This post is the first in a series of three about the British literary group "Dark Mountain." The second and third will run on Wednesday and Friday.
*************************************** No sooner had I debuted this blog than one of my various FB interlocutors directed me to the Dark Mountain manifesto, “Uncivilization.” And I promised back then I'd post about it, and finally here goes. The Dark Mountain group coalesced 10 years ago in Oxford, UK, as a literary-cultural response to climate change and various other emerging society-destroying tendencies. “[H]uman civilisation,” the authors claim, “is an intensely fragile construction. It is built on little more than belief: the belief in the rightness of its values; belief in the strength of its system of law and order; belief in its currency; above all, perhaps, belief in its future.” When they looked at the society around them, they concluded that “The machine is stuttering and the engineers are in panic.” They invoked Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, warning of “the inrush of the savage and the unseen” that so-called civilization elides.* Lucky for us creative types, “writers, artists, poets and storytellers of all kinds have a critical role to play” in such a crisis. We’re back in the saddle as unacknowledged legislators. We have a mission: to break “the last taboo,” which is “the myth of civilisation.” Or, more precisely, the way civilization distracts us from “the reality of our position on this Earth.” Their object was and is to de-center humans from humans’ view of the world. The answer is “uncivilised writing” – that which “attempts to stand outside the human bubble” and see humans “as one strand of a web rather than as the first palanquin in a glorious procession.” They then go on to distance themselves from “our literary lions” and from “nature poetry.” Yet the poets they hold up as positive exempla – Wendell Berry, W.S. Merwin, Mary Oliver – were all lionized nature poets. The Dark Mountaineers value Berry’s, Merwin’s, and Oliver’s “sense of place.” But in all three cases (most obviously, perhaps, in the case of Oliver), nature was something one wrote about – something that provided spiritual insights for the human writer, every bit as much as it did for William Wordsworth, albeit in a different idiom. Nature as referent. And for at least some readers, the insights often proved to be . . . well, somewhat shopworn. While Berry wrote some very powerful and incisive essays about land ethics, particularly in regard to his native Kentucky, mainstream US nature poets appeal to a large audience not because they advocate the destruction of civilization or a post-humanism, but precisely because rapport with non-human nature provides us with comfort, and its poets edify us as we return to our cubicles. US nature poetry is as humanistic as it gets. But the Uncivilsers’ poet laureate is another American, Robinson Jeffers. Indeed, the name “Dark Mountain” comes from his 1935 poem of the same name, which ends by invoking the terrible beauty of the “heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the / Dream-led masses down the dark mountain” towards destruction. This quote points to the problem with embracing Jeffers as (to use his word) an “inhumanist” writer – that is, one who disengages from the game of human society in order to produce something that shunts people to the margins: namely, he is always writing about people. He denounces them for not disengaging from the game of human society and writing about hawks and rocks, and he does so again and again. And he does so as a man speaking to men: his speaker is the unified “realist” voice, the “I” in the tradition of English-language poetry. His dark mountain is not even a real mountain; it’s a symbol – one he uses to talk about . . . civilization. Jeffers is also obsessed with human history. During WWII, he can’t stop listening to the radio and going on and on about humanity’s self-destructive obtuseness. Reading him, I want to say, “Rob – dude – just take the radio, go down to Big Sur, and throw the damn thing over the cliff!” But he doesn’t. In poem after poem, he inveighs against people and what they have created (as does “Uncivilisation”). Which, however, keeps the focus on people, not other beings or their milieu. [TBC . . .] ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- * I’ll leave it to the postcolonial critics to handle these quotations. Suffice it to say these European-American poets’ sense of place was a sense of land that was expropriated.
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |