Submitted by Scott Ross
I find graffiti within an urban environment interesting, a colorful splash of anarchy that is good for the soul. However, in nature, or in non-urban areas that are closer to their natural state, I find graffiti becomes something almost blasphemous; people have taken great effort to find paths less traveled only to find some jerk has spray painted a shout out to their high school class in their school colors – and there appears to have been at least every high school in the state over the last fifty years if the kaleidoscope of colors that has replaced the sandstone boulder’s natural reddish-brown hue. This speaks to my own concept of nature, as an area set aside or preserved in a state that is natural as possible.
I found the graffiti in “To Joanna” problematic at first because it seemed at odds with Wordsworth’s love of nature. By chiseling Joanna’s name into the rock, the narrator spoils nature. There was no need to chisel Joanna’s name on the rock to name it after her – Emma’s Dell is known by that name years after Emma and the narrator “are gone and in our graves” without any defacing of the Dell. What advantage is gained by making the correlation between Joanna and the rock permanent?
However, I grew to realize that the graffiti was acceptable within Wordsworth’s poetry, and problem was that I have a different view of nature. Wordsworth clearly believes that nature includes man, and he frequently indicates that nature is best enjoyed by more than one person. “Tinturn Abbey” is a nature poem, although one set amongst the ruins of an abbey, which serves as the presence of man within that natural setting. In “Michael,” man’s presence in nature is found in the remains of the rocks that were to be used to build a sheep fold. Emma’s Dell is a favored natural spot that the narrator shares with shephards, the model of living economically within nature.
That nature should be shared is seen in “Tinturn Abbey,” a poem where the narrator recollects a previous trip to the abbey ruins with his sister. In “Michael,” the poems titular hero finds that “objects which the Shepard loved before// Were dearer now” that he can share them with his son Luke. However, Wordsworth would have recoiled at the multitudes that invade Yosemite every summer, especially those who stay in the hotels and bring televisions and video games along for their trip to nature. Wordsworth advocated nature over urban life in part because nature allows one to transcend. I think of transcending as allowing your mind to drift into a transcendent space where things are simpler, less cluttered. The sight of roads, telephone poles, and electric wires can diminish a person’s ability to transcend. The ruins are acceptable because they demonstrate the triumph of nature over man's machinations and spark that same aspect of the imagination that Wordsworth treasures.
Of course, the very act of naming makes a place somehow less wild. The places described are named because people enjoy these spots and they intend to return. Each time they return to a spot, they will remember the name they have given this location and the person memorialized with the naming. The graffiti in “To Joanna” is emblematic of this
Scott, great reflecting on the significance of untouched nature and its ability to invoke in us a feeling of transcendence. i, too, have experienced such a feeling, for me, once-upon-a-time amongst the rocks on Coronado Island, in San Diego, when imagining the complete absence of civilization on the periphery of my vision. On another note, with rare exception, I loath graffiti and consider a kind of theft. That person stole the particular aesthetic vision belonging to the owner of the building, tainting whatever skill may be present in the graffiti itself. More sacred than the graffiti artist's sense of individual expression is the property owners right to the condition of his own property. In a word, such occurrences speak to a conflict of values, while also providing a kind of flash point of the society's struggle to define its own ethos amidst the ever-growing process of world-wide urbanization.
ReplyDeleteScott: Naming can also be an act of power, an attempt to exert one's authority over others. It's a frequent trope of Faulkner's, whose characters often used it this way.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the power aspect of naming; part of our collective inheritance from Adam is the gift of naming. Even in contemporary times, naming is power - the right to name something is implicitly granted to owners (or in the case of Staples, to corporate sponsors who wish to covertly advertise within a sports story.
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DeleteScott, I too was a little surprised by the graffiti moment and to be honest I didn't notice it until this time through the poem (and I've probably read those poems a couple dozen times). So the ecocritical focus produces it's first new reading for Garrett! OK, that's not true, but I was sensitized to the carving in ways I wasn't in the past. That writing can also be seen as part of a whole network of inscriptions that runs throughout Wordsworth's poetry. If we spent some more time with the larger corpus we would encounter countless poems called "Lines left upon a seat . . .", "Inscription for . . ." and so forth. Wordsworth was fascinated with what one critic called poetry's "epitaphic" quality, the way it calls out to us and speaks to us from beyond the grave, like the epitaphs in the churchyard. Think of how the landscape in Wordsworth's poetry is everywhere marked by human transit: the naming of places after personal events, the home of Michael and Isabel named The Evening Star, the unfinished sheepfold to which a story appertains, even the view of the Wye River valley which tells the story of his own life in its history of his perceptions of it. There was even a literal rock upon which Wordsworth, his sister, and a few family friends carved their names. It was dynamited to create rubble for a dam built by the Manchester Water district. Wordsworth fans picked through the rubble to find the inscribed initials. The debris was donated to the Wordsworth museum. Doesn't that story tell it all?
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