Documentos de Académico
Documentos de Profesional
Documentos de Cultura
Frederick Turner
When prairie restoration ecologists, by careful research, reseeding, weeding, and
fire, have rekindled a living prairie, they often begin to yearn for buffalo. Why would
they want their carefullyplanted prairie to be tromped all over by large animals? The
answer is that the rarer species, the special surprise of the prairie orchid, the turk'shead
disruption. But the same could be said for many prairies as a whole, which rely on
occasional fires to prevent an oak forest from growing up in their place. The Amazon
Basin is so rich in species because of the rapid climatic variations of the recent glacial
interglacial cycles, that periodically isolated and stressed its ecological communities and
made them diverge. It is the wild swings of salt and fresh, wet and dry, storm and calm
that make seacoasts so rich a field of genetic experiment.
Humankind is perhaps the most opportunistic of all such "disturbance" species.
We exist at ecological margins, whether indigenous or artificial; like beavers and termites,
but more so, we must disturb the Earth to exist at all. The recent rise of environmental
restoration, and the exciting new art of landscape design based on its findings, shows us
humans turning back to contemplate our own evolution and intervening in the present
world so as to recover its past. The deeply mediated nature of this process should not
alarm us; for nature always was mediated, experienced, sophisticated, disturbed, as the
history of species and biome evolution shows. We have accelerated the process, to be
sure, and must take care that it does not go astray, but here we are in the middle of it;
there is no escape.
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I want to talk a little about a landscape design exhibit now touring the country that
I had some part in bringing about. One of the glass display cases housing the Vintondale
Mine remediation exhibit had broken in transit when Terry Harkness first introduced me
to the EcoRevelatory Design show. The heavy plate glass had been etched with text and
imagesby some acid process, I imaginedbut the breakage made the words hard to read.
The case contained a dark orange substance, of the consistency of damp coarse salt. I
took a pinch of it and tasted it. It was as sour as vinegar or lemon juice, and acrid, and at
the same time foul like sweat, and somehow parched, as if antipathetic to moisture and
the human tongue.
This was Yellow Boy, the toxic crust that forms on the streambeds and alluvial
flats beneath the abandoned coalmines of Pennsylvania: it is a precipitate of the highly
acid waters from the old mineshafts and "bony piles" (slurry tailings). Yellow Boy is
mainly ferric oxide, but I thought I tasted sulfuric acid or carbonic acid as well; the
clusters of oxygen atoms on each molecule were reaching out to burn whatever they could
combine with. One was reminded that oxygen is a caustic and highly reactive element,
the bane of the Earth's first anaerobic lifeforms, the explosive fuel used at our own risk by
all of us eukaryotes.
That taste of Yellow Boy was the taste of the Industrial Revolution, when our idea
of value in the universe was the one given to us by the new and powerful science of
thermodynamics. Value was work, a diminishing stockpile of free energy, over the
control of which the social classes were locked in mortal struggle, and our idea of
production was to dig things up and burn them. We could not beat the increase of
entropy, of thermodynamic disorder; the best we could do was to outrun it by squandering
the abundant stores of natural order faster than nature itself could. One of the natural
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resources we burned was the sweat and youth of the laborer, of the hundreds of men and
boysoven stokers, pickmen, door boys, lift operators and carmen, who toiled at the No. 6
mine.
When we built our great industrial cities with the forces those men had put at our
disposal we found that the rain itself had become our enemy: it pooled on our streets and
our acres of roofing and our huge parking lots, soaked up the toxins of our commerce,
transportation, and waste, and rushed in flash floods through our homes and businesses.
So we "chartered" our streets, as William Blake put it, and built culverts and storm drains
and subterranean pipes and caves to hide and rid ourselves of what had once nourished
our crops. We wanted only the ordered, linear laminar flow of the liquid, not its unruly
consequences of our actions to be sent underground, hushed upeven, in the case of the
East German government, to the extent that the law declaring certain environmental
"sacrifices" a state secret was itself a state secret.
In Senftenberg, as a remarkable German exhibit shows, the great opencast lignite
mines that fuelled the Third Reich and the GDR had created the ultimate combination of
secrecy and threat. Local plumes of toxic industrial wastes, often from unmarked and
concealed sites, were waiting for the watertable, artificially lowered by mine pumping, to
recharge itself and rise to where they could be carried away. The town of Senftenberg
and its accompanying villages such as Buchwalde, lay directly in the path of the toxins,
which would begin to rise in flooding throughout the area in about 2020. The German
past, it seems, never ceases to haunt its present. As the exhibit text puts it, chillingly, the
only "solution" that seemed to offer itself was the complete depopulation of Senftenberg,
and the "Auswanderung" or deportation of the 1,000,000 inhabitants of the area as a
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whole. We "are what we do," as the exhibit text puts it, "if only through what we eat,
drink, and breathe."
But this EcoRevelatory Design show is an act of healing, of remediation, not of
recrimination. That healing takes place in several ways: the two powerful mine
remediation exhibits, American and German, demonstrate two different approaches.
The American exhibit of Julie Bargman and Stacy Levy forgives, celebrates, and
in the tragic mode, makes beauty out of horror and pity. A string of pond basins along
the valley cut the acid with alkaline limestone (itself composed of the carbonaceous
corpses of ancient marine life), raising the pH from a deadly 2.9 to around 6.0, then
cleanse and lenify the water further through the gentle filtering action of acidloving
wetland plants. The process is dramatized by the change in color of this "litmus garden"
from brilliant orange, through shades of yellow and green, to blue. With remarkable
artistic boldness the landscape planners have made the very colors of the environmental
poisons into a design element, recognizing the unearthly beauty that many of us have
found in the babyblue or scarlet or iridescent bronze of mine ponds, a beauty we are
ashamed to acknowledge. The healing process is further illustrated by the foliage of the
native trees, shrubs, and forbs that will be encouraged to recolonize the area, their very
names a rich embroidery of colorBlue Flag, Black Chokeberry, Soft Rush, White Ash,
Summersweet, Wild Cherry, Sassafras.
I was finally able to make out the words acidetched on the glass case. They were
a poem by Malcolm Cowley about this very place, from his collection, Blue Juniata:
Mine No. 6
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They scoured the hill with steel and living brooms
of fire, that none else living might persist;
here crouch their cabins, here the tipple looms
uncompromising, black against the mist.
All day their wagons lumber past, the wide
squat wheels hub deep, the horses strained and still;
a headlong rain pours down all day to hide
the blackened stumps, the ulcerated hill.
Beauty, perfection, I have loved you fiercely
even in this windy slum, where fear
drips from the eaves with April rain, and scarcely
a leaf sprouts, and a wilderness in pain
brings forth its monstrous children even here
. . . your long white cruel fingers in my brain.
The poem itself is a sonnet, an ancient classical form, composed at a time when it
was quite unfashionable to write in any other form than modernist free verse. Free verse,
like modernity itself, was functionalist, stripped of ornament, direct, heroically discarding
the "outworn conventions," the sentimental old jingles of rhyme and meter. So in
choosing the sonnet form, the ancient vehicle of the love song, Cowley is himself
attempting a perhaps premature remediation of the language. His poem is a blue flag or
wild cherry, struggling to grow in the tipple of the modernizing economy, and no doubt
this is why the designers chose it.
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The exhibit, no less than Cowley's poem, acknowledges the terrible beauty of that
"wilderness in pain." Those miners helped to make the steel that built this country, that,
forged into tanks and aircraft carriers, defeated the forces of state totalitarianism all over
the world. We have begun to outgrow the first witchhunt period of environmentalism,
when we simply condemned our industrial past. The theme of Julie Bargman and Stacy
Levy is forgiveness and celebration.
industrialization, excusable by their apparent heroic purpose, lie level below level of
subterranean toxinsthe secrecy of the totalitarian state, its unconcern for its citizens, its
denials of the still more terrible industrial dehumanizations that attended its birth. Such
things can not be forgiven in this century at least; they certainly cannot ever be celebrated,
even in the tragic mode.
But they must be, can be, managed. How? Kristina Hill turns, as do her
American counterparts, to poetry for her metaphor: in this case, to the greatest German
brought about the death of his beloved Gretchen, finds his way to salvation by a huge act
of public service: the creation of the great ringdikes that hold back the waters of the
North Sea and save the city threatened by floods. The very knowledge and technical craft
by which he rebelled against God and Nature is now turned to the purposes of the
community.
Kristina Hill inverts the metaphorthe "dikes" are not positive dams but negative
depressions of the water table, created by the same techniques of groundwater pumping
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by which the state had enabled the stripmining to take place and had concealed its
results. Unlike Faust, the designer is not trying to hold back a natural force so much as to
prevent a natural force, the rise of the water table, from carrying human poisons
admittedly natural themselves in their own deadly wayinto the human community. In
inverting the metaphor, the designer as she buries the means of remediation also digs up
and brings above ground the knowledge and responsibility of the human community. The
design provides pollution sensors on public display that must be monitored by the
population under threat, suggesting that the passive protection afforded by a literal dike is
not enough. The active vigilance and cooperation of the communitythat both helped by
its silence and collusion to create the threat and is currently menaced by itis also
constant and necessary current effort to suppress the forces of xenophobia, antisemitism,
and racism among its unemployed youth.
No line can yet be drawn under this history. Unlike the American restoration,
whose settling pools form a complete narrative sequence from tragic beginning through
comic remedy to the meditative and gentle retrospection of its wetland ending, the
German works cannot yet be concluded in peace. They must remain in a state of tension.
Hill's ending is like the endings of another German poet, Bertold Brecht, who did not
want the audiences of his plays to go out of the theater purged and satisfied, but full of an
aroused and unsatisfied sense of injustice, made aware of political and social evil, eager
to put things right and bring malefactors to justice. Though Brecht himself, as an active
supporter of the east German regime, was part of the problem and not the solution, his
expressionist method can be useful when turned against the legacy of his former
employer. Brecht used what he called the "alienation effect" (Verfremdungseffekt) to
prevent his audience from comfortably identifying with his actors, and in the same spirit
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Hill's interventions in the postholocaust landscape do not allow the local populace to
imagine that this place, even when restored, is an ordinary bit of countryside. The
commemorations of extinct villages displaced by the mines, markers of the sites of former
machinery, and above all the monitoring technology, will be a reminder of a past that is
still draining through the ground and cannot be forgotten. "EcoRevelation" is here an act
of political memory and admission of guilt.
Hill adds two little suggestions of hope, however: the yellow and red fields of
mustard and red clover, together with the black of the carbonaceous earth, will remind the
viewer of the flag of the Federal Republic and its ideals of decentralized democracy. And
there is a red door, with the year 2010 written on it, at the edge of the project, promising a
possible time when forgiveness might be possiblebut does so only at the cost of
invoking the image of another inscribed gateway, over which was written "Arbeit Macht
Frei"work makes you free.
What is a distant hope for Eastern Europe is, however, an immediate promise for
America, as the EcoRevelatory show demonstrates. East Germany must for now endure,
accept, and manage its past; America may be almost ready to draw a line under its own,
remember it in both shame and pride, honor it, and go on to new things. The designers in
this show take many paths to this goal, but there is a surprising confluence of themes.
celebration of the past. From both the west and the east coasts come loving historical
monuments that are designed to carry the past into the future as a source of inspiration:
Harkness' California foothills park, and the Governors Island project of Anuradha Mathur
and Dilip da Cunha.
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A second major theme of the show as a whole is ritual performance. The
Governors Island project explicitly includes performance spaces, as do the Oakland park
of Louise Mozingo and Edward Blake's plan for the Hattiesburg Convention center. This
latter is especially interesting for its evocation of the great garden of Stourhead in
England, where the visitor must, in a circuit of the lake, allegorically reenact the journeys
of Virgil's Aeneas in his ordeal of founding the city of Rome. The Hattiesburg Center
diverges somewhat from the general move of these exhibits toward an open and
unplanned synergy; everything here seems planned to the last detail. But there ought to
be places where human art has fully reinvented nature, just as there ought to be places
where humans have given the initiative over to other species. Human beings, after all, are
an animal species; one indeed like the beavers or the termites, who build and thus
profoundly change the landscape. But the Hattiesburg center returns us to prehuman
nature as well; for the little epic journey the visitor must take is not the story of a human
hero but the story of the history of a watershed, a river, a valley. Thus old and new genres
of human performancethe garden as aristocratic moral pageant and the garden as
futuristic terraforming epicare combined in this very interesting American arcadia.
showneeds some recognition of its own as an important element in the future of
American landscape design. Landscape must become a ritual space for the human
community to reestablish its ancient performative connection with the land. The crucial
point is that human beings are not alien beings that somehow supervened upon this planet
to its inevitable detriment, but members of an animal species, mammalian primates who
are as much at home here as any other species. Nature on this planet is not nature unless
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ecological knowledge as, so to speak, standing outside of nature, an objective observer of
it. We are both gardeners and part of the garden. Thus there are no oneway causeeffect
relationships between humans and the rest of nature: the connection is always there, and
the connection is always twoway, a tangle of feedbacks and mutual influences. The
classical logic of linear cause will not work; nor will its postmodern equivalent, Michel
Foucault's reductive political question "who does what to whom?"
The fourth theme is what one might call the embrace and acceptance of
turbulence. This theme shows up especially in the many exhibits that deal with
floodwater, runoff, silting, and the nonlinear and unpredictable elements of weather in
general. Modernist landscape and architectural plans always seem to lie stunned beneath
an endless halcyon blue sky. There are no puddles in the streets, no high winds and fogs
refreshing about this show is that so many of the exhibits get into the mud of nonlinear
reality. We see it in the mine reclamations, the Governors Island project, Achva Stein's
arcadian bladerunner Los Angeles, the heroic redesign of the University of Virginia
airport, the grand Anacostia River Watershed project of Joseph Eades, and the very fine
Pueblo, Colorado river project of Richard Hansenindeed, in virtually all the exhibits.
The Pueblo park design has an especially appealing plan to bring back the cottonwood
trees and the ecosystems they support. Cottonwood trees need flash floods to germinate;
whenever it rains, directing the waters to where cottonwood seedlings can grow. This
idea, of using runoff from streets, parking lots, runways and rooves, and treating what was
a menace as a resource and a place of renewal, has the deepest implications. One of them
is the notion that human waste itself is not the end of the world.
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But for me the most attractive version of this idea is the quietest one, the Joan
Nassauer plan for St. Paul, Minnesota. Nassauer has faced the problem of how to allow
the new/old organic vision of things to take root in Lake Wobegon, so to speak, or a
perhaps even more traditonal middle class suburb of the Twin Cities. Nassauer does not
force anything down anyone's throat. She is willing to work with the tastes of people who
like lawn ornaments, swingsets, outdoor barbecues and neatly mown grass. The first year
meetings. The human "oeconomy" is part of the ecosystem too, Nassauer recognizes, and
her gentle plan for Birmingham Street, with its sophisticated lowtech system of French
drains, wet meadow bands, microprairie restoration, "wetland to be viewed from a lawn,"
marks an important transition in the role of the artist, from the Romantic/Modernist
hectoring genius to the wise servant of the people. One can just imagine how pleased the
residents were with the dash of colored bloom, the neat little stone walls, the attention of
big city planners who actually listened to what they had to say. Perhaps it will take a
century for those local tastes to refine themselves to the point that an average
Mediterranean city has already reached. But there is no other way of getting there than
the slow way; and that way will have some very endearing eccentricities of its own that
we will want to keep.
One of the key ideas in this project is the notion of disturbance. The radical of
the word is turb, the same turb that we find in turbulence.
Indeed, new research seems to indicate that the richest areas of biodiversity on
earth are the places where human civilization, the most disturbing regime of all, has been
longest established. This wildly counterintuitive finding should lead us to reconsider the
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conventional wisdom that informs our intuition. Certainly, the rate of extinction of
species has shot up demonstrably during the era of human dominance. But in the roof
gutters and cornices and backyards and middens and kitchen gardens and warehouses and
railroad marshallingyards and canals and drains of human cities there are thousands of
opportunities for clever new adaptations: the British moths that turned black for
urban populations, the exotic imports that proliferated there, the multiplication of
cultivated flowers and weeds and "vermin." Though biodiversity counted in terms of the
number of species has surely declined, gross genetic diversity within the successful
species whose habitats have been extended by human beings may actually have increased,
leading to a greater likelihood of new speciation. An entirely novel species of mouse has
just been discovered in a town in Northern Italy. Steve Packard, the prairie restorationist,
has been creating prairies on waste lots in the heart of Chicago. Perhaps we are already
becoming the shepherds and husbanders of nature, rather than the despoilers of it that we
have often been.
The EcoRevelatory Design show, then, signals a major transition in our basic
cultural model of the human relationship with the rest of nature. To try to sum it up in a
clumsy sentence, it is a transition from a heroic, linear, industrial, powerbased, entropic
thermodynamic, goaloriented model, to a tragicomic, nonlinear, horticultural, influence
based, synergetic, evolutionaryemergentist, processoriented model. The heroic model
postulates a human struggle with nature culminating in human victory, while the
tragicomic model postulates an ongoing engagement within nature, between the relatively
swift and selfreflective part of nature that is human, and the rest. The linear model
imagines oneway causes and effects; the nonlinear model imagines turbulent interactions
in which the initiating event has been lost or is at least irrelevant. The industrial model
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requires a burning; the horticultural model requires a growing. The powerbased model's
bottom line is coercion; the influencebased model's is persuasion and mutual interest.
The entropicthermodynamic model involves an inevitable and irretrievable expense of
free energy in the universe and an increase of disorder when any work is performed; the
synergeticevolutionary model seeks economies whereby every stakeholder gains and new
forms of order can emerge out of farfrom equilibrium regimes. The goaloriented
model imagines a perfect fixed or harmonious state as its end product, and tends
paradoxically to like immortal openended narratives; the processoriented model knows
that nothing in this universe is ever perfect and immortal, that death comes to everything,
that the function of an ending is to open up new possibilies, and it prefers beginning
middleend narrative structures.
Another way of describing the transition is in terms of the crucial distinctions
each paradigm tends to make. For the old industrial regimewhich includes its
dialectical antithesis, puritan environmentalismthe essential distinction was dualistic,
between the natural and the human, the genuine and the artificial, the organic and the
technological. For the new paradigm, the distinctions are no longer absolute ones of kind,
but relative ones of degree, within scales running from linear to nonlinear, power to
beauty, simplicity to complexity, statistical to unique, isolation to feedback, nature as
thermodynamic decay to nature as evolutionary emergence.
The transition itself had three historical phases as regards its attitude toward
progress: the modernist, the postmodernist, and what I would call the natural classicist.
In the modernist phase, progress was linear advance toward a goal. Politically it tended to
be statedriven. In the postmodernist phase, progress was denied or opposed as an evil or
an illusion. Politically the state came to be used as a defense against progress, and what
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drove events were ideological communities united around such things as gender or race.
In the natural classicist phase, progress was reconceived and redefined on the model of
the marketbottomup, nonlinear, based on human classical tastes, using a sophisticated
tweaking of existing natural processes to achieve its intentions, and submitting itself
cheerfully to the consequences as part of the ride.
What kind of literature might emerge from such a radical revisioning of nature
and our part in it? I have been trying to answer this question in my own work as a poet.
Here is one example; the second of my "Texas Eclogues" series, about an artificial lake
near Dallas. In North Texas, where I live, there is strange zone of savannahs, residential
real estate and huge artificial lakes, very tangled and unkempt in places (and then
suddenly tamed or as suddenly let go wild again), where a whole new ecology is
evolvingplant and bird species from Louisiana, the eastern forests, the Gulf Coast, the
Yucatan.
I walk by Lavon Lake in the indian summer,
By the satinysilver bones and skulls of the trees,
Where I find halfburied in crumbly sable gumbo
The great greenblack shell of a dead snapping turtle,
A tiny convolvulus, violetthroated, enweaved
In its gaping orifice; a foamrubber cushion choked
With the lakesilt, bearing a miniature garden of clubferns,
An ant'snest, a gauzewinged azure surefooted dragonfly!
The caked and powdery beach is curiously pure:
Even the halfburied Budweiser gleams in the sungold,
And bronzyblack grasshoppers evolve to scavenge this newness,
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And archaean footprints of North American marsupials
Cross with the dog's, the crane's thin cuneiform
Stalked by what must be the paws of a feral cat.
The seeds of willows have made their way here, have grown
Into little sallowy arbors of halfshadow green
Where the shore is spongy, prairie aquifers spring
To the surface, lagoons with tussocks of buffalograss,
Groves of exotic bamboo, impede the footsteps.
And the lake, lit by the glowing skeletons, green
In the unnatural light of my sunglasses, turns to light blue
And mirrors, fantastic, the miniature hills of the shore,
Goldbrown in the early fall, with woodlands,
Radiobeacons, realestate development.
How young the world is. I am its oldest inhabitant;
I was there at its white condensation, I am here, I shiver,
I hear overhead the whimpering whoop of the geese,
Twoyearold ghosts of this, the new dispensation,
In their plunge southward over the edge of the planet.
They do not know where they are going; I drink them,
Swallow their great raggedy flightline into
The inner sky of my spirit, the divine southland
That dreams in the web of the human software, the fold
That the shepherd has made by the side of the still waters.
And the sky is so blue! The outlines but not the substance
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Of brilliant clouds sometimes appear in its firmament,
Deflecting the sunrays to cast a shadow of azure
Over the breezed, hazy perfection of heaven.
This place of bones is a province of ancient Pangaea;
I am the large land mammal of the Pleistocene,
My food is the turbulence caused by the jut of consciousness
Into the flow of worldinformation, the swirl of spirit
Boiling about the point where nature, transfigured,
Breaks and shivers into the glow of the supernatural.
This poem describes one version of what I call the Hadean Arcadia. "Hadean"
for Hades, the land of the dead and the everliving; "Arcadia" for the mythical place
where humans and nature are at one.
Certain places on the Earth are hellmouths, gateways between the land of the
living and the land of the dead. On this side of those gates the landscape is especially
strange and beautiful: often it is a valley on the slopes of a volcano, like Virgil's Avernus
in the shadow of Vesuvius, or the vale of Enna beneath Mount Etna that Milton compared
to Paradise. Volcanic soil, fresh from the bowels of the planet, is famed for its fertility,
and it can support rich harvests of corn and vine. Pluto god of volcanoes is god of
money. But this place is also a place of danger, and at the hellmouth itself the grass will
not grow and the ground is sulphurous, hollow, and bubbling with noxious gases. There
must be a sacred precinct to demarcate the two worlds from each other, lest the living and
the dead intermingle too freely. The Indians considered Yellowstone taboo for the same
reasons, and would not settle there; and we do likewise.
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It is the country that True Thomas discovers, after he has been abducted by the
Queen of Faerie in the old Scots ballad of Thomas the Rhymer. He is carried on the back
of her horse through the sunless country and across rivers of human blood to where the
path divides in threeone to Heaven, one to Hell, and one to "fair Elfland." There they
choose the third path that lies between the familiar ways of evil and good, the bonnie path
that winds about the ferny brae, up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen. At last they
reach the dark garden where seven hundred years can pass in seven, and he receives from
the queen the very awkward gift of truthtelling. (How, he asks, can I prosper in the
market or avoid the wrath of a king if I have this giftand how can I speak to a fair lady if
I must always say what is in my mind?) This is the country of the dead, but also of the
everliving: the Western Mountain of the Chinese, the Babylonian Dilmun, the Happy
Hunting Grounds of the Plains Indians. It is also the land of certain dreams, unbearably
delicious, but lit always by a strange anxiety, an edge of fear at the unknown, an urgency
of unknown cause. It is a place both of the past and the future; it is the dream you have of
a house you once lived in, and in the dream you are so happy and at home there, and just
before you awaken to find it is lost and gone forever, there is a special moment of
yearning, an opening to something even deeper, that is brushed swiftly away by the return
of consciousness.
My Hadean eclogues come out of that place. An eclogue is a sort of picnic in
words, a déjeuner sur l'herbe, and they are little picnics beside the cavernmouth of
Hades, the underworld. They are eclectic ecloguestheir classicism, the classicism of the
twentyfirst century, is not an exclusively European one or even a Western one, but a
classicism that their poet thought he found in his conversations with shamans, living and
dead, from every corner of the world. The formal meters in which these poems are
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composed are the medium of that conversation; they are the way I listen to voices other
than my own.
Where is the hadean arcadia of the twentyfirst century? Ancient poets always
found it in the countryside, in a pastoral place where the cultivated mingled with the
uncultivated, or in sacred groves that were uninhabited but managed unobtrusively by
eccentric sibyls or priests. In the nineteenth century they found it in the wild landscapes,
or what they thought were wildin the desert, the Alps, the Lake District, the exotic lands
of Abyssinia or Xanadu. Thus their attitude to it was elegiac, as they foresaw the
encroachments of the city, the dark satanic mills. In the twentieth century they found it in
the city, where the evening is laid out on the sky like a patient etherized upon a table. In
the twentyfirst century we will find it in the suburbs, in a suburban Rus that is not so far
away from the arcadia of the bucolic poets, of Virgil and Horace, Tu Fu and Li Po,
Kalidasa and Hafez, Radnoti and Pasternak. But it is a posttechnological landscape, one
in which the technology is perfecting itself into invisibility, and where form has ceased to
follow function but rather elaborates itself into new, delicate, intelligible structures that
create new functionsfunctions that we suddenly recognize from the cultural past. There
are times when the present breaks the shackles of the past to create the futurethe
modern age, now past, was one of those. But there are also times, like the Renaissance
and our own coming twentyfirst century, when it is the past that creates the future, by
breaking the shackles of the present. The environmental restorationists are recreating
extinct ecosystemsprairies, oak openings, dry tropical forestson land once apparently
claimed forever for the city or the farm.
The floating islands of the old Aztec Tenochtitlan before the Spanish came, in the
suburban district of Xochimilco ("the land of the flower gardens") must have been such a
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place. There are territories below sea level, like the polders of Holland or the shores of
Galilee, deep beneath imaginary oceans, where the light is just so, the light of the planet
Mars when we have turned that desert into a dimlylit arcadia. Seashores and springtimes
sometimes show it, when the sunlight is at a low angle and the evening lengthens out after
the clocks have been set forward.
This themepark place, this Disneyland of the dead or everliving, where Orpheus,
Aeneas and Dante have their adventures, has its detractors. It is in doubtful taste, indeed
it is kitsch, for its irony is aimed not at itself but at the censoriousness of its critics. It
gently mocks the oneway linear equations of morality and power that are so dear to the
political culture. It is the domain of nonlinearity, of dissipative systems that flourish on
the flow of decay, of perverse consensual fetishisms, of emergent structures and fractal
depth; it is drawn by strange attractors rather than pushed by causes and laws. It
recognizes power and beauty as opposites, and chooses the power of beauty.
The hadean arcady is also a place of religious experience. But in the twentyfirst
century it will be one in which the difference between existentialistatheist descriptions of
paradise, and JudeoChristian ones (or Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Mayan, Taoist, or
Aborigine ones for that matter), will have begun to go away. Suppose there could be a
poetry, even a scientific description of reality, that left undamaged the principles, the
honor, the history and myth, the ritual, the intellectual criteria of believers and
unbelievers of all kinds alikeas long as they were people of depth and thought and
imagination? This is the language that poets must seek now, not for the sake of political
project requires so complete a subjection of the our ego to the wayward and terrifying
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spirit of naturenature, that is, whose wildest creation and most unpredictable agent is
humanity itself.
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