yet, his presence disgusts and disturbs us. Surely this is not the hello the sailors want to be heard when they greet the Albatross. But perhaps it haunts their hello all the same.

The abject hello is the underside of reverence, the dark, ugly side of hailing. It is what hailing tries to excrete, to maintain its reverent authority.

When we greet the strange stranger, we are embarrassed by the fact that she, he, or it is already there. In the most intimate possible sense, for our existence is coexistence. There is already less of us to go around, and less of the strange stranger. The strange stranger from the first is not an integrated being greeting another integrated being in a more or less well established medium. “Hello” will always contain a trace of an awkardness, even hostility (Derrida: “hostipitality”), which it will struggle to edit out. The smooth, easy-wipe “hello” of a computerized telephone answering system or customer service contains the echo of this awkwardness in its very smoothness.

The sailors’ joy and relief (if that is what is implied in their hailing) has an exorbitant element within it. Perhaps it is this excess enjoyment that ends up getting the bird killed. It eats their biscuit worms, shares their world, seems to guide them through the ice. Perhaps their unbearable dependency on it is precisely what provokes the shooting. Or, aware of their humiliation (the bird sees it, even plays along with it), they kill what they welcomed with such relief. We will never know.

There is perhaps an isomorphic backward glance at the end of part 2, when the “death-fires danced at night” in a sickening reel (“About, about, in reel and rout”), and the bird is hung from the ancient Mariner’s neck, another humiliation. It could be read as a phantasmagorical increase of the play and fantasy that seemed innocent in the sailors’ play with the Albatross. It gets even worse in Part 3, of course, when Death and Life-in-Death are playing for possession of the crew (“casting dice”).

One of the ways in which Nature shuns ecology is in its rejection of the queer Trickster.

The Albatross appears to have come from a beyond, but who knows? Do the sailors know? Is there not some vaguely hidden recognition that the appearance of the bird and the sailors’ joy closes off the beyond forever? That the Albatross hails not from a beyond that gives meaning to a world bounded by a horizon, but appears abruptly on this side of a radically incomplete Universe, too close for comfort?

Isn’t this how the utterly trite meaning of the Albatross, a karmic weight around your neck, a weight that is detachable from the poem, even, as if this part of the poem were itself the Albatross of the poem—isn’t this how the trite meaning captures something profoundly true? That what we are witnessing here is gravity—matter itself, pulling us, pinning us to this side of reality? The horror of fog and mist is that it abolishes the background. Suddenly everything is foreground. The lifeworld goes up in smoke. The apocalyptic curtain is drawn around the beyond. The Albatross comes out from behind the curtain of mist, from out of its endless folds—we have no idea how far it’s traveled (or not).

Isn’t this anti-Wagner art, where you get to see the curtain wafting around, where you get to see that it hides not a world, not a horizon or a beyond, but a horrifying nothingness in its folds? This is the meaningless contingency in the face of which the sailors desperately try to rig up some kind of superstitious meaning in Part 2.

We are witnessing demystification, yes, but not so that we can see the workings underneath—another kind of apocalypse, and thus another kind of mystery. We are demystified, but there also takes place an “infinitization,” a disturbing appearance of infinity on this side of things. It just “cross[es]” the ship’s path, “At length.” No fuss, no bother really—just a reminder that we’re still alive.

How do we live in this world, on this side of reality, which is ecological coexistence, so easy to negate with apocalypticism, which now itself takes ecological forms? So easy to imagine the death of humanity, mass extinction—ha, that’ll teach those Cartesians! They’ll be laughing on the other side of their face when they’re dead! Is this why we are writing ecological criticism? To increase our Schadenfreude? Aren’t we just like the sailors, humiliated when our dreams (of Nature) are disturbed, wishing not for a genuine coexistence with other beings, but for a return to sleep, to green dreams?

At length did cross an Albatross,
Thorough the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God’s name.

(Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1.63–66)

Hi again. So here we have the fateful bird, emerging from the ice and fog, from the intense, oppressive atmosphere of sheer existence. Lévinas calls this “the element.” One is immersed in it.

The ice and fog already imply coexistence of some kind. Beyond the sort of “world” that Heidegger is after, I think. Something less “handy,” less to do with a horizon of meaning (you can’t see through all that fog in any case). The ecological thought tries to think “below” Heidegger. Heidegger is where more ecological criticism bottoms out. He’s the favorite of Deep Ecology because of this. We must engage with Heidegger rather than flee, otherwise we leave things like “world“ intact—things that I claim are part of the problem. Have a read of what Slavoj Zizek says:

“what we need is an ecology without nature: the ultimate obstacle to protecting nature is the very notion of nature we rely on” (In Defense of Lost Causes, p. 445 (in a chapter on nature, in a section called “Ecology against Nature”).

The idea of being immersed in a “lifeworld” is an ideological obstacle to thinking ecologically, which is, I claim, at its most fundamental level, a radical intimacy with other beings. I discuss this in Ecology without Nature.

So here comes the Albatross, “Thorough” the fog—right the way through it, to here, to this side, as it were. Up close and personal. It does not come from some beyond “outside” the fog. It comes from within the fog. It comes from within existence itself.

Infinity it not “over there” in some beyond. It is right here, even in the fog itself. It’s one of those entities we are becoming more and more familiar with as part of the humiliation of ecology, the humiliation that brings us closer to the Earth (and literally earth). Marx, Freud, and Darwin all humiliate human beings by decentering their place. The fog stands for what I call “material infinity”—things that are profoundly hard to grasp that are on this side of reality.

In many ways, abstract infinity is easier than say 4.5 billion (the age of the Earth in years). Try to visualize 4.5 billion of anything. Life on Earth presents us with this “very large finitude.” Now put a face on life forms. Assume that they are subjects, people like you and me (or at least, bad imitations of them, like you and me). This is infinity on this side of reality. Abstract void is easier to handle than the void of another person.

This is the Albatross, the face of the fog, existence as a person (beyond “personification”), approaching us in our vulnerability. “Thorough the fog it came”—like “Out of the sea came he” (Coleridge’s description of the sun). Suddenly it’s there, still an “it” in the grammar, but also a “he” or a “she”—a person. There’s no in-between moment when the Alabtross is far away, then kind of close, then… (This will affect our reading of another figure emerging from the distance, the Death Ship of Part 3).

Coleridge is great for thinking the scary environment of now. This environment is nothing other than life forms themselves.

Stay tuned, close readers!

Hi everyone—Tim Morton here. I was asked to start blogging here on ecological issues, and I’m delighted to accept the invitation. I’m actually working on a book right now called The Ecological Thought. It’s kind of the prequel to Ecology without Nature. I mean this in a rigorous way—not just the fact that the first book implies a view that I outline more deeply in the second one. I mean that in a rigorous sense, this “ecological thought” weirdly creeps up on you from the future. The best I can compare it to is Shelley’s idea of poetry, that it’s like a shadow from the future that somehow looms into the world of the present (A Defence of Poetry). Anyway, stay tuned.

Here’s a good question for starters: am I an ecocritic? I fancy that what I’m doing is ecological literary criticism, but I’m not sure it’s ecocriticism. Already I don’t belong on this blog! Ecology without Nature argues that in order to have ecology, you have to give up Nature.

Lots of people don’t like this idea. It’s like I’m stealing their toy. I recently had an interesting conversation with Donna Haraway about it—of all people she was the very last I would have suspected of worrying about me stealing the Nature toy. But she was.

Her argument was basically about “worlding”—ideas and practices constitute “worlds” not just ideas; people do things in these worlds and create values in them, etc. (You will see if you’ve read my book that the “worlding” idea itself recursively falls prey to my “hand Nature over” gambit!) I thought of a good answer, but I was too scared to say: “The Nazis had lots of ideas, and those ideas constituted a world. If your argument is valid, we should have allowed the Nazis to have their world and should not have intervened in the Holocaust, etc.” Preserving an idea because it makes a world for you isn’t that great, I think. (Not even because it’s good or even useful, mind you.) I’m sure there was a whole wild world of witch ducking stools too.

Anyway…

I thought this blog would be a good place to do mini close readings that point the way towards the ecological thought—so expect some riffs in search of an album, some organs without bodies. First up: to whom are we speaking when we say “Hello”? (With a little help from Coleridge.)