Nature Poetry After Nature I: Fresno Pastoral

In this series of three posts, I'm going to make into a kind of weird serial an informal talk I gave at Marymount University on Friday, September 25, 2015. The task was to talk about my new thinking about ecological poetics for a general audience of parents, students, and faculty. I'm grateful to Eric Norton for the chance to think through some of the largest questions of my next project in a personal way, and to Tonya Howe, Sarah H. Ficke, and others for the exciting conversations during and after my somewhat unorthodox -- because biographical -- presentation. These posts are modified, and expanded, from the oral presentation I gave.

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I.

I start this series of posts in a personal way, speaking about memory and about commitments, because as I've tried to say in other places, I think commitments are ultimately where criticism begins. One unstated suggestion of this post is that we might do well to acknowledge as much.

The image below shows my grandmother's house in Fresno, California. I didn't live there and it was never my house. But my brother and sister and I spent much time there growing up and so I associate it with our childhoods. After I left Fresno for college, and after I'd lived in New York, Durham, St. Paul, and now Washington DC, these associations have become stronger. I like this image because it's how I recall the place: a regular house, not fancy, showing the seams of its age but in some inextinguishable way alive: the blast of red from the camellia in the front, the daffodils, the Meyer lemon tree peeking from the right-hand wall, the whole place charged with an electric green. 

​The barn at the right is about 15 miles from my grandmother's place --we called her Noni-- in what used to be outside of town: Sanger, California. It belonged to my Uncle Ernie, the main structure on his small-plot farm; we'd go out there sometimes and climb on haybales, shoot things with BB guns, pick oranges. Once he taught me how to hold down sheep with my knee so you could shear them. It's hard; they squirm. This farm was an important place for my sister and brother and me: more significant in retrospect, perhaps, than it may even have been at the time.

You can see my Great Uncle Ernie in the image below, from 1979, when I was three years old. That's me touching the calf. I have a copy of this photo framed in my office and I stare at it sometimes, because I've always thought of it as a picture of what it looks like to touch new knowledge. In my most lachrymose and retrospective modes, the photo captures, for me, something like openness to new experience, to nonhuman life and the dignity of it, and even perhaps (if you can excuse some sentimentalism now) to the idea of care itself. Here’s it’s care from my Uncle toward me, of course --see how his left hand wraps around my entire arm, protecting me with one hand, leading me with the other. But also the care of both of us toward the haunches of this unknown being, whose body doesn't even fit into the frame.  It's hard not to see the strength of my Uncle's arms, the paleness of mine, and the calf, only half in the picture, escaping or indifferent to us. That animal --again, in my most melodramatic reading--represents something like otherness itself: a beyond to experience that I am here being shepherded –the word's no accident– to bring within the realm of my understanding.  

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​Only later would I come to realize that my idealized memories about the farm in Sanger conformed to an entirely formulaic way of thinking about modern experience. In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams canonically glosses it this way:

On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved centre: of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation. A contrast between the country and the city, as fundamental ways of life, reaches back into classical times. (C&C 1)

Clichés, okay, but powerful ones. Of course Williams also helped me realize that these memories conformed not just to a long history of differential thinking about the countryside, but also to a specific set of poetic tropes --the pastoral-- and to the whole history of instrumentalizing formulas about rural life gathered under that name. 

Despite being about farms, pastures, shepherds and nymphs, the pastoral is an urban mode, where the sophisticated urban dweller idealizes, even imagines into being a rustic other to his own fallen world. The urbanite formulates pure and idyllic scenes, laced by trees, moist with dew, to work as a counterpoint to his (he thinks) degraded life in modernity. Thus imagined, the pastoral is a mode of condescending self-regard by which the complex views the simple under a dispensation of loss (William Empson's definition); in Williams' words, pastoral shows carefully "selected images" of rural life in which people and things exist "not in a living but an enamelled world" (C & C 18). Here they're literally enamelled, colored in sepia: lacquered into a melancholic significance that I somehow, even knowing all this, can't shake off. 

An idealization, then: a kind of false consciousness about “nature” that’s only ever really about culture. I won’t dwell on the problems of this formulation, its reductiveness, even violence toward the scenes and people it depicts. Instead, and against this ideological reading, I want to hang with this memory for now, clichéd as it might be: to linger on this photo of myself engaging with the counter-urban world -- call it nature -- that continues to transfix me, a natural world free from contamination by modernity that in a very precise sense no longer exists, if it ever did.

I recently realized that his picture was taken just four months after the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster in Pennsylvania, half a world away. That event was just one moment --there were many others-- that helped crush definitively any idyllic notion that something like "nature" continued to exist outside of human influence, as invisible radioactive particles either seeped or did not into the tissues and soils and water surrounding those melted reactors. As C.K. Williams writes in his poem about the event, "Tar": 

However much we didn’t want to, however little we would do about it, we’d understood:
we were going to perish of all this, if not now, then soon, if not soon, then someday.

A premonition of death, then. I remember, under the pressure of this, the pools of tractor oil shining in the sunlight at Uncle Ernie's, the cans of pesticide abandoned in dark corners of outbuildings. Coffee cans full of greased machine parts. Uncle Ernie owned a small farm on the East Side of Fresno; my mom's father, Harold Solomon, sold seed on Fresno's West Side, played cards with farmers, and drank with them in roadside places where you marked a line on the bottle when you started and then another when you finished and settled up based on how far you'd gone toward the bottom. Neither is alive now. The idealized recollection of a simple life.  Under a dispensation of loss. 

Turning away from that world, my dad had moved to the City, in Williams' sense, but also to the City-- San Francisco. He'd been a liberal arts major, at St. Mary’s college in Moraga California; this was Berkeley in the late 60s, a place "of learning, communication, light," and in between overnight shifts in a parking garage he found time somehow to major in English and philosophy. When I was a kid, his books from that time sat on a shelf in my room --he’d given them to me-- and spanned across my adolescence in a bright but used-looking series of obscure titles, knowledge itself.  

Here’s one of those objects.  It's Aaron’s Rod, by D.H. Lawrence, which follows in a thinly altered autobiographical way a coal miner and labor organizer who longs to play the flute. In the 60's this book was about social conformity and the ambition toward art, but it's hard not to see today that it is also a novel about the extraction of fossil fuels, and the intimate relationship of this rapacious money-getting to the demolition of human life itself.  

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They were mysterious to me, these books, and represented something bigger: a life elsewhere, beyond; something permanent. I wanted to know what was inside them.  When I did look inside them I found things like this, at right: my father’s annotations, his notes, in a crazy scrawl I can still barely read. These were cryptic notations of mental process, an archive of the smartest person I believed I had ever met in the process of thought.  

In his copy of Aaron's Rod my dad underlined this passage: 

“Reckon it as you like, it’s money on both sides. It’s money we live for, and money is what our lives is worth – nothing else. Money we live for, and money we are when we’re dead: that or nothing. An’ it’s money as is between the masters and us. There’s a few educated ones got hold of one end of the rope, and all the lot of us hanging on to th’ other end, an’ we s’ll go on pulling our guts out, time in, time out –“ (16)
 
I am quite sure that this is ironic underlining: Aaron’s philosophy -- he’s a union organizer in a coal mine-- is a way of bleakly facing down a world organized against his own flourishing. Lessons like this stuck with me, and pushed me to want to generate my own sense of how philosophy and literature might be put toward the struggle Aaron describes here, the old antagonism, as Lawrence has it here, between masters and us. The question became how the “educated ones” Lawrence's hero sees as his enemies might aim for something better than dangling other people on a string, pulling their guts out -- how an education could open you up to a worldview that was more like the flute and less like the coal mine: a way of thinking where something more than money is, as Aaron puts it, “what we live for.”

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​Spurred by this other sort of encounter with the new, I left for college to major in English. I landed at Vassar, but since the biographical portion of this essay is now coming to a close, I will only say that it was beautiful, strange, and full of people I didn’t understand. East coast people.  It was in Poughkeepsie, the industrial center of the Hudson Valley, which I've come to learn was a center of nineteenth century industrial pollution, a generalized contamination slower and more dissipated but no less catastrophic, in its way, than Three Mile Island. In the booming heyday of the nineteenth century, this industrial town --located on an important railway line and shipping route, not far from New York City-- had air that was black with soot from breweries and paper mills, factories fired by the very kind of coal Lawrence's hero (or his ancestors) was busy extracting in England. Money was made, lots of it: Matthew Vassar's coal-fired brewery built the college I flew off to after my senior year of high school.

I want to shift toward the real topic of these posts, and into the second post of this series, by sharing the strange fact that Vassar’s most famous tree -- planted probably before its founding in 1867-- is a London Plane.  

You can see it below in a promotional-type image of this beautiful campus. Hybridized in London around 1645, roughly the same time London switched from being a woodburning city to a coal burning one, thus becoming the first fossil-fuel society in history, the London Plane was particularly adapted to the atmospheric conditions of the early Anthropocene. A hybrid of two kinds of tree, it would become a favorite of urban planners in England and the industrial areas of the U.S. because it was “particularly resistant to pollution," capable of withstanding London's "great stinking fogs," yellow-brown and toxic, that decimated trees and killed no fewer than 4,000 people in a single 5-day period as late as 1952 (Brimblecombe 124). It worked in America, too, and U.S. city planners became fans of the tree for its capacity to withstand the most hellish doses of industrial pollutants: the smoke that, as Rebecca Harding Davis wrote of another industrial city in 1861, four years before Vassar's founding,

rolls sullenly in slow folds from the great chimneys of the iron-foundries, and settles down in black, slimy pools on the muddy streets. Smoke on the wharves, smoke on the dingy boats, on the yellow river,—clinging in a coating of greasy soot to the house-front, the two faded poplars, the faces of the passers-by.

London Planes could live through it. This means that my own college was built with environmental catastrophe in mind. Unknown to me, in other words, my entire education unfolded under the sign of environmental disaster. I learned to think in the shadow of ecocide.

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In the next post, "Storm Clouds of the Long Nineteenth Century," I shift -- at last -- away from my own biography to sketch a brief history of ecological catastrophe and show how poems by Matthew Arnold and Jorie Graham generated effects to engage with it.