From Alive at the Same Time on the Same Planet: Noticing, Finding, and Attending with Kathleen Jamie

Leave a reply

Here is an extended excerpt from a conference paper I delivered in 2018 on Kathleen Jamie (leading up to a reading, which was an extemporized “walk-through,” of her lyric essay “Magpie Moth,” with which we began our class.) This excerpt includes mostly background information, and a brief reading of “Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead,” but stops short of a detailed reading of the essay itself. I hope you find it useful. [It’s also currently missing a “Works Cited”: I’ll see about appending one.]

I’m looking to catch something of the mix of craft and contingency, of form and fracture – perhaps a version of what she calls frissure – that informs Kathleen Jamie’s creative practice, a species of writing that inclines lyrically to catch and release the co-creative assemblages that emerge along verges and liminalities, at the collisions of the human and the non-human worlds. I want to contribute briefly today to the expanding critical reception of Jamie’s work; she’s a writer who I am increasingly convinced offers a crucial voice in what I want to characterize as the late—the epigone—figuration of a late humanity in our nascent and contested epoch, the so-called Anthropocene (a term that Jamie herself has so far avoided using). In her prose (gathered in Findings: Essays on the Natural and Unnatural World, 2005, and Sightlines: A Conversation with the Natural World, 2012), early versions of which often appeared as “Diary” entries in the last pages of the London Review of Books, and in her poetry (both her selected Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead, 1994, and more recent collections including The Overhaul, 2012, and The Bonniest Companie, 2014) Jamie traces and troubles a lyric negotiation among various conflicted registers of the human and the non-human, the natural and the unnatural, the organic and the inorganic, the vibrant and the inert, to evolve a practice of what she names, in one instance at least, “sympathetic repair,” an unstable and incomplete reconciliation of self-awareness with reciprocity, of attentiveness and indifference, of withdrawal and enmeshment. I’m re-composing my own essay on this work of gathering and accounting, of noticing and note-taking, of what she calls “findings,” in order to gesture at the recursive temporality of her thinking, to re-trace the scalar slippages in her writing between a local, experiential present and an inscrutable, inhuman, planetary time: the momentary and the momentous. To try to do so means, for me, assembling a certain closeness to her text, an auscultation, with a wide conceptual resonance, an ecology, and I had to figure out a few answerable reading tactics. What I’ve arrived at is to work through in front of you, with you today, a reading of one of her compact lyric essays, “Magpie Moth,” and to contextualize it as best I can by mapping a few of its filiations with her work as a whole. I’m assuming most of you haven’t encountered Jamie’s work before now, and aren’t necessarily familiar with this piece. In a way, that estrangement, that unknowing, actually characterizes much of Jamie’s approach to composition. It’s where she tends to start.

I initially encountered Kathleen Jamie’s poetry when she was one of the international nominees for the third Griffin Poetry prize in 2003. Two poems from her selected, “Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead” and “Fountain,” shook and surprised me. There’s much to say about these two remarkable texts, but I want to start by noting how they frame several of her emerging preoccupations, which could probably be distilled into two overarching tropes: the shoreline and the midden. Crack open a volume of her poems or her essays written after the late 1990s, and you’re unlikely not to find yourself on a beach or amid discarded matter, often both at once. Her preoccupations tend toward the archeological, the bio-medical and the corporeal, the curatorial, the endo-ecological, the ambulatory. We walk shorelines, outwith, gathering broken things, remarking traces of the weathered and the departed, trying to reassemble what we might have been by reading and sifting through remainders. Her approach, however, is neither nostalgic nor elegiac, not really—although touches of regret are sometimes hard to help. Instead, there is something in Jamie of a cold-eyed skepticism, a deliberate unsettling of what she names, in a Scots dialect version—a re-translation—of Hölderlin’s choric ode, “hame.” Many of her essays position her as a tourist in her own homeland, her oikos, a native who doesn’t speak Gaelic, who finds herself denatured—both linguistically and ontologically—in an ostensibly familiar space. I’m starting to map, I think, an instance of what Jahan Ramazani referred to yesterday – in response to a question I’m temporarily proud to say I asked—as the crunchiness, the textural unruliness, of lyric in translation.

In “Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead” Jamie finds herself as a latter-day Benjaminian ragpicker at a municipal garbage tip outside Edinburgh. She voices the poem as plainspoken choral witness, with a colloquial “we” she associates with the “state of the nation poem” she believes she’s writing: folks who have come upon a small mound of posthumously dumped household items from the fortuitously named Mr and Mrs Scotland:

On the civic amenity landfill site,

the coup, the dump beyond the cemetery,

and the thirty-mile-an-hour sign, her stiff

old ladies’ bags, open mouthed, spew

postcards sent from small Scots towns

in 1960: Peebles, Largs, the rock-gardens

of Carnoustie, tinted in the dirt.

Mr and Mrs Scotland, here is the hand you were dealt: . . .

Notably, the landfill—a site of the biodegradation and chthonic re-assimilation of household remains, of garbage—lies beyond the graveyard, beyond human memorial, and yet it also serves as the liminal space between preservation and dissolution, as Jamie builds a poem from a litany of what are either artifacts, bearing tactile traces of their owners, or lifeless and abjected crap, as she scrounges and appropriates other people’s barely decipherable material archives. They become vibrant and resonant—mouths spewing signs—only because she nudges for example the limited semiosis of a surname into a representative personhood, a citizenry. It’s notable that many of the objects she discovers are graphic: postcards, letters, a Dictionary for Mothers, a labeled repair-kit, embossed joiners tools. Place-names and notes are local, and regionally mythopoeic. The poem, as it lists each item, accretes trashed language into an assemblage of what might pass for allegiance, but it’s a gathering that the poem’s collective voice doesn’t know how to re-articulate, what to do with, what to preserve:

Do we take them? Before the bulldozer comes

to make more room, to shove aside

his shaving brush, her button tin.

Do we save this toolbox, these old-fashioned views

addressed, after all, to Mr and Mrs Scotland?

Should we reach and take them? And then?

The poem operates as a displaced and broken container, a contingent salvage, a misdirected summoning. Clipped tetrameters stabilize and then dissolve into the poem’s unfixed metric. In the end, anything saved or “repaired” will only be thrown into a kitchen junk drawer, to find its way, posthumously for the speakers, to the landfill once again. But it’s worth remarking that this is not a situation of despair, despite a lingering taint of existential dread. Jamie’s poem, however unfinished and however epigone, still reconstructs a texture of dissonant fragments, of detritus, into a kind of ugly beauty.

She enacts a latecomer’s archeology here, or perhaps reverses the work of the dig. You might compare Seamus Heaney’s “Digging,” where the coalescing of patrilineal filiation comes from an imaginary descent into turf, into the flesh of peat; Heaney’s pen is bluntly declarative. Jamie, by contrast, refuses a fantasy of earth in favour of a fraught genealogy of largely female-coded scraps, or rather, of a gendered admixture. (Compare Jordan Abel?) Her mode is not declarative but interrogative. The archeology becomes a digging through rather than a digging up. At a telling moment in “The Woman in the Field,” an essay in which she recounts her summer job as a teenager at an archeological site, Jamie links the inhumation of a Neolithic body with her own nascent work with trowel and pen (when she writes one of her first poems), and the ascription of meaning to uncovered objects through poetry, encountering how “the weight and heft of a word [she’s thinking of the Gaelic term ‘cist’], the play of sounds, the sense of carefully revealing something authentic, an artifact which didn’t always display ‘meaning,’ but which was a true expression of – what? – a self, a consciousness.” A reflexive question interrupts and unsettles the ascription of meaning: authenticity and “true expression” don’t quite overcome the material heft, the texture, of trowel, of scrape, of undoing.

This interruptive gesture is closely linked both to the midden and to the shoreline. In “Findings,” in which describes an abortive voyage to St Kilda, Jamie finds herself weathering a storm on a cove on Ceann Ear. She comes upon various layers of flotsam on the beach, much of it waste plastic, and eventually settles on a broken doll’s head as a souvenir, a relic that provokes an unlikely reflection on deep time and mortality, enacting another instance of her curatorial ragpicking:

But we pick and choose, and I wondered if it’s still possible to value that which endures, if durability is still a virtue, when we have invented plastic, and the doll’s head with her tufts of hair and rolling eyes may well persist after our own have cleaned back down to bone. (Findings 54)

The doll is at once human simulacrum, an extruded metaphor, and inhuman provocation, a fabricated—that is, poietic—plasticity troubling the distinction between what might and might not be “natural.” The wondering that Jamie describes situates her self-consciously in a vacillating interrogative, an unknowing. Moreover, that unknowing – notice her attention to the “eyes” of the doll – produces a disturbing noesis, implicated in a late and partial phenomenology, a close perception of our own visual imperceptiveness. Scale becomes an issue again: cosmic atemporailty, “durability,” sets itself against the details of decay and frissure – the airless clean of the epochal and the unruly dirt of the local, the small, the thing. Jamie’s inviting us to look again, to look not just differently but differentially.

“Magpie Moth,” as a prose-poem, insists on this renovation of attention, of witness; the consciousness that Jamie maps, as she attends on her own encounter with a moth, effectively leans into the cracks and gaps—both tactile and ocular—that inhuman contact opens. I want to walk us through her essay, both because you likely haven’t read it and because this kind of walk might be an appropriate and viable approach to her writing.

[. . .]

Literary Worlds: Kathleen Jamie at the Edges

Leave a reply

Not only because we had a snow-day cancellation, but also because I feel like I need at least to gesture, even this early in the course, at some kind of contingent, temporarily or partially unifying trajectory for our shared work and for the material you’ll read, I want to keep up, as best I can, a kind of lecturer’s blog where I can flesh out some of the key critical and interpretative points, the talking points, around our weekly texts. Please—students in English 200, at whom these posts are aimed—remember that these are blog entries, and, while they enact some of the critical practices we want to encourage you to take up for yourself, they are not intended as model essays, neither polished or finished.

We began on Wednesday, January 8, with a formal land acknowledgement, and I suggested that one important way to start to think about why this acknowledge might be more than thematically connected to the books and text’s we’re studying—it’s about a relationship to place, for example, as many of the works we’ll be reading, especially works that engage with versions of indigeneity, are—but that it’s also structurally and performatively implicated in our thinking. I referred to the work of the English philosopher of language J. L. Austin, and his lectures on what was to become Speech Act theory, How to Do Things With Words (1955). We didn’t go too far thinking about the complex questions of the cultural politics of land and treaties, but I gestured at a possible basic framework for our course, one that might emerge from considering what Austin called a performative utterance, that is, an aspect of language that involves not so much what it says as how it does things. There are two sense of the concept of the performative here, and they’re often confused, so it’s important to be a bit careful about this. Performance refers to action or enactment (both as kinesiology and as theatre); performativity—a term people often abuse—refers to the capacity of language to act within its own (often porous) bounds, and often enables a kind of reflexivity in language, what the critic J. Hillis Miller would have called “linguistic moments.” Austin called these moments illocutions, “pure” speech acts. The famous example is the marriage vow: saying “I do” occurs only as an utterance, but it enacts a promise and a contract—also types of speech acts—that alters our understanding of people’s identities, obligations, social relationships. Better examples of illocutions might be something like saying “thank you” or “you’re welcome,” which enact almost exactly and only what they say. Someone in the class asked a question about the wedding vow, if it was indeed a “pure” speech act, because it also appears, as a promise, to have ethical and legal implications outside of what appears to be the domain of language as such. It’s arguably a version fo what Austin might call a perlocution, a speaking that calls forth action in or from its worldly context—fair enough, good question. I’m not aiming to take this fairly particular reference to a fairly particular—though critically impactful—philosopher much further, but what I want to notice is that I’m opening up a key tension in all of our thinking around questions of engagement and impact, which are largely pedagogical or learning questions. Our title for the course is “Literary Worlds,” and we want to open up these questions by offering you ways to consider formal and aesthetic aspects of the works we’re reading—what makes them “literary,” for example, works of cultural import—and to think, too, about what Edward Said referred to as the worldliness of such works, how those works move through and beyond the representational or the textual to engage materially and experientially with how we live.

Kathleen Jamie’s “Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead,” a poem composed a little over twenty-five years ago, takes up this question of the worldliness of language—and of the literary and the cultural—in a couple of compelling ways. I’m just going to gesture at some significant elements in the poem, and invite you to consider them further—this might even be a way into your short assignment that’s due Monday night, the critical response. “Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead,” as what Jamie calls a “state-of-the-nation poem,” is a work of salvage and recuperation. It’s posthumous, as the title indicates, and suggests—because of the fortuitous surname of the couple whose household detritus the poet discovers by chance tossed away in a local dump—that the nation (what Benedict Anderson calls the “imagined community”), the place, to which these folks belonged is dead, or at least broken, constituted by garbage. Notice how the poem begins by specifying the location of the dump as geographically posthumous (etymologically, after burial in soil), “beyond the cemetery,” literally a zone beyond life, after death. Cultural memory now consists in a jumble or assemblage of artifacts, things like outdated postcards that Mrs Scotland had saved, many of them detailing special events in Scots culture. Most of these artifacts are language-objects, a book (Dictionary for Mothers), or Mr Scotland’s “joiners” tools with his surname embossed on the handle, to mark ownership, property, durability. All of these words appear to matter to the deceased, to speak to who and what they valued, to who and what they are, or were. But they don’t seem to matter much to the rest of us—their legacy, what endures beyond the limits of the personal, what they leave behind, is also swept away and bulldozed into the soil. There is a kind of ecology here that focuses in on mutability and entropy. “Do we save . . .” these objects, these words, and, by implication the spectres of Mr and Mrs Scotland? Notice the ambiguity of the pronoun here: Jamie doesn’t say I, but we. As readers of this poem we’re engaged in this same practical and existential self-questioning. Is it our task, as fellow travellers with the writer, to salvage meaning from her own repurposing and reiteration of the language-objects she both saves and copies out in her lines? Notice how the formal elements of the poem—the shapes of the stanzas, the variable, often fractured rhythms of the lines that gesture intermittently at both iambic pentameter accentual-syllabic metre and Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse—counterpoint a drive toward order with a continual dismantling and undoing of fixed structure, a coming apart as they’re put together, which the poem itself describes as a “sweeping up” and “turning out.” As a work of literary archeology, digging through national-cultural garbage, “Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead” enacts a poetic relationship to its world that speaks to the purpose of reading and of analysis, at least analysis as a search for contingently durable meaning.

I only have a few points to make at the moment about Jamie’s 2012 lyric essay, “Magpie Moth.” As with the earlier poem, there is a liminal ecology being framed in the text, framed around what we might call her interest in epistemic boundaries, the shorelines of human knowing. The essay maps a human encounter with the non-human, and investigates the limits of our instrumental reason and of (mutual) understanding. “But what do we know?” she asks herself, and us (in what might be a rhetorical or an actual question), near the essay’s unsettling close. As with the poem, her texts interrogate our capacity to comprehend, but offer little of the comprehensive, preferring to remain clear-eyed and unflinchingly baffled. What we come to see, as we try to use our own pens to wrench our clumsy feet from our eyes (and mouths), are the blurry, inapprehensible and absolute edges of our field of vision, of what can ever be seen. Something I didn’t talk about in either the lecture or the subsequent class is an anthropological pattern that appears to inform much literary writing that, like these two texts, is based on journeys into an unknown and unknowable space. I have to say I don’t accept what comes increasingly to me to feel like the deceptive symmetry inherent in this kind of reading, but I want to offer it to you as a base-line against which to think carefully about these texts, along with the Anglo-Saxon poems and Red. That pattern is the quest-romance, or hero’s journey, and it’s a narrative structure and even a modality of language that has pervaded what’s come to be known as Western culture. (Among the may sources for this archetypal patterning, I’d suggest having a look at Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism or at Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough—a late Victorian text in comparative anthropology and mythology—or comparing T. S. Eliot’s imploded epic The Waste Land, which in some ways prefigures—as a kind of monument to a decrepit European patriarchy, Jamie’s nascent eco-feminist writing.) One of the elements of the pattern involves what’s called a katabatic journey, a descent into a waste land or into a perilous underworld—a land of death—where a questing hero is tested, to emerged renewed and enlightened once they have, for instance, slain a dragon or a monster, or somehow purified a space. The journey, while horrifying, is (if successfully negotiated) often tied to healing or to cultural salvage: compare the garbage dump of Jamie’s poem, which constitutes such a waste land, or the misperceived “blank pool” on the moor that appears devoid of recognizable, healthy life, or to be inhabited by fish who aim to kill and consume the hapless moth; Jamie, by the end of the essay, has re-thought her false claim to god-like dominion, as the savior of a moth, and comes to understand herself as one creature among millions—a epistemic shift of scale—that constitute a living hyper-object, an ecology beyond any one creature’s control, each implicated in the many lives going on around them. The apparently deathly waste-land was not, in fact, in need of saving, of remediation, at all.