Looking for Degrowth? Suicidal Poets in The Five College Area Might Help You Out
Looking for Degrowth? Suicidal Poets in The Five College Area Might Help You Out
By Phil Wilson
Lately, my life has been consumed with fantasies about marginal ideas like sortition and degrowth. Thus, I have come to see the world as a "Where's Waldo" puzzle. An idea that, on the surface, appears to be cast aside, regarded as impractical, an affront to common sense, might have a hidden constituency. The world teems with obscure passions that seemingly have only a few lonely adherents - until you point the microscope. Waldo is everywhere.
How can that be? Why would an idea be thrust underground and have a rich complexity below the surface, while utterly disappearing at ground level? Where I live - in Hampshire County Massachusetts - we have an ongoing informal referendum on degrowth. One would think that degrowth would have no chance. After all, Hampshire County is where the American meritocracy has built one of its imperial centers. We even call ourselves the five college area - it is here that America separates the wheat from the chaff. Here, class stratification has become the local industry - like Wisconsin cheese or Idaho potatoes. That is what colleges do, attach people to their worth. We go to college like we landscape our yards, to increase value. I will expand on the results of our votes regarding degrowth - not just yet.
When counting the votes for degrowth, one should remember that the industrial machinery of class identity in Western Massachusetts also accidently spawned a small cottage industry of poets. Poets, like seagulls on the boardwalk, seem to congregate in academic locations hoping to feast on crumbs. The economists, social theorists and historians pay no attention to these, but magnanimously, poets have use of a grudging storage shed next to the maintenance building. Poets are the subversive other that few pay attention to, but there are exceptions.
Hampshire County, like America, has a bifurcated identity - a certain, obvious facade, and a curious substrate. Are we famous for universities that churn out the members of the ruling and subordinate classes as if they were so many factory widgets, or do we specialize in suicidal female poets who, like Sylvia Plath, a student at Northampton's Smith College, became the avatar of brilliance gone wrong. We also have Deborah Digges who plunged to her death from the upper tiers of the Umass football stadium. Down the road, toward Boston, we encounter the memory of Anne Sexton. And, if we wish to open up the topic of suicide more broadly, we have Amherst College grad, David Foster Wallace, who wrote brilliantly until he hanged himself.
For each of these iconic writers, we find, prior to giving up the ghost, an affinity for degrowth - if we define that term in its most basic form. Without ever naming degrowth, we find reverence and awe for nature juxtaposed with a skeptical eye for human expansiveness. Plath's poem,"Child's Park Stones," as an example, situates human hubris and the cold eternity of inanimate geology in a startling comparison:
"No man's crowbar could
Uproot them: their beards are ever-
Green. Nor do they, once in a hundred
Years, go down to drink the river:
No thirst disturbs a stone's bed."
In Plath's ordering of human endeavors and natural things, there is never a doubt that notions of human hegemony have been inverted. Child's Park Stones would play poorly at an ecomodernist convention. One cannot miss the strangeness of Plath's observations - the line "no thirst disturbs a stone's bed" frames the supremacy of geology in oddly anthropomorphic terms. Plath forces the reader to consider human pretense and egocentric tendencies as absurdities – Child’s Park Stones can patiently wait for us to die. Then we recall that Plath attempted to kill herself after being rejected from a spot in a Harvard writing program. Confronting human ego might have been more immediately critical to Plath than we casually realize.
I live, literally (no pun intended), a stones’ throw from Child's Park, and never- after observing these "stones" hundreds of times - thought to contemplate such a confrontation. The "stones" that Plath considers are more accurately, boulders, chunks of granite that formed during continental collisions hundreds of millions of years ago - events that uplifted the Laurentia Shield. Granite boulders were scattered throughout New England - carried along by glacial whims and randomly dropped as the climate warmed. Degrowth may, on the surface, be about economic planning, but it, more critically, reflects humility. Perhaps poetry is in the business of degrowth, the contemplation, with the raised eyebrow of disbelief, of our self- aggrandizement.
Salvation of a sort can be found in Plath's poetry - one can attain perspective, distance and escape from human deceit through nature and contemplation:
"A ruffy skylight oaints the gray oxbow
And paints the river's pale circumfluent stillness.
As roses broach their carmine in a mirror. Flux
Of the desultory currents —- all that unique
Stripple of shifting wave-tips is ironed out, lost
In the simplified orderings of sky-
Lorded perspectives." (excerpted from "Above the Oxbow")
Plath's poems often feature the narrator’s ironic methods of creating shock - the malignant themes of her culture may be “old hat” but her detached tone is striking. In Lady Lazarus, Plath bounces back and forth, with a peculiarly comic air, between images of the Nazi Holocaust and her own suicide attempts.
Plath wields a disturbingly casual voice, while imagining both her suicide attempts and the brutal murder of European Jews as commercial events, sold as entertainment - commodities to satisfy the morbid desires of the masses:
"The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see
Them unwrap me hand and foot——
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies
These are my hands
My knees."
It is difficult to imagine a more fiercely cutting means of framing our consumerism.
Plath closes the circle between her own despair and German war crimes with this ending:
"Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——
A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.
Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air."
There is complexity here that we cannot resolve - is Plath speaking of Nazi genocide or about the coldness of her German father, and her own confusion regarding her German heritage? What seems less ambiguous is Plath's rage, her sense of patriarchal transgressions and her focus on brutality and denial. When Plath refers to "Herr God, Herr Lucifer," there is no differentiation, only the common bond of maleness with the German formalities and their Nazi associations. Many advocates of degrowth have noted the patriarchal roots of capitalism, but Plath gives this observation a charge that mere polemics cannot.
I, of course, am not arguing that Plath ever set out to represent the idea of degrowth, but that her poetry unconsciously traced many of the themes critical to it - reverence for nature, the importance of counterintuitive reflection, the implications of patriarchy, and, quite essentially, an almost seamless voice of confrontation. The connection between patriarchy, overshoot and capitalist expansion should be obvious to us - and this is all indirectly, but vividly implied in Plath's poems.
Deborah Digges gives us a simpler, more direct path to degrowth - in "Vesper Sparrows" we have this amazing passage:
I love to watch them sheathe themselves mid-air,
shut wings and ride the light’s poor spine
to earth, to touch down in gutters, in the rainbowed
urine of suicides, just outside Bellevue’s walls.
From in there the ransacked cadavers are carried
up the East River to Potter’s Field
as if they were an inheritance,
gleaned of saveable parts,
their diseases jarred and labeled, or incinerated,
the ashes of metastisized vision
Digges does not leave us with merely the disturbing image of urbanization, mental illness and death, but then envisions that sparrows transcend this hellscape with an atavistic sense of pre-human purity:
They must have remembered, long enough to mate,
woods they’ve never seen,
but woods inbred up the long light of instinct,
the streaked siennas of a forest floor
Digges, in her poem, Darwin's Finches, takes her vision of nature a step further when the narrator wonders whether a strand of her hair recycled in a bird's nest counts as a manner of salvation:
As tonight in our bed by the window
you brush my hair to help me sleep, and clean
the brush as my mother did, offering
the nest to the updraft.
I'd like to think it will be lifted as far
as the river, and catch in some white sycamore,
or drift, too light to sink, into the shaded inlets,
the bank-moss, where small fish, frogs, and insects
lay their eggs
Would this constitute an afterlife?
With Ann Sexton's poem, "45 Mercy Street" - the inspiration for Peter Gabriel's famous song - we have a more subtle aspect of degrowth, the sense of loss, of contraction, of life's tragic and disappointing inevitabilities:
I walk in a yellow dress
and a white pocketbook stuffed with cigarettes,
enough pills, my wallet, my keys,
and being twenty-eight, or is it forty-five?
I walk. I walk.
I hold matches at street signs
for it is dark,
as dark as the leathery dead
and I have lost my green Ford,
my house in the suburbs,
two little kids
sucked up like pollen by the bee in me
and a husband
who has wiped off his eyes
in order not to see my inside out
and I am walking and looking
and this is no dream
just my oily life
where the people are alibis
and the street is unfindable for an
entire lifetime.
If we are to see consumerism as a false god, a wrong turn, a collective delusion, is it not critical to see life in its full futility? Tragedy is not, in Sexton's vision, mitigated by material objects, addictive distractions, but rather, demands sober attention (Sexton struggled with addiction, but her poetry is always starkly unmitigated by escapism or denial). If we view consumerism as a means of collective denial, a world in which the accumulation of trinkets provides a means of anesthesia, then a dispassionate, microscopic view of existential suffering becomes an act of degrowth. In a world stripped of material addiction, suffering must be rendered with intimacy. Great poetry hones in, by design, on the inevitable pain of living.
Ann Sexton, like Sylvia Plath, did not write to illustrate the concept of degrowth, but did so quite by accident. If I were to compile a compulsory reading list to illustrate the fundamentals of degrowth I would absolutely have to put 45 Mercy Street near the top of that list.
Novelist, David Foster Wallace spoke almost directly about degrowth in his 2005 "This is Water" commencement address at Kenyon College:
"Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.
They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation.
This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day."
Foster Wallace is alluding to "the commons" - the space in which all have an equal claim. The commons is somewhat ambiguous, and this ambiguity is, I believe, fundamental to our grasp of degrowth. The commons can mean a literal place - a community garden, a park, a town square, a shared event - but it also presupposes that personal wellbeing hinges on ones commitment to the collective. The commons, in Foster Wallace's rendition, becomes an internalized template, a sense of security that exists both within the individual and the cohort. The commons always transcends the parts comprising it.
For the record, I have referenced four brilliant writers who took their own lives at a young age. Plath put her head in a gas oven, Digges jumped from the top of a stadium, Sexton died via carbon monoxide, and Foster Wallace hung himself on his back porch. All had long histories of mental illness and the connection between their ideas and suicides is well beyond my scope. These four have become mythic figures, both deeply beloved and acknowledged as visionaries. I lament that I am too immersed in my average life to see Child Park's Stones in the way that Plath did. There is a cross path where genius, mental illness, suicide and degrowth converge, but I can only vaguely search for it. Perhaps, we might see these four as inhabiting the most outer orbits of our culture, as having the most remote and fine-tuned perspective.
I hate to pull a bait and switch, but I promised a word on the informal Western Massachusetts referendum on degrowth. Our most esteemed poet did not kill herself. She lived almost silently in the midst of the robber baron era when the ambitions and ego expansion of America first took aim at the environment. Emily Dickinson published almost nothing during her lifetime, and presumably wrote this poem on a scrap of paper which she may have placed in a drawer or tossed on the floor:
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!
How audacious to write this, even as a private act! Emily's father was an Amherst College administrator and a member of congress. Her family members were among the high and mighty of her world. The mid nineteenth century was no time to be proclaiming oneself a nobody – particularly not in Amherst where wheels of prosperity were turning.
While revisionist recreations of Emily Dickinson have plausibly depicted her as a passionate lesbian, that does not change the essential contours of her reclusive, marginal life. Emily courageously accepted, even reveled in her self-embraced ordinariness. But ironies played out across time that no one could possibly have imagine during her lifetime.
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If you visit the West Cemetery in Amherst, Massachusetts you will quickly see the bizarre referendum that history contrived. Many of the town fathers are buried there, the college administrators, the professors, lawyers, generals, congressmen and business leaders are all quietly at rest, but the public, by acclaim has overruled the past. Pilgrims, by the thousands come here oblivious to the local history.
They place stones, candles, coins, scraps of paper, jewels, pencils, notebooks, paper clips and all sorts of trinkets on Emily Dickinson's tombstone. There is not so much as a pebble placed on any of the other grave markers. There are heroes of capitalism everywhere in this graveyard – forgotten one and all. Some great yearning has been invested in this public outpouring - a sheer longing for the modesty and self- effacing simplicity that characterized Emily Dickinson's genius.
Dickinson's poetry conveyed such reverence for life that she dispensed with the boundary dividing people and animals:
Have passed I thought a Whip Lash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled And was gone –
Several of Nature’s People
I know, and they know me
I feel for them a transport
Of Cordiality
But never met this Fellow
Attended or alone
Without a tighter Breathing
And Zero at the Bone. (from - "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass")
If Emily Dickinson had known about degrowth, and consciously set out to manifest it, she could not have furthered its cause anymore than she did by accident. She took almost nothing for herself and created an unimaginable bounty for the commons – as the parade of visitors to The West Cemetery confirms. If her poetry can be accurately used to represent her mental state, it appears that she found deep pleasure in simple rituals and quirky, equalitarian observations. There is a humility in her playful interactions with nature that may well be unprecedented.
But there is always a flip side – Emily Dickinson has been commodified, her plain appearance glamorized and placed on posters in front of restaurants and shops. We live in a strange world indeed, where Emily Dickinson can be coopted as a symbol of sales and profit. I am not aware of an Emily Dickinson birthday sales event in Amherst, but would such a thing surprise anyone?
What do these underground veins of degrowth mean? Are there enough secret devotees to the values of degrowth to fuel even a smidgeon of optimism, or are our poets and writers in Massachusetts just curious artifacts that have no real muscle, no potential to move the needle of hope. I can’t answer that, but something stirs below the surface. Something.