BIOREGIONAL

BIOGRAPHY AND THE GEOGRAPHY OF AFFECT: SPATIALIZED

SOMNAMBULANCE IN ALICE OSWALDS SLEEPWALK ON THE SEVERN1

TOM BRISTOW
If only I could see a landscape as it is when I am not there. But when I am in any place I disturb the silence of heaven by the beating of my heart. Simon Weil Very hard to define, most close in kind To the mighty angels of purgatory Who come solar-powered into darkness Using no other sails than their shining wings Alice Oswald

An opening At the centre of Oswalds second book-length poem, Sleepwalk on the Severn (2009), lies a conflation between the feminine gendered moon and an old woman dressed in black, pictured against rainfall at night. The human is a symbol of blindness, and is indistinct from her environment; silhouetted against the soundscape, she: puts her ear to her heart no sound (23: 13); she scans the surroundings by ultrasound (17).2 These reports indicate an inquisitive and heightened subjectivity that adapts to external input failing solipsism, subjectivity attuned to the cyclical melodies and pressures of rainfall under moonlight beyond the upper human sense (ultrasound). They propose that Oswalds soundscape is an active watermark and perceptible fabric to this poem; additionally, they frame an intriguing question raised by the poems objective register of the conflated psychosis of the two subjects (moon and woman): 1 This chapter is based upon a presentation at the annual conference of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) entitled Literary Geography and Poetics of Place: Rivers in Alice Oswald's Poetry, Hilton New York, New York, 26 February 2012. 2 The author acknowledges the forthright critique of the concept soundscape and its reliance on a metaphor from landscape studies for describing auditory space (Ingold); the concept is sustained to indicate geography of sound, the mapping of voices in space. 1

Where might I emerge in the midst of being rained away? (14). Sleepwalk on the Severn is racked with disquiet, anxiety and discomfort; it speaks of struggle often relieved by a projective rhetorical question offering epigrammatic and succinct intellectual release from the quandary of how to emote in language, and how this might not lead to a narrow sense of security with ourselves, to which I will return below.3 The question here, while offering such qualified relief, details the larger relation between moon and earth; the dynamics within the hydrological cycle, and the huge repeating mechanism (3: 4) in which the human scale is dwarfed by natures cycles. Musical stress falling on I emerge and rained away (above) deletes the series of linear temporalities that give rise to named phases of the moon and the life-world responsive to it: it underlines emergence within loss, or better, ecological metamorphoses: the old woman is old in the sense that she represents repetition, memory and change (in plurality) more than she is determined by a signal trajectory toward final events from origin. In Sleepwalk we are taken outside of this causal, diachronic domain of reasoning for we enter a contract with the poem in terms of synchronic ambivalence that is best understood as being between states, hence the ecological intellectual freight of somnambulance as symbolic register of dynamic yet patterned, cyclical subjectivity rather than a neutral, inactive liminal state. Oswalds poem both embodies and gestures to this immanent dimension of our lebenswelt, not only as backings and forthings (23: 23), movements or repetition with tidal economies and a sense of pictorial depth, but Sleepwalk endows conflated selves with such paradoxical, conflicting details as to indicate life beyond the self: She puts out her hands Nothing One or two stars but no moon This is no good She gives up Soft little sigh with no mouth Yes This is not I (24: 1-8) 3 Casey argues, by noticing that something is out of joint an ethics of the environment can begin: that a response is elicited and an action induced (187). 2

 The first of these quatrains resonates with earlier lines (cited above) when the figure listens to her heartbeat: nothing is the response; is this simply the natural world operating on its own terms, resisting our instrumental requests (or categorical reductions) of life, to fit into our anthropocentric frameworks and sense experience?; is this the dissolution of subject in harmony with the dissolution of moon? It is hard not to notice that once the subject gives up the (re)quest for response and the cult of the explorer is dropped, the world is affirmed, first as other and then within silence. These lines precede a long pause in the poem, which will remind readers of Oswalds earlier book length river poem, Dart, and its empty reflection on immersion in water that is represented by an interval constituting an entire blank page. These pauses indicate the poets interest in poetic silence and typographical emptiness as a gathering space, to demonstrate that the space of the page organizes the events around the Severn, that it generates a cultural unconscious;4 both pauses in these texts follow moments when an ego or strategic mind is relinquished. However, in Sleepwalk, these lines work to clarify an environmental register within the poem that speaks clearly to an expansive subjectivity that runs across three meta-registers (columns) in the text; it affirms an interdependency between mental ecology and physical ecology, and a co-constitutive sense of selfhood and other, which is marked by affect. Each page has three columns: the central column holds the lyric poem proper; the left column indicates voice or identity; the right column monitors the phase of the moon. Oswalds not I is constant in this poem, while also taking the foreground or centre stage, as it were when it emerges into the central column (from the left) to dramatize the subject of the poem: the theme of destabilizing interaction between human and estuary.5 4 For my reading of the empty pages as a culturally material medium, see Cavells clarification of prosthetic aesthetics (75-79). 5 I ask my reader to entertain the word column rather than margin, for the latter denotes peripherality (which is false), the former suggests equal weight to all three registers (which is correct) with the additional advantage of connoting classical architectonics to hold up and keep in place. 3

Earlier, in Oswalds third collection of poetry, Woods etc. (2005), this relinquishment of stable identity takes on two quite distinct forms, and yet both prefigure the sense in Sleepwalk that I will endeavour to detail further below. In Excursion to the Planet Mercury we are presented with the mercy of metamorphosis (28) that is resident in the uncanny country | of the planet Mercury (5-6): - a mystery without I without air without you without sound. (6-8)

The opposite of the familiar is known only through the familiar injected with the notion of difference (here, the absence of what is expected). The mystery of Mercury, is that it is devoid of people, oxygen and music; and yet, the poem is entirely atmospheric and sense-oriented: it is a violently magic (9) place where the sky is seen racing along (10), the ground now hot now cold.. moves fast (12-13) and a few stones frisk about | looking for a foothold (13-14). While a high percentage of the language is characterized by or conveys an illusion of tangibility (as with the alliteration), our point of relation, or our contract with this uninhabited place, is one that attempts to measure in time, in heat and movement, and yet this inquisitive non-haptic reckoning of world fails in its distanced objectivity. This stance subtends the representation of planetary forces in the poem: it is opposite to the forces at play and it delimits these forces, partly due to its difference. This is the not I. Dust on the planet is all dandruff and discarded shells | of creatures too swift to exist (21-22); not unlike Earth and yet quite different from the I and air that make our planet inhabitable; thus in Woods etc. we note a deeper, non-anthropocentric version of the not I in Sleepwalk: the planets void is detailed as nothing but glimmering beginnings | making ready to manifest (31-32) a life which emerges and crumbles, failing accumulation outside of the parameters of process. It might not sound ecological but it is ecopoetic. A lyrical aperture a shade closer to the pronominal I and not I of Sleepwalk is offered in the poem River from Woods etc., a poem that is primarily about the

sounds of trees and rivers under moon, and yet it synthesises these sounds to bring forth another sense: ecopoetic I-sight: the earths eye looking through the earths bones carries the moon carries the sun but keeps nothing. (12-14) While the poem speaks from the perception of death or loss (bones), this poem is absent of finality (the period mark); in fact, out of the fourteen lines that represent a fragmented sonnet, there is only one comma, which indicates a pause after the only place name in the poem, Devon a toponymic knot in the fabric of the poems generative lines. This incompletion speaks of fluidity and continual movement, underlined by lines that run on internally (both here and in Mercury) to create relatively expansive sense units within the short form; moreover, the sonnet is broken up spatially, so that the closing sestet looks like two triplets, the latter (quoted above) most closely representing a quatrain with one line of silence. Uncanniness. Deliberate spaces in Oswald, as with the incredible pauses in Dart and Sleepwalk as mentioned earlier, often reconcile a moment when the lyrical voice is registered most strongly in its absence; here, sonication has slipped into visualization and yet the lyric I has become the earths eye these effects coagulate to horizontalize the vertical, humanized I of anthropos (a reduced transparent human is the net effect and to foreground an almost animist sense of physical objects: a reduced transparent human ego within the world of things is the net effect. 6 This highly sensitive and deconstructive vision that is triggered by sound runs through temporary, material registers of passing i.e. the earths bones that resonate across that penultimate line of vacancy before we return to the subject: the earths eye, which we learn carries but does not keep. This is complex and requires some reflection and sensitivity to the verbs, to poeisis. To keep is to continue or to possess; to carry is to bear something from one place to another, or to contain something: if we read that blank space as a negative enfolding event to bring 6 See footnote 7. 5

the eye and bone together while deleting these objects as distinct entities by covering them through silence (a form of blindness) we return to the larger subject that the sonnet constitutes, the eponymous yet anonymous river, which moves between places and takes (possesses) nothing, not even a name. I read these three indicators of collapsed human subjectivity as the basic theme or concept in Oswalds Sleepwalk; the topos that understates an ultimate antidote to utilitarian and instrumental minds: to acquire nothing in the service of nature.7 A selective ecocritical argument For ecocritics, a pro-environmental text, or an ecologically sound text will not relegate to the status of backdrop either the landscape-scale natural environment, or local biotaxonomic detail of material events and life forms. Moreover, ecocriticism attends to a deconstructive mode to underline the false dichotomy between humans and environments, within the post-Cartesian critique of subject-object modelling of Romantic literature onwards. In Oswalds Dart and Sleepwalk, this dichotomy is paradoxically amplified to extend a cultural ecological sense of non-dualism, as I will show8; in both texts, the river is the central subject which configures all subjectivities within its domain: it is not the background nor the backlight to human subjectivity, but it is the carrier of dynamic relations, under the sway of the moon. Moreover, the deconstructed self 7 This philosophical position that speaks to an ecological ethic wherein the resources of nature are not reduced to an economic standing reserve for our exploitation, takes inspiration from the recitative and aria Ich esse mit Freuden mein weniges Brot from Cantata 84 (first performed Leipzig 9 February 1727). 8 This paper explicitly presents fragmentation and reified conceptions of both human subjectivity and natural forces. This critical move relates to the distinctive problems identified by German critical philosophy and its attempt to establish a rational system based on things in themselves, which developed the idea that thought could only grasp what it itself had created (Jones 14); to move beyond this paradigm of the mastery of the world conceived as self-created is the premise of deconstructive ecopoetics, to replay the ideal subject-object relation (or identity) foreshadowed in Kant, Fichte, Schiller and Schelling, to animate the mind that found itself trapped in an irresoluble antimony: the ever- fixed gulf between the phenomenal world of necessity and the noumenal world of freedom (15). 6

that leads to an expansive selfhood to include moon and river in Sleepwalk, denotes intervals between subjectivity that detail how humans account for their experience in the world, and how humans respond to the forces of nature (particularly moonrise); this denotation, is in effect augmentation: articulation of the physical and mental interdependencies in the Severn estuary that portend what I shall attempt to clarify as a geography of affect within a bioregional biography: changes to humans recorded as a collective history and communal story of experience within the estuary region. What might be clarified in abstract as cyclical energies and ecological metamorphosis, is a sense of new identity within diluted versions of pre-stabilized subjectivity: a lyrical mode, underpinned by affect that extends metaphoric tenor to the intellectual freight of allegory to speak of emergence within (qualified) loss. In Sleepwalk, the moon-animated river is a site in which a number of subjects or registers pass through and are reconfigured. 9 These registers are caught between the voice of the moon (within five phases), and the identity of the dream secretary, the name given to the poet figure who is represented as the writer of this poem as it unfolds in time, taking note of the interactions and exchanges between humans and the environment under moonlight. The written out riverscape, therefore, in its very performative aspect that points to non- representation for its interest in ethnography and social relations, demonstrates how Oswald reads cultural spaces: as active surfaces upon which environmental subjectivity can be read; to an extent, Sleepwalk inhabits a situational aesthetic that details how things relate to surroundings, how environmental stimuli and experience colour and modify subjectivity. Line length, deliberate space and stanzaic formulation complement this impulse. Furthermore, rather than exemplify environmental determinism, agency in Sleepwalk and the generative quality of sense formation in poetic form are modelled to move the reader to think on how best to characterise Oswalds geography of affect i.e. to think on 9 Oswalds instructional preface to the poem is a declarative injunction: This is not a play. This is a poem in seven registers. Cf. the authors comments on polyphony in Dart: all voices should be read as the rivers mutterings. (sleevenote to Dart). 7

how cartographic emplacement (threaded with somnambulist psychological states) gives rise to the environmental subject. Uncountry of an Estuary: a synthesis of accumulative changes Excursion to Planet Mercury is a poem of unfixed particles of potentiality, loosened from gravitational anchors and objective audits; Sleepwalk, conversely speaks of moodswung creatures | That have settled in this beautiful | Uncountry of an Estuary (Prologue: 2-5) and it seeks to denote these subjects by name and in place. The settlement is highly contingent and provisional due to the influence of moon (affect, mood) and the unstable identities calibrated in accordance to fluid cartographies born of tidal movements (uncountry). Furthermore, if Sleepwalk is read as an extension of Darts synthesis of subjectivity into a singular, protean soundscape, where all voices are the rivers voice a bioregional (auto)biography the singular sleepwalk denotes a consistent and coherent mental ecology throughout the poem. It is autoreferential. Guattari challenges us to read aesthetico-existential effectiveness of psychiatric modelling in order to: grasp the a-signifying points of rupture the rupture of denotation, connotation and signification from which a certain number of semiotic chains are put to work in the service of an existential autoreferential effect. (56) This in turn initiates the production of a partial subjectivity: the beginnings of a proto-subjectivity. Oswalds somatic signification, often with an adjunct metaphor of hunger in Sleepwalk, speaks to a corporealized imaginary as envisioned by Guattari precisely through silent a-signifiying points of rupture. I have detailed these as silence and deliberate space; however, Sleepwalk also puts to work the synthetic accretion of identity both within the spatial determinates of a page (the three columns of environmental registers) and over time, on which I shall now focus. These fluid-somatic registers borrow lines from each

other, and mimic modalities and personhood distilled in specific voices in a sophisticated, writerly semiotic chain that denotes the influence and impact of moon on subjectivity: an immense biological engine (the moon-earth dynamic) and neural network (this Guattarian chain) are countersunk into the glow of individual consciousness which registers self-in-world. This has been readily defined as an almost sculptural attempt to fix and deliver language onto the surfaces and inter-connectivity of the situational (Whatley). The opening to the poem proper will assist us here. [screenshot?] The right column indicates New Moon; half way down the page, the left column denotes birdwatcher followed by fisherman; the central lyrical space opens with three italicised paragraphs (the notebook entry of the dream secretary, increasing in intimacy with surroundings as it progresses toward the characters); followed by two entries for the birdwatcher (his voice, the notebook); then four entries for the fisherman (two represent his voice that is split by the recording of events and underlined by an exclamation to be quiet, Shhh! (5: 22), by the dream secretary). An increasing involvement and presence of the poet figure, to the point of interruption, is most obvious in this opening page; however, three additional signifiers help to detail the situational aspect: sound, light, and embodied landscape. The scene is almost dark (2) and it is cut through by the birdwatchers wobbling light from a bicycle; the soundscape contains bird calls from humans, confessional disclosure by the fisherman, exasperated questions from both male figures, and the interruption of the dream secretary. The landscape takes on two forms: the changeable flooded fields home to those that are living within its darkened spatial formations e.g. the wind that walks on Waveridge Sand (1-2), the horse that trots through, knowing its way (20); the struggling along (4) of bodies who find difficulty in either acknowledging what is in front of their eyes (the birdwatcher cannot believe the birds are breeding at this time of the year) or difficulty in negotiating the physical topos (the fisherman walking in the mud). As an indicator of the difficulty of each characters situation, this negative somnambulism refracted in

the struggle of moon and poet, in silences and darkness, promotes a phenomenological shift in the recordings of the poet-figure from an early indication of the operational environment (signalled by the left column denoting registers defined by vocation and labour) in the first half of the poem that marries Darts poetic census of life-in-place, towards the perceptual environment (signalled by effects of the moon-earth dynamic). To illustrate this shift as an event coupled to affect, this paper will first underline the sense of an environmental subject (above) within the voice of the wind, which prefigures new subjectivity in the second half of the poem under the second new moon (Moon reborn); subsequently, reference to the articled clerk, the fisherman, the vicar, and the dream secretary will demonstrate the resultant somnambulist affect that these situational figures convey in the latter phases of the poem. Wind (and Birdwatcher) It is important to track how perspectives and experience merge into each other in Sleepwalk as this gives rise to an account of feedback from the environment, which leads to heightened sensitivity. The wind is the symbolic inspirational force in this poem and it allows for ruminations on a macro-scale but only after subtle, local prefigurement by the birdwatcher. Has something happened? Theres a hatstand here. There are tables in the bushes and hundreds of wayfaring birds coming down at angles to their mirrors but its this coat that interests me. . . (21: 9-13) Following a river of eleven names at the top of this page (ghosts and folk figures who drowned in or live off the Severn) the birdwatchers questioning attitude that is lost due to his interest in material objects is indirectly addressed by an inconsolable wind: In the beginning people didnt die They waxed and waned and Here lie the very remains

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Of a man Sigh Enter almost nothing No more than the rim of an ear Or the white of an eye (14-21)

The body here is ensounded: swept up in the currents of the medium (Ingold). Attentive readers receptive to Oswalds forward vision will recall these lines in two pages time when they read of the soft sigh with no mouth of the elderly lady, an embodiment of the sonic-visual synthesis that leads to dissolved human subjectivity and wider environmental perception. This is a response to the birdwatcher noticing wildlife mirrored in cultural objects during Oswalds presencing of absent, ghostly figures of the landscape. In this kaleidoscope of persons and objects, the two quatrains offer three modes of address from the always already mood-centred subject (moon), and yet rather than complexify the soundscape this response symbolizes a gradual loss of intensity, an attenuation of flux to a calm, universal medium. Firstly, the omniscient, historical, eschatological and metaphysical vantage point drawing from the lexicon of lunar phases; secondly, the first, fragmented opening of the second array of sense units delimiting the humanized action of the wind the sigh an exhalation of poetic breath and emotional register before the final mode; thirdly, the psychogeographic expansive ecological self triggered by the indicative mood translated into phenomenological account.10 This latter mode needs a little unpacking to understand how it leads to this particular sense of loss. Enter almost nothing is not an instruction; it is the personal recording of the moon inscribed within the moment of experience offered as invocation to the reader. Oswald is borrowing from Sean Borrowdales embodied cartographic technique that resonates with topographical work and echoes a tradition of situationist psychogeography. 10 See Oswalds acknowledgments for reference to Sean Borrowdale, the innovative Lake District poet (sleevenote Sleepwalk). Three pages of this text were anthologized by Oswald in the Thunder Mutters: 101 Poems for the Planet (2005). 11

 A man and woman in tense dialogue. See stems of flowers through a window. See a black umbrella open like a flower in a deep doorway and move at man-height out into the street like a dandelion seed. Cry of a scooter. An umbrella open and closes and opens like a fidget. Hear, Sorry. (Borrowdale, 2003: 238) These lines record images and sounds encountered by the body moving in space; the mind processing multiple depths of field and instamatic surfaces rather than a rich, layered, historical palimpsest; all data is revealed within the circumambience of the walkers experience, which captured poetically, attends to assembling an associative poetic haphazard jigsaw (of which I have offered one piece, framed by dialogue). The indicative mode is here not to instruct but to disclose evidence as it is brought into a sensorial space, to reflect the subjective processing of experience at the time of the experience of the writing subject; this momentary opening out as subtle extending of time, is a phenomenological mode paradoxically recorded to recreate the moment after it has passed, during the readers experience of the words. Borrowdale has named this as a strain of theatre, as field: a hybrid form which takes on a live correspondence with the world and draws rawly on its conscious and unconscious elements (Ancient Light [ref]). Preceding the Situationists and extending the decadent late nineteenth century perambulations of the literary flnuer, the interest in urbanism as a pattern of infused emotive force- fields within a city was articulated by Guy Debord and the Letterist International sense of detournement and derive: a remaking of the public space as one drifts through a generative contour geared by ones unconscious solicitations. For Lefebvre, cities are situations: The city, a present and immediate reality, a practico- material and architectural fact, and the urban, a social reality made up of relations which are to be conceived of, constructed or reconstructed by thought. (103)

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It is a contentious move to project this paradigm onto a poem of nature, and yet this seems to be behind Borrowdales aesthetic and is inspiring Oswalds emotive-blindness. 11 Sleepwalk qualifies the modernist remaking of the environment by the individual with an itinerary, for the environment remakes the individual. At page twenty-one, Oswald uses this inherited modality to enable the wind to voice its plummeting into the world, entering into the sensory receptacle to the point that there is no internal or external boundary to identity; to indicate the possibility of recreating this move for the subject reading or listening. These fragmented eight lines and the succeeding white space work to postulate changeability as a response to securing our identity: movement toward the unknown is to move beyond the struggle indicated in the poetry, to decontaminate and absolve ones self of the striving: to be stripped back to essentials, which in turn loses a sense of the flux (in the manner that the dead figures are lost) for it enters the flux. Oswaldian attenuation in microcosm; all subsequent illustrations offer local detail. Articled Clerk Named so as not to be confused with the Parish Clerk, this subject makes an appalling entrance: BANG! (11: 18), killing a goose that he mistakes for a duck while complaining about his predicament: Miserable weather. Bitterly bitterly cold. He is an incompetent misfit, and a nuisance to the poet and birdwatcher who require silence as a prerequisite to attuning to the environment. Later, the moodswung moon-affected clerk is almost unrecognisable: there was That flutter of white napkins of waders hurrying in And so many mucous mudglands 11 Ref Green Letters article psychog -> nature. 13

The simmering dish of mush and All night that seeping feeding sound Of moistness digesting smallness (30: 4-5; 7; 14-16) Picking up on an observation made by another I of the poem, the articled clerk speaks metaphorically (complementing Oswalds sub-text of sustenance), remarking on the dimly conceived folds of wings and sounds of feathers by representing birds as napkins; furthermore, the clerks sensitivity to the environment has affected his sense of being to the point that he articulates within (i.e. as part of) the evident soundscape. Note the onomatopoeia of walking in the tidal estuary, the mood-setting assonance of the use of a and u in southwest English dialect: many mucous mudglands elasticised into the sonic oscillation and convergence in the extended use of m alongside the sibilance of the s: simmering dish of mud and moistness digesting smallness all to denote the consumptive energia that generates organic material (humus) within the complex repetition of consonants with subtly distinct notes (particularly accented by the use of a e and i). While this might indicate a complete collapse of the former illiterate, atonal, bumbling self or a human position guaranteeing personhood beyond the earths turning our earlier introduction to this register it is invaluable to read a slight resistance to this complete change. The clerk is not a figure of absolute dilution and pro-environmental embodiment; he carries his rigid sense of self by sticking tight to his quatrains, and by articulating an unresolved inner conflict: I thought really I should have webbed feet | I should have white wings to walk here (31: 3-4). To enter into the bird dimension,12 perhaps; and yet to claim that this is not his place, while undoubtedly ethically charged in comparison with his earlier gun blast, is as much a false interpretation of his emplacement as his instrumental entrance. Fisherman Changes in the fisherman are equally drastic and inconclusive as the clerks. We begin with the counting out of a non-linear history: 12 In Dart canoeists claim entering the fish dimension [check and ref] 14

 Another thousand years The Moon, mother of many rivers Has grown young again It could happen to anyone Whose being both dims and widens As if carried by the wind (26: 12-17)

The wind is not embodied here; the body is enwinded (Ingold). Simultaneously to these two tercets, Sleepwalk registers the wind as very excitable with flute to foreground Aeolian inspirational forces within the shaping soundscape: this is what carries any subject in this space. 13 To grow young in this spatial arrangement of lines is to indicate cycles before a sense of chance and possibility; and again, the ego within a dimming selfhood, consonant with widening selfhood, permits a relinquishment of control for an expansive subject in tune, or at play, with melodic, cyclical elements (carried by the wind). The counting out of non-linearity is picked up and repeated by the fisherman moments later: the tercets are compressed into a sestet and recalled exactly (29: 1-6) and then substantiated twice, echoically: A man for example, Sitting very still in his bone-web, Dipped in old age up to the eyes, When the tide recedes, his arms Draggle to his sides As hollow as reeds. And a man for example When the tide returns he runs Thigh-deep through the Severn, Chasing the lightning of a salmon. (29: 7-12; 19, 22- 24)

13 This broken sestet with flute triggers an acoustic ecology that discloses a plurality of presences, already there in the landscape and yet not accessible without this auditory consanguinity acting as thread and spine to the voices (n.b. a tension in the shift from couplet to tercet on the way to quatrains following dusk, pp26-30). 15

Stepping outside of himself to speak of the fisherman as a singular contour with the polyphonic biography of the Severn estuary, we note the extent to which the tidal movements are biased. The man is hollow without the river and yet able to follow the atmospheric discharge of the changeable journeying fish; such polarity or extremity emphasizes the ambivalent phrase bone-web a compound that bridges rigidity and flexibility, fibre and fabric, that indicates terminus of life and interconnecting textuality; that transforms the figure from an instrumental oriented subject who desired an audience to whom he could narrate his stories of catching fish, to an instantiation of tidal forces and emblem of corporeality that is part of the rivers vector of free play. Vicar The complexification of character continues in the treatment of the vicar. The poems final representation of this subject evokes Oswalds consideration of whether nature has an authenticity requiring certain intelligence to decode it, and by implication due to the interest in cultural ecology and feedback to the individual in Sleepwalk, considers if non-human life transmits its detail without formulation or recourse to human epistemologies (Bristow 168). The increasingly attentive representative of a religious community identifies the limits to human understanding: Sometimes you see mudfish Those short lead lengths of eels That hide at low tide Those roping and wagging Preliminary pre-world creatures, cousins of the moon Who love blackness aloofness Always move under the cover of the unmoon And then as soon as you see them gone Untranslatable hissed interruptions Unspeakable wide chapped lips Its the wind again Cursing the water and when it clears You keep looking and looking for those 16

Underlurkers, uncontrolled little eddies (38: 1-17) The movement from sometimes to you, to the second person that includes I and you equally (as in the third person one), encourages a sense of objectivity in the opening to the twelve line stanzas that attempt to enfold life into the riverscape. Sleepwalks poetics negotiate falling into problems of interpolation and complicity, however; the repeated, strangulated stanzaic formulation compressed at a single word line gone not only spatially communicates to foreground loss but details the reverse energy or negative poetics that heralds the impossibility of possession (cognitively or otherwise) and thus detracts from constructing sense, sensitivity or subjectivity. The loss of world to be captured, coupled to the voice that is parsed through broken, moisture-lacking chapped lips delineates a loss of authority that acts as a central holding point, visually and cognitively: gone shifts the register from the experiential present participle (roping, wagging, looking, sucking (21)) to comparatively reflective and atemporal stock-phrases (untranslatable (25), unspeakable(26)) that lack the rivers fluency. It is quite telling how this measures up to the Vicars first appearance in the poem, arriving late and struggling with his horse: Heavenly Father etc. On my way to Arlingham over the river. Already late, Lord. No boat. Pretty angry now on account of (19: 20-22)

Primarily instancing another disconnected, goal oriented subject to support the figures of the birdwatcher, fisherman and clerk, the Vicar is not only bodily out- of-synch with the elements but his voice is fragmented, abbreviated and interrupted. Voice is of great concern to Oswald, thus we must read significance here. Furthermore, the addressee in this section is transcendental; in the final scene with the vicar, emergent and co-constitutive. Our non-authoritative, reflective subject under the influence of the new moon has travelled some distance from the frustrated figure of impaired speech. The earlier weakness was prefigured some lines earlier by the poets eye moving over the night map (19: 9) in the introductory narrative in the central column under No Moon. A printed night-map in the poets hands to suggest the recourse to tools (i.e.

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cartographic representation) might enable one mode of connection to moon. Noting the subtle change in the vicar from this position, however, allows us to disconnect his earlier frustrations to later surface indicators of anger: cursing, bothering; for these are not expletives demonstrating an inner self, they are verbs that help map the wind and detail a changed subject: Cursing the water (38: 13) and bothering the reeds (27) before it clears (13; 27) clarify an intimacy with the tidal flows that only momentarily rupture the visionary field. Dream Secretary To our postmodern and post-structuralist minds, the figure of the dream secretary is a problem: is the writer in the landscape mere historical fact?; or as an embodied subjectivity heightened by the changing phases of moon, does the owner of the notebook that becomes the poem that we are reading signify an intelligently figured intransitive event of writing?14 To recall, Sleepwalk has defined environmental performativity, comprehensive absorption into the other, and has offered a psychological field mode to promote the sense of event and bodily experience while simultaneously conflating subjectivity, voice and register to make it difficult to isolate a single or solitary agency in the multiple modes of biography that are coloured by various states of somnambulance and progressive affect. These are all revisited in the three figures at the close of the poem. The mother, the epileptic and the dream secretary require a full article alone. My attention to the poet-figure is to continue my line of thinking to reinvigorate the sense of protean identity with which Oswald closes Dart. The voice of the dream secretary ends Sleepwalk with three stanzas (two octets and a quintain) that contain irresistible contemplation on structure, spatial arrangement and line-length: thirteen of these twenty-one lines are self- contained sentences, which brings attention to the eight enjambed lines and to the spatial formation of the stanza. Within this formulation there is another, 14 I am drawing from Roland Barthes formulation. 18

hidden semantic mode: the floating octet, which runs between stanzas one and two: World black and white. Walk up the lane. Last thing each night. Look up for the moon. No sign but rain. Almost back home. One more last quick. Glance up for the moon. Eyes stripped to the darkness. Cant help but notice Little desklamp glow. As from upstairs window. Shoulder of a woman. There, thats her. Very old poor soul, maybe all but gone. (40: 5-12)

The irregular and rare breaking of the syntactic unit in this final movement (as indicated by the regular use of end-stopping) highlights pauses in breath and cognition; highlights momentary psychosis and staccato rhythms. This group of eight lines brings together the landscape as witnessed by the poet (5, 7, 9, 11); the instructive-historical, phenomenological navigation of place (5, 6, 8); the remove from emplaced subjectivity (7, 9-11) to an outside perspective, mirrored in the moons phase (11-12): a microcosm of the poem at large. The moons moods are mirrored in the affected subjects of Sleepwalk; the moon, too, is a mirror: Part of the moons effectual magic is that it borrows, by virtue of light being elsewhere. Such is the nature of a universe, and there is a sweep to this poem which lifts some of its light from other experiments, re-directing it onto the world stage of the present. (Borrowdale, Ancient Light)

The figure, walking up the lane in and old coat and old sleeves, glancing at the moon finds a very old poor soul (40: 12). This doubling, echoing, mirroring world of unsettling lightness (Borrowdale) threaded by Oswaldian preoccupations: gap, pause, calm, recess, abate, listen is a world very much of the self and the non-self that combine to write of home, our oikos and our place, as Wordsworth noted, when moving into the light of things (Tables Turned: An Evening Scene on the Same Subject 15). The infused urban perambulatory aesthetic within a contemporary pastoral affords an ecological stance: to be situated in an expansive subjectivity neither backlit nor foreshadowed by things

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but brought out by their light in relation to which subjectivity momentarily resides, co-constitutively. It is with this neo-Romantic ecology in mind that Oswald drops the central symbolic device in this passage, the mirror, for the window, a framed void or empty transparency. There are seven references to moon in these three stanzas; there are nine references to light; and yet in these closing lines it is the understated window that takes hold on our imagination. As indicated by the reading of the floating octet, the window signifies a move beyond the self, stepping outside of the self. The glance to the moon has become a glance to the dwelling place of the poet; as foreseen in the effort to find the moon, there was No sign but rain. Almost back home (40: 7): we are back with the old woman figure, ghostly echoed in this conflation between poet and moon once more. Furthermore, window takes the position of last word on the end- stopped line in the second stanza that echoes with two other words, in the same fashion that moon rhymes twice with itself in the first stanza. Thus, in this repetition we have something more open than the previous sound pattern(to other words as doubles): window is associated with halo and show, indicator and performer that are thematic mirrors of the psychogeographic field mode (above). These rhyming words come from two distinct anthropocentric registers. Firstly, halo restates Sleepwalks sense of oscillation rather than opposition between black and white, seen and unseen, by continuing the sense of the desklamp glow (10) controlled by the human hand, flicked on and off. Little hand torch halo (14) in addition to signifying fluctuation, collapses the beginning and end of the poem into a circle: Sleepwalk opened with an infa-red telescope in the hands of the birdwatcher; while replaying this moment in new terms of the domestic space, the absent musical hyphen connecting these four words little-hand-torch-halo indicates beyond the circular coloured band of light around the light-source (in itself, not only echoing the moons visual appearance but indicating the human hand of the poet within the light of things, in proximity to this tool). Secondly, the performative show details what the poet sees of herself when she turns back to the house and glances at the writers room: Letting only the light of a white sleeve show (16). The figure is indistinct, not even adumbrated by moonlight, but bodily merged into the night, balancing

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the dark medium of mime, or silence (Borrowdale) with the enlightenment of words, which do not mirror the landscape figure but offer a framed vision of the writerly hand, culturally radiant with the affect of changeable forces, poised to write the final lines of the poem. Upon reflection, the circularity of the first rhyme with window, recalled an investment in technology by a dramatized character struggling in the environment at the poems beginning before their moonlight affected change, while the poet and moon were more easily giving in to the darkness; the second rhyme brought out the authorial subjectivity into further relief despite the (visual-cognitive) obstruction of an aestheticized chiaroscuro. And yet, to entertain the notion of non-dualism implicitly performed within the poems internal logic of non-opposition, these two rhymes are not at odds, they are but part of a step towards a third move. The repetition of window in the position of line-ending in the enjambed line of the final quintain, not only overrides all rigid juxtaposition (above) by remarking a sense of fluidity, but it provides a teasing knot of sense before all is lost in the last three lines; these closing sentiments stress the word sometimes five times to detail the changeability of moon in its phases and the contingency of what is captured by a visionary glance upon the landscape (receiving sometimes moon, sometimes the poet, sometimes only the rain). In totality, this neat ending repeats Wordsworths sense of a heart as a subject that watches and receives (31-32): Sometimes the moon is more an upstairs window, Curtains not quite drawn but lit within and lived in. (Oswald, 40: 17-18)

The solitary orbiting satellite transforms into a transparent gateway between an interior professional space of writing and the outside world as we are taken on an imaginative journey to anothers interior space. The curtains ordinary social function to delimit public and private worlds and to obstruct or obscure, however, is relinquished for a metaphor of domestic presence illuminated by a wider locality of open selfhood (not quite drawn): an internally awakened self, like our affected subjects (lit within), emplaced under the new moon subject to

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the veracity of the Severns bioregion (lived within). I claim this as an ecological self in and of the landscape. Provisional conclusions and afterthoughts Disturbance and interruption; darkness and silence; pulsations and repetitions that cross between these two quite separate domains, Sleepwalk is an instructive example of contemporary ecopoetics that asks the reader to contemplate how the human fits within its environment, and additionally submits to how somnambulism might lead us to reassess how poetic reverie instantiates a recreative enaction of the world. Carters reading of Bachelards texts, Water and Dreams (1942) and The Poetics of Reverie (1960) indicates that a homology must exist between matter and mind, between the qualities of the material to be worked and the creative disposition of the artist who selects and works it (186). This is one context from which to approach Oswalds poetry15; while the English poet does not attempt to penetrate into substances like Bachelard claims, as a masculine will to power ([ref, f/n 30, p186] cited Carter 186), there is a common ground in that the double-malleability, the plasticity of human and world is a principle that accrues to the maker-dreamer rather than to the material; Oswalds dream secretary is a case in point. Somnambulance is an example of the mingling of reverie and reality: an intermediary world (Bachelard [ref /fn 31]).16 Oswalds environment in process (a history of the riverscape framed by phases of the moon) affords intimate relations, heightened subjectivity and openness to futurity; it is an irony of blindness in its sensitivity to sound and sound formations in spaces. The resultant fluid sensorium established by the presence 15 Cf. footnote 7. 16 Schama notes that classical modes of streams of consciousness are translated into oppositions in the symbolic topography of Renaissance poetry wherein forests represent disorientation, and flowing water in precise contrast gives the dream-traveller direction; in The Dream of Poliphilus water controls experience, and brooks sing to the protagonist (273). 22

of the writerly subject within the unfolding, emergent poem foregrounds a non- representational quality in Sleepwalk: the ways in which texts and spaces are imbricated, one with the other (Thacker; Hones). Moreover, the emphasis on the situated, embodied and partial subject evokes a spatial history that began in Dart as a poetics of responsivity and observation, and it is carried forth into a fresh writing and reading nexus of tacit knowledge in Sleepwalk. The use of the dream secretary heightens the performative aspect of the poem that enacts a biography of the voices of the river that are manifest in experience, and yet it is also symbolic of the event of writing, of literary texts as emerging geographical events: a performative social situation, spatially extensive and temporally specific (Hones 1311-1314). Finally, the current analysis attends to how characters pass through spaces within a geography that bonds instances of fragmentation and marginality within a bioregion that animates subjectivity and acts as a landscape or surface culture from which conditions (i.e. affect) can be read (Ogborn). Sleepwalk is a modern literary geography that attends to the textuality of space and spatiality of text (Thacker 62-65), and yet its outstanding contribution is to a poetics of porous personhood, and to a relational aesthetics that not only demonstrates the capacity of art to synthesize diverse facts, goals and references, but demonstrates how place attachment is relevant to the study of environmental perception. The person-process-place model outlined by Scannell and Gifford (2010) details how place attachment bonds individuals or groups to place, and how this varies in terms of spatial level, degree of specificity, and social or physical features of the place, which as signalled by Sleepwalk, is manifested through affective, cognitive, and behavioural psychological processes (5). Security-seeking motives partly explain place attachment from the perspective of positive affect providing a sense of protection and security; this study has moved beyond this area of environmental psychology to disclose extended loss of self as a means to feel more at home in the insecurity, fluidity and dynamics of place. This sense of home, or oikos, is informed by a perception of withness. Carson invokes a shared response to the world that enables sustainable visions: To keep attention strong means to keep it from settling (1999: viii). There is a

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world in that sentence. It relates to Weils sense of vegetative energy (Little 35). 17 Carson praises sleep as a glimpse of something incognito, the unrecognized that hides from us because it has something worth hiding, or so we judge (1999: 20). There is poverty in somnambulance: loss of self. The poetic sleepwalker can move beyond determinants of the waking life: Shoulder of a woman. There, thats her (Oswald 40: 11) instances the lyrical I looking on the self from a distance to clarifies who the I is, a Sapphic move predicating of her own Being an attribute observable only from outside her own body (Carson 2005: 161). This is ekstasis, standing outside oneself, where in Sapphos words All is to be dared: poverty as strength from insecurity.18 Carsons thoughts are contained within a treatise on Feminist dialogic entitled: Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simon Weil Tell God. Weil like Porete writes of the need to render back what the world (or God) has given her: the self. To yield the I is to drop our only possession: the power to say I (Weil 71; cited in Carson 2005: 167); to decreate, therefore, is to dislodge the self, to move from a former dwelling place or established position. For Oswald (in Sleepwalk) the loosening of our human-centred anchoring paradoxically enables deep human-oriented place-connections that engender new lyrical environmental consciousness; for Carsons Sappho and Weil, this reveals things previously disclosed or hidden in an event that is spiritual i.e. charged with ecstasy (from the Greek): both speak of presences under the form of absence. For Weil, evil is nothing but the distance between God and the creature; thus decreation is the act that suppresses this distance (Little 27); it is a paradigm that can be brought to a secular ecology of mind. 19 For Carson, negation requires [the] collusion of the present and the absent on the screen of the imagination following which, one is measured against the other with the 17 See Pinards use of Abrams [in this collection; chapter ref]. 18 Carson is reading fragment 31, which has been revised in English for over four hundred years, with particular attempts to convey the cool and yet impassioned tone, the concrete imagery and the spikiness of style of Sapphos original Greek. (Reynolds 23). 19 The sacramental destruction of the autonomous self and an emphasis on the perishable part of the human soul are extensions to this suppression in Weils thought. For more general background see apophatic theology or via negativa. 24

findings (that one is discrepant) leading to the annihilation of the discrepant data by a word meaning No (Carson 1999: 102). Oswalds Not I preceding prolonged silence, can be read as the decreative annihilation of the waking self when measured against the self-in-world existentially affected subject in the wake of the earth-moon dynamic. This is contentious, and yet floating subjectivity, heightened states of loose consciousness, embodied and emplaced subjects with diluted anthropocentric values operate within a literary geography indebted to sleepwalking in Oswalds embodied, perambulatory aesthetic. A new multidisciplinary research paradigm, loosely construed as embodied cognition is delivering fresh analysis on physical properties of places but is limited by a methodology that does not review environmental factors as predictors of emotional bonds, nor as Lewicka remarks, as a starting point for a place theory of place attachment (223). A new agenda with a mappable history. It is a quarter of a century since Donna Haraway placed discrete emphasis on Marxian resources to provide a fresh account of science to insist on legitimate feminist claims and meanings of objectivity, semiology and narratology: [Our problem] is to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own semiotic technologies for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a real world, one that can be partially shared and that is friendly to earthwide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness. (579)

While Sleepwalk might find some criticism in its fallacy of ambiguity, ecocritical accounts should counterbalance this limited response with articulate reminders of the epistemological fallacies of dualism and subject-object relations critiqued via semiotic fluency. Radically attuned to issues of difference and multiplicity, Oswalds evocation of moonrise and its effect on people within the region of the estuary indicates an earthwide project that is not at odds with the sincerity of the intellectual legitimacy and humanist playfulness that Haraway requires. It

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appears, therefore, that literary studies can contribute significantly to environmental psychology, particularly as place attachment studies need a theory of place (Lewicka 223). Post-script At the time of publication (2009), the British press was very interested in the river Severn and the Severn estuary as key ecological landmarks within the framework of the UK governments 2020 environmental targets. Charged with producing one third of its power through renewable energy sources within a decade, the estuary was at the heart of a governmental debate addressing collective responses to climate change and the capacity of the site to house a number of technologies including a barrage across the estuary (connecting England to Wales), a series of tidal lagoons, and a stretch of underwater turbines to harness the incredible fourteen metre tidal range of the Severn. A fourteen metre range translated into eight gigawatts of electricity, five percent of the UKs energy needs: a situation that is broadcast in newsprint, distributed by rhetoricians of the clinical world of ecological forecasts and economic modelling, and set in terms of myopic utilitarianism, expendability and crisis management during a morally bankrupt phase of toxic-late-capitalism. The situation of nature, our relationship with our lives and the external forces acting upon them are elected as central themes taken out of the context of political environmentalism and placed within Sleepwalks uncountry of the poetic imagination that cannot be usurped for expediency or self-interest: an imaginative site where the very act of writing is a corollary to walking20, and therefore an embodied political act in itself, to be well regarded as we enter a new era of enclosed spaces. 20 This Ingoldian idea drawn from ecological anthropology advances a philosophy of line-making as a creative, generative, sustaining and enriching process in a relational world (Lorimer 250). It is perhaps best suited to support literary analysis of poetic lines in Dart which is a book length line of the river tracing processes from source to sea. This corollary has a forebear in the idea that a walk is equivalent to a speech-act (de Certeau 97). 26

University of New England New South Wales 9-13 April, 2012

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Lewicka, Maria. Place Attachment: How Far Have We Come In The Last 40 Years? Journal of Environmental Psychology 31 (2011): 207-230. Little, J.P. Simon Weils Concept of Decreation in Simone Weils Philosophy of Culture: Readings toward a divine humanity. Ed. Richard H. Bell. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. 25-51. Lorimer, Hayden. Tim Ingold in Key Thinkers on Space and Place. Ed Phil Hubbard and Rob Kitchin. London: Sage, 2011. 249-256. Ogborn, Miles Mapping Words New Formations 57 (2005/6): 145-149. Oswald, Alice. Dart. London: Faber, 2002. ---, Sleepwalk on the Severn. London: Faber, 2009. ---, Woods etc. London: Faber, 2005. Reynolds, Margaret. The Sappho Companion. London: Chatto and Windus, 2000. Scannell, Leila and Robert Gifford. Defining Place Attachment: A Tripartite Organizing Framework Journal of Environmental Psychology 30 (2010): 1-10. Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. London: HarperCollins, 1995. Thacker, Andrew The Idea of a Critical Literary Geography New Formations 57 (2005/6): 56-73. Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Trans. A. Wills. Lincoln, Nebraska: U of Nebrasks P, 1997. Whatley, Ryan. Alice Oswalds A Sleepwalk on the Severn & The Severn Estuary. Ecoswitch.com. http://ecoswitch.com/books/alice-oswalds-a-sleepwalk- on-the-severn-the-severn-estuary/ Sept 23, 2009 [ref] Wordsworth [ref]

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