Exploring the planetary: on poetic contributions to developing a consciousness of terrestrial coexistence II

In the first part of this essay I discussed Dana Ranga’s poems that speak from the perspective of the individual or the few, in juxtaposition to Daniel Falb’s poems and theoretical texts that speak of abstract if not mystical objects such as the world population or ramifications in deep time. A poem by Berlin-based poet and musician Rike Scheffler from her recent volume Lava. Rituale (Lava. Rituals, 2023) seems to express a melancholia of alterity with respect to any (poetic) endeavours in exploring the planetary:

It doesn’t matter to the planet
that I use language

to describe it

– it is growing
over me

Yet, the last poems of her book turn from an I-perspective to that of a ‘we’ that glows, bursts and burns ‘for each other’, while ‘be:longing to oceanic debris and volcanoes’, i.e. the planet Earth that sometimes celebrates together with the we ‘in lumps’.

An emerging ‘we’ as part of the planetary is also the perspective of Tim Holland’s poetry collection wir zaudern, wir brennen (we are dithering, we are burning, 2022) that can be read as a poetic answer to the question of how a shared awareness of the socio-ecological dimension of the planetary and a corresponding practice could emerge.

The Berlin-based poet is interested in imagining futures that are not stuck in the apocalyptic scenarios typical of the current disillusionment in the light of continuing destruction dynamics in the Anthropocene. Together with Lukas Dubro, he has published the collection Kollaps und Hope Porn (Collapse and Hope Porn, 2022), in which science fiction ‘can be used to think about worlds that do not (yet) exist’. This thinking is also prominent in his wir zaudern, wir brennen published at the same time, which can be read as an imagination of a highly dynamic planetary future, which does not make it clear which future is imagined exactly, though there is an indirect reference to a time after 2045 and before 2065 on page 44.

The eponymous long poem makes up half of the book followed by an appendix with four files (a-d) each including several single poems. Right at the beginning of the long poem, the gaze shifts to the other end of the planet: ‘all the small stones have been rolling for a long time. bangladesh is retreating, the maldives. there are people under / water, they don’t dive. in new york, sky- / scrapers are being built as dams’. The North and Baltic Seas merge to form a ‘northeast sea’. Berlin’s lake Wannsee becomes a sea, the ‘wannmeer’, while ‘the champagne, moved to the müggelsee in climate change, burned’: ‘continents went as islands, cities fluffed/ themselves up’. The process of radical change to the Earth’s surface is in full swing: ‘water rose, had risen, continued to rise. / we heard that bottrop and hamm had already sunk, that a new archipelago lay between ruhr and lippe. / areas became remote, at the same time new links were created’. The world is sinking: ‘things borrowed for centuries went down’.

The dynamics and disorientation are achieved by an accumulation of verbs and the juxtaposition of very short lines and longer passages, which alternate between soberly descriptive, satirically comic, pathetically expressive or reflective character, while the continuous drive of the short sentences creates the impression of a coherent narration moving rhythmically forward like Bebop. The pleasure of writing is in evidence throughout the book and energises the aesthetic experience which is fed by dystopian scenarios.

The instance from which the future earth is experienced is a ‘we’, which initially refers to an unspecified group. This is precisely the reason why it can be seen as a placeholder for a possibility of co-constitution: ‘in the beginning we stood for that / which was not yet present’, ‘we was a symbol’, a wildcard for the possibilities of future collectives. In Holland’s poem, these collectives can no longer deny their dependence on the planetary due to the massive environmental changes. As the poem progresses the ‘we’ becomes more situated and concrete, because it gradually determines itself in contact and connection with various planetary agents around and within it.

Unlike the violent imposition of a (national) ‘we’ in the totalitarian regimes of modernity, this ‘we’ constructs itself relying on improvisation through activity and experience. All participants co-constitute the collective instead of being integrated into it from the centre. Holland’s aesthetics is therefore political, too (as Ranga’s or Falb’s): through the repeated use of the pronoun, the statement-like sentences seem like an invitation to become part of the political collective of care and speak together with the emerging ‘we’ of the poem.

The emerging ‘we’ is situated on the island of Berlin and is slowly formed in the experience of uncertainty and fear that are permanently produced by a damaged planet: ‘communal blinking: less births, we brooded about it / we cried / we woke / we dithered’ and: ‘we were afraid’. The massive planetary transformation, which becomes an existential threat and awakens the awareness of irreversible losses, no longer allows any kind of self-sufficient existence as individuals who are primarily concerned about themselves, as in (neo-)liberal modernity. The shift from existence to coexistence, which Patricia Reed defined as the centre of planetary consciousness in a lecture at Berlin’s HAU in 2020, is driven by the danger we experience together, from which we can no longer flee to another world or a self-sufficient way of life for the rich. This need for coexistence is what makes hope possible in Holland’s poem:

how did we manage to hope?

we knew how plausible failure was, but the
revolution was already here.

[...]

at the lake of plauen we found the will to optimism.

we wanted to believe that the time of dilatoriness was over.

we moved to berlin.

we followed the wind, and the wind followed us.

we were driven, we were carried by the wind.

A new collectivity grows through shared practice (at first weeping, waking, dithering, then swarming, swimming, running, protecting, living together): ‘each being more than an I / we became packs, schools, herds’, ‘swarms’, just as jellyfish and other animals form packs, swarms or a ‘people’. It takes years for a ‘frightened mass’ to find itself and grow inside the growing deserts.

Holland’s ‘we’ is not a mystical hyperobject such as the world population, nor is it an isolated group of glorified (yet misunderstood) individuals like Ranga’s space travellers, but a specific community of practice which is situated in a concrete place on the damaged Earth. It is materially and reflexively connected with the planetary: with physical forces of the Earth system (fire, rain, wind), with plants and animals, hybrids (‘pizzlys’), sci-fi life forms (‘prairie mammoths created from the DNA of a shag found in amber’) and fantasy creatures that settle in the neighbourhood to which Holland dedicates quasi-taxonomic portrait poems in the concluding part of the book (‘folder d. notes on some new creatures’). Robots such as ‘care android’ and ‘bots’ also join the collective. There is a pluriverse of agents creating new kinds of kinships, of the kind Haraway urges us to make (Haraway 2016).

The ‘we’ consists of processes of shared experience and learning. Non-human life forms also have knowledge and abilities from which humans can learn. Hands take the tentacles of octopuses as an example in order to become cognitive limbs, while animals co-operate with the human collective as ‘companion species’ (Haraway, 2003): ‘localised red foxes offered support, even crows’.

The collaboration between generations and species can be understood as sympoiesis in Donna Haraway’s sense (2016). In Holland’s scenario, it is made possible by ‘SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE’. This includes expressing feelings until vulnerability is no longer a threat, because ‘perseverance’ grows with the group, which is nourished by ‘closeness’ – ‘a withdrawal of feelings was no longer possible’. Anger and desire are freely cultivated, while fear, hatred and guilt are reduced: this co-regulation of feelings requires ‘slow thinking’.

The caring relationships lead to consolidation through institutions: the ‘we’ organises itself at a ‘general assembly’ as a registered ‘association’, from which ‘the secretary’ emerges as a single role, perhaps an allusion at the coryphaeus from ancient tragedies. Relationship work is done by committees, e.g. a working group on fear, in accordance with a statute that provides for the giving of love. The seemingly ironic combination of bureaucracy and liberation does not hinder the practice of mutual care, which is always invoked in capital letters in the long poem as ‘die KÜMMERUNG’ [the taking-care-of], a virtue, a practice, a lived institution. This practical-poetic power of connecting allows for continued work on the interrelatedness of the collective, in which, in principle, all actors in the local and planetary community can participate.

The collective is politically active and attempts to join other species in resisting an unspecified technological surveillance. Large corporations, the architecture of consumer capitalism and the institutions of power are occupied as biotopes and sites of social practice. The ‘we’ practises revolt and revolution, tries to do justice to all species and tap into all potentials.

The way of life of the ‘we’ as permanent learning with social intelligence leads to a utopian-planetary toolbox, an ‘archive for possible futures’. This includes not only evolved and newly created living beings, but also technologies such as ‘cloud cannons’, piezoelectric energy generation or geoengineering with atomised salt water or crushed diamonds in the atmosphere. At the same time, the technological considerations always remain centred on the Earth and reject fantasies of interplanetary escapism: ‘parallel earths are not to be relied upon!’

The utopia of a seamlessly expanding multispecies ‘we’ would not develop its aesthetic appeal in the book if the texts did not also speak of deviations from the group. On the one hand, the consolidated ‘we’ seems to break down into different collectives, which Holland portrays in the folder a of the appendix, with a manifesto-like poem for each collective. On the other hand, the individuals within a group may also deviate from it. They assert their autonomy and ‘drop out of the we’. Their perspective is given space in a prose section (‘folder c’). The ego can betray the ‘we’, withdraw from co-operation and focus on self-assertion, if only because it has a body that it can focus on. Negative feelings can separate one from the community: ‘here is just this shame. i can’t get to a we.’ Only the collective care, the KÜMMERUNG, defragments the ‘I’ so that it can connect again. Or it remains permanently separated from the others – at the cost of no longer understanding its own worries, pain and longing. In addition, there is also a happy individuation through desire and feelings with which the singularity of another is perceived and desired. Lovers my fall out of the ‘emotional democracy’ of the group in a ‘wholehearted bodily conspiracy only with you’.

Contemporary poetry has not yet answered how the love of individuals fits into the interdependence of the planetary. In any case, this conviction belongs to planetary consciousness: ‘I stand in the overall context of we’, in a ‘majority of many, moving and indulgent’, in which differences and individuality are co-produced. Each individual remains dependent on co-operation and exchange due to their needs and vulnerability.

What characterises Holland’s ‘we’ is the independent, joyful and ‘celebrated’ assumption of responsibility, because ‘those who do not bear responsibility do not find freedom. we grow / only with each other’. According to Donna Haraway, this is the central task of the planetary present: ‘learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth’ (Haraway, 2016). In Holland’s book the readers can experience how coexistence with care and social intelligence can make life on a damaged planet possible and desirable.

Timothy Clark saw an aesthetic risk of eco-poetry in the fact that in it, as in the environment itself, everything could be connected to everything else (Clark, 2019). Poems by Dana Ranga, Daniel Falb and Tim Holland and others such as Rike Scheffler as well as Marion Poschmann, Verena Stauffer, Sebastian Unger and others, most of whom are included in the anthology Lyrik im Anthropozän (Poetry in the Anthropocene, edited by Daniela Seel and Anja Bayer, 2016), counter this risk. Their poetry is aesthetically diverse and it raises our awareness of the very specific interrelationships between ecosystem dynamics, technologically conditioned experiences, latent material processes and social needs of the planetary present. Poetry concerned with the planetary can make unfamiliar and latent connections legible through its form, which does not have to adopt expectations of narrative or logical coherence and linear order. Moreover, it invites readers to imagine what it might mean for different species and technologies to coexist on our damaged planet.

References

Bayer, Anja and Seel, Daniela (2016): All dies hier, Majestät, ist deins. Lyrik im Anthropozän. Kookbooks: Berlin/ Deutsches Museum: München.
Clark, Timothy (2019): The Value of Ecocriticism. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Dubro, Lukas and Holland, Tim (eds) (2022): Kollaps und Hope Porn. 13 Zukunftsaussichten. Maro Verlag: Augsburg.
Haraway, Donna (2003): The Companion Species Manifesto. Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Prickly Paradigm Press: Chicago.
Haraway, Donna (2016): Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press: Durham/London.
Holland, Tim (2022): wir zaudern, wir brennen. Rohstoff/Matthes & Seitz: Berlin.
Scheffler, Rike (2023): Lava. Rituale. kookbooks: Berlin.