A Close Reading of ‘Surface Waters and Underground Seas’ from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962)
One way we can construct a causal chain that ties the deaths of living beings to our indiscriminate use of pesticides is by materialising the rhizomatic connections between living things on earth. Carson deftly achieves this connection in the following passage:
The passage offers the idea of going deeper within the syntax through the interventions initiated by the hyphens. This urges us to see beyond our initial glance at a body water, to go beneath the subsiding tide, before coming up for air at the end of the sentence. As we proceed deeper within this intervention, Carson uses a mix of asyndeton and polysyndeton to literalise the unexpected connections between invisible green cells and racoons. The commas and conjunctions erase any presumed boundaries between cells and plankton, fish and birds, since they feed, breathe and exist with one another. There is also an abundance of fricatives in words like ‘drifting’, ‘through’ and ‘fishes’ which causes friction; perhaps a literal fusing of the apparent boundaries between these organisms and the water. This fusion suggests that we cannot have minks without plankton, or birds without fish; life depends on other life.Water must also be thought of in terms of the chains of life it supports – from the small-as-dust green cells of the drifting plant plankton, through the minute water-fleas to the fishes that strain plankton from the water and are in turn eaten by other fishes or by birds, minks, racoons – in an endless cyclic transfer of materials from life to life.
This co-dependence is not immediate to the human eye. Our indiscriminate use of pesticides reveals our monistic view of food production; one which overlooks the flow-on effects of protecting crops from pests or disease. But if we allow our anthropocentric gaze to fall back on itself, if we watch as the tide subsides, we can see beneath the water-level of our ignorance to find that birds feed on the fish that feed on the water-fleas that feed on the plankton...
Yet this life-sustaining chain which connects all living things within water worlds is also the very chain that pesticides hijack. Carson describes how “the amount [of DDT] found in the flesh [of living beings] always exceeded the original concentration in water” when analysing the Clear Lake in San Francisco (a tantalising name for a lake whose depths are currently covered with a soft black ooze). Like the poison which severs the connections between lifeforms, Carson’s sentences begin to separate interconnected lifeforms; “the plankton contained as much as 5.3 parts per million”, the “California gulls had built up concentrations of more than 2,000 parts per million.” Here language and syntax plays a part in individualising species; the full stops separate the species, the numbers obfuscate reality, the signifier ‘plankton’ kills off the signified. “Even though no trace of DDT could be found in the Lake after 12 months of its usage,” Carson writes, “it lived on and grew in the lives of others.”
The poison has flow-on consequences since life depends on other life. The same lethal particles lodged in the gull were once metabolised by the plankton further along the food chain. And so something like a chain that sustains life becomes malevolent. No longer is there a feeling of things becoming ‘less intense, violent or severe’ as a flood subsides or order restores. Instead, there is a gradual cleaving at the chain by invisible poison. And so if we think of a chain of life connected by the loops in a repeated ‘S’, it becomes slowly shorn off by pesticides, cleaved to a single ‘C’.
And so the ‘C’ replaces the ‘S’; subside becomes subcide.
To see the whole chain of destruction caused by pesticides requires humans to see across different scales; from the heady-heights of a gull in flight to the plankton existing in subterranean waters. Carson is a master at fluctuating between scales:
Carson’s use of asyndeton mobilises words like water which stream through the passage as it does through rock and soil. In the absence of conjunctions, the initial word ‘rain’ is carried through the sentence without interruption, lodging itself in the commas and surfaces of words before finding its place in the valleys. We follow micro rain drops into a macro terrain - from visible to invisible spaces - through a topography that Carson constructs with words and their sounds. Take the phrase ‘rising under hills, sinking beneath valleys.’ Here the repeated trochaic feet of stressed-unstressed syllables create an interchange of rise and depression which can be mapped like so:Rain, falling on the land, settles down through pores and cracks in soil and rocks, penetrating deeper and deeper until eventually it reaches a zone where all the pores of the rick are filled with water, a dark, subsurface sea, rising under hills, sinking beneath valleys.
These words form a topography much like the hills and valleys of California.
The modulations in sounds produces a destabilising quality for the human reader - a motion-sickness of sorts - who hear the vast valleys beneath them, or the looming hills ahead of them.
And so to truly see the chains of destruction initiated by our unregulated use of pesticides, a destabilisation must take place. We must fluctuate between scales to take in the loaded consequences of our actions. We must remain attentive to the literal signs of our destruction in both sight and sound. And we must remain attentive to the small slips in language that cannot be heard but nevertheless turn words into something vastly devastating. While we might remain ignorant to the silences of Spring, we cannot help but see it subciding.
George Raptis (z5206747)