Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow, You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks! You sulph'rous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head; and thou all-shaking thunder, Strike flat the thick rotundity o'th'world, Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once That makes ingrateful man. –Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 3, Scene 2   Shouting into the elements during a terrifying, raging storm, King Lear pleads with the storm and, indeed, with destruction itself to let nothing remain—not himself and certainly not those who have betrayed him. The only other character we see at this moment [the fool] is frightened by the storm’s ferocity and, like any sane person caught out during a storm, just wants some shelter.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn9V3gtwMrc   This moment stands out for Lear's overt rage, with the storm of course reflecting his own internal state. But Shakespeare’s use of nature as a symbol doesn't do justice these days to the presence of what we think of as nature, treating it merely, as little more than a reflection of what [internally] makes humankind ‘human’ or whatever. Plenty of other literary works do the same, often treating nature as a reflection of humankind’s [or of the Gods’] activities or behavior.   What we forget about when we forget about ‘nature’ is just what Harryette Mullen talks about in a recent interview on her newest book, when she says: “They say, ‘We live in a city. We can’t relate to nature poetry’ ... One of our issues with nature is that we’re all about control, and nature is telling us every day, ‘No, we’re not in control.’” [emphasis mine] And this is what makes this scene in King Lear so terrifying: that our culture seems to have forgotten entirely about the actuality of what we call nature, that our culture continues to run along un-controlled and, even more terrifying, that our culture refuses to restrain itself—particularly in the face of losing our connection to Nature, to that Thing that made us in the first place, to What is actually in control.   . . .   What are the terms we use when we’re talking about ecological destruction?   This question recently came up among a handful of poets in a Facebook thread linking to this article. It strikes me that the greatest damage that can sometimes be done is to simply ask a question. By now most of us would probably agree that climate change is a real thing in the real world—but while we’re busy arguing about it with those who don’t think it is real, things are falling fucking apart. Maybe simple distraction from the reality of climate change has been the single greatest victory of the so-called ‘climate change deniers.’ In response, maybe we should be asking what language can use to change the terms of the discussion in order to make it more real and more present?   Zadie Smith laments something similar in a recent article “[t]here is the scientific and ideological language for what is happening to the weather, but there are hardly any intimate words.” Smith too seems to agree that the language around climate change (for her, ‘the new normal’) needs to shift, even if it’s already “so exhaustively sad—and so divorced from any attempts at meaningful action—that you can’t fail to detect [a] fatalist liberal consciousness that has, when you get right down to it, as much of a perverse desire for the apocalypse as the evangelicals we supposedly scorn.” The good news is that the language addressing climate change will eventually shift; the bad news is that it will probably happen too late.   Where Smith finally encourages the shift from a language of scientific acknowledgement to a language of lament leading to restorative action, Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith of Deep Green Resistance encourage a shift to language leading to active destruction. In his “Loaded Words,” Jensen questions the relationship and differences between language and action, and understands the importance of both, finally settling on a language that encourages destruction—destruction of our industrialized civilization and culture as the only means by which those things that still remain might have a chance to be preserved from destruction. In an interview for an upcoming documentary on Deep Green Resistance, Jensen also says: “[w]ar is being waged against the natural world and you don’t stop wars primarily by simply asking. One of the ways you stop a war is by destroying the enemy’s ability to wage that war.”   . . .   David Bowie’s song “Five Years” from Ziggy Stardust has got to be one of my favorite songs. In it, Bowie sings about how “the earth is really dying,” and goes on to describe how all these different people respond.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEtnGHeaAgY   This particular performance from Dinah Shore’s talk show sometime in 1976 floors me. Here, Bowie’s tune is slowed down and given room to breathe, its R&B roots are emphasized, and the band just fucking slays. It’s such a good performance, even if it’s a little too restrained at the end; this performance is much more unhinged and everyone just lets loose, though Bowie’s vocal performance isn’t as good]. Both performances are heavy, and the emotional impact hits hard.   I’ve always thought that Bowie’s choice to end the world five years out from the song, as opposed to say five days, five weeks, or five months, was what makes the song haunting. I mean, five years leaves just enough time for all these people to do the stuff they want to do before they die [the so-called ‘bucket list’], and to most likely die satisfied in the knowledge that they’ve lived as fully as they wanted [or, to maybe find a way to get the hell off the planet]. I’ve also always thought that, because everyone in the world of the song knows that everyone else is also going to die, that there should be a lot more shared empathy for each other, a lot more understanding, and a lot more people helping each other out—a more ideal world. But what he describes is something else: a moment or two of altruism and love mixed in with a lot of getting caught up in despair and chasing after desires. The lyrics pretty much just describe our own the real world.   . . .     Early in “Disturbance Categories,” from the book Animate, Inanimate Aims, Brenda Iijima writes of: “Vernal pools of heatness / Relics and ghosts of species / Albeit-living as living trophies” and of “Biome disintegration” as it charts the destructive change of the environment through the direct actions of humans who “Mine this ore” and “Destroy arteries.” (23) This disintegration into the ghosts of what once was is a concern that becomes further pronounced later, when writing of the “Disturbed environments” produced by mining, and of:   “A conundrum Contrary to nature Something contrary To nature [which] …   Threatens the landscape With alphabets, feigned Articles nautically to be Counted, inexorable.” (24)   Later in the book, in the poem “Zwitterions,” this destruction takes a different form when Iijima writes of humans appearing to work with the land, in a form of labor that “Bonds covalently / With earth.” (91) Of course, for those familiar with the “Grids of corn / Endless steppes of cornland” of literally inedible corporate corn crops, Iijima’s poem seems prophetic in its connection to what our civilization faces: “We are our harvests / The gods we design for fecundity / Are rustic harbingers” of a collapse all the news sources say is coming. (92) Here, Iijima’s writing simultaneously becomes a record of the coming destruction and its anthem.   While Iijima’s work speaks directly to the political and cultural contingencies of an ecological writing, British poet Peter Larkin attends to the forms the natural world takes, imbuing his writing with a sense for the structure of the natural—perhaps either as a documentary of what remains, or as a reminder of what remains more permanent than civilization:   “The composing process of secondary woodland does overstay when it rewrites the profile of pre-clearance vegetation. Being uneasily ajar is revision slighting a climax of arena: arena otherwise not patient with any cut-through not itself but a porch-approximation of horizons.” (81)   Like much of his writing, this passage from the “Opening Woods” section of his longer Open Woods [from his book Leaves of Field] alternates between prose and verse sections, displaying devotion to a consideration of natural processes that at times seem to reflect both a concern with the theological and with human internal realities. In this instance, Larkin addresses the palimpsest of natural processes and landscape recovery, through the lens of ‘composition’ and ‘revision.’ While his writing impresses a certain symbolic weight, it doesn’t distract from the actuality of the natural. It’s this restraint, this resistance to making the poem merely a conveyor of meaning rather than a thing in itself that keeps me coming back to Larkin’s writing:   “to be rich in trees may be to be poor in forest affront: colonisers (pine, birch, larch) take stride from light: continuators (beech, fir) need shade to be at the outset   dead beech leaves won’t suppress young spruce, acacia savours oak succeeding inhibits pine from weeding” (83)   . . .   Wind [Patagonia], by Francisco López, is an hour long documentary of the winds inhabiting the Patagonian landscape, and is clearly a work of ecological concern. Lopez of necessity records the one thing that cannot be seen, but can only be heard [or felt] here: the wind. Because Patagonia is a region that’s still relatively unharmed by tourism [though that’s changing], Lopez’s piece is compelling as a document of a particular place in a particular time, layering together the different winds—from light breezes to storms. It’s also really beautiful.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBlx42LB5F4   It’s a lonely recording of a mostly still lonely place, and its nature makes it unique in that these particular sounds will never occur again. But it’s the contours and shapes the wind makes that are highlighted here, while their connection to the particular place remains secondary [to my mind]. I hear the actual material of an open space, and sense the immediacy of what it means to be present in such a place. I wonder too where else similar moments can exist, and what ‘erosions’ occur in otherwise still largely remote places.   . . .   The Bay-area, Oakland-based band Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 put out a handful of really great records in the 90s. While I could probably write about many of their songs, one in particular stands out to me for its skewed perspectives lyrically and its sidelong, angular, yet genuinely meditative songwriting.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLKhArLDHrk   The structure of “Hundreds of Years,” from their album Strangers from the Universe, is pretty straightforward, but what makes it seem so odd is the ways it veers off into strange progressions, arpeggiated melodies, and digressive bridges—all punctuated by blasts of distortion and aggression. Its filled with interesting contrasts, but it stays in an even flux. It’s lyrics still haunt me though as I listen to this record 20 years after I first picked it up: “Trees may stand hundreds of years / you honk your horns and grind your gears.” The obvious contrast here between the ‘natural’ and the ‘human’ still works, has stayed prescient, and is probably more important now.   I was reminded of this song recently when I came across this image of a 3200 year-old sequoia tree. That’s older than some religions. Mindblowing.     . . .   It’s easy to get caught up in the anxiety of destruction; it’s less easy to call for it directly, openly. It was through Peter Larkin’s writing, and an interview with him, that I was introduced to Jean-Louis Chrétien’s work, the contemporary philosopher associated with the so-called ‘theological turn’ in phenomenology. In his essay “The Wounded World” Chrétien begins with the provocative statement that “Prayer is the religious phenomenon par excellence,” going on to say that “it is the sole human act that opens the religious dimension and never ceases to underwrite, to support, and to suffer this opening.” Specifically, Chrétien writes of language—of the [necessarily vocalized, audible] act of speech—that intends presence with the divine, actively generating a space wherein one and the other become communicative and present.   This recalls for me Lear’s speech above, and the things I’ve been thinking through in this series of blog posts. The language we use can determine and undermine the terms of engagement—it can be both direct communication and engagement, and combative activity. Writing, language, speech, and performance each can connect with politics, history, and personality—and with our environment particularly—with destructive intent.   . . .   Gush, pond,–Foam, roll on the bridge and over the woods;–black palls and organs, lightning and thunder, rise and roll;–waters and sorrows rise and launch the Floods again. –Arthur Rimbaud, “After the Deluge”   - DAVID JAMES MILLER David James Miller is the author of the chapbooks As Sequence, and Facts & Other Objects, and his poetry and critical writing can be found in: The Cultural Society, LVNG, Otoliths, Moria, elimae, Diagram, Jacket2, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Drunken Boat, and elsewhere. He edits Elis Press and SET, an annual journal of experimental poetry. He lives with his family.