Žižek’s Follies

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.  With great respect to those whom adore Žižek, fear is necessary for mankind to embrace new philosophical systems or re-embrace old ones, whether that be religion or environmentalism.  The Church by and large is averse to embracing new ecologies because the existing nature of creation must be respected.  In other words, any sublimated “superstitions,” however outlandish, can be evaluated but ultimately must be sustained for the entire body of believers to feel included.  Žižek’s “unknown knowns” fall into this category: religion (and environmentalism) in Žižek’s narrow estimation is established as that accessible only to the most intellectually attuned but not those who hear the word, understand that they are saved, and unconsciously embellish their faith with various glittering trivialities.  These trivialities in the aggregate represent in Žižek’s mind a danger because where a “great” leader—Bush II or Leopold II—might have the imprimatur of the evangelical church and the Catholic Church, respectively, any foreign enterprise embarked upon to improve a country’s safety or privilege it economically is, indeed, systematically evil.

Žižek is unafraid to take on religion or the new religion, environmentalism.  Human beings are reactive, nay reactionary, by nature and the Lord understands it.  Negative motivation is necessary, for without a counter-joy, real joy would be taken for granted and counted as an exclusively human purview.  Real joy, however, comes from the Lord and must also be shared.  Isolationist Christianity, for example, is an oxymoron which fails the basic tenets of loving one’s neighbor.  If America were to shut its borders as did seventeenth century Japan, many countries the world over—including Canada—would suffer.  The economic benefit American provides is important along with missionaries various church organizations send all across the globe.  Am I digressing?

Do economics and religion still go hand in hand?  When we spread prosperity, are we also spreading the gospel?  Heavy-handedness like the Iraq War is wrong, yes, but is the world safer with Saddam gone?  I would like to think so for the sake of the lives lost.  Are the atrocities committed in the Congo Free State important that they be remembered such that they not be repeated?  The answer to this is also yes.  I don’t understand why the spread of prosperity means, for Žižek, that resources must be purposed equally for all peoples.  The arc of the Biblical narrative does not reflect this: some will have much, others not so much.  But in no way is this inhumane.  In Žižek’s world, terror would reinforce the State’s governing of egalitarian resource utilization.  So there would emerge a totalitarian state to replace our current set of nation-states all fighting for hegemony.  Hmm….

The beauty of Christianity is that there is the hope that we will get to a point where all will feel inclined to volunteer to help and love one’s neighbor.  But that is not violent reinforcement.  In fact, the negativity of Hell is not a reinforcement but a warning, a heeding.

Cronon’s Conundrum

Our concept of wilderness is not natural because it presumes a “virginity,” an untouched quality that precludes Native Americans and which assumes that wherever man isn’t, nature is.  How homocentric!  If man has a religious or near-religious experience in the nature encounter, is his own nature as city-dweller wholly divorced from any personal redemptive qualities?  In other words, cannot man summon a sense of humility for his fellow beings without running to the wilderness and drinking in the sublimity?  Cronon grounds his discussion of wilderness in Scripture, wherein the wanderings of the ancient Israelites and the temptation of Christ occur in desert-like surroundings, not woods, teeming with life.  This is an important distinction.  Wilderness up to the late eighteenth century had been considered apart from creation and abysmal.  The use, then, of the term “wilderness” in the context of the nature encounter represented by the mid-nineteenth century a radical co-opting of religion to approximate, ironically enough, religious experience.

As the frontier became increasingly settled, the myth of wilderness as bestower of “rugged individualism” rose in prominence and embellished—burnished even—the extant American mythos as a land of opportunity for those willing to rise to the occasion.  Wordsworth’s sublimity less than fifty years on was supplanted by the economic opportunity immanent in farming, ranching, and owning large swaths of “wilderness.”  The secularization of the scriptural ideal of wilderness saw the transformation from wilderness as the place where God met the pilgrim on his spiritual journey to the place where God is made fully manifest in the life of the blessed citizen.  For those with money who could travel, going to the wilderness was a luxury, the benefits of which could not be experienced, understood, and enjoyed by the lower classes.  Analogously, for those with money, buying wilderness for the purpose of economic benefit was a privilege equally not to be enjoyed by the lower classes.

Wilderness is a myth because we assume that what isn’t owned by the federal government, a state, or a private individual is untouched.  This fallacy allows us to pursue a course of unimpeded annexation, whereby lands that are already owned or falling into ownership are purposed, re-purposed, and plundered yet again beyond all possibility of sustainability.  I prefer Cronon’s essay because it sticks a finger in the eye of boutique environmentalism, the idea that only by driving hundreds of miles out of the way—to Joshua Tree for instance—can the city-dweller wake up to his God-given, innate qualities of humility and start treating his fellow beings with more respect and compassion.  What hogwash.  Why do I need to go the forest to have a near-religious experience when we have religion available in the sunset at Venice Beach or the sunrise from my apartment stoop?

Why has a near-religious experience supplanted a religious one?  I don’t understand this.  As someone who is religious, I can’t wrap my head around the fact that a devolved form of Wordsworth’s sublimity is environmentalist grandeur run amok.

My First Summer in the Sierra and “The American Forests”

My First Summer in the Sierra

John Muir presents nature commentary blended with scientific notations.  Muir’s blending of flora and fauna is novel because animals are made to seem natural while man, suffering from a veneer of civility, must struggle to reacquaint himself with the outdoors and, in turn, his own God-given innate qualities.  I say Muir is novel because animals theretofore (before Muir) had been represented as primal and uncivilized while man was God-like and needing to be increasingly civilized (including various native peoples around the world).  Muir prefigures, in a pre-Modernist sense, the idea that Western man as animal is capable of primal instincts, and that our innate, God-given qualities allow us to accomplish much or destroy much.  Muir takes off his shoes and stockings at one point—he becomes one with nature, and in the process the various layers of staid, nineteenth century civilization fall to the wayside.

Muir actually attributes human qualities like happiness to the animals.  In fact, happiness seems to the abiding anthropomorphic quality of the various creatures he observes.  Muir re-attributes purpose to animals and gives man a new role: chronicler of natural history and observer of present-day plants, trees, and animals.  The theme of the commentary is conservation—that plants and animals must be cherished, protected, and enjoyed, not disregarded and forgotten.  For example, at one point Muir mentions mastodons from a former era.  The mastodon would have been a new concept to nineteenth century readers because the science of reading old bones was so new.  Muir embraces the science of natural history because he believes that studying the past is the key to preserving and protecting the future.

Muir as nature diarist incorporates multiple disciplines: scientist, rhetorician, poet, and chronicler.  Muir’s writings have the ring of the Book of Genesis in that the animals seem as new as the day God created them.  Muir seamlessly blends past and present in nature such that images conjured in our imaginations make us more appreciative of what we can go out and see today.  Muir drapes his commentary in origins: that of nature and that of man, and that both come from God.  The latent allegory here is that the happy creatures of God need protection by man and must not be hunted to devastation.  Man is capable of much evil.  His attitude towards nature is the best encapsulation of his own nature.  In other words, only by reacquainting ourselves with nature may we as mankind rid ourselves of the evils of the twentieth century: genocide, world-wide wars, exploitation, and extinctions.

Perhaps if Muir were to talk to us today he would say that the twentieth century was indeed a lost cause, but we have the power to make the twenty-first century worthy of the majesty summed in his pages.  We are indeed worthy of this marvelous responsibility but only by working together.  Muir does not forget the Lord, nor does he forget man’s personal role in caring for the Lord’s creation.  What a wonderful, wonderful message!  And I think that is something of which we as a people are capable.

“The American Forests” (From Selected Essays*)

Part environmental panegyric, part outdoors American jingoist sendup, part geographical overview of emergent, trans-national conservation trends, “The American Forests” is John Muir’s treatise on the importance of government intervention in protecting forestry by inscribing first in laws and also in industry the protections endemic to saving our national treasures, to wit the redwood, the live-oak, and the cedar.  Muir looks not only to Europe but also to Asia in his survey of late nineteenth century governments seeking to protect forestry as a means of not only sustaining natural resources but also burnishing national heritage.  Muir prefigures in a very prescient way the connection between ruination and contamination; in other words, that by destroying a forest, we destroy our God-given blessing and in turn corrupt the God-given nature inherent in the soul of everyone.  The American forest is Muir’s stand-in, his synecdoche, his pars pro toto, for the American approach to conservation and protecting the environment.  The forest is such an impressive stand-in for the totality of nature, that when Muir opens his piece by describing the breathtaking, seemingly endless beauty of American topography, my mind immediately returned to my pre-matriculation days as an undergraduate when I trekked through the Appalachians.  I remember climbing to the top of a mountain and observing the sea of green in front of me.  I was amazed.  Muir’s writing recalls in me that same feeling.

Muir acknowledges the inevitability of man’s ownership of nature.  In a very Progressive fashion, Muir privileges government over private ownership; it is no surprise the manner in which the seeds of conservation might have been sown in the mind of then-Vice President and soon-to-be President Theodore Roosevelt in 1900 when this essay was published.  Muir excels in metaphor.  When he concludes with the “Uncle Sam” personification, Muir summons the mythical, allegorical fighting spirit of the nation to remind us that the best of what we are as a people is what the pilgrims found upon their landing: green forests, lush landscapes, and untouched vistas.  (In Muir’s estimation, the Native Americans arrived significantly close to the pilgrims’ landing so as not to have much of an effect on the environment.)  The major challenge of the twentieth century was, then, preservation, conservation, and environmentalism.  Muir masterfully uses metaphor to make the nineteenth century reader environmentally self-aware, a quality we as twenty-first century readers take for granted.

Symbolism continues to be very important in environmentalist rhetoric because it not only focuses the attention of the lay reader, it also allows the essayist to engage in discussion of the effect of the military-industrial complex on the environment by usage of familiar terms like “Navy” and processes like logging which conjure images of environmental desolation.  The thread of Muir’s argument is that only American laws will protect the environment from ruination at the hands of private industry and the military.  What is ironic is that Muir’s words continue to be as powerful as any specific piece of pro-environment legislation.  Inspiration trumps legislation.

*I didn't realize we were restricted to the first portion of the book until after I had completed writing this.

“Spots of Time”

It is these “spots of time” (Book Eleventh, 258) that have made indelible impressions on Wordsworth’s mind, a motif (of reliance on the sensory experiences of youth in the “ordinary intercourse” [264] of life) recurrent throughout his poetry.  Wordsworth apparently has spent his first years principally concerned only with himself and unaware of the “fructifying” (1799 Prelude [First Part], 290; [“renovating” (260) in our version]) aspects of nature, those experiences that teach one how to think and feel.  But it is when he views a lowly pool and a heightened beacon providing a background for a lone woman fighting the elements that the reader becomes cognizant of the simplistic grandeur of nature, and hence, existence.  But why does a scene of death (the beacon was an execution site) initiate such an epiphany in Wordsworth?  Is it that he wants to know why the executed man murdered his wife?  A violent end to a domestic relationship is an undesirable occurrence indeed.  But where did the relationship go wrong?  Impatience (as Wordsworth experiences himself later on)?  A lack of understanding or empathy between the two, perhaps?  It is, certainly, Wordsworth’s primary imagination that perceives and records mentally the existence of the young woman, but, more importantly, it is his secondary imagination that struggles to give the whole scene, and thusly, the world, a unifying, coherent meaning.  Here, he is—among other things—attempting to make sense of the wife’s senseless death.  The reader is made to understand that only through empathy—Wordsworth’s idea of “behold[ing] in thee [Dorothy] what I once was” (Tintern Abbey, 120) and of being spiritually renovated when looking into the eyes of a loved one—can we truly see the humanity in one another.  In other words, we are all products (man and beast, all things great and small) of nature.  Only by understanding that fact, can we come to understand ourselves.  Only by viewing the woman backgrounded by the low pool and the high summit, can Wordsworth truly know her plight and, even, his own.  For, having lost his guide, he is as alone as the “Girl” (306) appears to be.  He is as lost and alone as the Mariner and his shipmates are when they drift aimlessly near the South Pole, a wasteland, much like, given the purgatorial significance of The Ancient Mariner, the dismal wood in which Dante finds himself at the beginning of The Divine Comedy:

           When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,

           I found myself within a shadowed forest,

           for I had lost the path that does not stray.

           Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was,

           that savage forest, dense and difficult,

           which even in recall renews my fear:

           so bitter—death is hardly more severe! (Mandelbaum trans., 1-7)

It is only when Wordsworth finds “dear Ones” (317) at side that he can roam in confidence.  Analogously, only when the albatross, a figure, according to G. W. Knight, of “Christ-like force” (English Romantic Poets, 203), appears, does the crew find their way from the “wondrous cold” (52) to a more hospitable clime.  Virgil has a similar significance for Dante, leading him out of the gloomy wood, through the miserable depths of Hell and up to the glorious gates of Heaven.

Works Cited

Alighieri, Dante.  The Divine Comedy.  Trans. Allen Mandelbaum.

            New York: Alfred A. Knoph, 1995.

Knight, G. W.  “Coleridge’s Divine Comedy”.  pp. 202-213.  English 

            Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism. Ed. M. H. Abrams. 

            New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.

“Purgatory Now”

That Wordsworth and Coleridge collaborated—even minimally—on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner serves to explain in part the presence of the theme of transgression and expiation that is recurrent throughout Wordsworth’s work but blatantly apparent in only this one poem of Coleridge’s.  But where Wordsworth’s episodic enlightenment to the glories of nature can be construed as the workings of the guilty conscience of an imaginative teenager, Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is imbued with a sense of the truly fantastical and horrific and, ultimately, edifying.  But this is not to say that the Mariner does not function within a world of his own making.  For, as Coleridge puts it in his Biographia Literaria: “The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am” (Norton Anthology, 477).  In other words, it is the primary imagination that continuously constructs our reality, because, according to Robert Penn Warren, to know something is to create that thing (New and Selected Essays, 342).  In this way, we re-create, in response to our ever-changing environment, ourselves, or our concept of ourselves, every waking moment of our lives.  Coleridge goes on to explain the secondary imagination: “It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it struggles to idealize and to unify” (477).  To reiterate, it is our secondary imagination that allows us to respond poetically (and sympathetically, as the Mariner ultimately does) to our perceived ‘ordinary world.’  The Mariner’s sea journey is, then, the quintessential Romantic Quest, a meeting, according to Anca Vlasopolos, of mind with experience (Wordsworth Circle, No. 10, 365), in which the subconscious desire to understand the natural world supersedes the very conscious desire to get home (my extension of Ms. Vlasopolos’s argument).

         It is not unreasonable to regard the Mariner as a poet-prophet, very much akin, in an evangelistic sense, to Wordsworth of The Prelude.  Wordsworth’s witness to the soothing power of God, for example, comes after an extensive ‘chronodicy’ in which he relates the “spots of time” concept (The Prelude, Book Twelfth, 208-335) and the fearful episodes of boat stealing and bird nest plundering.  What is interesting is that both Wordsworth’s spots of time involve death (as the Mariner’s spiritual awakening involves the death of his shipmates).  It is eerily ironic that first-hand encounters with death or death scenes would evoke creativity and sensation in a mind, instead of deadening the senses and immobilizing the powers of observation. 

         It is line 105 that I believe is critical to understanding the Mariner’s conception of reality: “We were the first that ever burst / Into that silent sea [italics mine]” (105-106).  This can be read two ways: 1) that the sea to the Mariner seems insipidly expansive or 2) that the Mariner wills the ship onto a sea of his own creation (the ship being the first thing to ever sail upon it).  Unless these lines are a figure of speech (which is a matter of opinion), it can be said that the Mariner’s secondary imagination has re-created or modified this reality to be part of a grand self-reprobative process, in which everything from then on has the special task of punishing him.  After hanging the albatross around the head of the Mariner (as punishment), the shipmates drop dead (as punishment for abetment of the murder), but interestingly, by the light of the moon (not the light of the bloody sun).  Robert Penn Warren explains this in the following way: “[I]f we accept the interpretation that the Polar Spirit belongs to the imagination cluster and yet exacts vengeance, then the fact that horror comes in the moonlight is simply an extension of the [following] principle: violated and despised, the imagination yet persists and exacts vengeance” (Warren 373).  It is the shipmates’ act of hanging the albatross around the head of the Mariner that constitutes such a violation: They throw the whole guilt on the Mariner, and he eventually wills them dead.  It is only when he is made to retell his story for the rest of his life (at the injunction of a Polar Spirit, an entity from that same region he once detested), does he, like Wordsworth, become a prophet of the greatness of all things natural.

Secondary Source Works Cited

Vlasopolos, Anca. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as Romantic Quest”. 

            Wordsworth Circle 10 (1979): 365-69.

Warren, Robert Penn. New and Selected Essays. New York: Random House, 1989.

’Tis Her Privilege

’Tis Her Privilege

Tintern Abbey explores the life of William Wordsworth in relation to nature.  What is fascinating about the poem as a whole is that from the banks of the Wye, and in as short a space as 159 lines, Wordsworth recounts his adolescent days of pure emotional communion with nature (along with the requisite teenage angst and uncertainty and passion) and his adult days of sublimity, and a basic knowledge of a “presence” (94) that is interfused in sunsets, in the ocean, in the sky, in the air, and most importantly, in the mind of man.  But a consequence of this sublime vitality is the weakening of his emotional powers that allowed him to explore nature each day with a fresh sense of awe and discovery in concurrence with “aching joys” (84) and “dizzy raptures” (85).  A useful question is: Does Wordsworth utilize the newly realized, mysterious, permeative presence as a vehicle to see in Dorothy what he once was?  The obvious answer is yes.  His adolescence, which engendered “an appetite; a feeling and a love” (80) within him, certainly must be cherished and missed for its vibrancy and immediacy and novelty and, even, charity.  Yes, charity, for Wordsworth was an orphan and nature became his parent.  Wordsworth, then, carries two kinds of memories: in an acute sense, those memories of nature that made an indelible imprint on his mind (“the steep and lofty cliffs” [5] and “[t]he [h]ermit” [22]), and in a larger sense, the aggregate of all his adolescent pleasures that lie “unremembered” (31), deep in the fugal recesses of his mind.

            But does it not seem selfish that Wordsworth beckons Dorothy every time he wants to see what he once was?  Or is her company necessary to sustain him against the onslaughts and the “dreary intercourse” (131) of daily life?  One of the first things we learn of Dorothy is her inherent quality to remind Wordsworth of what he once was:

           …and in thy voice I catch

           The language of my former heart, and read

           My former pleasures in the shooting lights

           Of thy wild eyes.  (116-119)

Wordsworth, in short, is able to see into the life of her; the intimate relationship he shared with nature in his adolescence continually governs his perceptions and actions, even in adulthood.  It is through memories of his feelings at being one with nature that Wordsworth is able to recognize a similar vitality in Dorothy.  Such a recognition immediately reminds Wordsworth of what nature has done for him in the intervening five years (during which period his enthusiasm in the French Revolution and the greater cause of liberty for all people waned greatly).  Dorothy, in a real way, represents that part of Wordsworth unchanged by the sights and sounds of the Revolution.  She is vibrant, mentally and physically.  Daily communion with nature has afforded her the opportunity for perpetual renewal, both in body and spirit.  Wordsworth, on the other hand, has witnessed firsthand scenes of senseless carnage and violent scuffles for power, along the way having an illegitimate child in an apparently loveless relationship (he later marries someone else).

            The uncommon combination of Dorothy and the cherished scenes of his youth triggers in Wordsworth a fructification of sublime proportions.  He realizes what has sustained him throughout his boredom at University and his tribulations abroad; he credits the indelible impressions made on his mind by the awe-inspiring scenes of his youth with saving him from many a sensual inundation in the city:

           These beauteous forms,

           Through a long absence, have not been to me

           As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:

           But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din

           Of towns and cities, I have owed to them

           In hours of weariness, sensations sweet

           Felt in the blood and felt along the heart…  (22-28)

So we begin to see that the emotionality of his adolescence reverberates, “unremembered” (31), deep in his soul and subconsciously affects every action he undertakes.  Wordsworth was, then, in his espousal of the early causes for the Revolution and his unabashed admiration for nature, the original hippie.  For him, only through nature can we “see into the life of things [not necessarily people but later on true of all things in Wordsworth’s case]” (49).  Only by growing up in the country can each person arrive at a sense of place and a sense of purpose.

Work Cited

Wordsworth, William.  “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey.”  The 

           Longman Anthology of British Literature Fifth Edition Volume 2A: 

          The Romantics and Their Contemporaries.  Ed. Susan Wolfson and 

          Peter Manning.  Boston: Pearson Education, Inc., 2012.  429-433.  Print.

Alfred C. Valrie Jr.

English 560

April 11, 2013

Professor Garrett

A Defense of Womanhood & A Rejection of Male-Centered Values

                I am first attracted to the names in Blake’s prose-poem.  Theotormon suggests to me a man tortured—“tormented”—by strong, unswaying principles which may at one time have been based on Biblical teachings, hence the “Theo.”  That is to say that in his heart there is only law and no forgiveness.  So when Oothoon, a name which conjures an ethereal, spiritual presence, is raped, Theotormon cannot look past her “fallen” state.  Instead of recognizing her as victim, Theotormon considers her “harlot” (Plate 2, line 1).  Bromion sounds like a potentially unstable chemical compound and also a lot like “bromide,” a meaningless statement meant to distract from aberrant behavior.  Accordingly, when Bromion speaks following his rape of Oothoon, he identifies black female slaves as desiring of violent domination: “Their daughters worship terrors and obey the violent” (Plate 1, line 24).  Blake ingeniously links white and chattel slavery in a fundamental way: that the privilege of both exists only in the mind of the tyrant.  It is ironic, then, that America—which gave birth to new liberty—also gave birth to a race of people, African Americans, who bear the “signet” (Plate 1, line 22) of the rape of black African women by tyrannical white men.  Bromion later indicates in a series of platitudes (Plate 4, lines 13-24) that life exists only by extremes (wars, sorrows, riches, and ease).  For Bromion, life exists only in the taking—that the strong must take, and the weak must submit.  Theotormon, on the other hand, cannot see past his own sadness.  When he binds Bromion to Oothoon, he dooms Oothoon’s womanhood.  Theotormon’s concept of purity is based not on Oothoon’s unyielding devotion but the former integrity of her undefiled physical state.

            Oothoon, consequently, bemoans the quality of man-made laws which have “bound” (Plate 5, line 20) women to men and in turn cause women to think “murderous thoughts” (22) in private and sublimate hidden “longings” (26).  The “rod over her shrinking shoulders” (24, 25) recalls also the strictures of chattel slavery.  I struggle, though, with the concept of the invisible quality of oppressed white womanhood being exactly similar to the physical torture immanent in American chattel slavery.  It is not the same.  While the two—white and chattel slavery—are linked in that they both spring from the mind of the tyrant, chattel slavery had profound psychological and economic consequences for an entire race of people.  Many white women benefited from marriages where they may not have been similarly fated as Oothoon.  One could argue that where upper-class white women are concerned, Oothoon is the exception, not the rule.  Oothoon is an extreme example held up as the epitome of white female plight.  Oothoon is first and foremost a rape victim.  In how many cases were women who were properly groomed for marriage, raped, humiliated, and then doomed to spinsterhood?  I don’t think too many.

Works Cited

Blake, William.  “Visions of the Daughters of Albion.”  The Longman Anthology of 
           British Literature Fifth Edition Volume 2A: The Romantics and 
          Their Contemporaries.  Ed. Susan Wolfson and Peter Manning.  Boston: 
          Pearson Education, Inc., 2012.  218-224.  Print.