essay
For “Nature” Say “Weather”
In her introduction to Memorial, Alice Oswald describes her version of The Iliad as “an excavation….a kind of oral cemetery.” I think about how cemeteries are small spaces walled off from larger ones, and then I can see it. The larger space in Memorial is a wilderness, depthless and timeless— and against it the human habits of ritualizing grief and making monuments to heroes are cut down to size.
In another introduction— this one to her selection of the poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt— Oswald suggests that Wyatt uses Petrarch’s sonnets the way a musician uses a flute; if this is so, then I want to say Oswald uses Homer the way a gardener uses an allotment of land. Oswald was working full time as a gardener when she wrote her first book, and it’s true that she applies a great deal of both learned knowledge and intuitive skill, as well as a kind of empathy— a sensitivity to the pre-existing ecosystem she is working with— to the task of bringing about a radical transformation of Homer. She has spoken of the two activities of writing poems and gardening as the work of “carrying [my] own meaning beyond the meaning of the grass, the weeds, the wind, the rain, the mud….” But she has never wanted, she says, to write “poems that prioritize my human meaning above the meanings that are going on around me.” Darwin’s famous marginalia, scribbled in a natural history book from his library reading— Never say higher or lower — springs to mind. A great deal of time spent with plants and the creatures that live among them acquaints the poet-gardener with the more-than-human lifeworld on an intimate level, and a leveling ethic forms, a reluctance to treat living things as mere objects— a kind of democratic animism, which thrums through Oswald’s work.
As if it was June
A poppy being hammered by the rain
Sinks its head down
It’s exactly like that
When a man’s head gives in
(Memorial)
We had poppies in my garden, growing up. I remember so clearly how they could collapse under the weight of raindrops. The precision of the flower-observation makes the moment of death— when the man’s head becomes a dead weight, and the neck goes limp— horrifically cinematic. It’s an image formed in the mind — the mental equivalent of a sun-print— by an acutely sensitive observer who has clearly knelt in the grass in the rain and watched, up close, this exceptionally frail and thin-stemmed flower, the garden poppy, give up the ghost.
Memorial opens with a list of names of the dead, each one in all-caps, as if engraved in stone; but the book’s center of gravity is in her re-writing of 77 of the Iliad’s 215 extended similes. For almost all of the first two-thirds of the book, each death is followed by an extended simile presented twice: you read it, then you read it a second time. The reader is meant to dwell with the images in the similes (and not, as I confess I did after a while with the names, skim). In one of her Oxford Lectures, Oswald has said she favors simile over metaphor because simile increases, where metaphor consumes, and to explain, she uses a pair of similes: “Simile is like pregnancy,” she says, whereas metaphor is “more like digestion.” Simile involves creating a new thing, and it respects the boundary between the thing itself and the new thing brought in to illuminate the original thing. It “doesn’t capture an object,” but rather “allows an object to grow away from the comparison.” This is an idea she reiterates, in slightly different ways, in several interviews and lectures. “For me,” she says, “poetry is about making a whole thing that has a life of its own, and then it gets moving outside of itself.”[1] What has happened between The Iliad and Memorial is not like gardening after all. It is closer to the cell-to-cell communication that begins a new life than to the cultivation of a piece of land. When we wall off a parcel of land, dot it with stones engraved with names, and imagine it will contain our grief, it is, in part, an attempt to subdue what is dreadful. In Memorial, the horrors of death are not subdued.
The long columns of names in Memorial are bloodless abstractions, but they represent what were once phalanxes of living men. Throughout the poem, the deaths that have changed the men to names cut in stone are graphically evoked: “a spear…splintered his teeth cut through his tongue broke off his jaw / And came out clean through the chin,” and we are made to feel the impact in our bodies: “unswallowable sore throat of metal in his mouth,”and to feel also the few associated brief, body-slamming images of what losing someone to a violent death is like for the survivors: “How can you kiss a rolling head?” But as dramatic as each soldier’s personal history and death-moment are, when they abruptly stop, what we’re shown, again and again, is a very quiet confirmation: there’s no more life here:
Poor ARCHEPTOLEMOS
Someone was there
And the next moment no one.
That is, there’s no more human life. The ongoingness of the battle isn’t life; it’s a self-consuming, ravenous hunger utterly divorced from hunger’s purpose, to sustain. In the identical-twin similes, a different living spark picks up where a man’s life has left off. The slaughter has consumed everything that enters the cemetery of human ambition, but there are greater energies:
Like a fire with its loose hair flying rushes through a city
The look of unmasked light shocks everything to rubble
And flames howl through the gaps
The living force is a destructive one in these lines but, it is an ineradicable element, and one that illuminates. If simile is like pregnancy, it’s clear that this offspring is wildly viable. In simile’s doubling action, the two parts are not inseparable. The first part of the simile—the human soldier in “civilized” battle— is cast out of time altogether, while the second— what happens in the natural world— appears before us, in some kind of time-outside-time:
Like the changing mind
That moves a cloud off a mountain
And makes rocks and cliffs appear
Pushing the landshape’s sharp edges up
Through more and more air
I was in a pretty dramatic car crash decades ago, and I remember it felt as if, at the moment of impact, I went into a kind of slow-motion somersault, tumbling outside of gravity, no longer inside the vehicle. But of course time hadn’t slowed down, I had just ceased to register it. What mattered was space: where was I flying to, where would I land, and would the space of the car collapse around me? Violence does this:
Like a boat
Going into the foaming mouth of a wave
In the body of the wind
Everything vanishes
And the sailors stare at mid-air
It separates mind and world. It breaks a Plank in Reason. It is as much an ending as it is a beginning, and in this, is a kind of parturition.
Oswald has said that, as a woman, she’s always searching for “something of my own in language,” and she says that this is why she prefers simile to metaphor. She thinks of simile, she says, as “a female part of speech.” This is tricky; several decades worth of feminist discourse on language and gender has made it difficult — since my own college Women’s Studies days, at least— to think in such essentialist terms. But I think the idea she raises is less about whether an intrinsically “female” language exists, and more about her desire to integrate into her thinking about language that uniquely female ontological experience which, when one goes through it, rearranges the ground of one’s being. She’s saying that pregnancy and giving birth profoundly change how you think about the world, and that this body-mind experience connects with her poetics. As a multiparous person/writer myself, in a world of seminal theories, seminal ideas, seminal works, and numberless other kinds of spermatikoi logoi, I’m also always searching for— what is it? Some area of language that doesn’t seem (like the seatbelts in all cars) designed for a differently configured body?
Questions of essentialism aside, misogynist language is real, and Memorial received a spurt of it in a review written by William Logan that ran in The New York Times shortly after the US paperback edition came out. Oswald’s “insistent use of ‘like’ for ‘as’,” Logan wrote, “turns her narrator into a gum-chewing Valley girl.” It’s extremely hard to hold that image in your mind if you’ve ever read Oswald’s work, or listened to or watched one of the Oxford Lectures. It’s equally hard to imagine any of Oswald’s predecessors at Oxford— where she’s the first woman to occupy the position of Poetry Professor in all the 300 years of the position’s existence— being on the receiving end of such a wildly incongruous, offhand diss. Seamus Heaney, who held the position from 1989-1994, I don’t think has ever had his work described as “merely” anything, and I would bet he’s never been called “cheeky” in a serious national periodical. Of course Logan’s bizarre response to Oswald’s book says more about the reviewer than the reviewed.
Near the end of the first two thirds of Memorial, Achilles “Standing downstream with his rude sword / hacking off heads,” renders the “whole river…a grave.” All that’s left after the horror passes is “a wagtail / Sipping the desecration unaware.” The lives and deaths of men are ultimately part of the carbon cycle, the breaking down and wearing away of living things to their constituent molecules, atoms, subatomic particles— as we like to imagine it, the “stardust” that everything once was.
* * *
Until 2020, when it was replaced by “Covid,” the word “time” had been the most-used noun in the English language for, well, ages. I was re-reading Memorial, thinking of bringing it into a workshop I was teaching at NYU, when Covid shut the city down, then, piece by piece, the world. Three months into lockdown, a family friend offered me the use of an old farmhouse that her parents had left empty at their deaths, for a couple of weeks in June. It felt like an impossible reprieve. The house is nestled in a lush meadow surrounded by more meadows, wilder and wilder the further from the house they are. The meadows give way to acre on acre of forest encircled by mountains. This land had been placed under a conservation order decades ago, so that, effectively, the only “developers” allowed to act on it are the flora and fauna that thrive in truly astonishing abundance. The existence of a conservation order gives the place a feeling of timelessness. This will persist unchanged until the planet’s gone, I kept telling myself. There’s a paradox at the heart of this sense of timelessness. I’ve returned to the house three more times since that first visit, and each time found it utterly transformed by the progression of the seasons. It’s an experience that put me in mind of the way evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould describes the complex matrix of different types of time we inhabit. Our experience, he says, is marked “by immanent things that do not appear to change; by cosmic recurrences of days and seasons; by unique events of battles and natural disasters.” It is a dichotomy in our Western conceptualization of time:
At one end of the dichotomy— I shall call it time’s arrow— history is an irreversible sequence of
unrepeatable events…and all moments, considered in proper sequence, tell a story of linked events
moving in a direction.
At the other end— I shall call it time’s cycle— events have no [episodic] meaning…states are
immanent in time, always present and never changing. Apparent motions are parts of repeating
cycles…[2]
The texture of time had already been disturbed by the Pandemic, but away from the city, in the house in the meadow surrounded by mountains, it changed completely. For two weeks, time’s arrow was subsumed in time’s cycle, and some of the anxious wondering that had possessed me— when will this end, where is this taking us? — seemed meaningless— or if it had meaning, it was coded in the daylight hours’ constant humming of the bees in the clump of dead trees by the barn, mingling with the bird music, the almost shamanic-sounding, rhythmic, slowly rising and falling mating calls of frogs; and at night, when the birds all seemed to fall asleep at once, and cicadas, owls, and coyotes joined the frogs in filling all space with their sounds. The silence of nature is borne in upon thousands of tiny sounds, says Simone Weil.
Up at the farmhouse, away from the city, I opened my laptop, and the name of the router appeared on my screen: MotherHarbor, and it’s just a router name, but I had lost my mother a year before the pandemic began, and was still (when will I ever not be?) grieving. And this place— the meadows, the forests so intensely busy with the ongoingness of non-human life— seemed miraculous. It held me, calmed my sleep-deprived, migrainous head, my shaken body. For two whole weeks I was able to stop fixating on the human world’s chaos: the madman in the White House, the thirty-thousand dead in the city, the crackdowns, the thick, choked voice of George Floyd calling to his mother through his long-drawn-out murder by a cop— the griefs, and the griefs, and the griefs.
What happens when the world surrounding the killing fields is made more vivid than the battle scenes themselves? What becomes of the epic when you subtract the narrative thrust? In Memorial, each time a man is brutally killed, History stops, and what I’ll call “weather”— in the sense Oswald means, in the preface to Gigantic Cinema, when she calls weather “undated Time”— eclipses everything, the action, the blood, the heart. And something like the world itself is left: “After all, what is not weather?” If a metaphor is “movie magic,” a simile is more stagecraft. There’s no sleight-of-hand— it’s all out in the open. When a soldier dies, the narrative grinds to a halt, and the striving clamor of battle gives way to a space of eternal return: the seasons, the weather, the cycles of day/night, birth/death, and underneath it all, you sense the presence of something against which the “deep time” of geological formation and destruction responsible for the land life plays out on, the mountains and plains, the rivers and oceans.
And what happens to things in the world when forms and identities merge, morph, split apart, rejoin, grow bright, vanish from sight, reappear? Something fluid, something flexible enough to reflect multiple realities at once.
Oswald rejects the term “nature poet” when it’s applied to her. Her relationship to nature is not the naïve orientation of the simple “nature lover,” although eros is palpably present in all her nature-based imagery. She is clearly moved by that “urge to affiliate with other forms of life,”[3] to which ecologists and some in the field of psychology have given the term biophilia. It’s as if something in her sense of sight, something both besotted and level-headed, of science and eros, allows her at times to occupy a different plane of physical scale— as if she were bee-sized and could clamber into the open throats of flowers, and engage the chemistry of honey-making. But it’s a very human process, gardening. And a human one, too, to probe and experiment upon the world, as you gather a poem’s materials with a kind of scientific curiosity: “So I have made a little moon-like hole / with a thumbnail and through a blade of grass / I watch the weather… and when it rains, the very integer / and shape of water disappears in water” (“Sea Sonnet”). Oswald’s poems embody a more-than-human intensity of presence, and she speaks of her writing as an ongoing “attempt to encounter something that’s not myself and that’s not like myself.” Rather than “nature poet,” I would say she’s something of a phenomenological poet.
Some of Oswald’s most powerful writing is descriptive, and some of her most powerful descriptive writing responds to the appearances and restless actions of water. Her lexicon of water-related words is something like a true version of the old false notion (still believed by many) of the vast “Eskimo” vocabulary of snow. Both the close, constant observational methods of science, and the delicious, longing-charged fascinations of eros are present in her water descriptions: “The sea is made of ponds— a cairn of rain…Is made of rills and springs— each waternode / a tiny subjectivity…//…the sea has hooves; / the powers of rivers and the weir’s curves / are moving in the wind-bent acts of waves. // And then the softer waters of the wells and soakways….” (“Sea Sonnet”).
The place to experience Oswald’s written water in its most astonishing forms is her 2020 book-length poem, Nobody: A Hymn to the Sea. Nobody is her reinterpretation of a single story from Homer’s Odyssey, in which a poet is stranded on an island. Water is not just inescapable, it is everywhere the poet’s gaze can turn. It’s not always benign; the language with which Oswald captures it in all its protean moods and forms is sometimes terrifying, always astonishing. Here, water appears to behave like a mystical shape-shifting demonic entity: It “turned in its cloak and shook itself into flames and burnt itself into fur and tore itself into flesh and told everything and instantly shrank into polythene and withered and bloomed … // and became a jellyfish a mere weakness of water a morsel of ice a glamour of oil….” It escapes perceptual containment, will never settle into being one thing: “This thing is formless and unstable….it is deep it is…fenceless…promiscuous and mingling….” (Nobody)
I’m reminded of a description of water I once came across years ago, when I was working at a bookstore. I copied the passage out, attributed it to phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but didn’t note down which of his works it came from. And then I lost the notebook that contained the description. As lost things can, it took on the quality of a dream, and I remember despairing of ever finding it again. After many years, I did. It wasn’t magic, just a Google search that finally got right. I was teaching a class on David Hockney’s swimming pool paintings, and I thought again of the water description. When I read it again, the language— from Phenomenology of Perception— was as dreamlike and beautiful it as I had remembered. Merleau-Ponty nets in language something that Hockney so dazzlingly invokes with color and forms:
When through the water's thickness I see the tiled bottom of the pool, I do not see it despite
the water and the reflections; I see it through them and because of them. If there were no distortions, no
ripples of sunlight, if it were without that flesh that I saw the geometry of the tiles, then I would
cease to see [what water is]…. I cannot say the water itself—the aqueous power, the syrupy and
shimmering element—is in space….It inhabits the pool, is materialized there, yet it is not contained
there; and if I lift my eyes toward the screen of cypresses where the web of reflections plays, I must
recognize that the water visits it…. or at least sends out to it its active, living essence.[4]
Perhaps the habits of perception and cognition that phenomenology aspires to dismantle are hard-wired in our brains. Perhaps the way we split things up with language into distinct, discontinuous objects, items, properties, qualities misrepresents and obscures perceptual reality. Water and light together are one continuous and organic phenomenon that seems to breathe as it seethes with constant motion (which is due to the fact that the moon is also an organ of the water). It presents as a kind of living thing, and the actions of reflection and refraction, far from being distortions, are its expressions. Merleau-Ponty’s “syrupy, shimmering element,” Oswald’s “glamour of oil” — phenomenologist and poet capture the sensuous, living qualities of water, in language that almost outperforms the thing itself.
Oswald’s lived relationship to water— perhaps more than all the other non-human quantities she comes into contact with—seems nothing short of fundamental to her being. She swims year round in the River Dart, she says, and I can tell you, that suggests she’s made of tougher stuff than I am. I have vivid memories of being forced to swim — not quite year-round, but close to it— in unheated Church Farm pool, with which my secondary modern school had an arrangement, in frigid, rainy English weather. I remember standing on the pool’s cracked cement lip, filled with dread, knowing there was no escape. I thought I knew what it must have felt like for a prisoner to face the gallows. But for Oswald, to slip into the River Dart’s icy current is to immerse herself in a life-giving, more-than-human medium. When she swims, she says, she is struck by “the strangeness of the way the body turns into a fish, but the head looks around it, above water.” The head remains human, she says, while the body transforms, becomes animal, or plant, or one of any number of unspecified non-human things. Elsewhere she attributes this infinite organic mutability to water itself. What she loves about water, she says, is “that it’s evidently not human nor is it animal nor even vegetable, but it does seem to have an intelligence.” This quality of water, she says, “challenges all my edges and understandings.”
Slippery and still, in shadow, and gleaming with light split by the crowns of trees, water creates weightlessness, renders the human less fixedly human in shape. It also seems to sharpen thought. The head in the world above the half-human, half-animal body in the water brims over with mental formations that draw from the body, and when that swimming body is one that has experienced the ultimate challenge to “I”-centered selfhood— I mean pregnancy— how would a poet with the mind-habits of a philosopher, like Oswald— not think on the strangeness and mystery of becoming for a while a doubled entity— both “I” and “not-I”?
With the head floating on the surface of the water, the mind is untethered, Oswald says, and yet the body is still subject to “all these laws like gravity, and limit, and size.” It vexes her, she says, that she isn’t able to make mind and body “be one thing.” And yet, in her poems, the palpable, phenomenal world, which only the body can access, is the source of empathy and thought.
As Bergson says, “the brain is the organ of attention to life.”
And as Marianne Moore says, ”these things are rich instruments with which to experiment.”
* * *
Works Cited
[1] Interview with Max Porter, The White Review
[2] Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geologic Time. Stephen Jay Gould
[3] Biophilia. E.O. Wilson
[4] Chapter: “Eye and Mind,” from Phenomenology of Perception by Merleau-Ponty
Miranda Field’s collection of poems, Imaginary Royalty (Four Way Books, 2017) was short-listed for the Believer Prize, and her first book, Swallow (Houghton-Mifflin) won a Bakeless Award in 2001. Her poems and essays appear in numerous journals, and are included in several anthologies. She lives in Manhattan, New York, where she teaches at Parsons School of Design/The New School, and New York University.