{"id":167393,"date":"2024-04-26T10:30:58","date_gmt":"2024-04-26T14:30:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=167393"},"modified":"2024-04-26T15:45:21","modified_gmt":"2024-04-26T19:45:21","slug":"choose-hope-or-despair-on-john-shoptaw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/04\/26\/choose-hope-or-despair-on-john-shoptaw\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cChoose Hope or Despair\u201d: On John Shoptaw"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

A flock of sanderlings in San Francisco, California, in 2011. Brocken Inaglory, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons<\/a>. Licensed under CCO 3.0.<\/p><\/div>\n

In 2007, the same year I was taking my third undergraduate poetry class with John Shoptaw at UC Berkeley, I wrote a short story for a fiction seminar. It involved two estranged friends driving a route familiar to me, between Cupertino and the sparsely visited San Gregorio State Beach. Halfway through the story, we learn that there has been a nationwide pandemic of debilitating anxiety and that everyone has received government-issued Ativan pills. We also learn the reason for the friends\u2019 strained conversation: the Ativan is not working for one of them. When he looks at the world, all he sees is loss and future agony. The friends have a final showdown at the beach, which is littered with dead bees. One friend insists that everything is fine (though his denial is wearing thin), and the other skulks off to a boat that he plans to launch recklessly into the slate-gray, unfriendly surf.<\/p>\n

This was of course an argument with myself, one I failed to resolve in my life as much as in the story. Thanks to Shoptaw, with whom I reunited eleven years later, and whom I count as a close friend and mentor, I\u2019ve learned a word that helps me understand the problem I faced. It came up one hot day a few years ago, in a sliver of redwoods at a local botanical garden, where we were discussing our respective projects involving time. The term is prolepsis<\/em>, a figure of speech in which a future event is represented as having already taken place. An oft-cited example of prolepsis is in Keats\u2019s \u201cIsabella,\u201d in which two men and a man they plan to kill are described as \u201ctwo brothers and their murder\u2019d man.\u201d For many of us, especially those of my generation and younger, there is a serious need to address something like a habitual prolepsis, a feeling that we inhabit a(n already) murdered world.<\/p>\n

How does one find the missing character, the hidden part, the middle\u2014where things still grow, actions remain possible, and the heart recovers its appetite? It is in this ambiguous, breathable space that you\u2019ll find Shoptaw\u2019s practice of ecopoetics. Against the timelessness of traditional nature poetry, ecopoetics takes place in a crisis-ridden present that is populated with individuals and mixtures, not symbols or binaries. The nonhuman characters of these poems are not allegorical but fellow imperiled travelers whose earthly wisdom and survival instinct are one with our own. This can be seen in \u201cFor the Birds,\u201d the very first poem in Shoptaw\u2019s forthcoming book, Near-Earth Object<\/em>. The visiting birds are transcendent, but they are also familiars, and in a few cases even have names. Where a bird in a nature poem might be an impersonal stand-in for immortality, these are mortal neighbors and refugees from the wildfire smoke that the poet breathes too. The poem is simultaneously ode and elegy: a line perfectly capturing the personality of chickadees is immediately followed by the mournful observation that \u201cthe chickadees once came to my feeder in bunches.\u201d<\/p>\n

With Shoptaw as their human agent, many nonhuman denizens of the world speak to us in Near-Earth Object<\/em>: Max the cat, garden ants, squirrels, the crickets chirping the temperature. Perhaps one of the most important messages they impart has to do precisely with declinism. It is in the nature of Nature to try to flourish; to give up on life is unnatural. In \u201cAfter a Cricket,\u201d a cricket has<\/p>\n

played
\nlike it would never have occurred to him
\nto stop before he was done.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In \u201cLeaving Tsunami Hazard Zone,\u201d the poet\u2019s own future-dread is answered by a rookery of harbor seals \u201cliving their loves out\u201d on the rocks below. In \u201cThe Fall Equinox,\u201d the image of a turkling intuitively trying to get back to the right side of a deer fence replaces the car-and-road image of the \u201cpoint of no return.\u201d And through \u201cUnseasonably,\u201d where the ends of each line contain seasons more and more out of order, swims a contingent of gray whales, surprisingly resurgent after being left enough alone.<\/p>\n

When I first read these poems and was trying to describe them to a friend, I said they felt cosmic, even though they often take place in Shoptaw\u2019s backyard or around his Berkeley neighborhood.<\/em> Breaching the boundary of human\/nonhuman also means troubling the boundary of earthly\/spiritual. The results are often funny, inflected with a tone of teasing admonishment. In \u201cThe Tree in the Midst,\u201d where the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge are revealed to be one, Eve learns all she needs to know by watching the animals. It\u2019s the angels, who have never set foot on Earth and don\u2019t know how to tell good fruit from bad, who have no useful knowledge. Likewise, \u201cJacob\u2019s Meadow\u201d flattens the hierarchy of Christianity\u2019s great chain of being, with a mourning dove indicating the actual location of \u201cheaven\u201d: the telephone line on which it lands. \u201cEarth to Jacob!\u201d says the poet to the man whose biblical stage props turn out to be real living things: a \u201csteep oleander riverbank\u201d (Jacob\u2019s ladder) and \u201cbats homing in on mosquitoes in the meadow\u201d (angels).<\/p>\n

In ecopoetry, such details matter beyond aesthetics. Just as cosmic gravity is always bringing us back home, Near-Earth Object<\/em> resolutely sets our sights on earthliness as the only possible or worthy goal: the ultimate condition and the ultimate gift, wounds and all. There is a name for this joy-in-grief and grief-in-joy, this self-dissolving awe mixed with sharp concern, this uneconomical responsibility to something in its hour of need: it\u2019s called love. Even the legal scholar Christopher Stone, in his 1972 proposal for the legal standing of trees, describes a needed \u201cdevelopment of our abilities to love.\u201d But this is something more than a fond or even tortured affection, or a patronizing call to save the Earth. Instead, I\u2019m thinking of what the Kanaka Maoli wahine artist and activist Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio said in an interview: \u201cAs humans, we don\u2019t actually protect our environment \u2026 She gives us an opportunity to come back into our humanity when we step into the role of protector.\u201d This kind of collaborative role, one that Shoptaw\u2019s poems assiduously demonstrate, is what can allow us to take it all in: the pleasure, the fear, and most of all the commitment.<\/p>\n

In the coming years, it is not just the forests and the watersheds and our many neighbors that we\u2019ll have to look after. Experiences of extreme climate events also cause psychic and emotional wounds in humans, as the red skies of September 2020 revealed here in the Bay Area. I\u2019m not any more confident that we as a species are prepared for this than I am about our seawalls. That is to say: the poet has an incredibly important job to do. The Aboriginal novelist Alexis Wright acknowledged something similar at the end of her eulogy for the animals who died in the 2019\u201320 Australian bushfires: \u201cWe cannot be guided by an ethos of neglect, brokenness of heart, misery of spirit that will lead us into a future world devoid of joy. The world\u2019s combined humanity must sing the planet up with careful songs, songs of responsibility and respect.\u201d Near-Earth Object<\/em> is a book, but a poem is first and foremost a song, just like the songs of birds, crickets, frogs, and whales. The impulse to sing comes from the impulse to live, and it\u2019s catching. I encourage you to return to Shoptaw\u2019s poems multiple times and to read them aloud\u2014to yourself, to your friends, maybe even to the birds. If your experience is anything like mine, you\u2019ll find shelter in them from shifting weather systems of wonder, sorrow, gratitude, and anger.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, after having read Near-Earth Object<\/em>, I happened to visit a patch of coast near San Gregorio, the location of that unresolved argument in my college-era short story. No longer an allegorical dead end, the beach stretched out before me, its ancient sandstone cliffs sheltering me from a cold early summer wind. I watched a flock of sanderlings, whose incredibly smooth and rapid running, seconding the movements of the waves, has always brought me unaccountable delight. Sanderlings. I looked them up on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology website. \u201cCommon Bird in Steep Decline.\u201d Just as I felt myself in the steep decline of prolepsis\u2014common bird now extinct\u2014another flock burst onto the beach: this one of school-age children, having tumbled out of the van of an organization working for equal access to the outdoors. They ran screaming and laughing toward their ocean, where they promptly began acting like sanderlings, playing tag with the waves.<\/p>\n

\u201cDespair is a form of pride,\u201d says Reverend Toller in First Reformed<\/em>, Paul Schrader\u2019s 2017 film about the moral-spiritual dimension of the climate crisis. \u201c\u00a0\u2018I know that nothing can change and I know there is no hope,\u2019\u00a0\u201d he continues, quoting the author Thomas Merton. Cross-legged on the sand, my pride evaporated by the scene, I thought again about my old story. Neither character had been correct. The future will not be perfect, but neither is everything lost; there is simultaneously cause for grief and cause for celebration. I have Shoptaw\u2019s ecopoetics of impurity to thank for this binocular vision. With it, I loved what I saw so much that I couldn\u2019t help it: I was forced to imagine a future for these children where they would know flourishing, where common birds were simply common. And in the meantime, as I kept watching the sanderlings with a pleasure I truly cannot explain, I heard a response to my own juvenile question, For what reason should I go on? The answer is in the very first line of this book. \u201cFor the Birds.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Jenny Odell<\/span> is an Oakland-based artist and the author of<\/em> How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy and<\/em> Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock. This essay is adapted from her introduction to<\/em> Near-Earth Object<\/a>, which will be published in April.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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