Tuesday, August 14, 2012

That's So Raven!

I probably go to too many conferences. Conferences can be very productive - they put you on a deadline and compel you to find your argument. But whenever I have a presentation scheduled, it becomes an anxiety-ridden month of doom and gloom. Not the most pleasant experience, but I still go and I'm glad I do. Graduate school can be such a solitary existence. All the more reason to desire community. Graduate school seminar papers can get so caught up in minutiae. All the more reason to want to believe that what you do matters in larger sense. This July's New Chaucer Society conference had all that. The community was vivacious and supportive. The papers were genuinely inspirational.

I won't get into the papers I heard (not right now, anyway) (besides better accounts can be found here here here here here), but I will say how much I loved the conference format. The threaded format was brilliant. I felt like I was reading two or three edited collections-in-production over a week. I came away with oodles and oodles of notes and musings and questions that I know I'll be coming back to for years to come. I also loved how many of the papers really worked as Talks. That is, they weren't documents written to be read, but written to be presented. Alex Gillespie's virtuosic performance, the ambience of Jeffrey Cohen's prismatic Thames, and the stirring homily given by Cary Howie on illumination and the presence of the divine. Is this a particular skill of medievalists? At any rate, it's something I hope to emulate in my career.

Sincere thanks go out to the organizing committee for putting me on a wonder panel titled "Human/Nonhuman/Animal." It was just about the last session of the week - something I quite like. I like being able to absorb all of the other papers first, so I can figure out where my argument might differ and so I can anticipate difficult, knotty questions (and just who might ask them). My co-panelists were great - it's always exciting to see nonhumans engaged in such diverse ways.

As for my own paper, it was on the York Play of the Flood. The paper is a reflection of my recent interest in systems theory and complexity. Now that animal studies has successfully dismantled the human/animal binary, the work shifts toward understanding the differences that remain and constructing a politics that respects the different unique needs, capacities, and faculties of each species. Too often, I think, the posthumanist practitioners of animal studies still commit the same "sin against rigorous thinking" that plagued those they critique. If each animal is unique, how can we respond to each animal uniquely? How can we be hospitable to what each animal needs, desires, and deserves?

More on how this fits into my dissertation soon, I hope. It's been a busy year so far - studying for exams (I passed, thank heavens), co-chairing the department's biennial medieval-early modern conference, presenting at RSA and NCS, and going through draft after draft of the prospectus. But now that I'm free from course work and exam studying, I hope to use this blog more.

You can find my paper below - comments, criticisms, suggestions welcome.

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On Refusing Noah As an Instrument of God's Will



Set three over the three days prior to a storm of biblical proportions, Wes Anderson’s recent film Moonrise Kingdom is about two animals who don’t want to get on the ark before the Flood. Sam -- with his signature coonskin cap, an orphan and the least popular boy in his Khaki Scout troop -- and Suzy -- the “emotionally disturbed” and painfully lonely raven – first meet during a local production of Benjamin Britten’s 1957 children’s opera, Noye’s Fludde, an adaptation of the Chester Noah Play. Sam wanders backstage, pushing past the children dressed as animals marching two-by-two in the other direction. When he reaches the dressing room, he finds six young girls putting the final touches on their avian costumes. “What kind of bird are you?” Sam asks. “I’m a sparrow, she’s a dove,” one girl responds, before Sam interrupts and clarifies. “No. I said, what kind of bird are you?”pointing at Suzy. Suzy blinks – not sure what to say, not sure whether to strike or recoil – before recognizing in Sam a kindred melancholy. After a penpal courtship, they decide to flee the confines of their stigmatization.

This paper is about such animals, like Sam's raccoon and, especially, Suzy’s raven, who want no part of Noah’s new covenant with God. They are the kind of animals characterized by Manuel De Landa in A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History as “weeds,” victims of “organic chauvinism.” Biomass that is devalued in human society and its anthropocentric economy is separated out into categories of the unclean or pests. While Noah and his sons tend to the animals that will benefit human society, the animals that confirm humanity’s pride of place, the raven, the raccoon, and all the other castaways must instead build their own home in an inhospitable world.

The Noah Plays are, as Rosemary Woolf argues, part of the cycle’s great pattern of Jesus “summoning the sinner into the church.” Several studies have examined Noah’s wife as such a sinner who, fitting with the play’s theme of establishing right order, eventually submits to her husbands’ will. But Noah’s raven has received much less attention as a sinful animal. Unlike Uxor Noah, the raven does not submit, and thus provides a counternarrative to the progressive vision of the cleansed earth and the pattern of salvation. To my knowledge, literary scholarship has not examined the political theology of human-animal relationships in the Noah Plays. That is, the animals have not been examined as animals, as MPs in a Latourian Parliament of Things.

In the Noah story, God plans to flood the earth because creation has rebelled. The stops and false starts of the Book of Genesis are repeated attempts to craft order out of chaos, and make meaning out of the meaningless. But the nonlinear system dynamics – geological, biological, and cultural - of the earth and its inhabitants always run into disruption and further complexification. According to God’s decree, these nonlinear dynamics have to be corrected and reset to fulfill the obligations of the prescribed, teleological, linear hierarchy. And so, God declares in the York Building of the Ark: “Sythn hays men wroght so woefully / And synne is nowe reynand so ryffe, / That me repentys and rewys forthi / That ever I made outhir man or wiffe.”

The Chester Noah, like Britten’s opera, gives more attention to the other animals destroyed in the flood, and in that play God makes clear that it is not just humans who have disobeyed: “Man that I made I will destroye, / Beaste, worme, and fowle to flye; / For on eairth they me deny.” Humans thus have their lot tossed back in with the nonhumans as they are sentenced to drift together in the Flood.

But when the waters recede, God does not reinstate Paradise. Noah neither achieves the William Empson’s “pastoral trick” of a seemingly, but only seemingly, sustainable static Eden, nor is Noah able to reach “buoyancy,” to use Steve Mentz’s recent term, in the nonanthropocentric ecology of the Flood. Instead, human-animal relations run aground on the mountains of Ararat. As the ocean recedes and the earth materializes out of the primordial soup of the sea, Noah selects one of each of the clean fowl and clean beasts for sacrifice in honor of God’s grace. Noah and God’s new constitution for human-animal relationships is written in blood. This new constitution was dramatized, and celebrated, with the comedic Noah Plays performed in Hull and as part of the York, Chester, Newcastle, Towneley, N-Town cycles. Celebrated because human dominance of animals also structured the English economy. As Karl Steel argues in How to Make a Human, this systematic violence against animals enables the ideology of human exceptionalism.

It makes sense, then, that the political theology undergirding the economy would be recapitulated in the great English cycle plays sponsored by the same zooeconomic complex. The hierarchy of the biological regime is evident throughout the cycle plays. Humans continually renew their own humanity and ingratiate themselves to God through an often violent separation from the realm of animals. This makes the comedy of human salvation from animal rebellion and the animalistic behavior of the antediluvian humans a covenant worth celebrating.

The destigmatization of eating of animals provides a new foundation for the animal economy. By dramatizing the theological understanding of Genesis and its application to contemporary life, the Noah Plays model how ecological complexity or fluidity is reduced to the solid hierarchies of economic order. By commanding the construction of the ark, the Noah story quickly reasserts that animals are not only made for human use, but also that animals need humans to survive. Noah’s willingness to act as savior to the birds, the cattle, the wild beasts, and the creeping things having life puts them in his debt. But some “organic chauvinism” is demonstrated here as well. God tasks Noah with saving seven pairs of each clean animal, the animals with a greater perceived value to human society, but the animals who are not perceived to be matters of human concern, the unclean, the creeping things having life, were less worthy of human economic, ecological, and moral consideration, and so only one pair of each are saved.

But what about the lives who do not need or want to be saved? Can one really say that Noah saves the rats, the pigeons, the fleas, the lice, the parasites - all stowaways who mock the Noachian Covenant? Would these “weeds,” creatures resistant to human domination, have been left behind in any case or would they have found their way aboard the Ark regardless? These less visible animals are the ones who stalk the margins of the economy or lurk in the dark corners of the ecological mesh, those animals that feed off the waste of human society. This brings us to Noah’s raven.In the second half of this paper, I would like to consider this disobedient bird, who, like Noah’s wife, refuses to accept Noah as the instrument of God’s will. In the York Play of the Flood, after nine months at sea, Noah and his family emerge from the ark’s cabin and wait for ‘the worlde [to] waxe agayne.’ After testing the depth of the water, Noah decides to send forth a bird to scout the horizons:

“Therfore a fowle of flight
Full sone sall I forthe sende
To seke if he have sight
Som lande uppon to light;
Thanne may we witte full right
When oure mornyng sall mende.”


These lines hint at the damage that has been done to the human psyche and humanity’s assumed place of divine privilege during these months at sea. The sponsors of the York Play of the Flood, the Fishers, Fishmongers, and Mariners Guilds, would have understood the fragility of the human when faced with the immense power of the sea, teaming with sharks and leviathans threatening to swallow them whole. With Noah shut in the ark with the animals human exceptionalism is temporarily held in suspension, biding its time. Noah and his family, scan the horizon for mountaintops so they may find the surety in their humanity on the shore.

Noah’s choice for a scout is the raven, “The raven is wighte and wyse is hee” but also “full crabbed.” Bold and intelligent but ill-mannered and untamed, the raven takes off and does not return. Six lines later, Shem expresses concern that the bird has not come back: “Fadir, this foule is forthe full lange, / Uppon sum lande I trowe he lende, / His foode therfore to fynde and fange: / That makis hym be a fayland frende.”

Theologians have a tradition explaining the raven’s AWOL joyride: released into the world, the raven sank back into sin, by gluttonously feeding on the dead victims of the flood. The carrion-eating bird feasted on the waste produced by God’s plan and Noah’s salvation and thus freed himself from participation in Noah’s new world order.

A second bird is sent out, the faithful dove – not as intelligent, but dutiful. This time, of course, six lines later the dove does return bearing evidence of his completed mission. While the York play lacks the explicit stage directions of the Chester play, we might assume that, like its counterpart, the bird nestles in Noah’s arms, happy to confirm man as his master. As Noah takes the olive branch, he sees in the distance the hilltops of Hermony – that is, Armenia – where humans and other animals are meant to share a common, harmonious destiny.

Several scholars have argued that the Noah story as told in Genesis and in medieval English Noah Plays is, as one scholar puts it, a “recapitulation of [God’s] first Creation. Through Noah’s obedience, he and his family come to participate in this re-Creation as Adam and Eve had participated in the first.” But this is not exactly the case. The ark does not run aground on a land of peace, but on a ruined world, littered with the detritus of its ancestors. God’s Creation 2.0 is an Anti-Eden, with an economy based on dominance rather than benevolence, stewardship, or horticulture. It is an economy that maintains the right to human ascendancy through blood sacrifice and systematic violence.

Noah’s triumph would be total if not for the raven. The dove confirms the privilege God has assigned to humans, but the raven does not affirm the status of his designated master, and instead feeds on human corpses. While the Flood Plays celebrate as a comedy - the most violent thing to ever happen as a comedy! - Noah’s new beginning , the new covenant with God, and the edibility of flesh, the raven’s rebellion injects doubt into this newly reestablished anthropocentric world. Noah’s response to the raven’s defection is then to pass judgment, to curse the rebel creature:

“Sen he for all oure welthe gon wende,
Then be he for his werkis wrange
Evermore weried withowten ende.”


Noah is in a strange position to be cursing the raven’s wrong works, since at the time Noah remains holed up in the ark and the raven has achieved his own salvation, having found food and freedom. Meanwhile, as one of the clean fowl, this dove that has saved Noah and his family may be the very same that is scheduled to be sacrificed for the glory of God upon landfall. Shem accuses the raven of being a false friend, but the raven and the dove may have a very different perspective on the matter.

In closing, I would like to suggest that this curious notion of salvation for some, sacrifice for others bears on current debates about sustainability and the ecological crises of the 21st century. The most recent volume of PMLA features a cluster on the buzzword sustainability and its deployment in contemporary green discourse. The authors repeatedly ask the question, “what do we mean by sustainability,” “sustainability of what and for whom”?

The question applies to the animals on the ark – for whom are they being saved? On his own, the raven decides he is being saved for no one and flies in a different direction. As a result, he is cursed for not fulfilling the assignments of his human master.

But rather than curse the raven, we must, as Steve Mentz argues in his article in the Sustainability cluster, “learn to love disruption, including the disruption of human lives by nonhuman forces…. After sustainability, we need dynamic narrative about our relation to the biosphere.” As Timothy Morton and others have shown, ecological thinking does away with the outdated models of equilibrium, homeostasis, and covenants that too easily exceed human control.

Even as a new anthropocentric system comes into being after the flood, the conditions for the disruption of that system are also created. The Flood marks an increased effort to control the animals and animalistic human behavior, but it leaves in its wake an ocean full of carcasses. The Flood does not purify the earth; it creates the conditions for the disruption of the newly instituted anthropocentric system. Rather than curse the raven who flouts human control, humans would do better to understand how that desire for control, the desire for Edenic stasis, causes the disruptions in the system. If we accept the ecological principles of dynamic coexistence, we might then write a constitution of human-animal relationships rooted not in gratuitous violence, but humble hospitality.Image credit: Image 229 from the Holkham Bible, BL AddMss 47682, fol 8r

Saturday, January 7, 2012

Dark December, Bright January


As of January 3, I have finished coursework and I'm on to preparation for qualifying exams. Since I'm working with a wide range of material, I would like to use this space as a lab for synthesizing texts.

Eden seems like a good place to start. The story goes that humanity once existed in perfect harmony with Nature with a big N. But then came the discovery that my pleasure might equal your suffering. It was in Eden (the story goes) that humanity discovered the shame of eating - the shame that comes from knowing subjective experience does not equal objective reality, the shame of knowing one's self is divided from the world. Various bucolic literatures express a nostalgia for this lost harmony. But this nostalgia extends from a belief that the prelapsarian past was a perfected thing, rather than an eternally unfinished, always evolving, always violent, always replenishing, cycle of growth and decay. The harmony can't be recovered if it never existed.

As ecocritics (among others) have shown, the fantasy of a perfect Nature is the invention of a culture interested in maintaining hierarchy, absolute authority, bad faith social harmony, immaculate self-conception, and the unsullied exercise of power. Ecocriticism, having stripped away the ideological projection of humanity onto Nature, shatters the image of static nature and peers into the actual experience of ecological relationships in a nonhierarchical, chaotic, violent, and dirty universe. Human coexistence with the world is not about the recovery of perfection, but being unstable together.

Part of the psychic disruption caused by humanity's relationship to Nature is the turn of the seasons. The relationship of self to world changes with the angle of the sun. The calendar moves forward like a slow motion disaster, redeemed at the last moment, redeemed by the return of light variously known the names Christmas, Saturnalia, Yule, Hanukkah, Yalda, Hogmanay, Junkanoo, solstice, perihelion. But redeemed for what? Another trip around the sun. Another slow motion disaster.

One of the very best examples of edenic thinking in English letters are the 17th-century country house poems. In the hands of Jonson, Carew, and Herrick, this minor genre celebrates the potential for perfect symmetry between humanity and Nature. Er, not quite symmetry. Rather, I'd say concentricity. Humanity is not the mirror image of Nature, but at the very center of Nature: Nature's vital spark. A celebration of near perfect humanity that holds together with nature in near perfect, static harmony.

And yet, before Jonson supposedly inaugurated this genre in England with "To Penshurst" (c. 1611), Aemilia Lanyer had already cut it down in "The Description of Cookham" (c. 1609). Winter returns to Lanyer's Cookham with an unsettling eviction notice: even stasis suffers a mortal end. Lanyer imagines a nourishing relationship between her creative faculties, the land, and its presiding spirit, Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland. The presence of the genius loci enables the vegetable growth of literary production. However, the false pretenses of this poem expose the fragility of paradise. “The Description of Cookham” is a farewell to the old year as it is overtaken by the onset of a new life.

The timelessness of the Golden Age in Ben Jonson's "To Penshurst" or the country house as a bulwark against the dark as in Thomas Carew's "To Saxham" is nowhere evident in Lanyer, whose Cookham is a broken dream:

Never shall my sad eyes again behold
Those pleasures which my thoughts did then unfold:
Yet you (great Lady) Mistress of that Place,
From whose desires did spring this work of Grace;
Vouchsafe to think upon those pleasures past,
As fleeting worldly Joys that could not last.(ll. 9-14)

As winter returns to Cookham, Lanyer tearfully admits that the idealization of the country house is a mere poetic shadow of the image of heaven: “as dim shadows of celestial pleasures, / Which are desir’d above all earthly treasures” (ll. 15-16). Lanyer sets up a comparison between idealized past fading into memory and present reality breaking through.

Standing in the cold and saying her goodbyes, Lanyer remembers the “ornaments” (l. 19) of Cookham and how its “Walks put on their summer Liveries, / And all things else did hold like similes” (ll. 21-22). Much the same as other landscapes examined throughout, Cookham is a clothed nature, enhanced by human adornment. The tree as a veil screens the creep of the real and allows a perception of a more perfect landscape where the noble blood of Margaret Clifford is indistinguishably “interlac’d with brooks and crystal springs” on the estate (l. 71). The graceful lineage of the family (ll. 93-96) is the very mortar of the meaningful landscape. The landscape honors Clifford, just as Penshurst and Saxham incline to their respective genii loci:

The little Birds in chirping notes did sing,
To entertain both You and that sweet Spring,
And Philomela with her sundry lays,
Both You and that delightful Place did praise. (ll. 29-32)

But rather than show the plants and animals honoring Clifford in the definite present tense, Lanyer hints at the untrustworthiness of her memory by moving this idealization to the past tense of memory:

Oh how me thought each plant, each flower, each tree
Set forth their beauties then to welcome thee:
The very Hills right humbly did descend,
When you to tread upon them did intend. (ll. 33-36)

But when Lanyer says things “hold like similes” the reader is told to keep some distance. The comparison holds from afar, but like any simile close inspection ruins the identification. In each of these twelve poems discussed in this calendar, the presiding spirit creates and sustains a meaningful semioscape through the power of simile. The power of representation maps the subjective experience of the semiosphere onto the objective reality of the biosphere. Humanity relates to nature across time and space through this system of signification.

Once removed from humanity, Cookham reverts to a disinterested state. The second half of the poem is an exposé on the conceit of the first half of the poem, as Lanyer calls all that idealization into question:

But whither am I carried in conceit?
My Wit too weak to conster of the great.
Why not? although we are but born of earth,
We may behold the Heavens, despising death;
And loving heaven that is so far above,
May in the end vouchsafe us entire love. (ll. 111-16)

Explaining human motivations for the idealization of nature as part of our dream of deathless life, Lanyer goes on to say that by enacting this dream we fill our lives with a warm pleasure: “Therefore sweet Memory do thou retain / Those pleasures past, which will not turn again” (ll. 117-18). When the poem turns back to the present in Line 125, Lanyer begins to grieve for the fading image, half-memory, half-dream.
Lanyer mourns with the landscape as her spirit and creative faculty wither with the departure of the Cliffords:

The trees that were so glorious in our view,
Forsook both flo’rs and fruit, when once they knew
Of your depart, their very leaves did wither,
Changing their colors as they grew together.
But when they saw this had no power to stay you,
They often wept, though speechless, could not pray you;
Letting their tears in your fair blossoms fall,
As if they said, Why will ye leave us all. (ll. 133-140)

Lanyer makes similes again to deflect her own failures, but this cannot cover up the fact that, of course, the trees cannot pray. The excuse of the trees speechlessness necessitates the simile in Line 140. When winter comes to Cookham, the trees’ “frozen tops, like Age’s hoary hairs, / Shows their disasters, languishing in fears” (ll. 143-44).

Anchoring the landscape, as is so often the case in bucolic literature, is a tree, “That Oak that did in height his fellows pass, / As much as lofty trees, low growing grass: / Much like a comely Cedar straight and tall, / Whose beauteous stature far exceeded all” (ll. 55-58). But this tree has an imagined relationship to Clifford, rather than real: it, too, merely seems:

how often did you visit this fair tree
Which seeming joyful in receiving thee,
Would like a Palm tree spread his arms abroad,
Desirous that you there should make abode:
Whose fair green leaves much like a comely vail,
Defended Phoebus, when he would assail. (ll. 59-64)

Caught between idealism and realism, timelessness and time, between the memory of summer and the present winter, the stability of the tree is a totem between the imaginary and the real, Lanyer’s attention to a dormant deciduous tree, (even though likened to the seemingly immortal cedar), instead of an evergreen is significant here: “A swarthy riveld rine all overspread, / Their dying bodies half alive, half dead” (ll. 145-146).

Finally, even the tree must be made to realize “that nothing’s free from Fortune’s scorn” (l. 176). As Lanyer embraces the tree, meaning vanishes. The tree cannot return the kiss or the embrace. The relationship between Lanyer and the tree is a deceit (l. 171) to which Lanyer is bound. The image of good Nature has all been a performance:

This last farewell to Cookham here I give,
When I am dead thy name in this may live,
Wherein I have perform’d her noble hest,
Whose virtues lodge in my unworthy breast,
And ever shall, so long as life remains,
Tying my heart to her by those rich chains. (ll. 205-10)

As Timothy Morton theorizes, all sentient life instinctually projects itself into the world: "identity as such is already a simulation – a performative display. Might this not imply that virtuality is hardwired into living substance? … Nothing is self-identical” (Morton 82). The pathetic fallacy of anthropomorphic description is not so much a fallacy as it is a way – the only way – of expressing the deep (or, in Morton's terms, the depthless dark) connections humans have with the world. Only a god figure can be said to be playing with a full deck of cards. The rest of us are just filling in the gaps with dreams and desires, projections and false memories. “Psychoanalysis asserts that melancholia bonds us inextricably to the mother’s body.” Morton asks, “Are we similarly bonded to Earth itself? Is the dark experience of separatenesss from Earth a place where we can experience ecological awareness? Is loneliness a sign of deep connection?” (Morton 16). What I believe to be more than a desire but a very human need to represent the deep connection of humanity to the world extends from the world. As Robert Watson argues in a very similar vein, “Representation is a symptom, not a cure, of otherness" (Watson 91).

I would wager all but the most obsequious bucolic literature (pastoral, georgic, country house poems, etc.) feels the distance between self and world; the poets and playwrights know the dark ecological connection is there, but cannot exactly put their finger on it. If, as Morton puts it in the introduction to The Ecological Thought, all existence is coexistence, I would argue that all existence is parasitic too. Lanyer depends on the image of ideal Nature as nourishment for the soul. She needs the ideal, even though the ideal does not exist or cannot be enacted on earth or can never be recovered from the lost Golden Age or Eden. These poets know it doesn’t exist, yet they believe it is absolutely vital lest they descend into the nihilism of a Lear or Leontes.

Raymond Williams accuses the pastoral poets of being “pretenders to simplicity” (20). At first blush we might apply the same to the other petty gods of bucolic literature: country house lords, woodmen, hunters, lovers, and revelers. But, perhaps reluctantly, most of the poets discussed do finally pull back the veil of Nature and reveal the dark side of ecology. Morton suggests an alternative, an alternative that Surrey, Wyatt, Shakespeare, Lanyer, Marvell, and Milton (and many others besides and long before them) had already discovered. Turn to the void, toward Death, the promise of decay that links all organic matter on earth.

It may or may not be the case that only humans understand or care whether or not the world goes on without humans. Ironically, perhaps this knowledge is what ultimately saves humanity from the abyss of nihilism. Regarding decay, Watson asks, “Is vermiculation nature’s way of loving us back – that is, pursuing an appetite for our bodies that constitutes a critique of men’s claims to love women or nature in any more benign and sophisticated way?” (Watson 79). Like all other matter, humans decay and are reborn as soil to allow other life to continue. And so, perhaps death is not as dark as it first seems: “Living and nonliving beings become the medium in which other beings exist. ‘Struggle for existence’ doesn’t necessarily translate into dog-eat-dog. It means the simple dependence of one being on another, like a desert plant depending on moisture” (Morton 61). Redeemed at the last moment by the return of light, December’s darkness promises a brighter January for someone else.

Works Cited

Lanyer, Aemilia. “The Description of Cookham.” Major Women Writers of Seventeenth-Century England. Eds., James Fitzmaurice, Josephine A. Roberts, Carol L. Barash, Eugene R. Cunnar, and Nancy A. Gutierrez. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. 38-43.
Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
Watson, Robert N. Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.


Image Credit: Jonathan Billinger