All things Anthropocene. All things, that is, marked by language — this word, Anthropocene, in particular, in this instance — by the inadequacies of language to do more than whatever it might be doing in the moment of its activation in embodied mind (in the human brain).
Poetry goes way back: representation pushed to limits beyond “mere” representation, the attempt through rhythm and rhyme and the makings of other patterns to weave language in the instance of its movement through embodied mind (chanting, song, recitation, voicing) to go beyond denotation, beyond words pointing to things, and even beyond words entangling with perceptual fields extending beyond material things (a rock, say) or phenomena (the color of the eastern sky at dusk; a blue-hued rock; a blue feeling, the abstract thought of blueness) to enact pattern-making and unmaking, to perform dynamic change unfolding in time and to model it, thereby fixing and embedding that model — a narrative, instantiation of a moral value, group identity, ethical guidelines and moral imperatives all bundled up – in “reality” in increasingly “permanent” ways.1*Part of this project involves an exploration of the Changes – the Zhouyi and the Yijing with its “Ten Wings” and the voluminous interpretive apparatus that has evolved from and around the core eight trigrams.
This began, simply, as a means of generating a walking algorithm for use in Situationist-inspired psychogeographical forays into Shanghai neighborhoods. I had been generating the algorithms otherwise, until, teaming up with Tim Tomlinson for a walk with students, I took his suggestion (after first resisting it, thinking it corny and stale and a bit too Chinoiserie-indulgent, if not an outright “problematic” instance of cultural appropriation) of using the Yijing. Over the past few years, the role of the Yijing in the project has grown, suggesting itself not only as a means of generating a 6 – 12 step walking algorithm, but also as a means of conducting walks and writing corresponding texts in ways that may resonate and correlate with not only the history of Chinese thought and culture as, in significant part, animated by the Changes, but also with “the West” by way of its translations and uses and appropriations of the Changes.
With regard to something like the question of the origins of language, for instance, it’s useful to me now to refer the second chapter of Richard J. Smith’s The I Ching: A Biography, in which he traces the relative codification of the Zhouyi into an official classic during the Han Dynasty and summarizes the “Great Commentary” from the “Ten Wings” on language:
“The process of consulting the Changes involved careful contemplation of the ‘images’ associated with, and reflected in, the lines, trigrams, and hexagrams of the basic text. According to the Great Commentary, sages like Fuxi ‘had the means to perceive the mysteries of the world and, drawing comparisons to the with analogous things, made images out of those things that seemed appropriate.’ Initially, then, there were only hexagram images, trigram images, and line images — pure signs unmediated by language. But later on, hexagram names, judgments, and line statements appeared in written form to help explain these abstract significations. Thus subsequent sages came to use words to identify ‘images of things’ (natural phenomena, such as Heaven and Earth, mountains, rivers, thunder, wind, and fire), ‘images of affairs’ (social and political phenomena, including institutions, war, famine, marriage, and divorce), and ‘images of ideas’ (thoughts, mental pictures, states of mind, emotions, and any other sensory or extrasensory experiences). Later commentators sometimes likened images to ‘flowers in the mirror’ or ‘the moon in the water’ – that is, reflections of things that ‘cannot be described as either fully present or fully absent’ ” (64).
This, all in the context of a larger presentation of the history of the Changes that makes it clear that the text itself can only ever be encountered – whether in a Chinese version or translation into another language, or via the hexagrams as posited “pure signs unmediated by language” (not possible) – as a reflection of itself that “cannot be described as either fully present or absent.” One question moving forward, for me, is how thinking about the Changes in the context of the Anthropocene might work, based in part on the premise that somewhere in the Changes we’re picking up signals of what it was like for humanity to transition out of the the Pleistocene and the Neolithic into the Holocene and the acceleration of technology – writing and image-making very much included – that settles in around the Bronze Age.
Poetry in the age of writing goes elsewhere, and shifts the locus of activity over time from group (chanting, song, recitation, voicing) to dyads (reader and writer) and individuals (reader; writer; readers as individuals comprising audience). In the age of type and print, further yet also back into a space analogous to orality insofar as the model, available to increasingly literate masses, may again become a group binding agent (so before the advent of settled agriculture-based cultures there was speech, orality, and then there was the “beginning,” with the written word fixing the flux and story of pre-literate cultures, and then mass production takes off and modernity arises with print and mechanical reproduction, and another vein of poetry becomes resisting the settlement in old nomad ways — say Li Bai, or Rimbaud, or Notley, for example, but moreso all those songs and voices out there that never found print, and therefore have avoided capture and enlistment in anyone’s national or other big group-bound project).
Where are we today? I’m experimenting with writing a poem of sorts arising from repeated walks in Shanghai. I do what we do these days: I have my phone, and I take photos, and I take sound recordings and make a few videos. I think, sometimes, that I should not be doing this — that the idea of poetry is other and separate from this (precedes it) and yet quickly realize that this would make for a poetry that is not of its time, and is not of this place (nor an accurate reflection of our lives, my life: I’m pretty online and as connected to my phone as most people I know).
So if I follow my method and go to a randomly selected Metro station and walk the “algorithm” (lefts and rights in a pattern, repeating) and take photos and record ambient sound, and shoot a few videos, where, precisely, is the poetry? In the lines, sure, if they succeed And how will we judge “success” — certainly, I hope, not by their lyricism or “relatability” or ability to connect my feelings to the feelings of a reader or listener in most of what I’ve experienced in discussions and public readings.
Enter Anthropocene: My conceit is to attempt to be a medium, to be a circuit or antenna or — name your device — that picks up on and registers the changes that “we” are experiencing and that we are enacting, changes that have us on the threshold of a mass extinction event, of a meters-plus rise in sea levels, of a geological timescale boundary. The idea of this “outside” in its basic contours is hardly new. With deep time and poetry’s distant origins in mind, the idea of possession by muse or god or animist spirit, this idea would seem as old as they come, and perhaps intrinsic to consciousness and language themselves. Spicer’s Martians.
But here is a cleavage: The idea (modern persistent in much contemporary poetry) of the individual voice and identity and experience (as memory, as narrative of one’s life) as being the it of poetry versus something that obliterates the individual. We have become used to flagging that larger category as inherently pretentious — who would presume to speak for “nature” or for “the world” and be taken as serious practitioners of the art?
Here, the ascendance in the US of “craft” and “voice” as primary aesthetic categories is notable, as is the long-running yet swiftly eroding demotion of poetries that represent collective experience, especially that of colonized and marginalized groups. In the case of such poetry, it’s less a matter of the “pretentious,” perhaps, than the “naïve” — true American modern poetry being the product of a sovereign individual subject and, yes, American history has indeed privileged what has become the vexed and vexing category of “the white man” as the apex sovereign individual, and denigrated work by native and colonized and once-enslaved and recent immigrant peoples (especially those who have become conceived in opposition to or contrast with “whiteness”).
And I digress: but this, too, is relevant: I am trying to write “about” Shanghai, after all, and yes, I am a white man (and using the I Ching to generate “algorithms”: cue up cultural appropriation and pretentiousness and staleness — John Cage, etc. — and Orientalism). Tying this back into the Anthropocene (rather, I suppose, simply noting its embeddedness in that seething aggregation of hyperobjects that the word “Anthropocene” presumes to try to name), Shanghai and my presence in it, living as I do in the former French Concession and working as I do at a “joint-venture Sino-American university” that only exists, one could say with confidence, in its present form by dint of the marketing power inherent in its American brand name, is bound up in this history of modernity and European colonial expansion, and that itself is the history of a stage of acceleration which has only accelerated further now that the once colonized and nearly colonized cultures of the world — constituted in their nation-states and corporate bodies, from Tata and India to Huawei and China, and on down the line — are now foremost among those at the leading edge of anthropogenic transformation of this planet, threatening (promising) to outstrip their former masters and unequal-treaty makers (and no, not “destroy” the planet any more than cyanobacteria did when they triggered the Great Oxygenation Event a couple billion years back — though I’m trying to focus my thinking more on just the Holocene and end-Holocene, which for Shanghai’s legible archeological record means about 7ooo year before present, when sea level rises and flooding stabilized, apparently).
This is enough for today, I think, but first a quick return to the tension I think and feel exists between photography — and I mean digital smartphone photography ca. 2019 — and trying to write a poem ca. 2019. I suppose it’s got something to do with O’Hara’s “Personism”: “While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born.” OK. And while I was trying to write (or at least think about writing while I was walking around the area near the Chengshan Metro Station in Pudong, or later as I went through notes and photos from the walk), I was realizing that if I wanted to — no, even if I didn’t want to — I could use my iPhone (my iPhone could use me) instead of writing the poem (or my phone and the internet, including that of things), and so: what is born? It feels so different, whatever it is, and I can’t find the words for it, so here is a photo, one of so many from the stream.
No, this is enough for today: My iPhone, my MacBook Air, my connection, we all draw our power from the coal-burning power plants in China’s interior, from soft Shaanxi coal pulled from Carboniferous beds (is this accurate? I will do some quick online research to find out), from extinction and evolved life and everything under the sun (but up is down, too, and ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space…).
No, this is enough for today!