Romanticism & Ecology

"Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" as an Ambient Poem; a Study of a Dialectical Image; with Some Remarks on Coleridge and Wordsworth

Timothy Morton, University of Colorado at Boulder

Notes

1  See William H. Galperin, The Return of the Visible.
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2  One of the most suggestive formulations is Elizabeth Fay's: "If William's picturesque belongs to the valley and bower, the sacred grove is where he situates the meeting of the picturesque and the beautiful with the sublime, a meeting that transmutes the feminine into the transcendent and brings the masculine sublimity of mountains home to pasture" (184).
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3   For a discussion of the significance of Sappho in the Romantic period, see McGann 94-116.
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4   "You may also find it interesting that Shinichi Suzuki advocates Mozart's Variations on 'Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star' as the first piece a child should learn in the Suzuki Method of musical training, which he theorizes as a form of language acquisition" (Nota bene from Melissa Sites, text editor of 'Romanticism and Ecology,' to the author).
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5   In general, the seventh chapter of Looking Awry is a sustained analysis of the rhetoric and politics of the sinthome. The term is a pun on the St. Thomas, who had to insert his fingers into the gaping wound in the side of the risen Christ, who had returned to convince Thomas of His reality. For Lacan, the sinthome is neither symptom nor fantasy but "the point marking the dimension of 'what is in the subject more than himself' and what he therefore 'loves more than himself'" (Zizek, Looking Awry 132)
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6  This would square well with the vaginal connotations of the sinthome, in patriarchy a wound that is also a space. See Zizek's discussion of Ridley Scott's film Alien (Sublime Object 79). It also squares with Lacan's view of subjecthood as a hole in the real caused by the removal of a "little bit" of it, that nevertheless results in the framing of reality (see Jacques-Alain Miller's explanation in Zizek, Looking Awry 94-5).
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7  I am grateful to Jeremy Braddock for discussing this with me.
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8  The allusion is to Spenser's Colin Clouts Come Home Again, 281-83, 245-48—"pleasant lea"; "Triton blowing loud his wreathed borne"; "coming from the sea" alludes to Paradise Lost iii.603-604, "call up unbound / In various shapes old Proteus from the sea" (Wordsworth, Poems 411).
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9  "Le fond de cette gorge, à la forme complexe, insituable, qui en fait aussi bien l' objet primitif par excellence, l' abîme de l' organe féminin" ("Rêve," 196).
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10  In particular, consider the following: "Insofar as it is not anchored to a specific source, localized in a specific place, the voix acousmatique functions as a threat that lurks everywhere . . . its free-floating presence is the all-pervasive presence of a nonsubjectivized object, i.e., of a voice-object without support in a subject serving as its source. It is in this way that déacousmatisation [the linkage of an acousmatic voice with a subject] equals subjectivization" (Zizek, Looking Awry 127).
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11  I have omitted the prose between lines 2 and 3.
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12   Heidegger's term is Zuhandenheit.
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13   Sartre's view of woman/sex as a "hole" (613-4) is relevant to the earlier discussion of space as invaginated sinthome (see note 5). For parallels between Romantic and existential disgust, see Denise Gigante, "After Taste: The Aesthetics of Romantic Eating."
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14   See for example Paradise Lost, 3.588-90 (where Satan is reduced to a figure seen through a telescope), 8.153-8 (where humans are viewed as not the only inhabitants of the cosmos).
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15   This is something of an evocation of the hellish ambience of the city, as noted in Benjamin's study of nineteenth-century representations of Paris (10). Benjamin was fond of Percy Shelley's Peter Bell the Third in this regard (370, 449-50).
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16   In Hartman's haunting phrase, "we call peace what is really desolation" (191). See Freud 30-1, 47, 67, 76 (on the "Nirvana" principle).
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17   For Marx, "classical political economy is interested only in contents concealed behind the commodity-form, which is why it cannot explain the true secret, not the secret behind the form but the secret of this form itself" (Zizek, Sublime Object 15). Malcolm Bull's very suggestive subversion of Nietzsche offers a view of "totalized" society that contains all those species that Nietzsche would categorize as "subhuman." Wordsworthian negative ecology would not, for Bull, be negative enough: it is far from philistine and thus subject to Nietzsche's nihilistic valuation of value itself.
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18   Rosalind Krauss has recently argued that this kind of "horizontality" is a feature of abstract expressionist visual art (Bois and Krauss 93-103). Evidently Wordsworth was very interested in such effects in the literature of an earlier moment of the avant-garde; compare the way in which the narrator in "Tintern Abbey" wishes to connect the landscape with "the quiet of the sky" (8) in a view that first, unlike the picturesque is radically "inside" its own frame, and secondly undoes the difference between horizontal and vertical that Krauss names as establishing a difference between human and animal, and is caught up in the commodity ism of paintings themselves (hung vertically in galleries).
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19   Robinson declares of the lines "This City now doth like a garment wear / The beauty of the morning": "Essentially Thomsonian, the line (and poem) personifies the city in order to allow variety to be absorbed by the beautifying feminizing unifying perspective of the composed and composing meditation" (100).
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20   Convolute J on Baudelaire (231): "From the eighth section of Baudelaire's 'Salon de 1859.' There one finds, apropos of Meryon, this phrase: 'the profound and complex charm of a capital city which has grown old and worn in the glories and tribulations of life.' A little further on: 'I have rarely seen the natural solemnity of an immense city more poetically reproduced. Those majestic accumulations of stone; those spires "whose fingers point to heaven"; those obelisks of industry, spewing forth their conglomerations of smoke against the firmament; those prodigies of scaffolding 'round buildings under repair, applying their openwork architecture, so paradoxically beautiful, upon architecture's solid body; that tumultuous sky, charged with anger and spite; those limitless perspectives, only increased by the thought of all the drama they contain;—he forgot not one of the complex elements which go to make up the painful and glorious décor of civilization . . . . But a cruel demon has touched M. Meryon's brain . . . . And from that moment we have never ceased waiting anxiously for some consoling news of this singular naval officer who in one short day turned into a mighty artist, and who bade farewell to the ocean's solemn adventures in order to paint the gloomy majesty of this most disquieting of capitals.' Cited in Gustave Geoffroy, Charles Meryon (Paris, 1926), pp. 125-126. Note 10 : 'The phrase "those spires 'whose fingers point to heaven'" (montrant du doigt le ciel), translates a line from Wordsworth's poem 'The Excursion' (book 6, line 19), itself a citation from Coleridge." Surely the antecedent of this figure is "Composed upon Westminster Bridge" (968), but it is more radical than the vertical fingers, indicating not a world of life-forms but a transcendental, theistic realm.
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21   In the second chapter of The Fateful Question of Culture, Hartman very eloquently establishes what for him is the necessarily phantom nature of this longing—its embodiment, for Hartman, would precipitate disaster. But to make this phantom transcendent would in a sense be to locate it. This is quite the opposite of what we are trying to establish: the figuration of "here" without location.
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22   Readers intrigued by Ronell's linkage of technology and schizophrenia in the figure of distant speech (in this essay, acousmatic speech), may be interested to know that researchers at the University of Colorado have recently discovered a receptor in the hypothalamus (in the brain) that is sensitive to the difference between foreground and background noise. When this receptor malfunctions, people are unable to distinguish between foreground (meaningful) sound (for example, speech) and ambient sound; hence the schizophrenic phenomenon of hearing voices in radiators, car engines, animals. . .
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23   When exploring the radically new environment of the space and moon, the first words between the American astronauts and Houston were phatic: "You can go ahead with the TV now, we're standing by . . . ." This explains the popularity in contemporary ambient electronic music of samples from radio talk shows ("Hello, you're on the air"), scanned telephone conversations and other phatic phenomena.
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