Listening to the Environment: Alice Oswald’s D(eco)nstruction

125 LISTENING TO THE ENVIRONMENT: ALICE OSWALD’S D(ECO)NSTRUCTION Monika Szuba and Julian Wolfreys DOI: https://doi.org/10.14712/2571452X.2023.66.8 Abstract: In this article, the authors pay strict attention to the minimal, the small, the barely there in Alice Oswald. Arguing that hers is an inclusive response to the environment, in which everything flows into everything else and the human being part of this flow, enfolded by the world he or she hears and sees, the authors focus on the small, the local, the barely heard, and ultimately the idea and presence of the stone as measures of how Oswald hears her environment, how this listening connects the local to the global, and how such poetic practice overcomes, or presents at least the possibility of overcoming, the anthropocentric superiority and distance that determines much thinking of the environment in conventional discourses. Keywords: ecology, phenomenology, stones, water, silence, listening, locality Before writing I always spend a certain amount of time preparing my listening. I might take a day or sometimes as much as a month picking up the rhythms I find, either in other poems or in the world around me.1 Nobody. The Thing. Memorial. Dart. Woods etc. Consider these words. They exist, along with many others in the works of Alice Oswald, as part of the “aneconomic, noncircular return”2 of the “natural” environment to which she listens; they are part of its rhythms of the world around 1 Alice Oswald, “Introduction: A Dew’s Harp,” in The Thunder Matters: 101 Poems for the Planet, ed. Alice Oswald (London: Faber and Faber, 2005) ix-x. 2 Michael Marder, “Ecology as Event,” in Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy, ed. Matthais Fritsch, Philippe Lynes, and David Wood (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018) 156. Monika Szuba and Julian Wolfreys 126 her.3 This bare sequence drawn from titles, words with which the titles resonate, hardly worthy of being named a list (for there is no immediately discernible taxonomy or logic), captures, or appears to capture, everything – and all the rest – as if the line, as if each partial title, each term, seemingly composed of, drawn from random observations and selections from across Alice Oswald’s published works, gathered, in a nutshell, how Alice Oswald hears the environment; or as if they were, there together in this list, a nutshell; and moreover, it is as if such fragments, passing signifiers, fleeting signifiers flowing into and out of provisionally identified forms, becoming other, suggest that with which Alice Oswald concerns herself, in which she involves herself and by which she surrounds her proper name as a poet of the so-called natural world and the environment: “Oswald,” writes Janne Stigen Drangsholt, “has frequently been described as a nature poet, and her work is crucially concerned with natural landscape and displays a particular kind of eco-connection to the land.”4 That “eco-connection” is such because each term, and every other term like it, just is a verbal signifier of things-in-the-world through which everything is said, while suggesting in the bareness, the difficulty and insufficiency, every other term, while maintaining its singularity, its provisionality, and its relation to every other term in supplementarity: every word is a supplement of – an addition to and a replacement for – every other, in an endless relation without relation. A necessary parenthesis: given the limits of space, we can only say a little more concerning the logic of the supplement, particularly as this is developed in the writings of Jacques Derrida. In De la grammatologie, specifically in relation to his reading of Rousseau and the subject of writing as secondary to speech, as a supplement, 3 “Nature” and “Natural” are horrendously overdetermined and problematic words. Not just “at present,” but for as long as the human subject has distinguished the “human” world from the “natural,” since “culture” or “society” were situated as opposites to “nature.” Given the scope of the present essay, it is impossible to do more than gesture here toward this problematic term, both more and less than a concept, more and less than an ontology always already haunted by its other. Suffice to say – and this is in itself insufficient – that the good reader should understand “nature” and the “natural,” or the “natural world” and all related terms and motifs, to be suspended in scare quotes, uttered ironically, placed under erasure, as being already of little or no practical use. There are many texts that seek to comprehend what the term “nature” means, but one might begin to understand what is at stake by turning to Peter Coates, Nature: Western Attitudes Since Ancient Times (Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press, 1998). 4 Janne Stigen Drangsholt, “Homecomings: Poetic Reformulations of Dwelling in Jo Shapcott, Alice Oswald, and Lavinia Greenlaw,” Nordic Journal of English Studies 15, no. 1 (March 2016): 11. Listening to the Environment 127 Derrida observes the peculiar logic of supplementarity.5 The supplement takes place because despite the apparent plenitude of speech – this is my voice, it is a guarantor of my presence, it signs a plenitude without lack – , there is nonetheless a lack that writing seeks to bridge, to fill. In this, it is an addition that admits to a potentially unending series of supplements. In the present context of this essay, we argue that there is an economy of the supplement at work in the texts of Alice Oswald. Every word signifies, names, indicates, imagines, invents, but with these “actions,” something is admitted as being the shadow of the thing itself, attempting to supplement the bare, naked condition of the word as thing, and indeed the thing itself that is signified in the supplement that simply is the word used by Oswald to identify, describe, re-present in the absence of the thing itself. Something, a “something,” that which is “something,” is signalled, named, but how we hear, how Alice Oswald hears and invites us to hear, this is something not so easy to capture. For, we might say, Oswald reads the environment in deconstruction – or d(eco)nstruction. Oswald’s world of things, woods, raindrops, stones is a world always in process of construction, the denot being a negative, but rather pointing us toward a manner of constructing that is always ongoing, presenting and performing ecology as event, to recall the title of an essay by Michael Marder; and to borrow a little from Marder, eco derives from the Greek oikos “meaning house or dwelling.”6 Oswald’s d(eco)nstruction shows us and invites us to dwell with and in a world of localities and pieces, fragments and flows, even as her poetry hears the eco-, the echo as well, in every “tiny thing” that barely reveals itself before giving way to another in the d(eco)nstruction of “this beautiful / Uncountry.”7 Further trenchant examples of Oswald’s d(eco)nstruction are to be seen and heard at work in all her poetry, often working through the means of lists, itemisation, brief observation, but for the moment we will take one brief instance from the poem that opens her Falling Awake (2016), “A Short Story of Falling.”8 The gerund motivating both the collection in its title and the “story” – in which motivation as motion and motif intertwine with each other – is nothing as such and yet is the movement that brings life and brings to life, initially as “falling rain,” the story of which is to “turn into a leaf,” which in turn falls. This motion, summoned through the gerund, generates the opening four stanzas, which trace 5 Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967) 308ff. 6 Marder, “Ecology as Event” 141-64. 7 Alice Oswald, A Sleepwalk on the Severn (London: Faber and Faber, 2009) 8, 3. Further references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text; the introductory materials in the edition are unpaginated, and are referenced as such. 8 Alice Oswald, Falling Awake (London: Jonathan Cape, 2016) 1. Monika Szuba and Julian Wolfreys 128 a sequence of falling motions that brings alive the non-human, specifically vegetal world; and this in turn is followed by a wish, “if only,” whereby through analogical imagination, the human subject desires the endless experience of becoming that the falling charts. The environment’s rhythms are heard by the poet, captured in the figure of falling, and apprehended as belonging to a process of flow and flux, change and transformation, to which processes human desire longs to be a part – one part among many, just as another momentary fragment, like a voice, a stone, a leaf, a twig. More than this, and from this – from every fragment with which Oswald presents us, inviting us to supplement the fragments so as to see the world she sees – what we witness, what we hear is an organic and seemingly random ecocartography at work, as that “short story of calling” attests: “[t]he idea of cartography” in Oswald’s text “comprises a democratic vision of being, suggesting that the voices and the languages of human selves are somehow naturally interlinked with the landscape.”9 Thus, the smallest thing, a rain drop, a stone, an unnameable “thing,” a named river: all form a series of connections and in doing so, cause transformations as we have said. This reiteration is a necessary response to the iterations of Oswald’s work, if we are to hear that properly. In Oswald’s poetry human voices respond to what they are given, as the poet does; they name the given, the gift of the so-called “natural,” non-human other, and do so, initially appearing either through flow or in iterative stutter, as one fragment supplements another, transforms or is transformed by every other fragment. From this, there is “a polymorphous and multifarious sense […] explored through a variety of form (the collection [Woods etc.] consists of rhymed and unrhymed sonnets, free verse, ballads etc.) and a metaphoric range which stretches from trees, outer space, birds, stones, and fields.”10 It should not be thought, however, that everything is unordered, absent of taxonomy (there will come a taxonomy observed, below); unless of course, Oswald has an idea of a macro-pseudo-taxonomy of the world that admits of everything, thinking big, rather than small, as Timothy Morton suggests we do with regard to the world and everything in it. Rowan Middleton summarises Morton thus: for “Morton, the very idea of ‘nature’ sets up barriers; consequently, he argues that we need to think big rather than small, ‘dislocating’ ourselves from the local if we are to come to terms with what he calls ‘The Mesh,’ or the ‘interconnectedness of all living and non-living things.’”11 9 Drangsholt, “Homecomings” 12. 10 Drangsholt, “Homecomings” 16. 11 Rowan Middleton, “Connection, Disconnection and the Self in Alice Oswald’s Dart,” Green Letters 19, no. 2 (2015): 157. Middleton refers to Timothy Morton, Ecology without Listening to the Environment 129 Certainly, the notion of the mesh, elevated to a concept, might be one form for thinking Oswald’s poetry, hearing it. The problem with this, though, is that in order for the idea of the mesh to be a concept in Morton’s way of thinking, it must be economic rather than aneconomic, it must be containable as an ontology: that is to say a manner of thinking in which everything is consonant with everything else, in the thinking of which properties, phenomena, things and the relations between all of these is absent of difference and non-belonging. That said, it must also be remembered that a mesh has holes, the holes are the difference that defines the mesh, and things fall through the holes, leaving the ontology and all thought reliant on it in ruins. If “nature” is thought as that which is everything that can be named without reducing everything to consonance, then it is not a concept, and therefore admits of difference, of local terms, of things and phenomena that resist incorporation and so cannot be gathered in a mesh. In response to the problematic of thinking the mesh, and as a way of considering alternative ways of thinking the figure of the mesh and listening to the landscape and the environment that we can learn from reading and listening to Oswald, we wish to pause at a particular poem. As an example of Oswald’s fragmentary thinking and “fragment-listening,” to coin a phrase for how we perceive what is at work in her poetry, let us consider what for want of a better phrase might be termed a key-word: the word “something,” a word that at once points to something, and yet admits of this thing, this phenomenon, that it cannot be named as such. Even though we may hear, like Oswald, we can only respond by admitting the paucity of language in the face of a “nature,” an environment irreducible to an ontology. “Mountains,” one of the poems from The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), Oswald’s first collection, is traced through with the word “something,” which word is, again, irreducible to any ontological status, given that it names at various times gaps, silences, and the impossibility to name directly.12 The word “something” appears repeatedly, both directly and indirectly; it is inferred through the shift in observation and subject. A thing that is unspecified and unknown, this pronoun “something” is at once barely a word, so poor, so little, and yet capable of embracing everything; it appears to name, it stands in for the name, when there is no name. Immediately, the word appears in “Mountains” six times across twenty lines and three stanzas, two of eight lines each, and one of four. However, there is an argument that would suggest that “something” is at work indirectly too, in places Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007) and The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010) 27-28. 12 Alice Oswald, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (London: Faber and Faber, 1996) 34. Further references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text. Monika Szuba and Julian Wolfreys 130 where it is not named but inferred, implied (both being moments in the process of composition), or, as Oswald has it in the poem’s final two lines – where, in the penultimate line “mountains” are finally signified directly (“the bigger mountains hidden by the mountains”) – “hidden […] / like intentions among suggestions.” How many times might “something” be said to be hidden in the poem? It is impossible to count, and this is the point. The poem suggests seemingly endlessly, all the while observing that “something is twice as different,” it is “side by side with anyone,” even while the poem acknowledges “spaces,” “between places,” “edges,” “lines,” “entrances,” holes, things that have gone, and so forth. In a line that echoes with the voice of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Oswald observes how a “something” “inslides itself between moments.” This between-something is a ghostly fragment that remains unnameable as such, as is every something in the poem, at once in it and yet not there. Something is both the threads, the weave of a mesh of the world, the environment, and also the holes, the absences, the difference that serve to define that mesh. There is no environment, no world in the poem, for the poet, without the possibility of hearing something, some bare thing, some minimal element or phenomenon. One can only begin to think something large like “the environment” or “the natural world,” Oswald tells us, by giving attention to, and so receiving the gift of, the small, the hardly there, the otherwise absent and indirectly inferred, and of course the local (the local being crucial in Oswald’s works, as the river poems concerning the Severn and the Dart attest). Coming back to Morton, his argument is that the idea of the local is limited by its associations with, as he puts it, “the here and now, not the there and then.”13 Before continuing with what it is that Oswald may or may not be doing exactly through those fragments, those lists and gatherings that accrete into a flow, it seems necessary to pause again over the Mortonian thesis. As with much of Morton’s work, there is a provocation here, the logic or assertion of which on further observation and reflection will not hold. Alice Oswald is, if nothing else – and yet the good reader will know she is so much more – a thinker of the local. Titles such as A Sleepwalk on the Severn (2009) or Dart (2002) make this abundantly clear. Yet both poems, concerning themselves with hearing – and recording – the voices of people who “live and work on the Dart”14 and the voices of “real people,” “some living, some dead” (Severn, n.p.) captured during the phases of the moon along the Severn Estuary; and from there the motions of the moon and its effects 13 Middleton, “Connection, Disconnection and the Self” 157; Morton, The Ecological Thought 27. 14 Alice Oswald, Dart (London: Faber and Faber, 2002) n.p. Further references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text; the introductory materials in the edition are unpaginated, and are referenced as such. Listening to the Environment 131 on the river and those voices or otherwise voices “read as the river’s mutterings” (Dart, n.p.); such poems may well be local, but they are not limited to the here and now, they are also concerned with the there and then, to recall Morton’s phrases. The water flows in each poem through the lives of those who are there at the times of writing, and also through those lives now gone. The past is always there in both poems, with their references to the work carried on for generations that make the histories of the rivers – the work of foresters, boat builders, crabbers, or as one line from Dart has it, “medics, milkmen, policemen” (7). (This line recalls the act of listing, of bare definition, with which we began.)15 All such figures, many with “embodied relationships with nature,” come to speak of the local, but also the global, they attest to a present, but also a past.16 Thus, when Morton speaks of the mesh, urging “the interconnectedness of all living and non-living things,”17 this is something already known to readers of Oswald. Everything in her texts is interconnected, everything with everything else; but we only know this if we can “only connect,” as a much more circumspect and considerably careful thinker has it; if we respect and give attention to difference as Oswald does, to what is precisely local, singular, specific; to that which connects the here and now to the there and then; and from a slow and measured understanding of the local “thing,” the “gap,” the “Dart,” rain, woods and all the other phenomena that Oswald lists, observes and pursues in their stillness and their motions; only then may we make connections. Oswald is, then, a writer of the local who apprehends and empathises with the global. Beginning with the small and specific, barely naming that and resisting unnecessary rhetorical amplification, Oswald is an inductive rather than deductive thinker. She sees the “World in a Grain of Sand,” as William Blake 15 Such listing of characters on Oswald’s part is not a little reminiscent of another nocturnal voice drama concerned with the local, Under Milk Wood, by Dylan Thomas (1954). Consider, when reading Oswald in Dart or Severn, the following lines by Thomas: “the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican…” etc. or “And you alone can hear the invisible starfall, the darkest-beforedawn minutely dewgrazed stir of the black, dab-filled sea where the Arethusa, the Curlew and the Skylark, Zanzibar, Rhiannon, the Rover, the Cormorant, and the Star of Wales tilt and ride.” Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood (New York: New Directions, 1954) 1, 2. Compare these boats with what Oswald calls in Dart the “boat voices”: “Oceanides Atlanta Proserpina Minerva […] Lizzie of Lymington Doris of Dit’sum” (34). There is, clearly, another essay or more to be written considering the relationship between Dylan Thomas and Alice Oswald. 16 Middleton, “Connection, Disconnection and the Self” 159. 17 Morton, Ecology Without Nature and The Ecological Thought 27-28. Monika Szuba and Julian Wolfreys 132 famously has it in “Auguries of Innocence,”18 and if she does not apperceive “Heaven in a Wild Flower,” to continue this Blakean analogy, she nonetheless invites her readers to realise the world and environment from such small signifiers. She is also the poet of the local who knows that understanding the socalled “natural” world (nature is after all not natural but a highly complex concept that humans have employed to various ideological and material ends in thought and in practice) begins and must always remain with the local, a “local” that is grounded in and by a single item, a thing or phenomenon. Take Oswald’s effort to name, to describe the river that is “not river at all” (3) from A Sleepwalk on the Severn. Definition is difficult, for the “not river” is “something like” what Oswald calls a “huge repeating mechanism […] Very hard to define,” but having a “Muscular unsolid unstillness” (4) marked by an “endless wavering in whose engine / I too am living” (4). It is important to acknowledge that this is not limited to a “here” or a specific temporal moment; it is at once local and global: it is concerned with the Severn river, and yet this is all rivers; all forms of water are unstill, unsolid, muscular, iterable; Oswald is clearly aware, acknowledges and agrees with the Heraclitean dictum that “no man [sic] stands in the same river twice.” So far, so familiar, but as Heraclitus goes on to observe, “for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.”19 The river changes, but rivers change us, we are changed by the world we inhabit. Rivers are mechanisms and engines, and Oswald (typically) defamiliarises our relation to so-called nature in order to have us understand and feel more completely, if we listen, as Oswald would seem to urge us to, with what might be called keen ears. What exactly is a keen ear? This can be explained if we acknowledge a commentary on Friedrich Nietzsche by Jacques Derrida: “To hear [Nietszche], one must have a keen ear […] it is the ear of the other that signs. The ear of the other says me to me and constitutes the autos of my autobiography.”20 For Oswald, listening is a crucial process of apprehending the world and thereby understanding one’s being in the world; she speaks often of listening, as the epigraph to this essay admits. But more than this, her poetry invites its reader also to be a careful auditor, to hear, in those lists and acts of ecological cataloguing, how the world is in the rain drop, the leaf, the shafts of light and streams of water, the stones, the rivers, and so forth. 18 William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence,” Poetry Foundation [source: Poets of the English Language (New York: Viking Press, 1950)], https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/ 43650/auguries-of-innocence. 19 See Plato, Cratylus 402a and Heraclitus Homericus B49a. 20 Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, ed. Christie McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf and Avital Ronell (New York: Schocken Books, 1985) 50-51. Listening to the Environment 133 There is, moreover, across and in all of Oswald’s poetry that ineluctable endlessness that involves the self, in which selfhood lives if the self listens and does not simply observe; for (and if this is stating the obvious, then perhaps that is necessary to counter, if not silence, the critique of the local) beginning with a particular river, which is always already not river, not river and more than river in Oswald’s understanding, Oswald moves through and from the unnameable to an energy typical of all waters everywhere, and beyond the subject of water, to the energy of everything in the world, including the human. Oswald has this understanding of water as at once always local (she not only writes about the Severn but also the River Dart in Dart) and always global and more than itself; indeed, in that the global reveals itself through meditation on the local, we see once more how the logic of the supplement is always at work. Let us consider one last aqueous example, this time from Woods etc. (2005): “Sea Poem.”21 Oswald does not assume knowledge of water but asks what it is, what its sound is. There is in Oswald’s work a relentless yet necessary and rigorous deconstruction that moves backwards as soon as there is a beginning, prior to commenting that it, water, is “oscillation endlessly shaken / into an entirely new structure,”22 and from there moving to ask about the depth of water and what defines that. Such is the depth, she tells us, that time “has been rooted out” from it, leaving us with an understanding of “steep shafts warm streams / coal salt cod weed.” We find ourselves in this apprehension back with a bare list, minimal signifiers of otherwise unrelated or minimally related phenomena. Yet, as with the meditation on the River Severn, so here, water is the medium through the interrogation of which we come to understand something other than water, even if that “something” is not always immediately discernible. The work of a truly environmental poet is not easy, and it never rests on easy definitions; it must admit to difficulty, to limits, to relying on mere signifiers, often as figures for which there is no name as such. “The Apple Shed” from The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile provides a more ordered example of what we call bare naming: “and now the comfortable dropping sound / of rain as heavy as a shower of apples / Ribston Pippin, Cox’s Orange / Woolbrook Russet, Sturmer Pippin, / Bradley, Crispin, Margie, Spartan, / Beauty of Bath and Merton Beauty” (37). But what exactly are we invited to observe? Yes, these are all apples – will every reader be aware of this, save for the demonstrable fact of naming in which the poem indulges, as if to illustrate a shower? – but beyond that? The list excludes, prohibits as much as it invites, and we are left with the “comfortable dropping sound” not of rain but of names, as each drops, one 21 Alice Oswald, Woods etc. (London: Faber and Faber, 2005) 3. 22 Might this not be a definition of poetry itself, of a poem? Monika Szuba and Julian Wolfreys 140 and the unspoken, the moment of transferring thought to poetic language, in a betweenness wholly typical of Oswald’s poetry. Against Heideggerian ontology, or rather supplementing the limit of Heideggerian ontology, Oswald offers her own ontological model, in which “[e]verything down to the lowest least whisper” (Severn 27), stones, leaves, and rivers may be capable of authentic dwelling, or a true Dasein and are neither worldless nor wordless but open, replenished with possibilities. As we read in The Ear of the Other, “[t]he ear is uncanny. Uncanny is what it is; double is what it can become; large or small is what it can make or let happen (as in laisser-faire, since the ear is the most tendered and most open organ, the one that, as Freud reminds us, the infant cannot close.”42 Poetry makes us hear what would otherwise remain unheard. Let us observe one last example of listening in Oswald’s poetry, “Birdsong for Two Voices,” where we are invited to listen: A song that assembles the earth out of nine notes and silence. out of the unformed gloom before dawn where every tree is a problem to be solved by birdsong. […] it gathers the big bass silence of clouds and the mind whispering in its shell and all trees, with their ears to the air, seeking a steady state and singing it over till it settles. (Woods etc. 5) Oswald encourages us to listen, and, in learning from listening, to respond to the environments in which we find ourselves, and in which we desire to find that self more than merely in harmony with but instead “seeped in” that environment rather than being in a condition of anthropocentric superiority, in antagonistic or uncaring activity, or as Merleau-Ponty has it, in contradiction with the world.43 Oswald overcomes the contradiction and grasps something fundamental in her rigorous adherence to the small, the barely nameable, the minimal, the local – which is that, to conclude with Merleau-Ponty: no form of knowledge – not even science – gives us the invariable formula of a facies totius universi […] synthesis […] is never completed […]. And yet, there is something […]. Something is determinate, at least to a certain degree of relativity. 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