VULGAR ERRORS/ FERAL SUBJECTS #4: A GHOST IN OUR HOUSE

 

Hello everyone, and welcome to our (slightly belated) fourth posting for Vulgar Errors/ Feral Subjects, an informal poetry workshop with a particular focus on writing (and writing through) the abject animal other.

In week three's IRL workshop, I coughed my way through some thoughts on the limits of representation, broached N/nature’s many dirty revenant survivals in the form of the ‘necropastoral’, and we discussed the ways in which a ghost could be a feral subject. I attempted to whip up some enthusiasm for Kim Hyesoon and Ariana Reines, and we might yet return to them (you have been warned).

But this week, by “popular demand”, I thought we’d start with ghosts, and the idea of ‘missingness’ or ‘absence’ and how this relates to the feral. I’m going to guess we’re all pretty familiar with the concept of ‘hauntology’, but just in case: this splendid neologism was first coined by Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Spectres of Marx. While Derrida’s specific claim is about the atemporal nature of Marxism and its tendency to ‘haunt Western society from beyond the grave’, as the term is used today it typically refers to the return or strange persistence of a variety of elements from the social or cultural past (as in the manner of a ghost). Does an extinct animal continue to exercise a powerful imaginative pull on our collective imagination? What about forms of violent and oppressive power? Are we haunted by the ghostings of colonial conquest and slavery in both material wealth and our contemporary forms of social organisation? How do we feel about the images of extinct or endangered animals, returned to us as metonyms or figures for extinction as whole? We might think about the dodo. Has the symbol assumed such a vivid and various afterlife that it actually disappears the historical violence of extinction behind a thousand kitschy signifiers? Does our cartoon, crowd-pleasing image of the dodo actually vanish the animal it purports to bring into focus?

Full disclosure, this is something I write about quite a bit, but rather than bludgeon you with my unexpurgated hot take, here is Avery Gordon, writing in Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (University of Minnesota Press, 1997):

 

What's distinctive about haunting is that it is an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known, sometimes very directly, sometimes more obliquely. I used the term haunting to describe those singular yet repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what's been in your blind spot comes into view. Haunting raises spectres, and it alters the experience of being in time, the way we separate the past, the present, and the future… (xvi)

 

Gordon, I think, is talking about trauma, which is also atemporal – even extra-temporal – living on through its traces, through its aftermath, its effects of repetition and deferral. Trauma time is recursive and hiccupping, breaking in on the ‘present’, never not happening now. A ‘ghost’ is the same: it fractures our traditional, linear conceptions of temporality. It is both ‘new’ – born of moment – and ‘from’ the past. It’s a glitch in the matrix.

 

Here's are the links to both Spectres of Marx and Ghostly Matters:

 

file:///C:/Users/onlye/Downloads/Derrida%20-%20Specters%20of%20Marx%20-%20The%20State%20of%20the%20Debt,%20the%20Work%20of%20Mourning%20and%20the%20New%20International.pdf

 

file:///C:/Users/onlye/Downloads/GHOSTLY_MATTERS_Haunting_and_the_Sociolo.pdf

 

In terms of thinking about the feral, and perhaps to start the ball rolling with our commitment to share material, I also offer something from my own current project:

 

hauntings are political. as politics itself is spectral: abusive power, oppressive yet subliminal, elided and denied. haunting is both a language for repressed social violence, and a model of experience. the ghost is that hidden thing becoming known to us. a ghost is a territory. a ghost is a calendar. those instances, says avery gordon, of ‘singular yet repetitive’ uncannying, a loss of bearings, a disruption to – and inside of – linear time and familiar place, collapsing the past and the present together. haunting is a temporal glitch. it is the impossible time of a love without object, expression or exit. broken hearted i’ll wander, broken hearted i’ll remain. trauma, which attaches to and penetrates the bodies, brains and memories of those who experience it. yet also resistance. against, in the first place, the mandated amnesia of the state, whose practice of containment is so strenuous precisely because it is forever incomplete. a ghost is incommensurable. forgetting is every bit as effortfully forged as is its opposite. this compulsive need to memorialise the past is not about memory per se, but an attempt to erect a cordon sanitaire around the raw, recalcitrant grief of involuntary anamnesis. to bracket this pain within prescribed parameters: in the very instant the immaterial are materialised they are obliterated, forced back into canniness, the commensurable mundane. broken hearted i’ll wander, broken hearted i’ll remain. and it’s the wandering that scares them. broken heartedness is catching. when i return, which is not so often now, i am struck again by the way in which our ghosts are both consequence and cause. they are – you are, my love – a symptom of this violence, and a continued provocation to it. is a ghost, they ask, evidence or testimony? it is perhaps the eerie testimony that arises when evidence is rejected or missing. and you are noisy ghosts, emissaries of an insolent, reckless, restless coming breed. poltergeists reflect not a dread of the future but its absolute refusal. that the past is here to stay or may erupt at any time from inside of the present. that the past is not merely animate in the present, but capable of influencing and affecting it. not merely a felt thing. we are full of such survivals, and yes, we identify with them: we’ll suck you through the television into the static, back and back. and of course we – the living – haunt ourselves. each other. we are figured as zombies, vampires, ghosts, boggarts, bogeys. because where is the present we might safely and purposefully occupy? there is a void. a paralysis. in your he-ad, in your he-e-ead… oh lovely boy, in the tv the material violence of history and the spectral violence of the sign converge. and oh, body, you sweet calendar of conflict counting out the days. if you think there will be resolution, you can just forget it, pal…

Several largish ideas here, and things I’d like us to focus on, discuss and maybe even contend a bit: firstly that politics is spectral – that in itself it constitutes a way of disguising and transfiguring more overt forms of domination. Second, that the abjected or feral subject lives out a kind of ghostly existence, both because the presence and the possibility of death is tangible in marginalised and threatened lives, but also because we (in this case poor and Traveller persons) are rejected and absented inside of culture, the product of superstitious fear, approached but never met, spoken around but seldom seen. The final idea is that this condition of ghostliness might be a way resisting coercive linear trajectories of grieving and healing, might translate itself into useful modes of thinking, being and writing. I’d suggest that this is something of what Kim Hyesoon was driving at with her Pig! poems.

Also, perhaps not unconnected to this notion of the ‘necropastoral’ that we introduced last week. This seems as good a moment as any to dive back into that weird and terrifying territory with a quick recap and run-through.

 You’re doubtless aware, but it might just bare repeating that in the broadest sense the pastoral refers to a lineage of creative works that idealise rural life and landscapes, and Nature with a capital ‘N’. The form dates all the way back to the 3rd century BCE, but the conventions these early poems establish are really picked up and popularised by the English Romantic poets writing around the 18th and 19th century, for instance Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelly. The pastoral conventions and themes these poets exemplify are: 1) The natural world as a space of reflection on the relationship between art and work; the pleasures of making art and the difficulties and demands of labour. The poem will often valorise particular forms of rural life and labour, against the encroachments of mechanisation and industry. 2) The speaker’s subjective experience is emphasised. 3) The poem’s speaker finds a reflection and expression in the natural world of his inner emotional state. This last is arguably the most prevalent feature of the Romantic pastoral, and the most important from our point of view.

Wordsworth’s poem, the snappily titled ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July13, 1798’ is perhaps the most familiar and famous example of the Romantic pastoral poem. This piece really inaugurated the whole Romantic preoccupation with the pastoral – it has the word ‘pastoral’ – in the opening stanza. Wordsworth was a central figure in the poetic revolution of the late 18th century, so it might be worth (if you’re not already achingly familiar) with having a wee read and a listen:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45527/lines-composed-a-few-miles-above-tintern-abbey-on-revisiting-the-banks-of-the-wye-during-a-tour-july-13-1798

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8ggFhBafUg

 

As I think we spoke about in the previous workshop, in the 18th century the Romantic conception of pastoral poetry was radical because it placed its emphasis on the speaking subject’s sensory and emotional experience. This was considered wildly democratic because the natural world can be experienced by everyone through their senses to some degree, and because there’s no specialist knowledge as such required to access or understand the poem. Further, Wordsworth and the Romantics were writing at a time when English society was being transformed on every level, undergoing massive changes from the agricultural to the industrial. The localities and landscapes Wordsworth wrote about were under threat, and his somewhat utopian vision of the countryside is perhaps a way of imaginatively resisting this threat from enclosure and industrialisation, the idea of progress at any cost. Think about not only devastation to the land, but the way that’s linked to the dispersal of communities, the dying out of local dialects and customs, the effect it had on all the glorious intricacies and idiosyncrasies of language, the effect it had on the individual, physically and spiritually. It’s also a way of enshrining these vanishing places in literature and art. Lyric imagination, for the Romantics is a defence against the remorseless cruelty of historical change, a kind of embattled utopian imaginary.

Which is all well and good, but what is Wordsworth actually saying about nature? What kinds of claims is he making? 1) He appears to be talking about a sublime experience of nature; that is that the natural world has spiritual properties that can be experienced through the senses and which produce either a consoled or exhalant state. Bit iffy? Well, as previously discussed, Coleridge at least agrees with us. He wrote a kind of riposte to Wordsworth in ‘Dejection: An Ode’ where he basically says, look mush, it’s not quite as simple as all that. I love that poem, so just in case you fancy a gander, here it is:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43973/dejection-an-ode

Back to Wordsworth and 2) he seems to be connecting the natural world to God – there are Biblical allusions and a high religious lexicon throughout. When Wordsworth talks about Nature with a capital N, Nature is performing the same function as God in more typically religious texts, in that the action of Nature on the human spirit leads to an improvement in the spirit and an inevitable moral improvement. Again, not sure about that one, but keep in mind, this is pre Darwin and pre Marx, so the idea of supplanting God with Nature, saying you don’t need these intermediary structures like religion, that’s very radical for its day. 3) Nature, for Wordsworth is presented in this poem as a source of spiritual awakening, with absorption in Nature and natural beauty as the solution to mental, political and social disconnection. Hummm.

The ‘necropastoral’ begins by asking us to think about the difficulties and limits of this approach. I’ll offer the following, but do feel free to add your own. 1) For us to experience Nature as a sublime or divine other, Nature must be something separate from ourselves. 2) Wordsworth's approach positions the natural world as meaningful only in respect to the sensations, emotions and ideas it produces in or reflects back from a human eye/ I. 3) Is the interaction of sublime Nature on human subjectivity always going to be uplifting or morally improving? Aren’t we just projecting our own mood onto nature?

In general we might also think about 1) concepts of nature are relative; historically and socially determined as well as psychologically subjective. The nature poem is shaped by ideology, by literary conventions, as well as social and cultural ideas. 2) The term “nature” is itself contested because it assumes an oversimplified relationship, and a frictionless distinction between the human, the non-human, and their environment. 3) Nature has been the receptacle for many different ideas, such as purity, escape, and savagery. The necropastoral emerges from a tradition of challenge to the R/romanticising of nature and rural life, and the concealment of its racial, gendered, and classed dynamics. These problems extend to how the rural landscape itself is often gendered. We're also talking about the way in which the lushness of the landscape is used as a tacit justification for colonisation (by the poet’s mind in the first instance, but also by nation states looking to exploit that land’s riches and peoples). We’re not just talking about the way the natural is colonised and exploited physically in the world, but culturally, by and through language.

Enter Joyelle McSeeney, and her wonderful book The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (University of Michigan Press, 2015), which we quoted from last week, along with her essay on the necropastoral. For those who missed it, let’s have it one more time:

The Necropastoral is a political-aesthetic zone in which the fact of mankind’s depredations cannot be separated from an experience of "nature" which is poisoned, mutated, aberrant, spectacular, full of ill effects and affects. The Necropastoral is a non-rational zone, anachronistic, it often looks backwards and does not subscribe to Cartesian coordinates or Enlightenment notions of rationality and linearity, cause and effect.  It does not subscribe to humanism but is interested in non-human modalities, like those of bugs, viruses, weeds and mould […] The Necropastoral is literally subterranean, Hadean, Arcadian in the sense that Death lives there. The Necropastoral is not an "alternative" version of reality but it is a place where the farcical and outrageous horrors of Anthropocenic "life" are made visible as Death. […] The obscene: that which should be hidden away but forces its way through the membrane. Obscene event = Apocalypse…

While we’re chewing that over, this seems a useful place to share a couple of McSweeney’s poems to consider in light of her theory of the necropastoral:

From ‘TOXIC SONNETS: A CROWN FOR JOHN KEATS’

Toxicon and Arachne, (Nightboat Books, 2020)

 

I read about the tubercle at night

and I went under. As a crime scene can excite

a drop of lumen to exude its hit of light, I shed wet

light. I wrap the motel room in light. I carry knives

bladed with sputum, and an instinct for spite

like a tree that reaches upward for the heat and wants to burn

or lay down in the slurry for the churn

to paper. Write me

down, chum me, make me into chyme,

spit me out to lay in sawdust like a germ

then burn me. I release a noxious smell.

Dose me with aminoglycocides

till I give in, then lay me in your litter.

I'm a threat to life.

 

+++

 

I'm a threat to life, a violent butter.

I spread my toxic inklings like a cloud

-seeding-drone, & drop on crops my shake

of violet water. As the clotted vena cava

sucks dye for the camera, a violent thought

turns all my justs to anger. A fist of cloud

breaks the crowny crater, which vomits up

its own grand cru, palpates the sternum

of the sky for ulcerations. O fish in flume, resting

on your mutagenic breasts, who do you give

your milk to. O mouth that cannot close, oh planet cleft

what cache of weapons do you lean on as you dream

in your pleural cavity, desertified, depressed.

Bad host, you clutch your guest.

 

+++

 

Bad host, you clutch your guest. Green seam

fluoresces in night vision, signature of

heat and flesh. Green ghost

lifts headline to the camera, proof of life

washed white by sudden flash. From satellite,

Earth turns on spit like a gut infloresced

with bad intentions. A god descends

with gifts of poetry and plague, he lights up

factory hens, a baffling intervention. They tote

their viral load on wheel, on wing, on breast,

transmigrate the globe and upload

souls to Heaven. O victor-bird, o vector,

I am like you, a non-state actor,

Death-fletched, alive, immune to all elixirs.

 

+++

 

Death-fletched, alive, immune to all elixirs,

I sit like a drone pilot at a dock of screens.

My attention is a fang that sinks through plasma

like a toxic arrow or a tooth in Coke. I'm fine.

I'm sick. I grip a joy-stick. Outside, a pink

crust announces evening, buzzards ride

heat signatures at dusk. Inside, plasmodium

reshapes itself, now a slipper, now a gauntlet

tossed down in the gut, and now a Glock, a mouse,

a Mauser, the lucky cloud that mounts the hill

to breaks its blessing on the forehead of the bride

or the wedding guest who's dead

yet cocks his eye

at any light now breaking in the sky

...

We might talk a little about these next time, but I think for now, the central thing to notice is the way in which the suffering, diseased, necrotic body is rendered visible within the space of the poem. The dead and dying - so often cannibalised by the poem as lyric sustenance (and here we're back at the ethics of representing the dead again) and transformed into bland, disembodied traces, return to us full of pus and vomit, seeping, bloated, scabbed over, repulsive to look at and think about: abject. 

Something else we might consider in the light of the necropastoral is the way in which cultural production (poetry) manages and mediates an experience of loss between individuals, and then between those individuals and their wider community. Poetry is implicated in a process of mourning that simultaneously enshrines the dead in collective memory, while disguising the gruesome bodily facts of their dying, and the historical/ political context that forms the long biography of their suffering. Culture (and generations of trauma studies scholarship) tends to frame both death and the traumatic loss  engendered by death as unknowable, 'unspeakable', untouchable. Yet as Naomi Mandel notes in the brilliant Against the Unspeakable: Complicity, the Holocaust, and Slavery in America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), the well-worn concept of trauma as unrepresentable, may well be a 'discursive production' that evades moral responsibility in representing atrocity by privileging the 'problems inherent in speech' rather than addressing the 'ethical obligations involved in such representations' (p.4,5). A kind of cop-out in other words, and one expedient to the aims of power. How much is masked by propriety, by an aversion to the "gory" details? Whose experiences and suffering are we erasing in refusing to look and reckon with the dead?

To what extent to we think that lyric practice is guilty of this process? Perhaps of beautifying or dramatizing death while erasing the granular particularity of the dead and their suffering? Is this true of animals? Are we again confronted with the limits of merely feeling "sad", talking about our pain rather than their death? Does this apply to humans too? Perhaps it is that loss - especially traumatic loss - provokes a complex challenge to communication, comprehension, and thought. Here's Mandel again, this time talking about Adorno's assertion that to write poetry after Auschwitz as impossible or barbaric. Mandle writes that Auschwitz becomes a word 'to refer to the limit of words, pointing toward a realm inaccessible to knowledge. Speaking the unspeakable would extend or efface these limits, diminishing the distance between us and that realm, highlighting the complex relation between what language includes and excludes, and forcing us to confront the implications of such effacement for thinking, writing, and speaking about what has been assumed to be unspeakable.'

How can feral help us to speak the unspeakable? Circumvent or disrupt different kinds of conceptual or moral prohibition on speech? What might some feral strategies be for engaging with silence - shocked or coerced? Can an animal speaker 'say' what a human speaker cannot? Are there different kinds of textual disruption that the feral could perform?

This seems like a really good place to share this visual redaction poem by Yedda Morrison. It's called 'Darkness', and according to Morrison 'Darkness is my attempt at a biocentric reading of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (first published in 1899), a re-working in which all traces of “the human” are erased. By “whiting out” man and grammatically foregrounding “nature,” the project aims to activate the backdrop or scenery upon which this story of colonial horror unfolds, and in so doing to attend to the latent narratives of any organic, non-human remains.'

 This is a very different approach to inscribing the presence of the threatened natural world in the text and grappling with the cultural silence surrounding it. It occurs me to that it might be a really useful technique for overcoming some of those silences and gaps we were talking about earlier, as well as redressing some of the troubling history of existing animal archives.

http://littleredleaves.com/ebooks/darkness.pdf

Our prompts for this session are to write as/ or about an extinct animal, or to write as/about a loathed and feared animal. We'll be catching up with those in our last session of the term. In the meantime, do enjoy some suitable mood music:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0bZofM6EOU