“In Wilderness is the preservation of the World”

– David Henry Thoreau, “Walking”.

Admiration and preservation of nature does not just demand us be engaged and aware, but also, expectant before its startling wisdom and power. How can the filmmaker unravel this extreme beauty into the eyes of the spectator to whom he wants to deliver the most striking image of nature with the intention to move him to act upon the environment? What relationship does the filmmaker want the spectator to establish with the film? How does the filmmaker and spectator interact with the film? What does the film evoke and provoke in our minds (and hearts)?

“Sacred Strides” is a short documentary that I think, unintentionally, is related to “Koyaanisqatsi”. Located in Southeast Utah, Bears Ears is a sacred land for the Ute, Hopi, Navajo, Zuni, Uintah and Ouray Native American peoples. President Obama proclaimed it National Monument in 2016, and was protected until 2017 when President Trump removed the protection and shrinked  it from 1,3 million to two hundred thousand acres. These ancestral native tribes fought with each other for centuries, but now they set their differences aside and came together to raise a unified voice for the protection of the land they believe sacred. From their places of origin in New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona and Utah, ran back to their sacred sites through 800miles of desert plateau into Bears Ears to pray as a united tribe for the healing of their land. 

The stage of this short film is set mostly in the desert during the days they run, gather around bonfires and prepare for running at dusk or sunrise. Beautiful images of desert landscapes transition between conversations and interviews with lonely runners in remote desert roads. They reflect about the relationship with the land, their history and the origins of the tribal conflicts they try to heal together. Early in the film (min 00:22) a group of Navajo and Ute gather around a bonfire at dusk, is cold, we can hear the tinders of the fire crackling, their tribe leader, Kenneth Maryboy, is exhorting them on the night before their arrival to Bears Ears. He says: “the Pueblo’s, the Zuni’s, the Hopi’s, they go up there, there are certain places, there are dwellings, they do their offerings, they leave the batons. But sadly we are about to lose those…You get earth, mother earth, one time, you don’t get it two times or a third time….where are we gonna get another one if we suffocate mom?”. He talks about the protection of Humanity’s sacred place proclaiming a powerful thought of something bigger than ourselves. He delivers the message in a different format but this is the same as Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi.

“Koyaanisqatsi” is evoking and thoughtful, moving, provocative and conscious. It creates the overwhelming effect that the admiration of nature asks for; it does not leave the spectator indifferent. Is frenetic at times, peaceful others, repetitive and deeply philosophical at the spectators will. The film uses two essential descriptive elements: image and music. Obvious as it sounds these two are threaded seamlessly making the film potent and arousing in an unusual fashion. Firstly is the apocalyptic and mundane nature of some of the images, secondly, is the psychedelic light the music sheds over these images what makes the spectator feel conscious and committed to act.

The film is introduced by and organ melody showing images of prehistoric pictographs in the Utah desert. Immediately after, it switches to a close up of a Saturn V engine igniting and lifting; maybe meaning departure from Earth. A series of images of desert lands in the Colorado Plateau follow. Accompanied by this repetitive circular melody with a bass choir reciting “Koyaanisqatsi” in the background, a slow moving image of the desert displays enduring times, tranquility and equilibrium. The effects of wind and water have shaped this rocky landscape for thousands of years. Clouds are approaching, a tempest is brewing as a simile of the advent of dark times, the arrival of industrialism anticipated by the camera panning down a waterfall. A peaceful calmed sea hit by constant intense winds evolves into a rough and fiery sea. The normal course of nature is broken as industrialism breaks into the landscape setting it off balance.

As the film keeps exploring the violent disconnection progress is producing, two images mostly shock me. After observing people in New York City, at min 42:24 two men walk in the street and in the background the facade of a building with an electric panel displays the phrase: “Grand Illusion”. Seems to be the transitory illusion progress sells us. I connect this image with a later one in min 53:54, when music becomes extremely frenetic pacing the machine-like behavior of the activities people are executing, a sausage factory comes into play. In a time lapse image, industrial manufacturing of sausage links rapidly move across a line of conveyor belts while too men in the sides pick the sausages and line them up in the conveyor to make sure the process is perfect and efficient. Immediately, the image switches to a set of seven escalators delivering people into an upper floor. Like minced meat linked together, humanity is minced by the voracity of industrialism that has detached and alienated it from its natural realm.

The romantic movement skillfully mastered the connection with the powers of nature through the arts. With the logical difference in style and format, it displayed the beauty we can visually see in present environmental films. Although the call for activism, as we know it today, was probably missing as there was yet no need for it, without visual images, romanticism conveyed the connection with nature in the emotional landscape. With the intention of answering some of the initial reflections early in this essay, I think Environmental films today capture the realities humanity faces in its aims to accept its status quo with the environment. Bonding the spectator with striking images or nature, makes us feel more compelled to act. Environmental films usually invite for activism in some way or form. The images, music, reflections, narrations, assembly of the image-thought duality, invite spectators to transform themselves from passive viewers to active protagonists. The final ends of the environmental film is to move spectators from the rationalization of nature we see in the BBC Planet Earth format documentaries to connection with nature and action that films like Sacred Strides or Koyaanisqatsi provoke. The environmental film has the quality of moving and the persuasive ability to call the spectator into action to change.

Pandemics have been throughout history terrifying and convulsive events with uncertain outcome. These dramatic events, that sometimes demand extreme political decisions, tend to exacerbate other conflicts that are latent in society, amplify political tensions and in some instances coalesce society for the future. One common denominator in exceptional situations, like terror attacks, is that pandemics open cracks for political power to penetrate deeper in its effort of governmental control.

Martin Wagner in his essay Defoe, Foucault, and the Politics of the Plague, takes Daniel Defoe’s fictional account of the 1665 Great Plague of London in A Journal of the year Plague Year under the scrutinizing lenses of Michel Foucault’s theory on political power. Foucault’s lectures at the College de France on January 1975, drew some ideas on individual agency, confinement and social control in times of pandemics. Foucault argues that plague replaced leprosy as a model of political control during the Bubonic plague episodes that lashed Europe from the late Middle Ages to the early eighteenth century. Europe’s political scene evolved from the “politics of the leprosy” to the “politics of plagues”. Leprosy involved “practices of exclusion, of casting out, and marginalization”¹ to keep the dangerous individuals “driven out in order to purify the community.”² Plagues instead involved quarantine, where “a territory was the object of a fine detailed analysis, of a meticulous spacial partitioning”³ with the objective of individual surveillance extended “to the fine grain of individuality”.⁴ To buttress his social theory of plague policy, Foucault wavers around the metaphors of two dreams; one is the “literary dream” of the plague, coming from the body of literature where plague appears as the “moment when individuals come apart and when the law is forgotten.”⁵ The second, the “political dream”, “in which the plague is rather the marvelous moment when political power is exerted to the full.”⁶ Defoe’s chronicle in A Journal of the year Plague Year, delves into the social behavior and quarantine practices at the time of the plague, and reveals how these two metaphorical dreams occur in the reality of the people of London. Wagner’s essay pivots around Foucault’s dreams, reconciling them through Defoe’s chronicle into a third one that he calls the “novelistic dream”. This novelistic dream wavers between the literary dream and the political dream coming to life in the stories of “healthy individuals who decide to shut themselves up before they are infected and before the government limits their movements and shuts them up”⁷ to survive isolated from the plague. Defoe’s literature of the plague and Wagner’s understanding of Foucault’s dreams present us with an opportunity to experience Covid-19 pandemic as a “metacommentary” of the three.

The elements that define the Literary, the Political and the Novelistic Dreams are easily recognizable looking at how our modern societies have behaved since the pandemic broke in the West in March 2020. Firstly I will shed my main focus in the concept of the novelistic dream,  what I would call public or civic responsibility, secondly I will mention what in my view is the social aspect of these dreams and how have helped in the eruption of society’s latent endemic issues.

According to Wagner, the novelistic dream is the one in which “the individual’s autonomy from government control and the government’s dream of perfect order are reconciled.”⁸ In his narrative, this is the confinement that just few can afford to inflict upon themselves. It responds to “the modern bourgeoise identity,”⁹ and I agree with Wagner description, as these individuals belong to a societal class where job is secure and can be performed remotely, households are large enough to allow distance between family members, children go to private schools, in some instances they own a second house out of the big cities, and therefore the “practice of shutting yourself up seems to enjoy privilege and status”.¹⁰ There is another class of citizens that in my opinion inhabit Foucault’s literary and political dream. These ones are usually blue collar, service and hospitality workers, and low income families that live in smaller houses where space is shared, have the necessity to work, or are forced show up at work with 102 DegF fever. These citizens do not own their decisions in respect of how to act in the pandemic because their decisions are limited by structure (social class, ethnicity, immigration status, customs, etc), instead of being a product of individual agency like is the case of the first ones. These are the ones most impacted by the pandemic. Finally in my opinion there is a third group that is halfway between the two. Their characteristic is disobedience as agency and are the ones that in the name of freedom and individual agency refuse to voluntarily lock themselves or wear a mask, and resist the law of the political dream to be imposed on them. Paradoxically these individuals in occasions enjoy the class status of the first ones but fervently oppose Defoe’s and Wagner’s novelistic dream by reason of partisanship, rebuttal of public health recommendations or civic responsibility.

One takeaway from the present pandemic and past ones is the tension between these three dreams and between the various attitudes citizens have adopted depending on which dream they inhabit. Between the ones that avoided confrontation with authorities by adopting “a form of agency that is in line with the law, without being a mere product of the law.”¹¹ The ones that when the governmental control becomes visible they resist and escape the confinement, or not wear a mask, calling into question the futility of this new sanitary dictatorship and surveillance regime. And finally the ones that belong to the lower class and are subject to strict demarcation and confinement, and swell the mortality data lists.

In line with Wagners analysis, present pandemic has revealed how social behavior has not changed in times of pandemics over the centuries. Defoe describes how the plague leashed specially on the poor, how the wealthy managed to scape the cities and even conspiracy theories rose driving fear or denial. Today, the poor and certain ethnicities are more vulnerable because their living and labor conditions, the wealthy flee cities like NY to the outskirts where population density is lower, illegal immigrant workers are forced to keep working, labour security determines chances to be more exposed the disease. A Journal of the Plague Year narrative has become overtime a contemporary account that depicts grand parallelism with todays Covid pandemic in a discerning fashion. But more over is a source of experience that shows how social issues that were before latent have erupted because the virus.

Notes

1. Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures in College de France 1974-1975. Ed Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni. Trans. Graham Burchell. page 43.

2. Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures in College de France 1974-1975. Ed Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni. Trans. Graham Burchell. Page 44.

3. Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures in College de France 1974-1975. Ed Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni. Trans. Graham Burchell. Page 45.

4. Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures in College de France 1974-1975. Ed Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni. Trans. Graham Burchell. Page 46.

5. Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures in College de France 1974-1975. Ed Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni. Trans. Graham Burchell. Page 47.

6. Ibid.

7. Martin Wagner. Defoe, Foucault and the Politics of the Plague. SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Volume 57, Number 3, Summer 2017. Page 509.

8. Martin Wagner. Defoe, Foucault and the Politics of the Plague. SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Volume 57, Number 3, Summer 2017. Page 503.

9. Martin Wagner. Defoe, Foucault and the Politics of the Plague. SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Volume 57, Number 3, Summer 2017. Page 510

10. Martin Wagner. Defoe, Foucault and the Politics of the Plague. SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Volume 57, Number 3, Summer 2017. Page 509.

11. Martin Wagner. Defoe, Foucault and the Politics of the Plague. SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Volume 57, Number 3, Summer 2017. Page 515

Sonnet to Robin – 

Robin is silent, not peaceful, a stretch where life is quiet, uneventful.

We always live backwards, sometimes frontwards, but rarely, 

…to prune the roses, to puff a fag or mow some grass, but there are no voices.

Listen to the silence.….to a possum, a squirrel, a sparrow, a bark,.…a jay’s flight with blue sparks.

Staring at the balcony, melancholy grows. inaction reigns, patience sighs. 

We just rarely talk, we always know, while we come and go, but always know,

… from our big houses, into our coaches, to ourtiny boxes.

Listen and smell..…a blue spell, clear breath,…..a hawk peeks with lure onto the urban green pasture.

Disease in our throats; broken uneventfulness that will reach our souls. 

Fucked up year, some say; to embrace nature and life in unknown ways.

Nature dominates, we still don’t understand, we fear it late to stop and stand….

Standing in the balcony, hopeful I feel, spellbound and expectant as Robin blooms green

Still uneventful we go, just nothing important, a gale of humane hope.

:

Right when the panic started, I was tempted to follow Berlioz’s steps with the opium, however my senses told me poetry is not hallucinatory or psychedelic but more about the powerful use of the word. How these entangle, twist, embrace each other, intertwine, bend and blend to create meanings that, maybe turning fantastic, are always premonitory of our deepest thoughts, feelings and forms of identification with reality.

Poetry composition feels to me like a puzzle of meaning; puzzling with the meaning and putting it together. I find it a state of the mind; embedded thoughts that concealed in the mind blend together turn into meaning. Seeking those intimate meanings is what gets the exercise so wonderful. 

Dams and Alpinism. I like the dams that are built in cold mountains and use bell-mouth spillway systems. Are very scary but at the same time are fascinating. The closer you are, the more fearful they get; you want to approach the edge but its spiraling waterfall torrent is so powerful that can suck you into the bell mouth. But you cannot help it, curiosity drives you closer and closer to that fear. Writing is a similar experience. A spiral flow of thought fed by rhythm, music, meaning. It absorbs you into the abyss but you cannot avoid it because you want to explore it to wherever words may take you. Curiosity gets you into the bell mouth of words and meaning.

Once I wrote a narrative poem about a Woodpecker, a Centipede, an Armadillo, a hair ringlet, and a roll in the hay. All together create a wonderful rhyme where the words and their meanings hug each other and entangle in a way that is almost graphical, like a hieroglyph. But the beauty of it is that you cannot reframe it in English or other languages. Poetry, its meanings, and the tools it uses to express itself become very unique to each language, and so does thought. The beauty of this sonnet exercise to me has been the creation of thought in a foreign language through the skill of twisting, bending words and finding its nuances to have them dance together in a brief sonnet to create meaningful thinking. Thank you!

Reading Natasha Trethewey – Living Monuments

Natasha Trethewey’s works display an intense, powerful and intimate connection with the recent history of the South, and also a strong determination in understanding her own existence and relation with her life events. Her poetry and prose are revealing of those relationships. Knowing little fragments of her personal life feels distressing and at the same time encouraging of how the power of words can provide, not just consolation, but even rehabilitation and healing of one’s own life.

Anguish and suffering have been in many cases a catalyst of creativity and art. Rimbaud’s or Hölderlin’s works are the saviors of their own mental sanity; at least until certain moment in their lives. Martin Heidegger in his essays Existence and Being (1936) said about Hölderlin’s poetry: “Poetry is the establishment of Being by means of the word.” Natasha can certainly be represented by this line as she is what her words do: show us how the rivers of oppression, conflict and despair flow through meandering ravines and valleys to reach at the end an ocean of peace. 

Poetry in its intention to decipher, enlighten and think thought, depicts the intimacy of words. Set in perspective to history, poetry shows us the intimacy of those historical moments that historians in their work try to elucidate. Poetry inquires and asks ourselves from a position of self reflection, giving the reader and the writer the ability to understand each other, interpret each other and have a conversation to seek truth. Poetry becomes then a testimony for the reader and a testament for the writer, both in search of understanding. 

Understanding and truth is what historians, poets and readers try to piece together. Conflict, power struggle, repression are constants in the history of nations and peoples. Some historical events across the world disseminate monuments that sow discord and leave a legacy of suffering that accomplishes the opposite to what monuments should leave us thinking. Natasha in the Epigraph of Native Guards uses a thoughtful quote to start the conversation of monuments and history.

“If this war is to be forgotten, I ask in the name of all 

things sacred what shall men remember” ?

– Frederick Douglass

Hence, what are we learning from our monuments? what do we remember of what our monuments are telling us? What are monuments testimony of?

I think monuments represent tiny fragments of history, likely one side of the historical outcome, and therefore, rarely seek truth but just exaltation of certain qualities and historical ends. We see that perpetuating this single view of history through monuments, in many or most occasions, produces divisiveness rather than unity and understanding of historical conflicts.

My perception of monuments has always been an aseptic one. A concept of monuments that has helped me understand their symbolism as the vestiges that history leaves for us to look at, to understand what is behind and what we have ahead as time progresses. When reading Native Guards I realized that mine is the convenient stance towards what monuments tell us. Especially towards certain kinds of monuments. Without the correct historical context, monuments can be considered anything the viewer conveniently sees. Natasha’s poetry came to me to enlighten what these monuments mean to others; others like Caroline Randall Williams; others that do not have a voice; others that are ignorant of their own history and blind to what those monuments are telling us:

“Weathered monument to some of the dead”.

“What is monument to their legacy?” 

– Elegy for the Native Guards.

This exclusive, one sided and crippled use of use of historical monuments helps Natasha’s work not just to unearth the horrors of slavery, but through their (her) poetry, she leaves the reader other traces of historical analysis worth to investigate, as they appear to me as universal reflections on history.

For the Native Guards, joining the Union did not change their situation much. In December 1862 they where free men doing a “nigger work”, to whom their “half rations made their work familiar still”. The things they needed where taken from the confederates abandoned homes, like the used journals. In these journals the poems are written overlapping others writers words. From the journal it reads: “On every page his story is intersecting with my own”. Looking at this line as real a historical event, there is his story (history) and there is my own story (history), both intersecting visions of history. Like in life and history, those two trajectories, despite being the same history, have a different outcome for one person and the other. Successful for the one that writes it, dreadful for the one the suffers it (Natasha). In an almost existential way, the third part of the poem, January 1863, poses the question of freedom and emancipation in a way that it becomes a permanent one throughout the history of nations and peoples: “and are we not the same, slaves in the hands of the master, destiny?”.

Natasha’s poetry makes me think that history is maybe not just what we see written in the books, but is more what it does to the people that experienced it first hand. Hence history is a living thing. As monuments are erected by the ones that shape history, the powerful, history becomes something denied to all others, the weak, the abandoned, the helpless, and therefore turning it into a source of suffering and disagreement. Natasha gives us the opportunity to see history from the eyes of the oppressed, not as a matter of historical accuracy, but as an intimate and delicate historical poem. Her work is a powerful testament of how the humble and poor live and experience in a format that is not in the historical accounts. Inviting us to reflect first hand, and dialogue about what we are going to do to avoid it to happen again in any other way or form. If not we can look back at the beginning of the book in Charles Wright words: 

“Memory is a cemetery

I’ve visited once or twice, white

                                   ubiquitous and the set aside

Everywhere underfoot”

– Charles Wright.

“What is the use and purpose of poets in an age of darkness?” thinks Hölderlin in part seven of his Bread and Wine poem.What are poets for when we most need them? To my heart Natasha elegantly and formidably reached the high purpose a poet aims to accomplish. She moved me into the intimacy of the sufferings of many Afroamerican people in these dark times of History.