[intermission]

On extinctions.

yyz, yyc, yyj; melancholy elephants

En route back home from a lightning trip to Toronto, I read bits of several books, but finished first Spider Robinson's Melancholy Elephants, short (primarily) speculative fiction. I can't promote the title short story enough, but I'm not entirely sure why. There's something about the resolution, perhaps, both of the scene and its players, determination in the face of silent desperation, of probable failure leading to sociocultural death, that appeals to me. It insists earnestly that small victories are essential. That changing huge sweeping behaviours happens not once, but continually, gradually. And that, try as you might (and likely should, since people tend not to learn best second-hand), you can't do much of anything entirely alone. (Here, I would like to offer my condolences to Spider and his family for the passing of his beautiful wife, Jeanne, inspiration for The Stardance Project, and offer this gem rather than my own clumsy, awkward words.)

The second story in the anthology, "Antinomy," claims for its title "the word for the sharpest tragedy a human can feel" (45), aligning urgent contradictions with dramatic suffering and remarking on the strangeness of the word's disuse. It seems, though, to modify the anthology's title, describing the melancholy of the elephants—people of the future, caught by the efficacy of their own record-keeping and resource-devouring in an eminently unsustainable downward spiral of literal and figurative consumption.

"No Renewal," originally published even earlier than the collection's 1984 release (ominous?), is rife with tubercular spasms. I read this one in the Calgary airport, sipping on a gin and tonic as I waited for my transfer, and its fixation on "lasts" was troubling. Conforming to Fredric Jameson's description of the role of SF, the story projects itself into a consequential future where the protagonist owns "for all he knows, the last small farm in Nova Scotia" (126). This farm is conceptually isolated, "bordered on three side by vast mined-out clay pits, gaping concentric cavities whose insides were scraped out and eaten long ago, their husk thrown away to rot." In place of the neighbouring farms of his childhood, Douglas has for neighbours the oddly mixed metaphor of "an apartment hive, packed with antlike swarms of people." The story idolizes rural pastorality, yearning for the "sawmill, rushing streams, hundreds of thousands of trees, and acre after acre of pasture and hay and rich farmland" of yore that perished in the fiction when "the petrochemical industry died of thirst" (126–27). Though Robinson often tackles heavy themes, he rarely leaves the reader in despair, preferring generally to somehow turn his stories hopeful. But the hope in this particular excerpt is a bleak one, and the "birthday present" cantankerous aged Douglas can expect is reminiscent in its blessing of young Smeagol's ill-gotten gift; his expiration date's shadow looms ominously with the end of even artificially subsistence agriculture and, particularly in juxtaposition with the next story, "In The Olden Days," cultural heritages.

The interplay of antinomy and the "Melancholy Elephants" fixation on infinity is the key to uniting the stories, I think: "I think it comes down to a kind of innate failure of mathematical intuition, common to most humans. We tend to confuse any sufficiently high number with infinity" (12), and act accordingly:

Well, it takes a lot less than [ten to the eighty-fifth, "the current best-guess for the number of atoms in the universe"] to equal "infinity" in most minds. For millions of years we looked at the ocean and said, "That is infinite. It will accept our garbage and waste forever." We looked at the sky and said, "That is infinite: it will hold an infinite amount of smoke." We like the idea of infinity. A problem with infinity in it is easily solved. How long can you pollute a planet infinitely large? Easy: forever. Stop thinking. (12)

So now what? 25 years later, we're still fixated on the infinite, even though we're running out of all sorts of things, including the hydrogen mined for the kids' balloons at Victoria's World Partnership Walk (and, according to one earnest ten-year-old, the turtles who will eat said balloons if released by his younger brother). While some of the individual stories in this collection refute Robinson's tendency toward hope, the tales fit, one way or another, into an arching narrative of extinctions, of creativity, of ways and forms of life, and to the hopefulness of enlightened sharing. His characters mature through the textual bildungsroman to marital, sexual maturity. By honing and focusing his earlier characters, many of whom have to forced from their self-absorption by the epiphanies in their mini-narratives, to the eminently adult "High Infidelity" and finally the phoenix of "Rubber Soul" as a cultural maturing and rebirth. It is important to the growth of the elephants that they strive for dynamism; even the progressive tendency of the bildungsroman is challenged by the non-sequiturs, stories like "The Chronic Offender" that resist a simplicity of development and the framing narratives of "Melancholy Elephants" and "Antinomy" with their profound anxieties. Extinctions, the stories earnestly confide, are complicated—and unbelievably important.

Today's focus on extinctions inadvertently but quite conveniently segues with the topics of my next posts, Terry Glavin's Waiting for the Macaws and other stories from the age of extinctions and Douglas Adams' The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Reading these three texts concurrently, especially coming out of Don Gayton, certainly informed my reception of each. Now, how to reconcile these looming extinctions with drinking imported gin suspended in an airport, waiting for my next flight?

Stay tuned.

interlude continued

A quick word on the absentia: I have been houseguest-sitting for the past few days and have not had a chance to do any reading at all. I did, however, cruise the used bookstores of Victoria and the Times Colonist book sale and found a whole bunch of gems. Pocketbook considerably lighter, I am now the proud owner of the following titles, which will hopefully make their way onto this blog in the near future:

From Munro's,
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun (w/aigu over the second "u"—and the only "new" book in the bunch)

From Russell Books,
Andrew Dobson, The Green Reader
Terry Glavin, Waiting for the Macaws and Other Stories from the Age of Extinctions (this should be the next post, as I was reading it with Gayton—a stark contrast and fascinating juxtaposition)
Robert Gottlieb, Environmentalism Unbound: Exploring New Pathways for Change
Stephanie Kaza, Mindfully Green: A Personal and Spiritual Guide to Whole Earth Thinking
Pojar and Mackinnon, Plants of Coastal British Columbia, including Washington, Oregon, and Alaska
Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-eye View of the World
Spider Robinson, Melancholy Elephants (which is my favourite of his short stories, so I hope the anthology is as good)

From Snowden's,
C. Miller, Some Parasites of British Sheep, with Some Suggestions for Their Eradication and Control (complete with advertisements for a tantalizing variety of "sheep dips")

From TCBS,
Henry Beard, Zen for Cats
Vinson Brown, Reading the Woods
Deborah Coates, Cat Haiku: The Ancient Art of Japanese Poetry—Cat-Style [sic]
Theresa Corrigan and Stephanie Hoppe, With a Fly's Eye, Whale's Wit, and Woman's Heart: Animals and Women
Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein, Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: A Mystical Excursion into the Natural World
Paula Gunn Allen, Spider Woman's Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women
Ted Harrison, Children of the Yukon
Harold G. Henderson, An Introduction to Haiku: An Anthology of Poems and Poets from Basho to Shiki
Monte Hummel, Endangered Spaces: The Future for Canada's Wilderness
Ken Kiernan, This...is British Columbia (whose second installment I recently found at Fireside Video, which has a fascinating array of gardening texts and romance novels)
Nancy Larrick, Room for Me and a Mountain Lion: Poetry of Open Space
Bruce Mitchell, The Love of Big Cats
Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf
Ian Niall, The New Poacher's Handbook (not sure if this is serious or not...will report back)
Bhikku Nyanasobhano, Landscapes of Wonder: Discovering Buddhist Dhamma in the World Around Us
Reader's Digest, The Bedside Book of Nature
Sierra Club, Ecotactics: The Sierra Club Handbook for Environment Activists
Mrs. Herbert Strang, The Great Book of School Stories for Girls: Play Up!
Henry David Thoreau, Walden or Life in the Woods (nope, didn't already have it...)
Bill Watterson, The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book
- - - ., Weirdos from Another Planet!

Some common themes making their way throughout, certainly. It will be interesting to see where the attention wanders over the course of reading.

In the meantime, let me direct your attention Glavin-wards with this brief, but compelling, excerpt:

The simple premise of this book is that all these extinctions are related. The intent of this book is to explore the relationships among and between all of these extinctions, and one cannot even begin to do that by relying on the prism of environmentalism. As a separate category of thought, environmentalism is of little use in comprehending the scale of extinctions the world is suffering. Extinction is the fate befalling the things Hosea described—the wild and the tamed, the land and everyone that dwelt therein, and the beasts of the field as well as the fowls of heaven. All these extinctions are part of the same phenomenon and properly part of the same conversation. The forces at work in the world are "not well understood," to borrow the vernacular of scientific journals. But they are cultural forces. (Waiting for the Macaws 5)

Thank goodness (which stubbornly tried to typo as "goofness" three times; perhaps a sign, but I feebly resist).

interlude

Not strictly to form (then again, I've always favoured the functional), but there is a new Robert Hass book, The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems. His work, including the title poem, has received mixed reviews, but the poetry of Robert Hass will always be among my favourite.

Hass himself is delightfully helpful; while working on Ecodemia, I stumbled across his team-taught course in poetry and the environment, and emailed him to ask for the syllabus and permission to use it on my site. He not only obligingly complied, but encouraged my fledgling idea by suggesting sites like River of Words as good fits for the site I had in mind.

So, thanks again, Dr. Hass. I will be picking up the book this afternoon, and reading it in the woods somewhere so I can come back and write it up. This is going to be fun.

marifield drive, victoria: interwoven wild

We’re digging in the clay, MF chopping away with his shovel and me plunging viciously with my pitchfork, and an enormous, vital nightcrawler springs from the tortured earth. It’s a strange feeling, massacring thousands of shining white bulbs in order to prepare ground for planting—counterintuitive on this first day to the point of visceral shock. When the bulbs pulse and move, scattering in panic at our brutal penetration, I struggle to justify our well-meaning annihilation.

I become rapidly less and less helpful, opting instead to sit crosslegged and pull the stems and roots one by one, rationalizing to my partner and myself that this is more thorough, will prevent the reappearance of these all-too-willing “pests” and their subsequent second holocaust inflicted by our tools. It’s not that slow, methodical murder is exactly better, rather that it feels less wanton, more conscious somehow and connected.

Reading Don Gayton’s Interwoven Wild: An Ecologist Loose in the Garden on my bus ride after gardening seems to make sense of some of my moral confusion. For a more careful, less eminently subjective, review, stroll on over to Book Addiction. For me, Gayton's methodical simplicity of approach, detail-oriented and focused on the experience of gardening, jives with my slow, mucky preference. He makes me yearn to compost, as an activity rather than an ideology, and wonder again aloud with MF at the regenerative power of severed worms, who, apparently, eat microbes rather than leaves.

I keep wrestling with my conscience as I tear down ivy and ferociously unearth clusters of nondescript bulbs. My continual fall back to the nondescript is encouraging me to pick up a plant identification guide, to engage in "the slow process of recognizing and committing plants to memory" (64); I feel like this indiscriminate late-stage microcosm of a plant- and insect-based holocaust would be alleviated if I took the time to get to know these plants, first. Perhaps herein lies my tendency to revert to meticulous, patient slowness as I pull each "weed" and all of its roots, then replace as much of the soil as I can. MF's approach is much faster—in the amount of time it takes me to clear two metres, he can normally manage five. Gayton, also reverting to language of warfare and conquest, addresses this tendency to guilt thus:

My arsenal for the weed war is pretty basic. I have my hands, the dandelion fork, a scythe and a dutch hoe. Henry David Thoreau mused about this implement while in his garden, wondering what gave him the right to "make invidious distinctions with his hoe," choosing which plants should live, and which should die. I have none of Mr. Thoreau's qualms. (56)

I, on the other hand, certainly do. If not just for the sake of the discriminate displacement of these plants as groups or individuals, then I am certainly concerned for their dependents—the post-World War civilians teeming with life and left with barren, stripped soil to bake in the May sunshine and eventually starve. And yet, this moral dilemma, this continual confrontation with the very real and immediate impact of human aesthetic intervention, is perhaps the most present I have been in [the pithy, short] ages [of the seemingly interminably young].

Speaking of presence, I intend to ask the Victoria Zen Centre's Abbot, Venerable Eshu Martin, about the morality of gardening according to the Rinzai Zen tradition tonight at the weekly Tuesday sit in the University of Victoria's Interfaith Chapel. Perhaps musing silently on the breath and its destructive, essential tendencies will simplify my guilty gardening. More on this later this evening, I suppose—this book and its setting will have to exist twice, I think.

In the meantime, I shall continue to approach this garden with the overwhelming astral application of significance, hyperbolically (and perhaps accurately) posed by Gayton: "one could even imagine a system of astrology based on trees" (78), an arbourology that distills and elevates. Though certainly a problematically anthropocentric approach to the immediacy of non-human nature, perhaps this quasi-neopagan imposition would indeed provide another kind of lens, one intensely focused on the role of immediacy in a grander sense of the moment.

shepherd books, meeting interwoven wild

Purchasing Interwoven Wild: An Ecologist Loose in the Garden was, well, kind of wild, in an appropriated French saying sort of way.

I wandered into Shepherd Books for what I thought was the first time, and gave it the new-old-bookstore-once-over, careful to reign in my interest in the hopes of avoiding the over-zealous sales pitch—actually, this pitch applies to all manner of sales establishments; I just have more self-control in others—while paradoxically scrutinizing the shelves for the placement, division, and density of the environmental literature and science fiction, and was pleased to discover that though the SF wasn't immediately visible, the nature and travel writing was. Indeed, they took up the middle display, shiny utopian scenes of waterfalls and foreign countries juxtaposed against the post-1984 Carsonian pronouncements. I browsed idly through some of the authors and titles, just to get a sense of who was waiting patiently there and how the screening process at this particular location played out. I was late for a picnic at Beacon Hill Park, whose website is ironically utilitarian and decidedly unattractive (and who is pictured in the margin photos of this blog, actually), and had just stopped in to make good my longtime resolution to take a peek inside.

To my further delight, as I approached the shelved environmental creative nonfiction, I noticed that not only did the section on environmental literature spread out to the surrounding walls, but that books lay three deep in some places. One place in particular, for no immediately apparent reason, caught my eye. Compelled, I shifted through the two books ahead of it to pull out the aforementioned loose ecologist's gardening text.

I was already somewhat familiar with Don Gayton, and this text in particular, as he had come to English 478: A History of Nature Writing (syllabus hosted on Ecodemia) to chat about his latest work and its role among authors such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Luther Standing Bear, and John Vaillant. His presentation was quite engaging, perhaps especially to those in the class from the sciences, perhaps to those from the arts, for both as examples of the extensions of their roles.

What was particularly strange about finding his book, though, was that I knew it was going to be there. Not in the store, not in the section—remember, I had never been there—but in that particular location, behind the two nameless books in front, on the middling shelf against the wall. I had already bought this book from this place with the intention of reading it, and I couldn't refuse.

It was pondering this already-seen on my way to the park, the precision of location, the clarity of detail, that inspired the project as it stands now.

Thanks, subconscious.

lifelabs, 1641 hillside avenue: going away to think

I'm going to start in an unlikely wood—and not the hundred-acre variety, either—LifeLabs in the Lansdowne Professional Centre. Here, I was waiting for some lab results to be processed and reading Scott Slovic's Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility. It was a strange day, one in which absolutely every single out-of-house interaction went awkwardly awry.

After (questionably) helping a friend to move his couch into my Fernwood basement suite for active summer storage by opening the door just quickly enough to permit standing in the way, I was offered a ride down to the lab. Protesting politely against infringing on the driver—friend of my friend and still practically a stranger—was to no avail whatsoever. Instead, I managed to hopelessly confuse the poor girl and render myself entirely inarticulate, mumbling incoherent syllables of uncommunicable self-recrimination. Her look of mute concern at my tongue-twisted flailing served only to finally silence me as, practically fuscia, I climbed into the backseat and buckled my belt. So far, I was off to a good start.

After arriving at the lab, I was quickly prepared for my test and then sent to sit in the waiting room for half an hour. Having been warned about the wait the first two times I attempted to take this test, I brought Slovic with me to delve into his notions of bioregionalism, smugly imagining my composed inner monologue as evidence of staying home to think.

Slovic addresses bioregionalism, discussing the apparently inherent contradiction of ecocritics preaching ecological sustainability and the importance of the local by travelling all around the continent to present on these issues. He describes the ecocritical scholar's relationship to literary and inspirational "home" in response to Wendell Berry's admonition to stay there, claiming physical regionalism as "the quandary, the anxiety, of the place-conscious scholar. Should we wish to sustain our species on this planet, we must learn to live more lightly—to use fewer resources and trample less aggressively on this surprisingly delicate globe" (15). Slovic claims that "Berry pricks my conscience and leads me to consider the virtues of my travelling life and the possible virtues of a more sedentary, home-rooted life." But what is more interesting to me is how Slovic chooses to deal with this ethical confrontation, deciding

to take the poem as a prompt and point of departure for such meditations, not as an absolute statement of prohibition....The point is not to push everyone into a sudden immobility, but to nudge those of us who travel frequently to do so more mindfully, with more awareness of the costs of such a life to ourselves and to the planet.

This observation of the importance of mindfulness, too, strikes a chord with my own interpretation of the role of ecocriticism more broadly. In a world necessarily concerned with and impacted by the concrete, physical realities of uneven population and resource distribution; air, water, land, sound, and aesthetic pollution; and in- and out-fighting between those working to suggest alternative actions and modes of consumption, it seems essential that we take the time to sit and think, think about what imaginings and their side effects brought us to where we are and are continuing to propel us where we seem to be going, think about how some of these imaginings might be ir- and reconciliable, and to think about how they might together reimagine sustainability that works and lasts, is dynamic and fluidly evolves to transcend confrontation in favour of interdisciplinary approaches that incorporate every aspect of our societal imagination.

Whew. An eyeful, certainly. This hopelessly overwhelming series of phrases and clauses is of course a selectively reduced and incomplete assessment—it only just barely begins to olfactorially graze the edge of a single lupine on an immense mountainside shrouded in the potential of its nigh-spherical resting place—but we've got to start somewhere. Why not here, reading Slovic in the LifeLabs waiting room?

My technician, who was moving to Nanaimo and whom I had seen weekly in the fall for INR tests, directed me to room three.

"I've never been in this room before!" I said brightly, hoping to mitigate some of the unhappy patients she had received before me.

"Oh, my, I'm going to miss you, too!" she rejoined, much to my confusion. Baffled, I struggled to sort out how her answer applied. "But maybe you'll come and see me in Nanaimo, someday," she consoled me, and I gave up trying to think of a reconciling or self-explanatory response and smiled.

Well, one missed connection at a time, I suppose. Craigslist has it figured out; we need to start facilitating conversations, any way we can. And any time I start to feel like home has become too predictable, it kindly offers non-sequiturs to remind me that communication gets scrambled as soon as I step outside my door. Plus, I went all the way from the familiar waiting room to room three, unfamiliar in its own right, and then to an unintentionally alienated Nanaimo. There's plenty of work to do, literary studies, in reading, writing, re-reading, and re-writing our societies, one neighbourhood at a time.