a sense of complicity - scratchpad

This is a theme that crops up a lot in the vicinity of Andrea Brady's poetry. Commentators mention it. The poetry mentions it. ("Winter Quarters", "Friendship 2") - the poetry, everywhere, is alert to it. You might almost say, lives and dies by it.

In our world it's hard to escape.

So thanks, Obama administration.

I am not very happy, right now, with the activities of Royal Dutch Shell, as they crow over their arctic adventure go-ahead.

Yet I drive, eat, heat and earn. (It's been estimated that 20% of pension funds are invested in fossil fuel companies.)

(I think we should now routinely call them fossil fuel companies. "Energy companies" is an attempt to occupy the centre ground that is now totally inappropriate.)

In fact you could say that a general unease and disapproval of fossil fuel industries goes back with me to teenage years. That was 40 years ago, and I don't think I'd heard of global warming, but it seemed vaguely wrong to me (and of course many others) that we were "using up the planet's resources". We were very protective of the planet, this big bouncing baby that was suddenly wriggling in the arms of my generation after all those millennia of being far too big for human beings to conceive let alone affect.

This was how I felt when university pals went off to earn big bucks with Schlumberger.

It was in the late 80s when we began to think that "the greenhouse effect" presented a more immediate danger than exhausting the planet. Svante Arrhenius had floated the concept in 1896, but no-one had thought it was really happening. Then the papers told us that the poles were melting. Cows and termites might have something to do with it, but it was mainly all about fossil fuels. 1998 was the hottest year on record.



Meanwhile Schlumberger's site characterizes the present time thus: "In this new decade, Schlumberger products and services are more relevant than ever, as E&P moves into more complex and environmentally extreme areas – especially offshore and in deepwater – and the search for unconventional oil and gas intensifies."

http://www.slb.com/about/history/2010s.aspx

 E&P means Exploration and Production.

http://www.epmag.com/ 

One of the many interesting things about the above publication is that it contains a story by Tim O'Connor of the Environmental Defense Fund. As its motto indicates ("Finding the ways that work"), the EDF is known for building bridges with industry and working closely on practical solutions. They are not intrinsically anti gas, indeed they see the real priority right now as replacing dirty coal with cleaner gas. I think that might be right.

A sense of complicity may lead to pursuing a greater understanding of what we deplore yet comply with. That is an intrinsically open research. It risks, and may interfere with, the political beliefs you began from. I don't claim that this happened for Andrea Brady when she sought to understand WP. But she knew she had to understand why we people ourselves, not excluding my and her complicit selves, desire light and fire and violence and energy so much. What drives this? She had to risk celebrating it.

A sense of complicity has deep connections with suspicion of judgment and a sense of moral relativism, even though they are in obvious ways opposed. (The sense of complicity does plant a moral flag.)

*

Complicity has, as it were, two frameworks. One of them is material: it traces, with more or less credibility, the way in which our personal economy is implicated in larger evils. I cook a meal; the gas I burn comes from Russia, the profit goes to BP and Rosneft. Igor Sechin.

The second framework, not always clearly distinguished, is spiritual - a sense of global community. A sense that what is enacted by Monsanto execs or ISIS pan-national wreckers is done by all of us, and by myself, because I am a sinful human being too. Though I may not be able to make the direct connection in the way that I can connect the economics of Siberian gas to my tin of ravioli, yet I believe we're linked. Purity I don't accept. And since purity means polarization means the end of dialogue, maybe there's something to be said for this.

Yet the material framework is the more moral one. The spiritual framework is rhetorical: one beats one's breast for the actions of our fellow-sinners, but this avowal of community involves no real personal responsibility for the consequences of those actions. The material framework, on the other hand, convicts us, personally, of sharing in the responsibility. We may or may not allow ourselves to feel guilty (that depends on our mood and our character and our skill in concealment and denial), but we know we are responsible.

*

Schlumberger makes no political contributions, directly or indirectly, and only funds Trade and Industry Associations which do not make political contributions themselves.

A glance at the American Petroleum Institute website suffices to show it as a very political animal indeed, vigorously struggling against the chains of regulation. The very slender threads of regulation, as arctic Alaska is finding. One of the more disturbing statements in API's account of its struggle with the Obama administration is the claim that it represents not only 625 oil and gas companies but "They provide most of the nation’s energy and are backed by a growing grassroots movement of more than 25 million Americans".

What does this mean?

Since when do we "back" corporates?

No wonder they don't need to give contributions to anyone else. This IS a political party.

Or rather, it's a gang.

In a time when polarization of beliefs threatens to break down the social consensus that allows democracy in the US, I'm concerned about the implications of this remark. It hints at a return to dark-age tribalism, in which people survive by aligning themselves to a chief who rewards you with loot. The chiefs, in this case, being bosses.


A search on the Schlumberger site (with sparse results) for "environmental impact" or "global warming" is an enlightening indication of how the industry thinks, and what it never thinks.

Here there is not much sense, yet, of perceiving oneself as in the same boat as the tobacco industry and makers of white phosphorus: still legal, but unfit to be seen.

Yet slowly this perception is coming to be. The Guardian's divestment from fossil fuels is a tiny but significant measure of the direction we are going in. It's beyond time.

In the mean while, on with the species extinctions.

Consciousness of complicity is mostly just background radiation but sometimes it grows to be like a wave of nausea. It is a tweak, it says, you either find a way of tranquilising yourself or you'll have to do something you don't want to do.

After all, in reading about Shell or Schlumberger I'm reading about myself. Didn't I fly to Australia this year? We are oil-persons.

Consciousness of complicity is a middle-class guilt thing. Poor people don't have consciousness of complicity. Complicity indeed requires power; but then everyone has some power. It doesn't make the garden of complicity necessarily a bad place to cultivate. Though bad things grow there easily enough.


 ... * I've just discovered that the Guardian published a profile of Schlumberger today. Nice coincidence.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/18/where-there-is-oil-and-gas-there-is-schlumberger


*

The focus of Brady's Wildfire (2010) is incendiaries (from the shirt of Nessus to Greek Fire to the white phosphorus used by US troops in Falujah). But when the focus is this intense it starts to suggest wider concerns.

One of those is fossil fuels, as is apparent from the epigraph and from the chapter entitled "Crude".

Another is the psychological or spiritual drive that produces the unbridled capitalism, exploitation, violence and self-harm of our species. A drive that is also the need to give and receive love.

(That's why petrochemicals are so hard to give up. And it's what permits the "enablement" argument.)

Maybe we can add Rabindranath Tagore in 1914: "Gradually we came to see that outside of the nations Europeans considered their own, the torch of European civilization wasn't used to illuminate but to start fires. That's why they rained cannon-shells and lumps of opium, both at once, into the heart of China..."  (Kalantar, 1914)

*

There can't be any more poetic forms now; at least, no interesting ones. The only new forms are those that break poetry.

The subtitle casts doubt on whether Wildfire should be thought of as a poem. It was published both as a book and on the internet. (http://www.krupskayabooks.com/wildfire/poem.html). The latter format is in fact essential, because it contains the hyperlinks that take us to all Brady's source-texts. Reading those source-texts is a study in itself and an essential part of the Wildfire experience. This is truly an essay in that it has a clear topic and is intimately linked with other writing on that topic, to the extent that its presence as a poem can end up being forgotten. (As Brady herself commented in the interview with Andrew Duncan.)

Bring milk and fire, and my blood I bring him again; tear me in pieces, give me the sword with a ball of wildfire upon it.

(Tamburlaine, Part I, V.1.310-11)

Zabina's speech (just before she smashes her brains out) stands out from the remorseless pentameters elsewhere, both because it's in prose and because articulation breaks up into fragments. Some of the arsenal of rhetoric is at last laid aside; the fragments that are left exposed, like this ball of wildfire, attain a clarity not found elsewhere.

This is "wildfire" in the same sense that Brady's poem uses it: an inflammable, phosphorus-based material used as a weapon. It's fire that can be directed and that sticks. It is the "Greek Fire" of medieval warfare (though the exact composition of Greek Fire is a matter of dispute, but phosphorus must have been a large part of it).

As white phosphorus (WP, Willie Pete) it is still used in modern warfare. US troops used it in Fallujah. It probably should be banned as a chemical weapon, but its use is often excused as merely providing illumination, or to flush out enemies that can then be attacked by other means. Even though WP itself is deadly. This all comes from the informative links mentioned earlier. If Wildfire existed only to connect those links, it would still be a formidable essay.

Illumination, from the fire. Obscurity, from the dense smoke. WP produces both: it could be an image of poetry, specifically the kind of poetry that Brady writes. Or, it could be a commentary on the Tagore passage quoted earlier.

It exists, certainly, to link Part 7 of Ancrene Wisse, G.H. von Schubert's remarkable Der Geschichte der Seele, Browning's "Karshish", the siege of Acre, and so on - too much!

"The poem began as an attempt to bypass the vulnerability of writing to occasion. I'd got tired of susceptibility, ground in airy feeling. I wanted to write a forensic poem, one whose structure could accommodate an excess of social  information. ... I was tired of trying to position "us" on the ground... " (from Brady's end-note to Wildfire).

I interpret this "susceptibility" as principally moral susceptibility, and I interpret this "trying to position" as a weighing of complicity. In short, Wildfire is an attempt to move outside of the logic of complicity - which has its preciosity, as well as pitilessness. (Mutability can be seen as driven by a similar determination, though employing totally different means.)

Yet, a page or two further on, Brady says: "I don't want to fabricate a critique which spares me, in whose light I glow with ethical priority". Nor of course does she want to spare the reader, with her closing salvo of "What would make you throw yourself out".  The answer to that question, however, is probably not "A sense of complicity".



*

ENABLEMENT

The sale of oil has been and probably will be the most effective source of funding for ISIS.

(G.W. Bowersock in the NYRB, speculating on what might happen to Palmyra)

Nor, of course, is the economy of ISIS unusual in that region. The semi-autonomous Kurdish state is founded on oil. One can't have a simple view of the consequences of "enablement".

The "Enablement" argument has become popular among fossil fuel companies as a justification for their line of business.

For instance, Peabody used "enablement" to justify coal extraction; they said it brought heat (and therefore hope and a decent life) to poor villagers in China.

The Chinese woman who presented this heart-warming video was, however, not a poor villager. She was shortly afterwards identified as a Monsanto executive. (Peabody and Monsanto are both based in St Louis.)

The enablement argument is what lies behind Tony Abbot's self-serving claim that coal is "good for humanity".

Today it's Commonwealth countries who are most aggressively exploiting the dirtiest fuel sources. Canada's tar sands, and the massive coal deposits in Australia's Galilee Basin.

I feel a sort of transferred shame about those profiteering ventures, just as I do about Norway's insensible explorations. But in one sense this is a mistake; it is too preoccupied with nations. This is an international matter.

A sense of complicity is an ethics for a globalized outlook. It states simply that "we" (whichever group or nations we identify with) - we can't be clean until the whole earth is clean. That religious belief has turned out to be true, after all: because the common atmosphere is the measure of all our burnings.

Another form of the enablement argument is the claim that burning fossil fuels buys us time. Time for prosperity. Prosperity in turn brings scientific research and social progress. That, eventually, is what will solve the global warming issue, and it will solve it while we live in comfort. In fact, while we live our times. For doesn't someone who turns their back on fossil fuels step out of our time altogether, go back to the dark ages, become an irrelevance? Indeed, aren't energy efficiency and clean energy in conscience-stricken Europe and America themselves an irrelevance? They aren't the growth market for fossil fuels. The enablement argument is pitched at developing nations like China and India. Consumption in developed nations is static.

But these rhetorical questions need to be answered with "No". What happens in Europe does matter. Fuel-efficient technologies and economically-persuasive clean energies need a proving ground.

I'm reminded of university days again. By the end, some of the post-grads had cars. As we popped across to Seaham to see the Bloody Cranesbills wavering on the coal-strewn shore. in the freshness of the experience, in arriving at Castle Eden Dene to see  at first hand what I'd previously only read about, we discussed the enormous enlargement of possibility that the car was giving to us. We contrasted this wild accessibility with the logistical nightmares we had previously negotiated in reaching the lake district or Osmotherley by public transport.

Though we didn't know it then, we were using the enablement argument.

But, so far as I myself was concerned, it never did enable anything. I never wrote that history of the North York Moors. I've driven up and down a lot of motorways, made hasty flying visits in which too much experience was and wasn't crammed, mostly to no good purpose.  I time-sliced my life with fleeting glimpses of lives I'd never lead. I was addicted to getting there. I ticked boxes instead of living.

That's what having a car enabled.

*

In the history of the notion of complicity, one of the most critical documents is Ivan's deunciation in The Brothers Karamazov. Here he recounts a number of piteous accounts of children being sadistically tortured and killed. The Kingdom of Heaven, he says, is eternally tainted by these histories. God was complicit. And Ivan, though only a weak ordinary human being, is more moral than God, because his soul rejects a system that is complicit in torture.

Ivan's intention is to indict God. God, after all, is supposed to be perfect.

No-one claims the same of humanity and its civilizations. Yet to be accountable is to be measured by a standard of perfection. And besides, terrible histories such as those told by Ivan place self-defence itself under a moral cloud. In the face of such evils the only decent thing, it seems, is to humbly confess to a universal complicity.  (Agamemnon "made politic respects to heaven" in Chapman's Homer).

I wanted to remark that no-one has ever made a convincing defence of God against Ivan's argument. But in a way that's not true: complicity is a weak accusation. The argument forces us to make a distinction between the insanely sadistic general and the intensely moral forces of heaven. The latter can be tainted, but all the shock-value of the taint lies in the disparity. In the same way, identifying the complicity of educated domesticity with mortar-bombing of Fallujah depends for its force on a recognition of disparity. And in that way, the complicit (whether it's us or God) begins to wriggle off the hook. The weakness of the complicity argument is that it's insufficiently "forensic" (quoting Brady's end-note again).


*

Books to go

Another home move, and a clearout. The books are going to Julian House in Bath.

A consequence of relativism is that I could almost as happily keep these books and get rid of others. Most of these books I part with only because I have too many to read; some are favourites that I look forward to finding again one day.

*

For example, John Lothrop Motley, the first volume of The Rise of the Dutch Republic (1855). An Everyman hardback; a format for reading that, in my opinion, has never been bettered. How happy I am that formerly, at least, I had time for these deep dives. Now I can only wonder at the marvellous first chapter. Motley's classical idea of the ancient Netherlands being populated partly by yellow-haired Gauls and partly by red-haired Germans is a structuring myth that the few facts in Caesar and Tacitus can be strung around.

The truculent German, Ger-mann, Heer-mann, War-man, considered carnage the only useful occupation, and despised agriculture as enervating and ignoble. It was base, in his opinion, to gain by sweat what was more easily acquired by blood. ...

The contrast between priest-ridden Gauls and austerely monotheistic Germans is Motley preparing the ground for his later account of the Catholic-leaning Belgians and the Protestant Dutch. (As also, his claim that the ancient German government was fundamentally democratic, the Celts aristocratic.)

*

There's just time to mention, before night falls on it, one of the more obscure volumes in this big box.

Through the Land of Babylonia: A Fascinating Tour in Bible Lands by Leonard T. Pearson (1939, revised 1951). The Rev. L.T. Pearson travelled initially in a Nairn bus across the Syrian desert (with a party of 9, including three ladies); once in Iraq the party travelled by sleeper-train and Rolls Royce motor-car.

Pearson proves from the Bible that 1938 is the year when the time of the Gentiles comes to an end and the Holy Land becomes once more the gathering of the Hebrew people; as foretold, exactly 2520 years after Nebuchadnezzar. He takes his Bible very literally. The vitrified brick of Birs Nimrud is, in his view, the remnant of God's high-heat desolation of the Tower of Babel.  The silt found at Kish and Ur is a remnant of the Great Flood (3200 BC in Pearson's reckoning).

The long day spent in the ruins of Ur inspecting the walls and buildings of various ages, examining the pottery and piecing together the stories of the past, cause one to return to the Hotel on wheels, filled with wonder. On turning in for the night and with one's thoughts still back in the very early ages, the writer was brought abruptly into the present by a tap on the window and the stationmaster said:-- "Mr. Pearson, I thought you would like to know that Cambridge has won the boat race -- I've got it over the wire!"

Pearson's style veers between this pleasant homeliness and exalted preaching. Thus, passing the natural Oil Wells between Kirkuk and Mosul, and seeing patches of fire ("It is Hydrogen, which, when coming in contact with the air, bursts into flame"), he thinks this may be the Burning Fiery Furnace in the book of Daniel, and he homilizes:

The Law of the Sabbath is broken, even in church circles, the Word of God is popularised by taking out the very portions that would "hurt" the reader to his heart's good. The world today is worshipping "flesh" as in no previous generation under the guise of health, and exalted to the rank of deity until modesty, prudence and purity are ordered to the flames of extinction. It is in the suffering that the Christ is made manifest, it was so in Nebuchadnezzar's day, in Smithfield's bonfires, and it will be until Christ is revealed in the fullness of His Glory.

Meanwhile we arrive at Nineveh where the author takes the opportunity to demonstrate the literal truth of the story of Jonah, and to explain that Christ's three days and three nights in the tomb (paralleling the whale) actually ran from Wednesday sunset to Saturday sunset.

a walk in the park

Cherry Tree, Bath 5th April 2015

This tree is beside the pond in Royal Victoria Park, Bath.

A single-flowered pink cherry ought to be Sargent Cherry (P. sargentti), but this tree looks very different to the ones I'm used to seeing in Shaw (Swindon), pictured here. (On the trees in Swindon the leaves emerge beetroot-red along with the flowers.)  I suppose the other possibility is that this is a Yoshino Cherry (P. x yedoensis), but their blossom is nearly white, usually. The date could support either - the Sargent Cherries in Shaw bloomed the following day.

Possibly the tempering effect of water accounts for the profusion of blossom on the lower branches.


Conveniently growing next to it, the double flowers of Prunus 'Accolade' , which is a hybrid between P. sargentii and the Winter Cherry P. subhirtella. 'Accolade' comes into flower a few days earlier than Sargent Cherry.

Prunus 'Accolade'

Prunus 'Accolade'

the snowy scratch-card

OK, I admit it, I'm only posting this to see how my new email subscription service Feedburner (sign up over there on the right!) will handle multiple posts in a single day. (Not something that's likely to happen very often, but hey.)



[The piece that followed this flippant opening grew into a ten-part essay about Andrea Brady's poetry that was finished in September 2015 and has now been moved to Intercapillary Space. 

http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/andrea-brady-cut-from-rushes-etc.html

]

*

 After an immersion on this scale there's a strange sense of being reborn to life and feeling able to take a look around. And naturally, one of the first things I see is all the things I've missed out of my essay, of which the most glaring is Dompteuse, Brady's response to Hannah Höch.

The wire mother is a terrible cage regardless
serves its purpose. Same cloth
cuts an obscene hourglass against their figures,
proportioned to a Spanish drama on the Bangalore line.

*

And here's another free extra for those who've arrived at this obscure post:

The Brady poem I came nearest to writing about without actually doing so was "Tunic" (in Wildfire).

Coincidentally, (I'm writing this on October 1st 2015), I've just received my copy of the anthology of innovative women poets Out of Everywhere 2 . Brady is one of the 44 poets and is represented by "Tunic" (most of it, anyway), along with some extracts from Mutability.

Thale Cress (Arabidopsis thaliana)

Thale Cress (Arabidopsis thaliana), Middleleaze 7th April 2015

Named after Johannes Thal (1542–83), German physician and botanist. His Sylva Hercynia (written 1577, published 1588) is the first flora to attempt coverage of all the plants in a region, not just the ones with known medicinal properties. (It was, for example, the first to describe this charming and ubiquitous plant.)

Hercynia, in this case, meant the Harz mountains of N. Germany. *

Thal was severely injured in a horse and cart accident while on his way to visit a patient, and died a month or two later, aged only 41.

* It's possible that the MHG word "Harz" (mountain-forest) is somehow derived from the word Hercynia. Classically, the Hercynian forest (as described by Caesar, Tacitus, etc) covered a much wider area: a vast band extending eastward from the Rhine and running right across Germany, Bohemia, Romania... The Harz, like the Black Forest, is a relict.

Not to be confused with Hyrcania, classical name for a region of Iran immediately south of the Caspian (formerly Hyrcanian) Sea. In later writers (such as Shakespeare), the name usually crops up as a haunt of tigers. Probably Virgil was the key reason for this widely-dispersed meme, when he has Dido accuse Aeneas , "Hyrcanaeque admorunt ubera tigres" (Hyrcanian tigers nursed you). Tigers became extinct in this region in the 1970s.