Remarks for Sigma Kappa Delta, Psi Alpha Chapter's Poetry and Storytelling Night, Earth Day Edition

Hi all --

We gather here to share poetry, prose, and anything else appropriate on the theme, more or less, of what the Earth means to us. It's a theme my younger self would have dreaded. Me, younger: "I got nothing to say about nature, but this panther tried to kill me in a video game." Even now, I much prefer cities. I lived in rural Missouri for a year, and while it was stunning–I think industrial decay makes overgrown grass and endless trees that much more impressive–I realized quickly that if you really need anything, you have to have access to a city. The irony of how far people had to drive for a proper veterinarian clarified this for me.

Still, I think I know what to say to my younger self. It's a little more than "get away from the screen and touch grass," a little less than "God made the natural world. Get away from the screen and touch grass." It starts with a longread by Brendan Egan, Professor at Midland College, entitled "Five Hours From Someplace Beautiful." Weirdly enough, I met him at a gathering of Sigma Kappa Delta in St. Louis, even though he's down the street. And I didn't think to read his incredible reflection on the environmental condition of Midessa until Mallory, a co-advisor of SKD and librarian extraordinaire, shared it with me. I want to read a few paragraphs from his essay to illustrate what's at stake:

Like most of the new middle-class neighborhoods of Midland, ours half-heartedly aspires to the slick charm of the suburban American dreamscape. Our front yards are made of gray river rock or squares of sod that never quite take to the soil. Pumpjacks teeter in quarter-acre lots set between cul-de-sacs. There always seems to be not quite enough trees and a few more trucks than anyone could need.

Our builder told us to expect some wildlife to appear our first year—scared out of hiding by the scrape of bulldozers and graders. We found scorpions on the bathroom tile. Our neighbors were freaked by a rattler curled into the corner of their garage. One afternoon, my wife spotted a barn owl roosting in the just-framed eaves of a two-story across the street. It felt as if the moon itself had been displaced. We stood at the bottom of the driveway, watching until it yawned its broad wings and circled toward the seemingly empty fields that lay beyond the subdivision.

The next Saturday morning, I went walking in the direction of the owl, past construction sites where roofers and masons were already blasting corridos from their boomboxes. I was looking for some sense of place—an assurance, however vague, that my life is connected to the natural world and the history of the people in it. I had an impression that neighborhoods like ours are not place itself, but a palimpsest upon it.

To find the here here, I had to walk past the end of the road.

Professor Egan's essay does what you might call a double move. He calls the land here "shit." I don't mean that as a curse word, and I don't think he means it that way either. Ditches which collect innumerable plastic garbage bags, fragments of tires and glass on and beside roads, oil wells gone dry and abandoned. The land, unfortunately, must contend with an economy of extraction. At the same time, he notes that environmental narratives for centuries have been far too rosy and idealistic about beauty worth preserving. Yes, many of us in the room know that the English Romantics in the 19th century helped save their Lake District from becoming an industrial wasteland, mined and covered with trains and factories. Environmentalism in any sense had to start with an invocation of the sublime. But what does it need to be now? What does it mean to accept a land as imperfect, not dazzlingly beautiful, but fundamentally healthy? What does it mean to love something because you know it is good for the future as it is?

That's where I need to bring my younger self. Not to "trees are cool" or "the screen is melting your eyes." Both are true, but there are larger considerations. The question of the Earth is the question of nature, and the question of nature is openness to how we can live. Nothing, as I continually remind my students, has to be this way. I'll wrap up these opening remarks with a consideration of Emily Dickinson. I've been reading her for over 20 years now, and some of her major themes revolve around her interaction with a garden or the wildlife around her. She can sound like a creature herself. For example, consider "I had a daily Bliss:"

I had a daily Bliss
I half indifferent viewed
Till sudden I perceived it stir —
It grew as I pursued

Till when around a Height
It wasted from my sight
Increased beyond my utmost scope
I learned to estimate.

I've been watching those videos where people attach a camera to their cat or dog. Because of that, I can't shake the feeling that she's talking like she's one of them. There's a "daily Bliss" she's sort of curious about, something which comprises the colors and shapes of the background. "Till sudden I perceived it stir"–here I'm thinking how dog owners will do a funny voice for their pet, saying stuff like "fren move?"

Except here, she's the one saying "fren move." For a moment, a glimpse of a greater beauty, and then it disappears forever. To quote her once more: "Increased beyond my utmost scope / I learned to estimate." Dickinson comes awfully close to outright saying that human reason is a subdivision of nature. One could assume that whatever it is I wanted in the game–whatever it is we truly want from the oil field–is somewhere else on this Earth, in another guise.