Bacteria Also Have Their Thunder: The Poetics of Metanoic Noumena

///I've had a very shit couple of weeks, and haven't been doing much beyond basic survival necessities etc. The "What is Culture?" post is finally coming along, however, and should be up in the next couple days (for real this time). The original draft was about 3 pages, but, following some editorial criticism that it was a bit too abstract, it's become about 3x that length. The path to grounding it spun off into an historical narrative story-telling which has been very fun to write. Very excited for y'all to read it, but I do want to take my time with it before pushing through a partially finished piece.

In the meantime, here's a short review of Brenda Hillman's poetry collection, "Extra Hidden Life, among the Days." The review is a bit selective, focusing on the poems and aspects I appreciate while leaving out some criticism I do have of her work (significantly liberal, occasionally aggrandizing, etc.). At the moment it's more helpful for me to glean positive things from what I engage with, as constant, vigilant criticism takes its emotional toll. Anyway, I hope you enjoy.\\\

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A review of "Extra-Hidden Life, Among the Days"

Brenda Hillman’s poetry is an ecopoetry which has lost its father the sublime. Ecopoetry, which can be traced in the west to the English and American Romantics (Blake, P. Shelley, Coleridge, Thoreau, etc.) relied for a long time upon a notion of the natural sublime, a metanoic experience which collapses aesthesis into a single moment of unity with transcendence. But the sublime died, and it was a deserved death—the sublime co-aggregates whiteness, the sublime stands in as a personification of femininity as a perpetual maternal (Mother) phallus ([sublime] Nature), the sublime manifests phallic melancholy, the awful yearning for the out-of-reach and soared.

Yet this death like the death of God leaves a confused vacuum, an ambiguity and an unmoored anxiety. How to engage poetically with a concept so structurally cemented in epistemic socio-cultural matrices? It is into this problematic that Hillman steps, into a space of a double “grief,” a grief for the death of the coherence of ecosystems, for the destruction of plethoras of forms of life (including humans racialized as abject or gendered as secondary); and so too a form of grief that is like the grief for a dead abusive parent—we do not wish for its return, we recognize its toxicity, and yet the absence leaves a gap. "My mother is dead and everything is worse now," says Bojack Horseman at his mother's funeral. His abusive mother is dead, and the dream however naive of fulfilling that gap for her, becoming for her the reconciled oedipal subject, is now forever and finally foreclosed—similarly, the anxiety of the sublime is not solved with its deconstruction and death.

The sublime experience as metanoia redirected into the co-aggregation of European-male group identification is problematic, but the metanoic experience which is redirected is nevertheless real: that awe is possible, a noumenal phenomenon which causes a seizure, an aesthetic break in experience—“When you are confused about poetry/& misunderstand its brown math,/the sessile branches & a seal of awe/attach the tree to the dark” (27). Poetry here is behind a condition, is accessed through a release or a break—a metanoic experience exuding from a noumenal ontological geometry.

Hillman's poetry is the rescue of a concept of nature, a positive concept, from the clutches of the fetishization of Burke and P. Shelley: “some [those who would discard “nature” on the grounds of its social construction] like to avoid the word nature/but what to put in its place/for ants & thoughts & parking meters/stars & skin & granite, quarks…”(27). The “brown math” of nature is an infinite set of sets, matrices of ecosystematic forces which are in constant momentum, which coalesce with and deconstruct one another—a set of matrices disrupted by the overextension of anthropocentric expansion and territorialization, dissolving and breaking apart at the joints. Yet the Anthropocene remains an ecosystematic force, wrapped up in the immanent whole of interconnectivity, an interconnectivity wherein parking meters and ants have an intrinsic causal relationship, where asphalt lots and forests are part of a networked whole. The category of nature expands to include human life and production, while recognizing the effect human activity has on ecosystemic coherence—environmentalism avoids primitivism while emphasizing anthropocentric imbalance, rescuing the value of an object-oriented noumenal metanoia from a romanticized oedipal transcendence in order to begin to heal our marred relationships with non-human life.