Marginal worlds Group 1
Robert Frost's poem, A Brook In the City, describes a city's violent process of construction over a geographical location historically occupied by a brook. The poem perpetuates the conception of nature as a defiant force struggling against the constant development of urban environment. Frost does, however, generate a tension between man-made and natural worlds that creates the potential for the emergence of a hybrid term such as ‘natureculture’; an esoteric, eco-minded neologism that highlights the inherent interconnectedness of these binary forces.
What is the significance of Frost opening the poem with an image of a farmhouse? A farmhouse is after all neither obviously urban nor natural, but rather caught in a sort of halfway point between the two. It is ‘almost-authenticity’, ‘almost-naturalness’, ‘almost innocence’ in comparison to the brook which is these qualities fully. Perhaps by opening the poem with an image of a farmhouse “linger[ing]”, followed by the question “But what about the brook..?”, the speaker is urging us not to mistake the farmhouse for nature, not to let this placeholder represent the real thing. This would make sense considering the following metaphor of the house being “held” by the brook “as in an elbow crook”, which presents the brook as somewhat of a parent figure or the ‘essence’ of the relationship. Sure, the farmhouse lingers (we might hear the speaker say), but don’t forget what has happened to the thing of real beauty and majesty that now lies buried beneath our feet.
The speaker is asking after the brook as one who “knew” it, a verb that is problematic. The speaker ‘knowing’ the brook in this context does suggest a sort of familiarity and amicability between human and brook, an anthropomorphised friendship. At the same time, to ‘know’ something slides quickly into ‘understanding’ something, ‘representing’ something, ‘commanding’ something, ‘dominating’ something. While a sense of playful innocence and vitality is generated in these lines through the verbs “dipped”, “leap” and “tossed”, and the brook’s agency suggested by the word “impulse”, there also does seems to linger in these lines a subtle sense of domination. Maybe it is in the way the speaker “made” the brook leaps his/her knuckle, or tossed the flower in to “try” its currents, as though the brook is passive and something that can be easily manipulated.
This sense of the brook’s powerlessness is reinforced in the following lines as the speaker describes the process of the city being built over it. In the line “is wood water to serve a brook the same?” the speaker is equating the tree’s wood with the brook’s water and so drawing a parallel between the fate of the burning apple trees and the brook cemented underground. The sibilance in “stauch”, “source”, “cinder”, “sewer” mixes with the assonance of the ‘d’ sound in “dumped”, “down”, “deep”, “dungeon” to create a harsh, thumping sound which accentuates the violence of the takeover. Suggesting the brook can still “live and run” in its new dungeon makes it sound like a vulnerable, wild animal, a far way away from the “immortal force” it once was earlier in the poem.
The final musing on the part of the speaker rhetorically questions whether the brook can ever really be ‘cemented’ down or whether it lives on in our everyday, busy urban lives in the form of guilt. It suggests that the city’s inhabitants’ domination of nature will come back to haunt them, more in a psychological sense rather than the physical threat of climate change we are experiencing now. This final image contains a suggestion of ‘natureculture’: rather than nature existing on one side of a line, and culture existing on the other, the relationship is better represented as a line with the endpoints glued together to create a circle.
Short film
This short film reveals and summarises the complexity of the assumption that the world of humanity, of culture, of our lives is somehow seperate to the natural world. In a world full of screens and fluorescent lights it can be hard to remember our connection to the world around us, nature is a part of us and we are a part of nature
Photo Essay
This photo essay investigates the notion of 'marginal worlds' in relation to 'subterranean worlds'; envisioning marginal worlds as 'worlds beneath'. 'Subterranean', refers to something existing, occurring or done under the earth's surface. Secret; concealed.
(1.)
James Terrel's 'Roden Crater'
The Roden Crater, located in the Painted Desert region of Northern Arizona, is a large-scale artwork created within a volcanic cinder cone by light and space artist James Turrell. The artist acquired the dormant cinder cone in 1977.
Reflecting human visual and psychological perception, Turrel's Roden Crater establishes a controlled environment for experiencing and contemplating light within a highly designed subterranean, marginal world. Situated within the tradition of American landscape art beginning in the 1960s, requiring a pilgrimage through the remote desert at night as an integral part of the art viewing experience.
In this work, Terrel has drawn upon and adopted principles of 'naked eye observatory'. The precariously precise nature of this project is evident through the artist's painstaking process of calculating the excavation and alignment of the crater's tunnels and apertures to make sure they reveal the sky, filter the direct sun, and project vivid celestial visions into the subterranean space.
"The east portal, the alpha (east) tunnel and the sun/moon chamber act in concert as a monumental camera obscura, or pinhole camera." (https://www.designboom.com/art/roden-crater-james-turrell-skyspaces-north-arizona-desert-02-15-2016/)
With a limited invasion of its surrounding environment, only the subterranean space has been transformed: "internally the red and black cinder has been transformed into special engineered spaces where the cycles of geologic and celestial time can be directly experienced." (http://rodencrater.com/about/)
image from:
https://i-d.vice.com/en_us/article/59b8d5/5-things-you-might-not-know-about-james-turell-from-nude-gallery-tours-to-drakes-woes(2)
Sewers of New York and surrounding urban legends
Myths surrounding the New York sewers, their origin and existence, especially the presence of albino crocodiles, reflect the association between subterranean (marginal) worlds and cultural associations with abnormality, as well as the connection between limited environments and mutation. Some say that New Yorkers bought allegators and tried to flush them when they grew disconcertingly large.
Tales of mutant crocs state that they: "...would live the majority of [their] life in an environment [without] sunlight, and thus it would [eventually] lose its eyesight and the pigment in its hide and that the reptile would grow to be completely albino, pure white in color with red or pink eyes. Another reason why an albino alligator would retreat to an underground sewer is because of its vulnerability to the sun in the wild; as there is no dark pigment in the creature's skin, it has no protection from the sun, which makes it very hard for it to survive in the wild." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewer_alligator)
image source :
https://www.flickr.com/photos/neelin/6300683309/in/photolist-5T2i7Z-5oQ5mV-aALDCR-268F4-cprKiW-znP34e-rCyUQg
(3.)
The Great Stalacpipe Organ
The Great Stalacpipe Organ is an electrically actuated lithophone located in Luray Caverns, Virginia, USA.
A custom console produces the tapping of variously sized ancient stalactites with solenoid-actuated rubber mallets to make corresponding sounds. A solenoid is a type of electromagnet that generates a controlled magnetic field. When a key is pressed, an electrical pulse is delivered to the striker before vibrating the natural formations.(http://mentalfloss.com/article/75920/stalactite-organ-worlds-largest-musical-instrument).
Able to operate without a player, the stalacpipe organ reflects post-human notions 'recognising the specific abilities and capacities of anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic beings alike...(an) expanded definition of life (that) also allows for the inclusion of and interaction with technological artefacts and thus accounts for technological mediation ('mechanic autopoiesis').' (Rosi Braidotti, 'Posthuman Critical Theory', The Postman Glossary (2018)
The great stalactite organ harnesses the affordances of small, isolated, controlled environments to produce subterranean sound, culminating in an other-worldly subterranean experience. It is the largest musical instrument in the world, built by the inventor, mathematician and scientist Leland Sprinkle.
image source:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/mother-nature-pentagon-mathematician-created-worlds-largest-instrument
(4.)
Giant Crystal Caves in Mexciok
This image of Mexican giant crystal caves exhibits the miraculous growth enables by the controlled environments of marginal-subterranean worlds. Giant Crystal Cave is connected to the Naica Mine at 300m deep, in Naica, Chihuahua, Mexico. The cave is largely unexplored due to extreme heat conditions. The isolated, 'marginal' situation of the crystals allowed their slow crystallisation process over the course of at least 500,000 years.
source :
https://www.flickr.com/photos/8870290@N06/543180734
(5.)
Underground Railway
Underground railways reflect the hybrid term 'nature-culture' that embodies the concepts contained within the 'brook in the city' poem. Underground railways exist as a result of human tunnelling underground to form man-made marginal, subterranean environments that exist below cities. Whilst the poem is about a brook that is thrown beneath a city in the process of development and construction, the earth around the negative space of a dug-out tunnel of earth is lined with brick to make it feel like an urban space.
The Hoover Dam
"I walked across the marble star map that traces a sidereal revolution of the equinox and fixes forever, the Reclamation man had told me, for all time and for all people who can read the stars, the date the dam was dedicated.
The star map was, he had said, for when we were all gone and the dam was left.
I had not thought much of it when he said it, but I thought of it then, with the wind whining and the sun dropping behind a mesa with the finality of a sunset in space. Of course that was the image I had seen always, seen it without quite realizing what I saw, a dynamo finally free of man, splendid at last in its absolute isolation, transmitting power and releasing water to a world where no one is."
(Joan Didion, 1970, 'At the Dam')
The Hoover dam is a concrete arch-gravity dam, located in the Black Canyon of the Colorado Rover, and can be described as a 'marginal world' due to its position of in-betweeness on the border between the US states of Nevada and Arizona.
"The bronze sculptures at the dam itself evoke muscular citizens of a tomorrow that never came, sheaves of wheat clutched heavenward, thunderbolts defied. Winged Victories guard the flagpole. The flag whips in the canyon wind. An empty Pepsi-Cola can clatters across the terrazzo. The place is perfectly frozen in time."
Joan Didion's descriptions of the Hoover dam enforce its connection to the concept of deep time, or geologic time, through her sublime vision of the dam as a 'dynamo finally free of man, splendid...in its absolute isolation'
"I used to wonder what it was about the dam that made me think of it at times and in places where I once thought of the Mindanao Trench, or of the stars wheeling in their courses, or of the words As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen."
Like the statacpipe organ, Didion's vision of the dam highlights posthuman notions recognising the individual potential of non-human elements, post-humanism being "(an) expanded definition of life (that) also allows for the inclusion of and interaction with technological artefacts".
(6.)
Iceberg
Icebergs are natural formations aligning with the closely associated ideas of the subterranean and the marginal. An iceberg is a large chunk of freshwater ice, floating freely in open water after becoming detached from its original glacier. About 80-90% of an iceberg resides below sea level, causing them to drift with the currents rather than the wind.
"iceberg" originates from the Dutch word ijsberg, meaning 'ice mountain'. I think that this etymological connection between icebergs and mountains highlights their similarities- both having a 'secret', 'concealed' underside that is hidden from view; an opposing, conversely situated, 'marginal world'.
Grotto in an iceberg, photographed during the British Antarctic Expedition of 1911-1913, 5 Jan 1911
source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nationallibrarynz_commons/4078337967/
Critical Review
In my critical and creative engagement with the concept of marginal worlds, I have gained an understanding of the complex nature of marginal worlds- their unexpected potential for growth, adaptation, meditation, creation and human artistic intervention.
In my photo essay I investigated the notion of 'marginal worlds' in relation to 'subterranean worlds'; envisioning marginal worlds as 'worlds beneath'. 'Subterranean', refers to something existing, occurring or done under the earth's surface: Secret; concealed.
According to Kathrin Huppop: “Subterranean environments are characterized not only by continuous darkness but also by a reduced variability in the number of specific abiotic conditions such as moisture, temperature, and water chemistry, as well as by isolation and restriction in space” (Kathrin Hüppop, in Encyclopedia of Caves (Second Edition), 2012)
Subterranean worlds are controlled environments; receiving limited supplies compared to the 'mainstream' world with its abundance of light, exposure to elements, and varied ecosystems. It is for these reasons that such worlds can be described as 'marginal', for they exist 'on the margins'. The strangely mystic, indefinite appeal of worlds at the margins is described in Rachel Carson’s ‘The Marginal World’ where she states: ‘Always the edge of the sea remains an elusive and indefinable boundary’
Subterranean worlds are clearly marginal worlds due to their isolation and sense of separateness from the mainstream world; the ‘underside’ of a town, an 'underworld', the ‘underbelly’ of a city. They exist as under-spaces with limited supply and variability such as caves, sewers, and drains.
Marginal spaces, however, can be transformed with human, artistic intervention; exemplifying their sonic qualities to instrumental effect, as is evident in the ‘Great Stalacpipe Organ’, even shaping the way light is directed into their enclosed chambers to create monumental cameras (James Terrel’s ‘Roden Crater’). Turrell’s artwork forms a ‘naked eye observatory’ that extends the normal capacity for seeing of the human eye to witness the constant movement of earthly and celestial events, as well as subverting the human-centric notions of the ‘artist’s hand’ or the ‘artist’s genius’ through creating a work based around direct natural, geological experience. Post-humanism is a critical approach displacing anthropocentric, Western philosophical notions of the ‘human’ with its implied, hierarchical conceptions of gender, class, ethnicity, and rationality. These two marginal spaces, the volcanic interior that was purchased and reconfigured by Terrel, and the cave that houses the Great Stalacpipe Organ, embody an autonomous quality that sees a rejection of the ‘human’, as well as subverting dualisms between the human and the nonhuman, the living and the nonliving, the animal and the technical. Both of these engineered marginal spaces use contemporary science to challenge traditional understandings of human embodiment.
Their isolation from the "main" world also sees the cultivation of fascinating, deviant species, or the growth of spectacular abnormalities away from human sight or intervention, such as the Mexican Giant Crystal Caves. This spectacular growth was permitted by extreme heat conditions, that kept humans at bay, over a crystallisation process over many thousands of years. According to Rachel Carson, in ‘Marginal Worlds’, ‘only the most hardy and adaptable can survive in a region so mutable, yet the area between the tide lines is crowded with plants and animals…where the casual observer would say there is no life, it lies deep in the sand, in burrows and tubes and passageways”
The deeply meditative appeal of marginal worlds, which frequently provide perspective into the nature of ‘deep time’, is articulated by Carson who describes the allure of ‘the edge of the sea, where the drama of life played its first scene on earth and perhaps even its prelude; where the forces of evolution are at work today, as they have been since the appearance of what we know as life; and where the spectacle of living creatures faced by the cosmic realities of their world is crystal clear’ Marginal worlds are particularly illuminating spaces in regards to the concept of ‘deep time’, seeming to exist as pure spaces that act as microcosms for cosmic events on greater scales, is evident through Didion’s description of her sublime encounter with the Hoover dam which has a stately presence of timelessness. The transcendental appeal of the marginal is also exemplified with Terrel’s Rodin Crater where the internal space of a red and black cinder has been into meticulously designed spaces conducive to the direct experience of geologic and celestial time.
References:
Joan Didion
Kathrin Huppop
(Rosi Braidotti, 'Posthuman Critical Theory', The Postman Glossary (2018)
Carson Marginal Worlds
