‘Peering into the dark machinery’: Modernity, Perception and the Self in John Burnside’s Poetry
Monika Szuba
The promise made by modern science to explain the world has been countered with the limits of knowledge, sensed ever more acutely now that its grand project seems to have gone awry. A collection of dispersed and unintelligible signs, reality remains as unreadable as before. Any knowledge (including self-knowledge) is marked by uncertainty, instability and undecidability. The self has become an object of introspection, driven by a very modern sense of insecurity and fluidity. Qualities emerging after meticulous self-scrutiny are liquidity, indeterminacy and impermanence, as Zygmunt Bauman (2000) writes. The modern subject’s increasingly insistent self-gaze is an attempt to grasp a sense of self. Gazing upon him- or herself, the subject narcissistically – and hopefully – looks into the nature of selfhood. But this reflective consciousness may come at a price of flesh. As the modern subject gazes and peers (and processes), he or she becomes more and more disconnected from his or her corporeality. The discontinuity between body and mind results in persistent mindedness. Technological progress has introduced new practices of representation, removing any immediacy of experience, making the divide between presence and absence more fuzzy, underlining spaces in between.
One of the consequences of modernity is also a divide between the natural and human world (a paradoxical turn of phrase as it seems to imply that what is natural is necessarily inhuman and what is human is unnatural), which has governed Western intellectual life since the seventeenth century. This separation constitutes the foundation of the image of modern Western man. The priority given to science and the rising importance of technology in the life of Europeans have led to the dire effects of industrialisation. This has allowed both science and the humanities to make their own claims for absolute truth. As a result, anthropocentrism has become more pronounced than ever.
Considering the above, I would like to examine the problems of perception, (self-)knowledge and mortality in John Burnside’s poetic work in the context of a larger identity of Europeanness. Engaging with the European heritage, his poems anatomise the Western mind and body. Persistent self-mirroring reveals aspects of the visible and the invisible, surface and depth. I would like to argue that Burnside’s writing reflects a considerable preoccupation with surfaces: ice (‘Pieter Brueghel: Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap 1565’), glass (‘Joseph Wright of Derby: An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768’), mirrors (‘The Myth of Narcissus’) and skin (‘De Humani Corporis Fabrica (after Vesalius)’). Slippery and smooth, hard or soft, fragile and brittle, surfaces separate, reflect, refract, invite. The urge to know what is beyond the immediate impression, the mere facade, brings a tension between the outside and inside, between exteriority and interiority. Explored by means of senses, any surface is tantalising only with depth that it hides beneath. The poet’s preoccupation with surfaces may bring to mind Georges Poulet’s essay, ‘The Phenomenology of Reading’ (1969), and his consideration of the ‘inner’ life of things that only the literary can reveal.
For the purposes of this chapter I have selected four ekphrastic poems that will illustrate my discussion. I wish to see how, by incorporating Pieter Brueghel, Vesalius and Joseph Wright of Derby among others, Burnside constructs a bridge between a sixteenth-century vision of man and a contemporary one, reinforcing continuity, but at the same time challenging these images and posing timely questions. I would like to examine various spaces depicted in these texts: the space of mind, body and natural world. I would like to see how these poems (three of them relating to visual works from the sixteenth century and one from the eighteenth century) aim at reaching under the skin of the modern man represented in Burnside’s poetry:
1.‘Pieter Brueghel: Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap 1565’ (from Black Cat Bone)
2.‘Joseph Wright of Derby: An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768’ (from All One Breath)
3.‘The Myth of Narcissus’ (from The Good Neighbour)
4.‘De Humani Corporis Fabrica (after Vesalius)’ (from The Good Neighbour).
‘PIETER BRUEGHEL: WINTER LANDSCAPE WITH SKATERS AND BIRD TRAP 1565’
‘Just now’ (from Latin modernus, modo): this meaning of the word ‘modern’ is at the centre of Burnside’s poem ‘Pieter Brueghel: Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap 1565’, which comes from the collection Black Cat Bone (Burnside 2007: 59–60). If we look at the painting, we notice how, consumed with the activity, human figures give in entirely to what is just now, as if diving into the surface of things. The brittleness of these tiny skaters and their scattered movements reinforce the impression of momentariness and fleetingness. Concerned with this present moment, the skaters are suspended between past and future, forgetful of the experiences, oblivious of the consequences. The bird trap in the foreground offers an allegory of human life, the entrapment of being. The freedom of skaters in the background, their carefree activity, which seems to provide a momentary release from the everyday, is in stark contrast with the lurking danger, hidden from their sight. The juxtaposition of the free, unfettered movement of the skaters and the ensnarement awaiting birds is quite striking. The realisation of the viewers – we know something the skaters seem not to cognise – imparts knowledge of the inevitable. The skaters do not see the bird trap: their sight does not reach that far, they are separated from knowledge. However, the perspective of the viewer of the painting – and the poetic subject – allows for detachment. The distance also enables a comprehension inaccessible to the skaters. Due to the time perspective, the viewer/reader may have an insight into their precarious situation that is not available for those involved. The speaker of the poem comments on their activity, relating the contrast between the momentary freedom of skaters and the ensnarement of their lives in the second stanza:
this is their escape
from hardship,
but each has his private hurt, her secret dread (Burnside 2007: 59)
Each of them is temporarily released from the trap, ‘momentarily involved / in nothing but the present’. The movement lifts them from their daily lives – releases them – and helps to focus on what is happening just now. One man skates away from ‘the loveless matron he’s had to endure / for decades’; one woman, ‘never released from the fear’, is afraid that her husband will beat her ‘as he’s beaten her for years’. This immersion in the present – the self-abandonment – lasts but a brief moment, in which they become enmeshed in the present, just for an instant: an ‘infinitely short space of time’. They enjoy themselves innocently, ‘unaware of any / danger’, like these starlings, fieldfares and redwings (Burnside 2007: 60). The bird-like figures of skaters, their arms spread like wings (birds frequently appear in Burnside’s poems, e.g. ‘Kestrel’, ‘Peregrine’, ‘Geese’, ‘Joseph Wright of Derby: An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768’, a sign of the importance of birds in human understanding, a demonstration of how they live within us, how significant they are for us), the human silhouettes are as big as the bird figures. Burnside imagines that the skaters, tied to a mundane, humdrum existence, are hankering after freedom represented by birds. Yet, the reference to birds emphasises the irony that governs their lives, as in the light of the trap seen in the foreground, their freedom is illusory and fleeting.
The poem’s epigraph comes from the inscription on Breughel’s painting: ‘Learn from this picture how we journey in the world. Slithering as we go, the foolish and the wise.’ ‘Lubricitas vitae humanae’ suggests the slippery surface, the precariousness of human life. The sense of transitoriness pervades both the visual and poetic image. The fragility of ice brings to mind the provisionality of existence, its fickleness, interspersed with brief and uncertain moments of oblivion. The citation also juxtaposes implicitly the happy moment of brief oblivion with that greater oblivion of death. The skaters seem unreflexive and carefree; one of them experiences ‘thoughtless grace’, the moment takes him back to childhood, representing an idyllic time: ‘to glide free / in the very eye of heaven’. And ‘it could be simple – paradise foreseen – / but’: the final word ending any illusion of paradise, the following lines (‘thorns and briars’, ‘rope’ and ‘snakes’) suggest the opposite: hell, pain, finality.
The looming vision of the snare is there, present: the skaters, resembling birds, circle dangerously close to the trap with their illusory existence and petty problems. Focusing on being in the present, however fugitive it might be, the skaters continue with the shadow self at their back. The poem leaves us with ‘other to his other’ as we read in the last stanza of the poem:
It seems a fable and perhaps it is:
we live in peril, die from happenstance,
a casual slip, a fault line in the ice;
but surely it’s the other thought that matters,
the sense that, now and then, there’s still a chance
a man might slide towards an old
belonging, momentarily involved
in nothing but the present, skating out
towards a white
horizon, fair
and gifted with the grace
to skate forever, slithering as he goes,
but hazarding a guess that someone else
is close beside him, other to his other. (Burnside 2007: 60)
He senses a shadow, a companion moving ‘towards an old / belonging’. A possibility in the form of another self brings a shudder of strangeness at the brief realisation of alterity. Yet, the nagging sense of not belonging can be shed for an instant, just now. Acutely aware of this condition, the modern man in Burnside’s poem cannot fully shake the sense of precariousness. He experiences a yearning to transcend his life in a moment of elation, to free himself from the commonplace and the habitual, to slough off the only life that he knows in the hope of a renewed self. Behind that there is perhaps a pervading sense of transience.
‘JOSEPH WRIGHT OF DERBY: AN EXPERIMENT ON A BIRD IN THE AIR PUMP, 1768’
The next poem also features a bird, but this time it is given a central position and is in effect entrapped. The poem, ‘Joseph Wright of Derby: An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768’ (Burnside 2014: 26–8), coming from Burnside’s latest collection All One Breath, focuses on the moment in social history of modern Europe that brought scientific advances, inevitably changing people’s understanding of the world. Particularly, the laws of nature had to be considered and reconsidered. The pneumatical engines, or air pumps, were ‘all the rage’, demonstrating the nature of air and its force of life-support. People gathered for a show to watch small animals die of hypoxia. Usually conducted by a natural philosopher, the shows instructed and entertained, part of ‘modernity’s project of the technological domination of nature’ (Zimmerman 1994, qtd in Westling 2014: 149).
Burnside’s poem depicts animal experimentation, which results in unnecessary suffering of the bird, serving as mere visual pleasure, reifying it. Similarly, by offering a representation of suffering, the painting performs a similar function. In this, Burnside also provides a comment as the painting does the same, offering a critique of representation. Suffering is applied in a more sophisticated manner thanks to the power of technology. From the perspective of 250 years we can see that technological advances have actually enabled efficacy and sophistication in killing, making it more efficient and/or more cruel. The distance the machine offers in the act of ending a life makes the act ‘clean’, saving the hands from becoming dirty, creating an illusion of the removal of the responsibility, helping the perpetrator not to think about the death of the other.
The text demonstrates the attitude of modern Europeans to nature and to elementary things such as life and death, breath and self. Combining light and dark, the chiaroscuro can serve as a representation of modern science versus traditional values and beliefs. Memento mori creeps in once more, but this time it is technologically enhanced. The painting shows a candlelit scene; the viewers lean in a reverential attitude around an air pump. Inside a bird is fighting for breath. The image is visually arresting, demonstrating admiration of scientific advances and hope to understand and grasp reality. The use of chiaroscuro and the arrangement of figures reminds us of Caravaggio and his Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence (1609). The reverence demonstrated by the witnesses of the experiment in Joseph Wright of Derby’s painting points us back to the religious scene, simultaneously suggesting a secularisation that has taken place. Not a newborn Jesus, but a dying parrot: the reversal demonstrates a new direction in the development of the industrial era, its secular, perhaps even cynical inclinations.
Studied empirically in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the properties of air, including the power of vacuum, fascinate. Space devoid of matter, the void – even if seen in operation – is difficult to comprehend. What the spectators are witnessing is an empty space that kills. One might say, horror vacui, nature abhors a vacuum. Some viewers in the painting are demonstrably fascinated by death, searching for answers to final questions, the primal source of life (air/breath). The pump enables ‘amateurs’ to play ‘god for an hour’. Modern science ushered in more sophisticated scientific experiments – but what is so special about killing a bird with a sleight of hand, technologically supported magic? As Francis Bacon argues in Novum Organum Scientiarum (1620): ‘Man is Nature’s agent and interpreter; he does and understands only as much as he has observed of the order of nature in fact or by inference; he does not know and cannot do more’ (Bacon 2000: 33). And so the modern man believes that the desire to possess knowledge entitles him in his doings and explains his actions.
The experiments with the pneumatical engine performed by Robert Boyle in 1660, who tested the reliance on air in the survival of small creatures (birds, mice, eels, snails and flies), are one of many examples of the disturbed relationship between birds and modern men. Boyle is the implied figure in the poem, presented as a ‘showman’ (the word is employed twice: in lines 3 and 42), who ‘brings a touch of theatre to the lives / of squires and merchants’. Indeed, he is a theatrical figure, perhaps a bit blasé, his eyes ‘incurious’, as if he has seen it all. He has assumed a vantage point of a coolly disinterested spectator, for whom death is ‘one more / instance of casual slaughter’. Science is depicted as showmanship, the experiment as a staged act, ‘the game of life and death’, a dramatic gesture and a slick move. His shows are routine: ‘whenever he peddles his trade, / it’s always the same’. The first-person voice (rendered in italics) leaves no doubt as to the possibilities of revival or resurrection. The conclusion is equally unsentimental: placed in vacuo, living creatures die. They perish bodily deprived of air, but there is another implication here as they die figuratively when everything is reduced to ‘fact’, and data.
There is a stark contrast between his casualness and the audience’s reactions ranging from fascination to terror to rapture. All of them watch with close attention to the spectacle unfolding in front of their eyes (part of the society of the spectacle (Debord 2000), they are gathered for a show; what they experience indirectly is a mere representation). The participants in the experiment reveal a growing distance in the relationship between nature and culture, the former reified and turned into mere natural objects. It is as if the void behind the glass represented a different dimension, in which animals ceased to be living beings and instead became things. Or perhaps the spectacle of the pneumatic engine seems to fascinate ‘squires and merchants’ exactly because the bird is like them, breathes like them, which makes the show all the more riveting. The participatory present tense of the poem brings us closer to the picture, draws us into the scene. The speaker bridges the then and now, ambiguating the showman’s role. We are drawn in much like the contemporary audience even though we experience the scene from the temporal and spatial distance.
The final gaze is directed out of the room, unseen by the gathered people, who are transfixed by the show and oblivious to – or perhaps ignorant of – the world outside (and the world in general): ‘the moon is full tonight / . . . though nobody here can know / the world it illuminates’. The unknowability of the world is impossible to transcend, even with the support of technology. The poem ends with the following words:
and the silence that follows a kill, when everything stops,
that held breath over the land
till the dead move on. (Burnside 2014: 28)
It touches upon one of the most fundamental elements of modernity, namely, the drive for knowledge, the urge to pierce the surface in order to reach the essence of things (whatever it is). It involves collecting empirical evidence: scientific observation, measuring, calculating, labelling. The result might be disenchantment, as the sociologist and philosopher Max Weber calls it: ‘the knowledge or belief that . . . there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation’ (Weber 1946, qtd in Macfarlane 2015: 24). ‘Wonder’, associated with enchantment and unknowing, has been draining from the modern experience, replaced with disenchantment, which is a ‘function of the rise of rationalism’ (2015: 24). What follows is that ‘In modernity mastery usurped mystery’ (2015: 25).
‘THE MYTH OF NARCISSUS’ (CARAVAGGIO, NARCISSUS, 1599)
The introspective and reflective subjectivity, the hallmark of modernity, produces a rational attitude towards the inner self and the world. The next poem, coming from the 2005 collection The Good Neighbour (Burnside 2005: 50–4), ‘The Myth of Narcissus’ (Book III of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 2004), undertakes a recurrent theme in Burnside’s writing (for instance, in A Summer of Drowning (2012), one of the characters, Ryvold, quotes Leon Battista Alberti’s study, Della pittura, On Painting (2013), to discuss Narcissus).
The poem’s epigraph is a citation from Yamamoto Tsunemoto: ‘Our bodies are given life from the midst of nothingness’, introducing the doubleness of existence and inexistence, form and emptiness. Narcissus emerges from nothing: his self appears with his reflection. The tension between presence and absence is foregrounded, provoking the questions: what is there before the look, what is the nothingness before form, the nonexistence before matter? Is the real above or beneath the surface? The inside appears outside, or as Poulet (1969) argues, we are inside it, it is inside us: ‘the shadows glide like fish’ (Burnside 2005: 50) (compare the skaters in Pieter Brueghel), where the shadows are ‘ebbs of nothingness’ (2005: 51). The poem opens with a dualistic vision of the world: a sap and a shadow, ‘where friend or foe / is all there ever is / to make a world’ (2005: 50). The effect is reinforced by the repetitions, which usher in the absent Echo and remind us about the reflection. Narcissus’s gaze is directed to the surface of his potential self, which will be ‘the perfect body’:
and he is here, who may be all
reflection:
here, in the not-yet-seen,
in the unenchanted. (Burnside 2005: 51)
Waiting for the enchantment to be lifted, and a spell to be unsung, Narcissus remains watchful, expectant, one could perhaps say on tenterhooks, as if stretched on a frame. The repetition of the word ‘here’ foregrounds – grounds – his being (although the poem belongs to the section of the volume entitled ‘There’) as if stretching and fixing it. The present imperfect body is there ‘for hurt and sin’.
What Narcissus notices on the surface surprises him, as ‘what he sees is not the animal / he half-expected’ (Burnside 2005: 52). His animal-nature dissolves in the reflection: ‘what he sees / is something like the future he has gathered’ (2005: 52). The dyadic specularity of his identity is reinforced by the glassy surface of the water. What he sees is his potential self, or ‘something like’ (Burnside favours lack of precision, vagueness of feeling, perception and language; compare Something Like Happy, 2013) Further in the poem the words: ‘rising to find the surface / and bleeding through’ (2005: 54) suggest an emergent thing, becoming, accompanied by pain. The ability to cross over or pass through foregrounds a transcendental notion of the self. ‘A new form’ emerges, an idea finds its way to the surface. It fetches loss as the employment of the word ‘forfeit’ suggests: we abandon the body, we slough it off, going beyond. Further we read:
the presence left unnamed, unrecognised,
the blue scent flowing through, the emptiness
that wanders in the current
shaped
and lost
by looking:
proven
immaterial. (Burnside 2005: 50)
The word ‘still’ is repeated (2005: 51), meaning both unmoving and incessant, and also in the present, existing. The present – the ‘here’ – gliding on the surface of time in a form of a continuous return, in the iterability of ‘here’ and ‘still’ is spread in front of our eyes, stretched as if on a canvas, even though ‘left unnamed, unrecognised’, ‘immaterial’. Both these concepts – here and now – constitute an iterable motif in Burnside’s poem. It may be applied to images. The viewer is always at the surface of a painting, in its here and now, a situation which creates a tension between the ‘here and now’ of the representation and what is understood historically in the depths of reflection on the part of the modern viewing subject. Narcissus continues his existence in a self-contained world. His gaze is reflected from the surface and bounces back to him:
the look
that turns back on the self
and makes it whole (Burnside 2005: 51)
Narcissus, a representative of the modern man, displays an obsession with selfhood whose main characteristics are instability and uncertainty. He may become complete when he fully (i.e. bodily) perceives himself and ‘perception is not the achievement of a mind in a body but rather of a whole organism in its exploratory movement through the world’ (Westling 2014: 7). Yet, gazing at his own reflection, Narcissus remains still, unmoving. Marshall McLuhan suggests that Narcissus does not recognise himself:
The Greek myth of Narcissus is directly concerned with a fact of human experience, as the word Narcissus indicates. It is from the Greek word narcosis, or numbness. The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image. The nymph Echo tried to win his love with fragments of his own speech, but in vain. He was numb. He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system. (McLuhan 1999: 41)
Immobile, he becomes numb; having lost his speech, he becomes dumb – he is all sight, the other senses have deserted him (or perhaps he has shed them all). He just gazes, riveted, rooted, vanishing slowly into absence. There is a powerful sense of loss of physicality as the world disappears into a heap of broken images. His self-sensed self is disembodied, vacuous. He faces a realisation that knowable reality transcends his awareness, transporting himself into the mercurial self on a shimmering surface, losing his grounding, exchanging his palpable being for a virtual one. He sees himself seeing, he catches a glimpse of self-realisation. But trapped in the mirror stage (Lacan 1977), he finds his self only with the assistance of a mirror, an object placed outside himself. His identity is only definable with the aid of something external.
Narcissus’s gaze bounces off the surface and returns to him, initiating a process of disembodiment, as his self-perception moves to his reflected, virtual self. In Realist Magic, Objects, Ontology, Causality, Timothy Morton cites ‘an ontological insight . . . engraved onto the passenger side wing mirrors of every American car’ (Morton 2013: 32): ‘objects in mirror are closer than they appear’. Indeed, for Narcissus, his reflected self seems closer than himself. The words ‘That self is metaphor’ (Burnside 2005: 53) offer a concept of identity as a representation of something else, designating a distant ideal.
‘DE HUMANI CORPORIS FABRICA (AFTER VESALIUS)’ (1543)
In the final poem that I would like to discuss we get under the skin. ‘De Humani Corporis Fabrica (after Vesalius)’ from The Good Neighbour (Burnside 2005: 4–7) refers to De humani corporis fabrica libri septem, or The Fabric of the Human Body, an Early Modern anatomical atlas published in 1543, which explores different systems of the body, combining modern science and anatomy. Scientific enquiry is represented in the form of artful woodcut illustrations painstakingly depicting the human body.
The Latin word fabrica, meaning ‘the manner of construction’ or ‘workmanship’, ‘skilful production’, can also signify simply ‘craft’ or ‘art’. Employing the title of the anatomic atlas, Burnside thus continues its idea of the body as an artful construction, a work of art (is there an artist behind it?). What follows is the idea of orderly nature, with no hint of contingency. The priority of close, direct observation results in meticulous visual rendering but the impossibility of a verbal one, creating once again a dichotomy between surface and depth, visible and invisible. The first words of the poem, ‘I know the names of almost / nothing’, signal a recurrent concern in Burnside’s writing: language is insufficient. ‘I know’ – the first words of the poem – is countered by ‘nothing’; the ‘names’ are not there. The poetic subject does not know himself – or the world, for that matter. Labelling and naming mark the limits of his knowledge. He foregrounds his ignorance, repeating: ‘I have no words’, as if his word-hoard was empty, as if he were speechless. At times the known words are emptied of their meaning, signifiers missing their signifieds: ‘or else I know the names / but not the function’ – the distance between the two impossible to abolish.
The above lines echo Michel de Montaigne’s (1993) question ‘What do I know?’ (Que sais-je?, people are unable to attain true certainty) and Jacques Derrida’s ‘Qui suis-je?’ (‘Who am I (following)?’, être or suivre (Derrida 2008)). In a constant pursuit of self-knowledge, the modern man reaches under the skin to find there – yes, what? Perhaps the intransgressible limits of self-knowledge, another proof of the unintelligibility of oneself. Transcending the boundary of skin does not bring many answers. The unreadability of the self is stressed by the impassable limits. Reaching beneath the surface does not remove doubts, crossing the barrier does not eliminate the distance. In an attempt to understand, the speaker tries to pierce the outer layer, to ‘peer into the dark machinery / of savage grace’ (Burnside 2005: 6). But as we peer inside, things appear paradoxically covered. The use of the word ‘machinery’ suggests its mechanical function (in the seventeenth century the word ‘machinery’ had theatrical connotations as ‘devices for creating stage effects’). A mechanistic vision of the body as the vessel for spirit – ‘Hydraulics for the soul’ (2005: 5) – emphasises the body’s function, which is down-to-earth and mundane (but indispensable). What is under the skin presents an obscure vision of things, reflecting the fallibility of language since – whatever it is – is not named or not recognised (labelling does not help). Language fails us, repeatedly, irrevocably. As in ‘The Myth of Narcissus’, the body is a mere imitation of an ideal form:
as if I had been asked to paraphrase
this body with the body I possessed:
hydraulics for a soul
cheese-wire for nerves
a ruff of butcher’s meat
in place of thought. (Burnside 2005: 5)
The body replaces the mind, meat replaces thought. This is one of the two references to meat in the poem, the second one in lines 41–3: ‘ribbed and charred / like something barbecued’ (Burnside 2005: 5). How can we talk about the modern triumph of rationalist concepts of mind and intellect? The empiricists’ advocacy of matter designed for thought?
Apart from the representations of the human body in the anatomical atlas the poem contains a reference to George Stubbs, an engraving from The Anatomy of the Horse. This foregrounds the affinity of humans and animals: both Cartesian machines, complex and alike under the skin. For Descartes (1988) animals were mere machines, devoid of a reflective cogito. We do not know for certain whether the horse or any other animal has consciousness. Stripping it of its skin, reaching beyond the surface will not render an answer. And thus once again the problem of surface and depth resurfaces. Peering under the skin’s surface does not reveal more than raw flesh. The closeness is further emphasised in the ending of the poem: ‘the living flesh / revealing and erasing what it knows / on secret charts / of watermark / and vellum’ (Burnside 2005: 7) – the last word of the poem is ‘vellum’, or parchment made from animal (calf) skin. Our creaturely nature cannot be ignored as it brings an embodied ‘knowing’. The kind of knowledge coming from embodiment, from the chiasmus of the flesh, to use Merleau-Ponty’s term, is there before rational thought.
There is also a soul – or as Burnside prefers to call it these days, a spirit: a choice, which, as he explains, is an attempt
to replace the idea of the duality, which suggests two separate things, with an idea of the binary, where the two things complement each other. What is interesting is the play between these imaginary forces that you might think of as spirit and matter. There is no such thing as matter separate from spirit, or spirit separate from matter. (Dósa 2009: 119)
The essence of the living things is there – ‘the single eye exposed: / a window into primal emptiness’ (Burnside 2005: 5) – with the preposition ‘into’ standing between the outside and the inside, surface and depth, the visible and the invisible, presence and absence.
CONCLUSION: AN ATTEMPT AT
Peering to pierce ‘the not-yet-seen’, Burnside’s poetic subjects attempt to probe the condition of the modern subject. Is humanity really ‘the apex of creation’ (Westling 2014: 6) as Descartes wanted? The triumph of technology, which has brought machines mastering nature, does not seem to have the power to enchant any more. Disconnected from the natural world by dualistic logic for the past three centuries, just now the modern man needs to access intuitive knowledge that comes from the phenomenological alertness to the moment in time. Burnside proposes to abolish the view of the natural, in which the human and the animal are separated, the former absent from his bodily reality. Oscillating between exteriority and interiority, Burnside sees a possibility of a nondualistic, embodied understanding of subjectivity. He reminds us that in the material frame we are grounded – our bodies provide this grounding – as we experience our selves enmeshed in the world. Just now, the unstable function of the self, a shimmering mirror-image, could be deepened. Perhaps a non-narcissistic inter-subjectivity is on the horizon: thanks to kinship – ‘kinship of flesh with flesh’ (‘Ports’, in Burnside 2000: 5) – there is a possibility to erase dichotomies and entrenched views in the hope of attaining an ideal form within a larger living system, the mesh of interconnections (Morton 2011), ‘this very knot of relations’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012: lxxxv).
WORKS CITED
Alberti, Leon Battista (2013), On Painting, trans. Rocco Sinisgalli, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bacon, Francis (2000), The New Organon, trans. Michael Silverthorne, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bauman, Zygmunt (2000), Liquid Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Burnside, John (2000), The Asylum Dance, London: Jonathan Cape.
Burnside, John (2005), The Good Neighbour, London: Jonathan Cape.
Burnside, John (2007), Black Cat Bone, London: Jonathan Cape.
Burnside, John (2012), A Summer of Drowning, London: Vintage.
Burnside, John (2013), Something Like Happy, London: Jonathan Cape.
Burnside, John (2014), All One Breath, London: Jonathan Cape.
Debord, Guy (2000), The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Fredy Perlman, Detroit: Black & Red.
Derrida, Jacques (2008), The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills, New York: Fordham University Press.
Descartes, René (1988), Selected Philosophical Writings, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dósa, Attila (2009), ‘John Burnside: Poets and Other Animals’, in Beyond Identity: New Horizons in Modern Scottish Poetry, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 113–34.
Lacan, Jacques (1977), ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’, in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: W. W. Norton, pp. 502–9.
Lyotard, Jean-François (1979), The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Macfarlane, Robert (2015), Landmarks, London: Hamish Hamilton.
McLuhan, Marshall (1999), Understanding Media: The Extension of Man, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (2012), The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes, New York: Routledge.
Montaigne, Michel de (1993), Essays, trans. M. A. Screech, London: Penguin.
Morton, Timothy (2011), ‘Mesh’, in Stephanie LeMenager, Teresa Shewry and Ken Hiltner (eds), Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 19–30.
Morton, Timothy (2013), Realist Magic, Objects, Ontology, Causality, Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press.
Ovid (2004), Metamorphoses, trans. David Raeburn, London: Penguin.
Poulet, Georges (1969), ‘The Phenomenology of Reading’, New Literary History, 1: 1, New and Old History (October), 53–68.
Weber, Max (1946), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, New York: Oxford University Press.
Westling, Louise (2014), The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language, New York: Fordham University Press.
Zimmerman, Michael (1994), Contesting Earth’s Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity, Berkeley: University of California Press.