Of Greens and Garbage

Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth
The triumph of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ode to the West Wind"

Though in some ways political, and in part a corrective to Wordsworth, Shelley's sublime Ode demands of us a Gnostic-metaphysical interpretation: the seer asks the wind to be made an instrument of prophecy, itself delivering to the poet a revolutionary vision beyond the external world (as catastrophic, primordial Creation/Fall). In Prometheus Unbound, Jupiter is the Demiurge, Joyce's 'hangman God', opposed by Prometheus as Gnostic redeemer, whose fire is the divine spark (or pneuma), the oldest and best part of consciousness alienated by the strangeness of nature.

It is, of course, Earth Day. And it feels, in our native Vermont, as if (nearly) spring. Today at the University of Vermont a wide range of Green-minded people are outside doing Green-minded things. Their telos in many cases is to become the ecological conscience that their society so sorely lacks. And as it has been for years now, the clearest clarion call is over 'recycling awareness'. To that one might say, as the Jacobins once said to the Girondists, enjoy your 'revolution without a revolution!'

It should be no wonder that many large businesses and corporations are getting in on the Earth Day and recycling program game: paradoxically, it works for capitalism, not against it. American capitalism, for all its dynamic wealth generation and commodity movement, generates an astounding amount of trash as its excrement - not just the sheer amount of material stuff that we throw away, but the figurative garbage, the outdated technology and appliances, that piles up in our closets or basements. Though usually distasteful, the trash has its own poetic dignity (perhaps in the same way that billboards and neon lights can be the stuff of urban, futurist poetry), like the defunct attack aircraft used as a canvas for concept art in DeLillo's Underworld.

But the trash remains a powerful allegory: it is a qualitative heap of unmovable matter, the ambivalent Real of late capitalism, which is closed off from our everyday consciousness of economic process. Psychologically, we have as difficult a time imagining garbage still existing in the world (once it's collected at least) as we do imagining our shit, semen and urine surviving once they're out of sight. Here, then, resides the dark truth of our efforts to change the world by recycling: the utopian dream of the seamless recovery of our garbage, which will be reinserted into products without remainder, is the ultimate capitalist dream. The free circulation of garbage is the free circulation of capital. And the Greens tirelessly work to deprive us even of a useful, and potentially revealing, metaphor.

Now, one can trace a line from Shelley, undoubtedly a man of the Left in his day, and his Romantic contemporaries back through Milton to Spenser, and forward through Whitman to Crane, Stevens and Ashbery. Each remarkably original and New, they nevertheless contain within their work (at least) one important epistemological similarity: that Gnostic animosity towards nature. Of course, this is an ontological difference, not an ecological one. But if the predominant liberal community is going to revolutionize our approach to the environment without a revolution, then Prometheus, humanity's first subversive agent, is destined to meet his ironic end at least once more.