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

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