chapter 14

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THE DARK ECOLOGY OF ELEGY

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timothy morton

The woods are lovely dark and deep . . . Robert Frost, Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening

E C O - E L E G Y,

OR WHERE

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Pastoral is about the past, and thus foregrounds the reality that all art is about the pastwe look at what photons did to a photographic plate, we read what someone wrote ve seconds or ve centuries ago. As much as this is inescapable, however, ecological elegy is also about the future, and this future has two distinct modes. In the rst mode, there is nothing left for elegy at all. In the second, there is no end to the work of mourning. More strangely still, each mode may appear simultaneously in any given text. Elegy appears to be a quintessential mode of ecological writing. One can read books about the ravages of agribusiness on traditional farming techniques, with titles like Epitaph for a Peach. Or consider the rst sentence of the Dalai Lamas preface to a collection of essays on Buddhism and ecology: The earth, our mother, is dying (1990: v). Rachel Carsons Silent Spring, a criticism of the pesticide industry, uses

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ubi sunt tropes, elegiac gures that mourn the absence of things. Carson titles a chapter on lawn pesticides after a line in Keatss moody La Belle Dame Sans Merci: And no birds sing (2002: 10327). There are plenty of elegies for the environment. So many are the ecological elegies within and outside the literary canon that it would be tedious to list them and almost impossible to account for their varieties of subject matter, tone, ideological scope, and form. Consider Percy Shelleys laments over the scorched earth policies of tyrants (among them, Queen Mab and Ozymandias). Then there is Gerard Manley Hopkinss Binsey Poplars with its lament over those who Hack and rack the growing green (l. 11). Philip Larkins The Trees hauntingly evokes plant growth and decay: The recent buds relax and spread, j Their greenness is a kind of grief (ll. 34). Moreover, humans have entered a historical moment at which the consequences of past and present actions on the Earth are becoming increasingly evident. Since this is the case, we might expect elegy to be a signicant mode of contemporary ecological writing. If ecology is often elegiac, elegy is also ecological. Whether or not it is explicitly ecological, elegys formal topics and tropes are environmental. When Orpheus weeps for Eurydice, animals and trees listen. Mountains and streams echo back the tears and cries of the protagonist or the narrator. The affective fallacy enjoys a second lease of life in ecological poetics (Cavell 1988: 61). But even if the earth does not reply in kind, it may echo back our cries. Echoes are ecological in the precise sense that they render to us a sense of the surrounding world, just as the echolocation of bats provides them with a sense of space and distance: She is walking in the meadow, j And the woodland echo rings (Tennyson, Maud, 4.378). If echoes are ecological, however, they also trouble our ideas about what ecology and the environment mean. We usually think of these words as denoting an essential nature that exists somewhere out there in an authentic world that is either unhuman, nonhuman, or more-than-human, or possibly even inhuman. This is because the form of the echo gets in the way of a stable concept of what is natural. Echoes are literally how poetry, as sheer writing or as sheer voice, carries on after our own, or the Poets, or the protagonists, voice has died away. They are the earth of poetry, the weeds of writing growing up out of the cracks of signicance. Weeds are owers in the wrong place, and in this instance, the echo is a rhetorical ower in the wrong place, making a mockery of exactly who the narrator is and exactly where she is placed. Renaissance poetry thematizes this when echoes ironically amplify, refute or challenge the stanza after which they come, when a syllable resounds in sonic and graphic space, undermining the coherence of what was just said. With their mechanical repetition, echoes trouble the idea that ecological writing has to animate the world. So on a very basic level, poetic language is not on the side of a reied concept of life. Consider what Walter Benjamin says about echoes and the sensuality of sheer language (Tragic Drama 1977: 210). This sensuality impedes access to the concept of nature as an independent thing that is decisively yonder, over there. At the smallest scale, the form of elegy interrupts the functioning of concepts of nature. Ecological language might appear to be intrinsically elegiac. In a sense, nature is the ultimate lost object. It is the never-arriving terminus of a metonymic series: birds,

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owers, mountains . . . nature. The ecological threat, however, is quite the reverse of elegy. In elegy, the person departs and the environment echoes our woe. In ecological thinking, the fear is that we will go on living, while the environment disappears around us. Ultimately, imagine the very air we breathe vanishingwe will literally not be able to have any more elegies, because we will all be dead. It is strictly impossible for us to mourn this absolute, radical loss. It is worse than losing our mother. It resembles the heterosexist melancholy Judith Butler brilliantly outlines in her essay on how the foreclosure of homosexual attachment makes it impossible to mourn for it (1997: 4, 13840). (In another context George Haggerty (1999) has argued that elegy, with its voluminous form, is particularly useful for staging and hiding same sex desire.) I mention this because, as we shall see, ecological writing is often deceptive about the affective relationships it stages between conscious beings and nature. It often imagines those relationships as natural in themselves, and thus paradoxically loses a sense of the troubled and troubling intimacy that is the basis of relationship. We cannot mourn for the environment because we are so deeply attached to it we are it. So ecological discourse holds out the possibility of a mourning without end. Ecological elegy, then, must provide forms that undermine a sense of closure. Just as for Butler the truest gay male melancholic is the strictly straight man (1997: 147), so the truest ecological human is a melancholy dualist, mourning for something we never lost because we never had it, because we are it. What seems like a poetical analogy, even a form of kitsch (the affective fallacy), turns out to be the most radical possible content of an elegy: the very environment that is used as a backdrop for expressions of grief. What happens when this backdrop becomes the foreground? This chapter assumes melancholy to be an irreducible element of subjectivity, a primordial relationship to objects rather than one emotion among others. We thus part company with current revisionist approaches to melancholy that situate it within a broad history of affect precisely as just another emotion. Before psychoanalysis, humoral theory viewed melancholy, produced by black bile, as the humor that brought humans closest to the earth (Benjamin 1977: 153). This proximity suggests that melancholy may provide the basis for an ecological delity to objects, a political project that may be self-destructivevaluably soprecisely because it is a moment in the unfolding of what Alain Badiou calls a truth process, a rigorous and relentless distinction of the subject from its identications (2001: 4057). This ecological delity is the core of what I call dark ecology (see Morton 2007: 140205). Environmental elegy is caught on the horns of a dilemma. Normally, the natural world provides a sounding board, an echo chamber for the narrators cries of loss. Scholarship has asserted that the reverberation of nature is the way in which elegy imagines how grief is brought into language. Nature becomes an analogue for the objectifying process of writing, which detaches our grief from us and makes it bearable by negating it (Sacks 1985: 245). What happens, however, when this sounding board itself becomes the object of lamentation? There is no objective correlative for this loss, since the elegiac convention is that the scenery is itself the analogue for what has been lost (p. 83). We have lost the objective correlative for loss itself, and have slipped away from mourning, which nds an appropriate way of

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symbolising loss, back into melancholia, which has no way of redressing woe. We have moved from the work of mourning to the work of sheer suffering, the Trauerspiel (literally, the German baroque lamentation play) that Benjamin described as neither tragic revelation nor consolatory grace but rather an image of hopeless, yet dogged, endurance . . . it is as though the lamentation play were a landscape in which each character is a stranded fragment or ruin (Sacks 1985: 79). We touched on the contemporary relevance of ecological elegy at the beginning of the chapter. An elegiac mode is appropriate, given the loss of species, of habitats, of old forms of lifeold here standing in for anything that happened earlier than last week. All that is solid, as Karl Marx said of capitalism, melts into air; the very literariness of his Shakespearean allusion has an elegiac ring (Marx and Engels 1977: 224). Environmental language, however, speaks elegies for an incomplete process, elegies about events that have not yet (fully) happened. The essays that appear in British newspapers such as the Guardian and Independent on the subject of global warming are a case in point (see Monbiot 2004). They fuse elegy and prophecy, becoming elegies for the future. In ecological elegy, something strange happens to elegys usual organization of time. Ecological elegy asks us to mourn for something that has not completely passed, that perhaps has not even passed yet. Consider the Dalai Lamas words: the earth is dying. Traditionally, elegies weep for that which has already passed. Ecological elegy weeps for that which will have passed given a continuation of the current state of affairs. The future perfect hollows out time. As readers of ecological elegy, we have to occupy two places at once: projecting through imagination into the future, looking back on the present; and reading the elegy, in the time of reading, the here and now. The double position reproduces dualism, as we look back upon ourselves from the vantage point of the imagined future perfect. From this imaginary vantage point, ecological rhetoric struggles to posit the ecological crisis as an event since things only happen when one looks back at them having happened (see Koselleck 1985: 10515). Thus the elegy, weeping for a lost Edenic oneness between humanity and nature, undermines this weeping at the very moment of weeping itself. Ecological apocalypticism warns against either total destruction, or against (or perversely, in favor of) life going on without us: against total death, or the death of us. In both instances, consciousness goes onwe always imagine total destruction from some impossible imaginary vantage point, a future anterior. Ecological apocalypticism is like what Marxists call triumphalism. It puts the reader in a decidedly unecological subject position, sitting back and letting the other take care of business. The content may be lamentation, but the subject position is passive enjoyment. The fundamentalist, deep green idea goes even further, putting this radical loss in the past, asserting that humans have already lost the connection with Mother Earth, a time when there was no Cartesian subject-object distinction, something resembling ve poetry. Leo Marx asserted a long time ago that elegies what Schiller says about na for the lost garden were predicated on the age of the machine, just as, for Martin Heidegger, poetry reveals the earth (his technical term for the ontic essence of things) through technological openings of language, much as a digging machine reveals the

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earth by cutting into it (Leo Marx 1964; Heidegger 1971: 469). Just like Lewis Carrolls Walrus and Carpenter, our love of nature is based on a capacity for devouring it. Deep green elegy, then, faces a dilemma at the formal level, precisely because it presupposes the very loss it wants to prevent. Its form actually busies itself with getting rid of nature before full destruction occurs. It is not hard to detect in it the sadism of the elegiac mode. The reader confronts the paradox that ecological writing kills nature for a second time, before it has fully happened for the rst time. A radical loss is too hastily mourned. Since according to this rhetoric we have lost both Innenweltand Umwelt, in Husserlian language, there remains no environment in which we can wonder whether we have lost anything or not. This narcissistic panic fails fully to account for the actual loss of actually existing species and environments, coral reefs (70 per cent are gone), as if we were in the midst of a slow motion nuclear explosion. This is not meant to suggest that there are not beings who are dying, right now. But the unseemly rhetorical rush is at best unhelpfully paradoxical, and at worst implicated in the aggression towards the biosphere with which its content tries to frighten us. There is something, then, about the form of nature poetry that resembles what Freud says about mourning and melancholia. Perhaps the future of ecological poetry is that it will cease to play with the idea of nature. Since ecology is, philosophically, thinking how all beings are interconnected, in as deep a way as possible, the idea of nature, something over there, the ultimate lost object as this chapter claims, will not cut it. We will lose nature, but gain ecology. Ecological poetry must thus transcend the elegiac mode. How, on the other hand, are we to arrive at this stage? Is it possible to think what I call the ecological thought right now, or must we still hang on to nature? Perhaps we must approach this subject in a paradoxical way. Perhaps a kind of philosophical and poetic judo is required. Instead of getting over nature, perhaps we need to get under it, or go through it. What would this passage look like? It would, perhaps, look like coming out, in the language of sexual identity politics. It would seem, hypothetically at least, to resemble admitting to the excessive contingency of desire, the kind of desire that the word nature lover seems almost to ignore or silence. It might appear as a kind of absolute melancholy, a necrophilic holding on to the corpse of nature. A Hamlet-like lingering in melancholy would be more appropriate, even more scientic, in the precise sense that it would open up a philosophical and aesthetic space for the arrival of non-identity. It would be an attunement, an allowing of the object to stick in our throatsan acknowledgement that nature is not lost. This caveat is directed not at the content of ecological rhetoric, but at its form. Attention to form would open a space for a politicized melancholya presence to the idea that something is happening, right now, not at some impossible future date. We could refuse to swallow the planet, metaphorically as well as literally. In a twisted move derived from consumerism, ecological thinking could allow the object to stick in the throat and vomit it back up. Nothing is determined yet; we are just beginning

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to include nonhuman beings in our politics. Along with the coral, another thing that is vanishing is our habitual point of view. This habitual view is one of distance: we are here and nature is yonder. Despite their content, this is what ecological Jeremiads are mourning at the formal level of narrative position. The really difcult elegiac work would consist in bringing into full consciousness the reality of human and nonhuman interdependence, in a manner that threatens the comfortable way in which humans appear in the foreground and everything else is in the background. To adapt the words of Freud (Where id was, there shall ego be), where nature was, there shall ecology be. Straight after this pithy maxim, and as the nal words of the lecture, Freud himself inserts a very suggestive sentence: It is a work of culture [reclamation], not unlike the draining of the Zuider Zee (1989: 100). Psychoanalysis itself uses an ecological metaphor to describe the process of becoming aware of the Id. The silence after this sentence says everything: replacing nature with ecology is disappointing, because it brings the unconscious into consciousness, and, as a rule, in the words of one psychoanalyst, consciousness sucks. Encoded into this drainage work, then, is a painful work of mourning. Elegy works as much against ecology as for it, despite the overwhelmingly environmental quality of elegiac tropes, and the predominantly contemplative mode of its narration, eminently suitable for conveying ecological awareness. Elegy aids mourning by weeping for the lost one on our behalf, performing the sadism that we will need for proper digestion to work. The text kills the lost one symbolically, burying her so that she does not come back to haunt us. Instead of providing the poetic equivalent of canned laughter, automating mourning for us on the page, progressive ecological elegy must mobilise some kind of choke or shudder in the reader that causes the environmental loss to stick in her throat, undigested. Environmental elegy must hang out in melancholia and refuse to work through mourning to the (illusory) other side.

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There is a symptomatic text that will help explain many others, if only by its extraordinarily experimental relationship with elegiac tradition: Percy Shelleys poem Alastor. Having considered the paradoxes and ironies of elegy and ecology, we are ready to examine some of the extreme forms that elegiac pastoral has taken. These extremes provide limit cases that challenge our ideas about what elegy can do, and about what nature is. There is no denitive pastoral elegiac form, and trying to provide a scheme that would t everything is a Procrustean task. There are, however, unique examples of how poetry before our age of denitive ecological panic set out agenda from which poetics can still learn. My example appears during the Romantic

E L E G Y A N D E N V I RO N M E N TA L E X I S T E N C E : T H E S Y M P TO M W O R D S WO RT H

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period, at the very beginning of the moment variously dened as capitalism, modernity, and the age of industry and technology. The principal topic of Alastor is intimacy. Intimacy is also a fundamental category of ecological thinking. What I call the ecological thought is the thinking of the interconnectedness of all beings, in the most profound possible way. Intimacy, therefore, is a key to this interconnectedness, and with it, the concepts we hold about sentience. Intimacy involves closeness with beings who may or may not be sentientand how, nally, can we ever tell? One of the structural markers of sentience, in short, is the very opacity that the other presents to me: I cannot know whether she is sentient, whether she is even a she or an it. Alastor suggests that nature writing must break with the solipsism of which it is all too capable, but that this break involves a frightening, excessive openness towards the opacity of other beings. The elegiac occasion of Alastor could not be more strange and powerful. It is an elegy for a ctional Poet, one who perhaps stands for a real poet. The Poet is unmourned, unsung, unknown in both death and life (Shelley 2002: ll. 5066). The Poet is radically attuned to nature, a nonviolent vegetarian who wanders through the wilderness alone, until a dream sends him on a quest deeper and deeper into nature in a search for the ideal beloved. He is a stranger Poet: our encounter with him is an encounter with the radically unknown. From where do we glimpse his passage and death if not from some impossible point of view? As the stranger, the Poet stages the fundamental ecological problem: the fact of sentient beings, of sentience itself. If lyric, as Allen Grossman observes, is the genre of the other mind, then elegy is the genre of mourning the radical inability to know, to be intimate with, this other mind (Grossman and Halliday 1992: 211). Since ecology is profoundly about intimacy, about being with other beings (sentient or not, and how can we tell for sure?), then elegy in this sense is deeply ecological. The Poets sheer existence is in play: There was a Poet, begins the third verse paragraph (Shelley 2002: l. 50), like Wordsworths lyrical ballad There was a boy or Coleridges It is an Ancient Mariner (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner 2004 , l. 1). Shelley broaches the existential isness of the Poet, the sense of what Emmanuel vinas calls the There is (il y a). What is the it that rains in the phrase It is Le raining? What is the it or the there that is the Ancient Mariner, the boy, the Poet? This il y a, this opaque nothingness, will turn out to be the kernel of the poem Alastor vinas imagines at its zero degree as the environmental itself, a nothingness Le creepiness of the night. It is the sheer existential quality of Heideggerian Da-Sein, the there of Being-there. No wonder then, that Shelley names the tomb and its environs, right away:
There was a Poet whose untimely tomb No human hands with pious reverence reared, But the charmed eddies of autumnal winds Built oer his mouldering bones a pyramid Of mouldering leaves in the waste wilderness. (ll. 504)

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Poet and environment are imagined together as a world of death. The rest of the poem exfoliates these dead leaves. Since owers are traditionally tropes (the owers of rhetoric), then the leaves are writing, the process of accretion and erasure, adding layer upon palimpsestic layer of sheer scrawl to the initial image, not so much eshing it out as extending it, in the Cartesian sense of matter and space as extension. Like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, then, Alastor becomes its subject, this demonic opaque isness, this inertia that we mistakenly hypostasise as nature. Since tropes are owers, the mouldering leaves are surely gures for gures (Shelley elsewhere uses dead leaves as a gure for his writing). The zeugma of mouldering bones . . . mouldering leaves equates the corpse of the Poet with the dead letter, or even more minimally, with the space of inscription (the leaf of paper rather than the ower of rhetoric). It is as if, for a moment, we watch poetic writing itself (the Poets own writing?) biodegrade, abandoned, like all waste (recyclable or not) in a place that is dened as wild precisely because it is the place of abandonment. Poetry degrades into (mere) writing, writing degrades into paper, paper degrades back into the stuff of trees. This is an illegible archive, a library where the books and shelves have reverted to their raw materials. And it is an unseen archive. The image of the pyramid in the wilderness anticipates the ruined statute in the desert in Ozymandias, an ironic statement about the nullity of tyranny. In both cases, something seems to have gone awry, something to do with the place from which we view the wreckagea no mans land. It is a fascinatingly ecological image, and a disturbing oneas we read the poem, are we recuperating, recycling the waste, or celebrating it? Is nature really a cycling, holistic system, or is it an innite garbage heap? The poem announces itself as a critical commentary on another great pastoral elegist, William Wordsworth. In a companion poem, a sonnet addressed to Wordsworth, Shelley laments the political and aesthetic decline from a radical avant garde of the person he calls Poet of Nature (l. 1). Shelley had been reading Wordsworths magnum opus, The Excursion, and Mary Shelley noted that he was Much disappointed. [Wordsworth] is a slave (Mary Shelley 1987: 25). Alastor elaborates on the sonnets claims, depicting a Poet protagonist who goes in search of an ideal vision, leaving behind the actually existing social situation (presented in miniature as a young woman who tends to his needs), delving further into a nature that removes him from humanity and isolates him in a suicidal quest for the absolute. Wordsworth, says Alastor, has reied nature, turning it into an abstract thing set apart from human relations, a mere sounding board for a form of subjectivity that is nally nothing more than narcissism. Alastor is thus highly suitable for close examination: it is a text that scrutinizes other texts, nding them wanting precisely at those moments at which concepts of nature are at stake. Or does it? A careful reading of Wordsworth makes clear that his poetics was also written in a critical pastoral mode, in which a single, independent, solid nature out there is constantly challenged by a vertiginous, spiraling, deconstructive mode of poetic textuality that undermines all solid-seeming views of what being a subject, and being nature, might mean. The most heightened moments of the Wordsworthian sublime, for instance, consist in moments of elusive or even failed contact between

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the human and the nonhuman or inhuman. Is this really happening? Is this really happening to me? What does that mean? The famous spots of time in The Prelude, for instance, open up these sorts of questions. Even in non-blank verse, miniature lyrical forms, Wordsworthian nature is wonderfully evasive and anti-essential. The closer the reader gets to it, the more it looks like a text, and an undecipherable one at that (Morton 2004). We could claim that Shelley never read the texts from which he might have derived a different Wordsworth. But this evades the question of the Ruined Cottage section of The Excursion, the one passage most proximate to Alastor, which with its double frame surely provides Shelley with something like a model for sophisticated ecopoetic composition. I will return to this specic theme later. For now, we are left with some troubling questions. Wordsworths pastoral oeuvre challenges Shelleys own critique of it. Is Shelleys Alastor thus in fact hyper-Wordsworthian, rather than anti-Wordsworthian furthermore, is Alastor about nishing the job Wordsworth started, or does the poem actually fall below the mark? The way Alastor poses itself as a critique makes it startlingly fresh, for it engages the reader in a deceptive, shifting game of interpretation and counterinterpretation to which there might be no end. It is therefore a superb poem to think with, specically to think the vexed relationship between elegy and ecology. Shelleys Preface to Alastor is either too simple, or it is deceptively simple. It cannot just be straightforwardor can it? It has teased generations of readers. Why write the poem at all, if a straightforward Preface would have sufced? One feels a professional obligation to generate new readings. But this does not exhaust ones puzzlement. The Preface seems to want us to think that the Poet protagonist is a miserable failure who cannot identify with others properly: Those who love not their fellow-beings, live unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable grave. In this, the Poet is distinguished from the common herd by his high level of civilization (he is pure and tender-hearted), only to fall back into the throng of the morally dead (Shelley 2002: 73). Many have declared their distaste for the Poets ignoring of his actually existing female companion in favor of a masturbatory dream, a dream that starts him on his journey (ll. 14991). Yet in condemning the Poet in this way, we become what we have condemned, a signicant side effect in a poem whose title is the Greek for avenging demon. The argument seems to want us to say, That Poet had it coming. Indeed, the Poet is overwhelmed, not only by nature in its radical otherness, but by huge waves of blank verse that continue to break upon the shore of the page long after he has died. Like ngernails and hair, the poem itself goes on after its heros death. Unlike in most elegies, the reader nds herself in the position not of a vengeful humanity, but the impossible one of nature itself. There is a hint of this at the beginning, when we glimpse the Poet as already dead, and then through the eyes of an antelope, in a gure that narratology calls focalizationthat is, the way narrative can convince us that we are viewing a scene from the particular point of view of one of the actors in the scene:
he would linger long In lonesome vales, making the wild his home,

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Until the doves and squirrels would partake From his innocuous hand his bloodless food, Lured by the gentle meaning of his looks, And the wild antelope, that starts wheneer The dry leaf rustles in the brake, suspend Her timid steps to gaze upon a form More graceful than her own. (98106)

It would be an ecological commonplace to claim that Shelley is here giving us access to a decisively nonhuman point of view. We could go further and assert that the antelope is capable of aesthetic contemplationof appreciation for no reason, in Kantian terms, in other words, of one of the things, perhaps the thing, that makes humans human (non-animal). Is it in fact the antelope who thinks something like This form is more graceful than my own? We will never know. That is the beauty of untagged indirect speech, as Jane Austen (the pioneer) knew, for this unknowing opens up the space of the other mind (Grossmans phrase 1992: 211). We glimpse the possibility that the nonhuman world is not impersonal. It is indeed a decentering image. The Orphic Poett subject for elegycharms the animals: he awakens in them an innate capacity for contemplation. Something remarkably similar happens in Rilkes rst sonnet to Orpheus:
Creatures of stillness crowded from the bright unbound forest, out of their lairs and nests; and it was not from any dullness, not from fear, that they were so quiet in themselves, but from simply listening. Bellow, roar, shriek seemed small inside their hearts. And where there had been just a makeshift hut to receive the music, a shelter nailed up out of their darkest longing, with an entryway that shuddered in the wind you built a temple deep inside their hearing. (514)

Orpheus enables an intimacy to open up within and around the listening animals, a temple deep inside their hearing (l. 14). Animals become contemplative, quiet in themselves (l. 8), which suggests that they have this capacity, whether or not Orpheus singing induces it. This is a profound suggestion, more profound, perhaps, than the regular ways of posing the question of animal sentience and consciousness. Even in this position, however, we remain in touch with the Poet, who already holds a profound ecological view. This is the view established in the rst verse paragraph, according to which nature consists in a fraternity of equal beings, a beloved brotherhood (l. 1). But retroactively, looking back from the end of the poem, the very lines just quoted, exemplifying the vegetarian republican view of the other, exist within the sadistic gaze of nature that overows the Poet at the end. Compassion implies asymmetry and distance, an irreducible distance that we try to get rid of at our peril. Shelley remarkably accomplishes a critique of sensibility that leaves us with no other option, despite its retroactive corrosion of the republican-chaste-proper

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view. Like Victor Frankenstein, a roughly contemporaneous gure in the oeuvre of his partner Mary, Shelleys Poet is the pinnacle of his culture. But Shelley makes it clear that despite himself, the Poet wants something. Shelleys genius is in seeing that the Poets very abstention from desire is in fact saturated with desire. The reader goes along with natures continuation, and writings continuation. We identify with the Poets dead body, relishing the ood of gorgeous, hyperreal nature imagery. We occupy the view of the necrophiliac narrator who oozes out of the poems beginning, like a second head growing out of the apparently sober, chaste, republican narrator who frames the story as a healthy moral lesson. Tilottama Rajan has argued that the doubling of the narrative generates a phantasmic quality that suspends the truth-value of the tale (1994: 41). There are two poetic introductions before the introduction of the Poet proper (There was a Poet . . . ; see Crucefyx 1983). Scholars generally agree that there are at least two people in the poem. I argue that there are at least three. It appears that there are two narrators. The rst evokes the universal brotherhood of nature in a prayer that the narrator has not sinned against natural propriety. This narrator is chaste, ecologically fraternal, nonviolent:
Earth, ocean, air, beloved brotherhood! If our great Mother has imbued my soul With aught of natural piety to feel Your love, and recompense the boon with mine; If dewy morn, and odorous noon, and even, With sunset and its gorgeous ministers, And solemn midnights tingling silentness; If autumns hollow sighs in the sere wood, And winder robing with pure snow and crowns Of starry ice the grey grass and bare boughs; If springs voluptuous pantings when she breathes Her rst sweet kisses, have been dear to me; If no bright bird, insect, or gentle beast I consciously have injured, but still loved And cherished these my kindred; then forgive This boast, beloved brethren, and withdraw No portion of your wonted favour now! (117)

This is not just about nature, but about the subject position from which nature is known and viewed. Note the modesty of the negatives: If no bright bird . . . I consciously have injured (ll. 1314), withdraw j No portion of your wonted favour (ll. 1617). It is an exemplary imprecation. The polite voice picks up on a Wordsworthian strain: grey grass, bare boughs. So does the second, with its voice of living beings, and woven hymns j of night and day, and the deep heart of man (ll. 489). Oscillating between eros and philos, but always remaining within the bounds of propriety, the opening verse paragraph is a consummate performance of ecological awareness. There is only one somewhat ambiguous moment, when the narrator drops eros and philos and heads for family love. The dear quality of the voluptuous

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pantings (ll. 1112) just skirts the right side of eroticism, evoking perhaps the fond Oedipal gaze of a father and daughter by using dear in the sense of held in deep and tender esteem (OED adj. 2a.). Dear implies a chaste, almost aesthetic distance rather than sexual involvement. Nevertheless, the incestuous charge is there in its absence. We shall return to this in a moment. Shelleys sonnet to Wordsworth, which accompanies Alastor in the Alastor volume, is a critique of the Poet of Nature. But which poet? The second voice yearns for incestuous contact with the corpse of mother nature, Mother of this unfathomable world! Shelley sets this passage off in a fresh verse paragraph. It is as if the poem is ja ` -vu like technique reminiscent of the double frame of The Ruined restarting, a de Cottage, which Shelley read in its Excursion form in preparation for Alastor (see Morton 2007: 1467):
Mother of this unfathomable world! Favour my solemn song, for I have loved Thee ever, and thee only; I have watched Thy shadow, and the darkness of thy steps, And my heart ever gazes on the depth Of thy deep mysteries. I have made my bed In charnels and on cofns, where black death Keeps record of the trophies won from thee, Hoping to still these obstinate questionings Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost, Thy messenger, to render up the tale Of what we are. In lone and silent hours, When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness, Like an inspired and desperate alchymist Staking his very life on some dark hope, Have I mixed awful talk and asking looks With my most innocent love, until strange tears Uniting with those breathless kisses, made Such magic as compels the charmed night To render up thy charge: . . . and, though neer yet Thou hast unveiled thy inmost sanctuary, Enough from incommunicable dream, And twilight phantasms, and deep noonday thought, Has shone within me, that serenely now And moveless, as a long-forgotten lyre Suspended in the solitary dome Of some mysterious and deserted fane, I wait thy breath, Great Parent, that my strain May modulate with murmurs of the air, And motions of the forests and the sea, And voice of living beings, and woven hymns Of night and day, and the deep heart of man. (1849)

In establishing its subject position, this passage differs dramatically from the opening. This is the poetry of presence rather than absence, of horror rather than doubt.

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The blatant address to the mother cuts across the paternal and fraternal language of the rst verse paragraph. And yet the language is no less faithful to nature than the rstperhaps more so, in its lurid perverse intensity. This sort of language is precisely what we nd in the rest of the poem. It speaks with the voice of a child, and an unchaste Freudian child at thata child with an all too human psyche, traversed by unnatural pre-Oedipal desires. Nature here is the innite garbage dump, the charnel ground hinted at in the image of the Poet covered in mouldering leaves. The night that makes a weird sound of its own stillness (l. 30) is an amazing image of the incessancy of writing, and environment, which in this strange elegy, continues even after the description of the Poets death, both inside and outside the poem. The outrageous use of render (l. 28), with its connotations of rending meat, jars with the chaste vegetarianism of the rst introduction and, later, with the Poet himself. This narrator is both sadistic and masochistic, able to hang motionless like an Aeolian harp, long-forgotten in some mysterious and deserted fane (ll. 424). The narrator himself becomes a recording or monitoring device. It is as if, within the frantic and frenetic activity of sadistic rendering and peering, there is an all too passive being, which is perhaps even more horrifying. Despite the consistent Wordsworthianism, we are dealing with very different personas, and very different natures. The second narrator seethes with pre-Oedipal violence, or with the violence of the murderous dissecting scientist. Is this second voice latent within the rst one: inside every chaste nature-lover is an incestuous necrophiliac just waiting to burst out? Or is it entirely different? As the poem proceeds, the necrophiliac narrator calls the rhetorical shots. Even if the rst narrator is different from the second one, he or she distinguishes himself or herself as consciously chaste, and thus remains within the second narrators orbit. Or chastity is suffused with desire. Or necrophilia is really the obscene underside of the republican viewand so on. The narrative doubling is not only phantasmatic, as Rajan argues, but also mutagenic. In Darwinian evolution, there is no stable nature but only a proliferation of genetic mutations and haphazard cell divisions. It is as if the restarted poem includes an idea of the unnatural within nature itself. The passage is enough to make ecocriticism recoil in disgust. Notions of life permeate ecological thinking. Vegetarianism enjoins us not to eat dead animals. Conservation is predicated on the idea of protecting endangered species from extinction. Efforts to avoid global warming are in effect attempts to maintain the current state of affairs namely, one in which humans are still alive. The realization that the narrator of Alastor includes death, and even a sexualized desire for death, casts a shadow over this supposedly happy view of sheer life and its preservation. That is the whole point. Disgust is what falls out of the aesthetic dimension (Gigante 2005: 121). Kantian aesthetics maintains its coherence by excluding an unassimilable substance, the vomit into which language threatens to collapse (Derrida 1981). Alastors necroecological celebration is a nightmare form of eco-vomit, suffused with sadistic vegetarian enjoyment, alluding to a passage from Paradise Lost 11.47990 (the Angel Michaels depiction of a lazar house) that was very compelling to the vegetarian Shelley:

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O, storm of death! Whose sightless speed divides this sullen night: And thou, colossal Skeleton, that, still Guiding its irresistible career In thy devastating omnipotence, Art king of this frail world, from the red eld Of slaughter, from the reeking hospital, The patriots sacred couch, the snowy bed Of innocence, the scaffold and the throne, A mighty voice invokes thee. (60918)

Yet by forcing us towards identication with the disgusting, the narrator breaks down the aestheticization that reinforces the dualism of subject and object, and the dualism between subject and subject, and between subject and abject (the psychic remainder of the mothers body; Kristeva 1982: 131). The verse literally humiliates us, bringing us closer to the earth, and to the Poet. Even if animals can do iteven if it is an animal trait, not a distinctly human oneaesthetic contemplation still presupposes distance. Thus Alastor starts as radically ecological, then pushes even its own radical envelope. In the same way Frankenstein, Alastors companion text, opens with Victor as a republican. But his disgusting creature poses the difference between imagining fraternity and living it. Living it has to do with coexisting with the other mind in extremis, with a person who might not even be a person. We are dealing here not with the dead but with undead. Alastor, says the Preface, allegorizes a predominant state of mind, in which we do not love our fellow men. In contrast, the poem takes us on a perverse journey that compels us to enjoy the Poets death, as a self-regarding virtuous vegetarian is killed off by the incessancy of his search, surely an analogue for the incessant, luxuriant blank verse that sprouts up even as he becomes a mere skeleton. This sinthomic writing is charged with enjoyment. Our nose is rubbed in death as the writing writhes around the Poet. This is not Wordsworth. Or if it is, it is Wordsworth left in the fridge for too long. This is a signicant way of putting it, since Shelley appears to disambiguate Wordsworth (as the horizon of all the things his writing means, the supposed inner life of the author) from Wordsworth (the actual texts that bear that signature). In his late writing, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan suggested that the therapeutic process was not about being cured of symptoms. Instead, it was about being cured of the pathological subjective relationship to those symptomswhere in earlier analysis the object was to get rid of the symptom, seen as a coded message about some kind of subjective deadlock that the patient could overcome, in this form of analysis what is dissolved is not the symptom but the subject for whom the symptom exists. Alastor performs a similar operation on Wordsworth. The second narrator gets rid of the subjective distance towards the traumatic symptom of sheer writing without end, and achieves something like Wordsworth (as language) without the subject Wordsworth, which we could describe both as the set of ideas and beliefs about language, nature and so on, and as the formal distance towards this content which we assume

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to be an attitude or personality of some kind, by lling the blanks in the text with meaningfulness. We should recall in passing that Wordsworths highly metonymic style invites this kind of lling in, while the explicitness of the second narrator impedes it. We move from chaste, living Wordsworth to rotten, undead Wordsworth. In so doing, we discover a new way of doing elegy.

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Can we mourn for a monster? Nature is no longer unhuman but inhuman, radically different, irreducibly strange, threatening to our need for coherence, for a background that constitutes a human foreground, or a mirror that reects us gratifyingly. It becomes necessary consciously to choose this mode among others, in an existential acknowledgement of our difference from the sort of people who do not identify with others. We thus identify with our symptom, our necrophiliac enjoyment of sheer nature, teeming and rotting. It is not so bad for ecology after all. Even here, even in vengeful elegy, we are able to stay with whatever is inadequately signied by nature. Shelley introduces an analogue for it in the astonishing description of the overgrown lawn that the Poet encounters, oozing with tendrils and roots. Only a substantial quotation will capture the way in which this oozing poetic spreads out over the temporal experience of eyes drifting down a page in silent reading, a poetry that is at once discourse (the record of a mind) as Anthony Easthope argued in his book on blank verse (1983), and sheer stuff, writhing writing:
The meeting boughs and implicated leaves Wove twilight oer the Poets path, as, led By love, or dream, or god, or mightier Death, He sought in Natures dearest haunt some bank, Her cradle and his sepulchre. More dark And dark the shades accumulate. The oak, Expanding its immense and knotty arms, Embraces the light beech. The pyramids Of the tall cedar overarching frame Most solemn domes within, and far below, Like clouds suspended in an emerald sky, The ash and the acacia oating hang Tremulous and pale. Like restless serpents, clothed In rainbow and in re, the parasites, Starred with ten thousand blossoms, ow around The gray trunks, and, as gamesome infants eyes, With gentle meanings, and most innocent wiles, Fold their beams round the hearts of those that love,

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These twine their tendrils with the wedded boughs, Uniting their close union; the woven leaves Make network of the dark blue light of day And the nights noontide clearness, mutable As shapes in the weird clouds. Soft mossy lawns Beneath these canopies extend their swells, Fragrant with perfumed herbs, and eyed with blooms Minute yet beautiful. One darkest glen Sends from its woods of musk-rose twined with jasmine A soul-dissolving odor to invite To some more lovely mystery. Through the dell Silence and Twilight here, twin-sisters, keep Their noonday watch, and sail among the shades, Like vaporous shapes half-seen; beyond, a well, Dark, gleaming, and of most translucent wave, Images all the woven boughs above, And each depending leaf, and every speck Of azure sky darting between their chasms; Nor aught else in the liquid mirror laves Its portraiture, but some inconstant star, Between one foliaged lattice twinkling fair, Or painted bird, sleeping beneath the moon, Or gorgeous insect oating motionless, Unconscious of the day, ere yet his wings Have spread their glories to the gaze of noon. (42668)

Shelley here achieves an astonishing intensication of Wordsworth, a hyperWordsworth that is mutating into something else, lurid and lugubriousone is tempted to say psychedelic. It is as if he discovers a threatening excess within the chastity of Wordsworthian language. What we encounter here is not nature, at least not pre-psychoanalytic nature, since whatever Shelley is evoking is charged with psychic energy, disturbing rather than soothing. In psychoanalytic language, it is the drive, the relentless pulsation of life and death, and death-in-life. It is as if in losing the desired thing, we come close, too close, to a surging, destructive play of sheer matter: what we have lost is in fact a distance towards this traumatic spurt of livingnessI hesitate to use that more domesticated word, life. What the Poet is chasing in the form of the vision is the fantasy object as what Lacan calls objet petit a, as a nonpresence that can only be glimpsed anamorphically. And yet, far from being gone, the fantasy object becomes more existentially real than one had expected or even desired. We move from objet a to , the imaginary real, an image that is so intense that it becomes toxic. Ironically, the more the Poet plunges through nature qua that which is never enough (objet petit a par excellence), the more it keeps sprouting around him ever more violently and erotically. It is as if we have moved from the genre of elegy to that of horror, from obliquity and absence and mourning to full frontal esh: from life and death to animation and reanimationwhich turn out to be the same thing.

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Love of nature is unable to maintain a chaste, cool distance. Since Alastor is part of Shelleys critique of Wordsworth for betraying his revolutionary principles, most readers, including me, have assumed that the necrophilia is part of the problem and that the militant vegetarian chastity of the rst narrator and the young Poet is what we are after (see Morton 1994: 99110). But this chastity perversely conceals a particular desire. This is implicit in the slavish connotation of the narrators following nature like [a] shadow (l. 82): he is shadowing nature not distantly but very closely, intimately. The result is not assuming an ideological distance towards this disgusting incessant enjoyment object, but stepping into it. Like many vegetarian writers, Shelley himself was fascinated by horric imagery of blood and gore. Alastor is no exception. The hyperreal images of reections are juxtaposed with images of ultimate opacity, disgusting abject things whose abjection is essential to the formation of the subject-object dualism. The collapse of distance dissolves barriers separating subject, object and abject. But close up, it may not feel like that. It is as if the narrator is scratching the groove of the work of mourning, playing it against its grain. We remain unable to slip into elegiac mourning, since the narrator has planted love, indeed lust, for nature, right at the point where the ideological needle slides into the next cut. There is a bump in the record. The thought this scratching exfoliates goes like this. Truly to love nature, not as a mirror of our mind, but as sheer otherness, would be to love what is least subjective about it. It would be to fall in love with the dead. To be fully ethical, then, is to admit to the perversity of our desire. Surely the Cartesian idea of a pure res extensa, simple extension, is the most radically different one we can think ofpoetically it is dead matter. This is blasphemy in most ecological discourse, but what Alastor enacts is a kind of enlightened Cartesianism, as a form of ecological awareness. By erasing the difference between consciousness and the world, or between subject and object, deep ecology hopes that it will make ecological social practices inevitable. But like Alice trying to get away from the Looking Glass House, the more we try to escape the dreaded Cartesian dualism (bugbear of ecological thought), the more we nd ourselves back where we started. Furthermore, the more we try to vivify matter, the less regard we pay to it as matterthat is, as inorganic form. We need to live up to the truth of our desire to animate the dead. Deep ecology is not deep enough, because it eschews the dead in favor of the living. Remaining with the dying in the present moment, and accepting the fact of our own death, are echoed in the choice to maintain the painful awareness of being aliveof having a mind that differs from our body and from itself. Melancholia (letting the dead stick in our throat) is more ethically rened than mourning (allowing them to be digested). Rather than reading the Poets journey into death in the Caucasus as an allegory of failure, we might decide, somewhat perversely, not to do to the Poet what the Preface states is the cause of his woesexclude him. While waves of iambic pentameter wash over the Poets corpse, the reader delights in death even while eschewing ita double view that powerfully encapsulates the compassionatesadistic identications of the vegetarian Shelley.

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We are caught in a bind. To read the poem ecologically, we must enjoy killing off the Poet. Some scholars have sometimes approved of this (see for example Roberts 1997: 1503). I hate that stupid Poet, he deserved to die, I am superior to himis this what we are supposed to be walking away with? A Nietzschean mastery that would spell death to nature? How to overcome Nietzsche? If we keep thinking like that, we will always fall back down. Instead of trying to read to win, how about we read like losers (see Bull 2000)? It gets worse. Once we have decided that despising the Poet maintains the sadistic distance, we are empowered to feel superior all over again, thus reproducing the sadistic distance. Metasadism is sadism. We cannot get out. The poem does not achieve escape velocity from an earth that is also bound up with a certain sadism (the mother we are sucking); instead we fall further and further into its gravitational eld. Alastor is a poem with which we can rethink ecological poetics. Alastor offers the possibility of a noir ecology, in which we admit to the contingency of our desire rather than chastening it into invisibility. By realizing our implication in the phenomenal world, we do not abolish the difference between subject and object too quickly. In fact, any really deep ecological approach would linger with this difference for as long as possible. Alastor is about how to relate to the fact of narcissismthe utopian edge of which are the oceanic poetics of absorption into Nature beloved by ecological thinking; and whose dystopian qualities include letting other beings suffer while soothing background music bathes us in an ambient aquarium of sound. Like Frankenstein, Alastor enjoins us to love people even if they are not people. Shelleys poem astonishingly enriches and problematises the idea of loving people established in its Preface. To love the earth properly would entail acknowledging the very articiality and otherness which ecological discourse tries to negate. So we return to Descartes, and the so-called Cartesian dualism, the whipping boy of all ecological discourse. Percy and Mary Shelley were both sensitive to the way in which melancholic aloneness could inspire feelings of connectedness, feelings that they both associated with the ecological thoughtthe idea of interconnectedness in all its ramications. So committed was Percy Shelley to this idea, he wrote in the essay On Love that:
in solitude, or in that deserted state when we are surrounded by human beings, and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the owers, the grass, the waters, and the sky. In the motion of the very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is then found a secret correspondence with our heart. There is eloquence in the tongueless wind and a melody in the owing brooks and the rustling of the reeds beside them which by their inconceivable relation to something within the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance of breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes like the enthusiasm of patriotic success or the voice of one beloved singing to you alone. Sterne says that if he were in a desart he would love some cypress. . . . So soon as this want or power is dead, man becomes the living sepulchre of himself, and what yet survives is the mere husk of what once he was. (2002: 504)

Even separation induces a feeling of connection. Notice, incidentally, the Wordsworthian language: blue air, enthusiasm. Notice, however, the stranger, almost disturbing quality, a chiastic logic according to which the owing brooks and the

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rustling of the reeds beside them appear to assume almost like sentience. The uncertainty of this quasi-sentience is precisely what disturbs, for it implies darkecologically, that what unites humans and other beings is not a common sense of life, but the fact that consciousness itself depends upon some kind of machinic, wave-like process. This process exhibits something like the zero degree of language we glimpsed in the necrophiliac narrators delight in murmuring sound: the rustle of language. What if man was already a kind of living sepulchre, an empty tomb, a mere husk like the seeds of the rustling reeds? It is nally our intimacy with that which is the deepest and the darkest. Under these circumstances, elegy would perform the melancholy knowingness that we are machines. There is an obvious t between ecology and elegy, and a less obvious asymmetry. Elegy mourns absolute loss and is preoccupied with bringing to life and killingthe work of sadism and the transcendence of sadism. With its view of impermanence and the cycles of life and death, the rhetoric of ecology appears opposite. It might be possible to bring elegy and ecology together by thinking through the properly ecological thought, that is, the radical intimacy with radical strangers that the idea of the interrelatedness of all things implies, at its extreme. Dark ecology chooses not to digest the phobic-disgusting object. Instead it decides to remain with it in all its iz ek 1992: 359). Dark ecology is the ultimate reverse of meaningless inconsistency (Z deep ecology. The most ethical act is to love the other precisely in their articiality, rather than seeking their naturalness and authenticity. Dark ecology refuses to digest plants and animals and humans into ideal forms. Cheering yourself up too fast will only make things more depressing. Linger long (Alastor, l. 98) in the darkness of a dying world.

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