Missing Links

Reading the Capitalocene with W. D. Snodgrass

Understatement will be the death of us. Yet the confessional, the contemporary and the Capitalocene share precisely this tendency for euphemism. Today, the most potent part of any present person or polity – or poem, for that matter – resides in its unpleasant peripheries: that which goes unsaid, that which waits concealed. Externalities, for example – the unaccounted environmental and social costs of business ventures – do not so much exist beyond our lived reality, but beyond our ideologies, cultures and imaginations. In the Capitalocene then, the margins have migrated to centre stage, the afterthoughts advance to the fore. The details dominate now. Things that once seemed irrelevant or unmentionably small – the molecules we now call greenhouse gases, the grains of dirt which constitute the arable soil supporting all of civilisation – ascend to the zenith of existential import, eclipsing all our lives. W. D. Snodgrass permits us to review this profundity – this merging of the massive and the miniscule – in his similarly understated “Sitting Outside” (2006). Snodgrass explores the crucial interconnectedness of contemporary life through his particular approach to proximity, temporality and materiality, informing what it is to speak honestly in the war between profit and planet, what it is to be connected.

So as not to overstate my case, I should not argue for any absolute, universal properties of confessionality, contemporaneity or the Capitalocene. This would risk reductionism and essentialism. As Greece’s former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis ruminated: “You put five Greeks in a room, you have ten opinions.” (Varoufakis 2015: 36:53) Generalising is always a simplification. But general terms do have their utility (e.g. ‘white people’, ‘capitalism’, ‘patriarchy’). Varoufakis’s proverb dispels the notion of Greekness simply enough; it does not, however, deny the existence of Greeks. Hence, I propose something more modest: not of confessionality nor contemporaneity in their full, but of a single trend among many that inhere among confessions and contemporary culture, a trend I shall suggest shares much with Capitalocene thought; that is, the magnitude of the marginal, or the power of the peripheral, that constitutes our truly interconnected reality.

The claim is, in some sense, trivially true. The devil is in the details. Our fullest experience of, say, a poem stems not necessarily from its most obvious features (for example, the rhyme scheme), but perhaps the force of its metaphor; that hidden, implicit realm. Alone, the architecture of the piece itself does not satisfy a reader, as it would a photocopier. A rhyme scheme that yields neither insight nor aesthetic character is mere word-play. A word without meaning is but a shape, a symbol of nothing, a noise. To be a word, the sound must serve semantics. The appearance of the word (the obvious part), defers to its implications: its disputable, intangible meaning (the hidden part). Hence, the most pertinent properties of words are paradoxically invisible, peripheral.

Consider, for example, how the structure of this phenomenon echoes throughout our contemporary confessional culture at large. One would imagine such private, delicate acts to remain concealed within the booths of churches, or behind the doors of shrinks. The importance of confession, we traditionally assume, resides in its invisible utterance – that it is peripheral to public life – the same way the importance of words resides in their invisible meanings. But the contemporary disagrees: confession proliferates throughout our most abundant public spaces, rising to a kind of ubiquity in quotidian experience. Spiritual genres of confession promise absolution, for the subject to transcend mortal and material imperfectness, to connect with that supreme power. Psychotherapeutic genres purport to provide understanding, a liberation from mental maladies buried in the unconscious, and thereby offer healing. The legal system extracts confession to accord punishment, responsibility, compensation and ultimately order. Supermarkets themselves force us to confess to the telos of our earnings: What’s really in the trolley this time? Confession, a previously intimate act, now distributes itself in the contemporary through a network of institutions.

Of course, social media functions in all these ways and more. People transcend their small lives, joining causes and movements; they connect with communities which share their interests; they heal through cathartic posts and the praise that follows; they share articles which elucidate relatable experiences, bringing new understanding; they establish order as mobs of online bullies to decry those who fall short of their standards. Since most webpages are rimmed with advertisements tailored algorithmically to our consumer habits, the internet – an infinite virtual supermarket – has become the greatest confession to our personal desires. In fact, in a sense, confession is the currency of digital existence: from any anonymous account, a user can espouse whatever opinions they cannot from behind their true face; a kind of para-confession, whereby we expose ourselves, but in disguise. “Give a man a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” (Wilde 1997) Moreover, the #MeToo movement evidences the power of confession to initiate public revolt, invite a broader cultural reflection and spread political consciousness on the fusion of patriarchy with business elites. The digitisation of culture has digitised confession, amplified its presence and sharpened its claws.

However, this is not without paradox. While it is true that contemporary confessional poetry has always blended “the inclination to personalism and consciousness building” with broader cultural assessments (Hoffman 1978: 688), more recent confessions contest with the rise of government surveillance and corporate monitoring of internet users through data-analysis systems, such that anti-democratic institutions now circumvent privacy entirely. On some level, digital confession is superfluous; Big Brother already knows our secrets. By contrast, the sagas of Snowden and Assange reveal that the rules do not apply both ways; so much so that uncovering the lies of policymakers often has little effect on the composition of any regime. The emperor may have no clothes, but he does not seem to mind, since his X-ray cyber-goggles have him laughing at the peasants much harder than we could laugh at him. Confession in the 21st Century sees both its explosion across public platforms, but also its strange nullification. Without privacy to begin with, there is no confession: only seamless interconnectedness.

Snodgrass’s “Sitting Outside” (2006) approaches this interconnected supra-confessional mode from several angles, beginning with proximity – of closeness, distance, and relating. Specifically, his use of pronouns and articles depicts social experience as implicitly intimate, collectively vulnerable and, in some sense, contagious. Snodgrass might prefer this description of intimacy rather than ‘confession’ per se (Dillon 1975: 278), but both terms serve my case: in the contemporary, we do not simply communicate, it seems, but are ourselves communicable.

From the outset, the speaker begins: “These lawn chairs and the chaise lounge” (1). We might ask: Why not ‘those’ items of furniture – or simply ‘the’? “These” radically narrows the space between us and the scene: they are no longer ‘those items over there’, but ‘these items over here’. This situates the reader directly in the scene itself, and by extension, alongside the speaker. The reader becomes the confessing speaker’s guest; no – warmer still – their confidant.

The same attractive force draws us near when the speaker admits: “And you can’t be too sure.” (26) The pronoun is curious: it is not the neutral ‘one’, nor the first-person ‘I’ used throughout the rest of the poem. It is ‘you’, presumably in the general sense that we typically interchange with ‘one’, but it also carries the second-person meaning – a direct reference then to the reader. When Snodgrass’s speaker recalls of their younger self a fear of death’s contagiousness – “a child dread you could catch somebody’s dying / if you got too close.” (25-26) – we are wise to notice a prophetic quality. The speaker has indeed brought us “too close”; we stand in the scene with them, beholding the lawn chairs with them, and in their confession of their own uncertainty, the speaker describes the reader’s uncertainty too – hence: “you”, the reader, cannot be sure. The death we have caught, as it were, is the death of our perceived separateness.

Thus, while it is commonplace that the “I” that is wont of the confessional mode should indicate a willing, if reluctant vulnerability, Snodgrass’s speaker reveals more. Since we have been magnetised so close to the speaker – with the “These” in line 1, and the “you” in line 26; the head and tail of the poem, no less – Snodgrass invites us to blend our own subjectivity with the speaker’s. Their vulnerability becomes our own. After all, empathy is precisely this – feeling what others feel (Bloom 2016: 03:59) – and reading itself exercises a profoundly empathic capacity.

In our contemporary world, we find this shared vulnerability, this transmittable temperament, in the advents of blogging, vlogging and social media. As often as we describe to fellow denizens of cyberspace our most celebrated successes, we frequently communicate our longings, anxieties, weaknesses and traumas as well. We have become each other’s confidants; the virtual world, the therapist’s couch. Furthermore, the proliferation of news content into television, mobile and computer platforms tugs us that much closer to the lives of strangers: immigrants, the victims of natural disasters, imperial invasions and terror attacks, and even hungover celebrities. If the digital age has expanded our access to information, it has open in its wake the floodgates of empathy. For Snodgrass then, it seems the answer to the question, Where do we stand?, is simply: Together.

This is especially evident in the text’s preoccupation with time. Particularly, the poem orchestrates the figure of the father in conjunction with temporal connectors, qualifiers and phrases which jointly express a cyclical temporality. A self-perpetuating logic of this sort continues the trend of magnifying minutia in the Capitalocene contemporary, such as the car ride to work which, multiplied across the millions of other commuters, burns holes in the ozone layer, or the plastic packaging around the potatoes one purchased from the store which now coagulates with other discarded packets into a floating island of trash somewhere in the Pacific. The micro-affairs of everyday humxn life produce dire consequences in our present society, due in large part to their cumulative effects throughout time

In the poem, for example, the speaker explores this phenomenon when he tells us that the items of furniture

of bulky redwood purchased for my father twenty years ago, then plumped down in the yard where he seldom went when he could still work and never had stayed long.

(2-5)

The speaker pains to specify the exact temporal oscillations of their past. The passage states “twenty years ago”, uses the connectors “then” and “when” to adjoin phrases, and the adverbs “seldom” (not often), “never” (at no point in time), “still” (enduring) and “long” (for a while). Phrases like “while the weather lasted” (7) emphasise this same transience, along with sections like:

in those last weeks, sick of the delusions they still maintained, their talk of plans for some boat tour or a trip to the Bahamas once he’d recovered.

(10-13)

The “last weeks” and “the delusions they still maintained”, the discussion of “plans” – these temporal references force the reader to consider the fleeting, unfolding nature of reality; what Capitalocene ontologist Graham Harman calls “emergence”, or the fact that the properties of objects in reality are forever changing (Harman 2017: 30). The poem’s diction is laden with language charged with various modalities of ‘pastness’, as it were: the recovery the father would have enjoyed but that he never in fact experienced; preparations for a potential future holiday that were abandoned unrealised. Snodgrass’s speaker obliges us to inhabit this tremulous awareness of temporality: the contemporary we experience presently is not absolute, but the telos of a past, and furthermore is actively producing what will follow, and thus a past-in-the-making.

Snodgrass’s remarks on temporality do not end there. After line 9, all explicit mention of the father disappears. Yet the shadow of his having lived haunts the rest of the poem. Timing is everything: While Snodgrass’s speaker resigns themself to the view that “talk of plans” are “delusions”, he braces himself for his father’s inevitable death. But by the poem’s close, the pattern has repeated: as the father sat in the garden, retired and with a son, so does the speaker. “I’ve retired” and “sitting in the shade here” (23), the speaker tells us, “I have a son, myself” (21). In time, then, the speaker has transformed into a replica of his father. The complex pastness at work in the passage is cyclical – history repeats itself – in a way not unlike the Earth System: the churning of oceanic crust subducting into and surfacing out of the mantle; carbon dioxide feeding the biosphere’s plants, while the animals who feed on the plants produce more carbon dioxide in turn; and so on.

When Snodgrass writes “Of course the trees, / too, may not last” (18-19), proceeding to describe the falling leaves, the dying branches and the shedding bark, the reader finds herself caught in exactly this cycle. She remembers that the passing of time evidences itself in the aging of the living, in the gradual enfeeblement of organic creatures and vegetation. Living is the fact of slowly dying. The speaker’s childhood fear proves prophetic again: we are born having caught death already. It is only a matter of time.

Snodgrass’s emphasis on the cyclical, temporary nature of things urges us to regard perhaps the most significant temporal paradox of the Capitalocene. As individuals, we operate within the limits of our lifespans, while the forces destabilising the climate produce exponential ramifications for the longevity of whole societies and the biosphere itself. This too is cyclical: the more we confine our concerns to our short lives, the faster the gears of the globe continue to grind. Among humxns, a centenarian is rare; the first Industrial Revolution happened not three centuries ago; Earth itself is four and a half billion years old. From our microscopic lives, macroscopic economic and geologic processes are inconceivable – and certainly imperceptible. Once more, that which lurks just beyond the horizon of our consciousness has come to play a pivotal role in the contemporary. The Capitalocene’s ecopolitical fine print disclaims the survival of our species.

“Sitting Outside” thus literally situates us outside ourselves. The particular handling of proximity has distributed our consciousness through the life of the speaker, invoking our contemporary digital age of psychosocial interrelatedness. Snodgrass’s use of time, through the figure of the father and temporal qualifiers, reveals to us the full scope of our geological narrative. In our own mortality – the kind Snodgrass’s speaker experiences when sitting on the lawn chairs of his deceased father – we rediscover the fate of the biosphere at large. Just as the cycle of a humxn life repeats, so do the ecosystems in which we play our part. The latter is simply ponderously slow, and so quite peripheral to our brief, fragile existences. Yet it is this ecological periphery which underpins all our livelihoods.

We turn at last to materiality. In the first place are the commodities without buyers, the possessions without people. The furniture “purchased for my father” (2) is a passive construction; there is no subject, no friend or family member mentioned. Phantasmal hints at a market milieu course through the poem: the mention of “stock reports, counted pills” (8), imaginary holidays overseas, and the repeated reference to retirement (“when he could still work” (4), “since I’ve retired” (23)). When Snodgrass writes “what cars passed” (7), we do not behold people on their journeys, but disembodied vehicles. Moreover, the “what” directs our mind’s eye not merely to the mere fact of cars passing, but to their particular makes: their brands. As such, Snodgrass introduces to the contemporary the circulation of products, fetishised artefacts which have usurped our attentions, while the industrial processes which have birthed these goods have also imperilled all of known life. We remember the brands, not the ecocide; yet the more important of the two is incontestably the latter.

On the other hand, the poem beckons to a dynamic material world, one we might call ‘natural’: the “dry and splintery” (16) armrests, the shifting winds (24) and the heavy wood of the furniture (2); the weather that doesn’t always last, and the willows under which memories revive to warp the consciousness of the confessing speaker. These objects juxtapose with the aforementioned commodities, but not as oppositional binaries. Rather the presence of both these sorts of objects constitute an unstable third category: an ontological type which is neither ‘natural’ (unscathed by humxns) nor wholly ‘artificial’ (entirely created by humxns). The willows, while seemingly natural, also perform in the cultural construct of the garden. The redwood furniture were once alive in a similar way.

Thus, Snodgrass articulates ‘nature’ and ‘artifice’ not as opposites, but as objects within Timothy Morton’s Symbiotic Real – that is, the reality consisting of interconnecting organic and inorganic components, for which distinctions such as natural and unnatural are simply incoherent (Morton 2007: 14-26). Organisms like the poet are produced by parents, and become parents to other organisms, but also produce poems. Trees can grow into shade-casting wardens or serve as chairs on which to nap. The nature-artifice distinction generates a Capitalocene mythology by which that offering aesthetic pleasure or raw materials is incorporated into the state-capitalist system as ‘Nature’, while the rest divided are into tools, consumers and labourers. In short: assets. For Snodgrass, mementos – the objects we keep as memories, such as the willow or the furniture – grant us a “model of intimacy” (Mazzaro 1972: 102), a structure to our most fundamental interrelatedness. Since the text collapses the notion of ‘Nature’ merely as an aestheticised commodity, the reader is left with the brute fact of her interrelatedness: not only at the intersubjective level she experiences in standing beside the poem’s speaker, nor merely at the temporal level she experiences in observing the ramifications of her actions for global geologic processes, but in the very fact that her existence is in no way fundamentally different to that of trees, cars, chairs and the dead. We are all mementos, structuring each other’s intimate experience of an ecological reality.

These triangulating themes of proximity, temporality and materiality deepen our understanding of the present considerably. Confession, once a private, peripheral occasion, now constitutes the basis for solidarity, for a culture of shared vulnerability. Contemporaneity, once apparently temporally distinct, for which the past and the future seemed marginal, now occupies a space of multiple time scales – humxn, societal, ecological – all in constant motion. The Capitalocene then confronts us with an interconnectedness with all that has seemed external – other people, their products of their labour and their arbour, even the living and deceased. Yet this we struggle to admit.

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[I submitted this essay as part of a seminar series on contemporary poetry. We were tasked to closely analyse a contemporary confessional poem, in order to derive an understanding of both confessionality and contemporaneity.]

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References:

1. Snodgrass, W. D. “Sitting Outside.” BOA Editions, Ltd. Poets.org, 2006. Accessed 6 Sep. 2018

2. Varoufakis, Yanis. “Europe is Kaput. Long live Europe! – Slavoj Zizek, Yanis Varoufakis and Julian Assange – full event.” YouTube. Southbank Centre, Nov 23, 2015. 36:17-36:58. Accessed 6 Sept. 2018.

3. Wilde, Oscar. “The Critic as Artist.” Green Integer. Green Integer, Issue 3, 1997

4. Dillon, David. “Toward Passionate Utterance: An Interview with W. D. Snodgrass.” Southwest Review, Vol. 60, No. 3, 1975, pp. 278-290

5. Hoffman, Steven K. “Impersonal Personalism: The Making of a Confessional Poetic.” The John Hopkins University Press. ELH, Vol. 45, No. 4, 1978, pp. 687-709

6. Bloom, Paul. “Paul Bloom: Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion.” Youtube. Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, Dec 19, 2016. 03:59-04:02. Accessed 13 Sep. 2018.

7. Mazzaro, Jerome. “The Public Intimacy of W. D. Snodgrass.” Skidmore College. Salmagundi, No. 19, 1972, pp. 96-111

8. Harman, Graham. Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. Pelican Books, 2017, pp. 30

9. Morton, Timothy. “Toward a Theory of Ecological Criticism,” Ecology Without Nature. Harvard University Press, 2007, pp. 14-26