This is a lovely piece, Adam, which you gravely fucked up a bit I hope. It brings to mind Richard Flanagan's long drowning sequence in Question 7, and Leo Szilard's long baths and his—their—tracing back to Wells the wellspring of fission in The World Set Free, at least as Szilard saw it. I've been reading Sebald's After Nature, thinking about nonhuman sentience, as I do, and one of your contentions struck me, that conservation is conservative and past looking. I don't know if this is so much untrue as cracking open for me what is an almost elemental struggle, since preservation is all about preserving the future and seeing the source of our survival in the past, a bit like taking advice on policy from historians. Perhaps it's that we look for clues to better progress in our own past and not in nature's. There is something in this which connects me to your remark about Oswald's lack of river rubbish (aside from corpses). Not sure where I'm going with this, but it's fascinating. Thanks!
Yes the conservatism/conservation elision is crude, even provocative, although the idea of conserving things is increasing alien to modern political conservatism, which operates by a break-stuff-and-change-everything, à la Liz Truss, Elon Musk or Trump: which, in other words, has no respect for the past, or tradition, and which sees the environment only as a resource to be exploited and extracted in order to make money. The point about Oswald's many drowned bodies is that they still speak, or that the river speaks through them: they connect us to the past, and stand as Fisher-King rebuses for renewal and rebirth (or so I argue). The tension between this, the traditional forms and (again: I argue) presence of Coleridge, and Eliot and Hughes in Oswald's poetic reworking and reflow on the one hand, and her newness, her metamorphoses and changes on the other, is really interesting. Passing through what Shelley calls the pores of the water:
I am the daughter of Earth and of Water,
The nursling of the Sky;
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores
I change but I cannot die.
This post is way, and indeed waaaay, too long already, but I found as I was writing it kept opening on new vistas of sacred water, and flow, immersion and drowning: I haven't read Flanagan's "Question 7", but will.
This is a lovely piece, Adam, which you gravely fucked up a bit I hope. It brings to mind Richard Flanagan's long drowning sequence in Question 7, and Leo Szilard's long baths and his—their—tracing back to Wells the wellspring of fission in The World Set Free, at least as Szilard saw it. I've been reading Sebald's After Nature, thinking about nonhuman sentience, as I do, and one of your contentions struck me, that conservation is conservative and past looking. I don't know if this is so much untrue as cracking open for me what is an almost elemental struggle, since preservation is all about preserving the future and seeing the source of our survival in the past, a bit like taking advice on policy from historians. Perhaps it's that we look for clues to better progress in our own past and not in nature's. There is something in this which connects me to your remark about Oswald's lack of river rubbish (aside from corpses). Not sure where I'm going with this, but it's fascinating. Thanks!
Yes the conservatism/conservation elision is crude, even provocative, although the idea of conserving things is increasing alien to modern political conservatism, which operates by a break-stuff-and-change-everything, à la Liz Truss, Elon Musk or Trump: which, in other words, has no respect for the past, or tradition, and which sees the environment only as a resource to be exploited and extracted in order to make money. The point about Oswald's many drowned bodies is that they still speak, or that the river speaks through them: they connect us to the past, and stand as Fisher-King rebuses for renewal and rebirth (or so I argue). The tension between this, the traditional forms and (again: I argue) presence of Coleridge, and Eliot and Hughes in Oswald's poetic reworking and reflow on the one hand, and her newness, her metamorphoses and changes on the other, is really interesting. Passing through what Shelley calls the pores of the water:
I am the daughter of Earth and of Water,
The nursling of the Sky;
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores
I change but I cannot die.
This post is way, and indeed waaaay, too long already, but I found as I was writing it kept opening on new vistas of sacred water, and flow, immersion and drowning: I haven't read Flanagan's "Question 7", but will.
And I have to read Oswald. The arguments compelling.
Oswald is very much worth reading.
I will have to print this to read it properly. Thank you for writing it. I have enjoyed Oswald’s work.
It's much too long, Michael, you're right! I ought to provide a summarised version.
I am really enjoying your work.