Elisa Gabbert, "In Nature"

Elisa Gabbert's "In Nature," for me, remarks upon a scholarly problem, if not a philosophical one. The problem does seem far removed from our emotions or needs: Who cares what "nature" is? What does it matter, as she says in the first line, "I can think, but rarely of nature?" The car is breaking down, it's impossible to afford a house, health insurance would be nice. We're struggling to focus on "nature" in the most fundamental sense, e.g. the planet is burning to death but we can't master a collective action problem to stop it.

The trouble is that we have a thousand years of treatises which see the term as the foundation of science (i.e. natural philosophy), trying to think through all it implies. For the past, "nature" isn't just the natural world, a place we go to in order to hold Burning Man or become triathletes. It's the question of how we fit into the cosmos. How does our behavior, say, relate to that of a frog? If plants can be used as medicine, does that imply purpose within the whole itself? What is human rationality meant to do? These are some of the questions "nature" implies, but the trouble is that they have to be immediate for us. They're not.

If we want any sort of dialogue with the past–if we want to try for wisdom–we probably want an intuitive, felt sense of what they meant by nature. So it goes:

In Nature (from The New York Review of Books)
Elisa Gabbert

I can think, but rarely of nature.
I look with my back to the landscape,
As if in a Claude glass.

A cheat code. Ninety-nine lives,
Which might as well be infinite
Unless this isn’t the first one?

Nietzsche said There’s a rollicking kindness
That looks like malice.
I ascribe that “kindness” to fate.

A breeze carries unknown pathogens,
Information that can’t want to die
Because it’s not alive.

What it wants is desire.
A barrier to crossing
The chasm of the day.

Gabbert describes, no pun intended, the most unnatural reaction to a landscape. "I can think, but rarely of nature," she intones. I can remember when I've been dragged out to a place with breathtaking beauty--forests covering the world with a rich green, mountains daring you to ask what the view is like from their peak--and I'd rather be back at home watching reruns because I am not in the mood. That's not what's happening with Gabbert. "I look with my back to the landscape, / As if in a Claude glass."

She's an artist with a tool. The Claude glass allows for gradations to be seen, simplified, and used. You can create a technically amazing product with all the detail. The data, the information. But this isn't "nature" in the older sense. There's no contemplating a swamp and wondering what it means for creatures to dwell in a mess of earth and water. There's no sense of how the place regards you, how it sees an observer or intruder.

In fact, the notion one can do nothing but analyze nature comes from the very fact of the past. The landscape has been drawn before. Every organism within put in a book and given a Latin name. The chemical structure of the region noted and its effect on air temperature and pressure documented. When Gabbert says she has "A cheat code," she's saying she can't see because this landscape has already been seen. Seen too much, by "Ninety-nine lives" which aren't hers but are? If everyone writes so others know, they are giving of themselves, no? They've created her, a being defined by knowledge but strangely not rationality. Can she even identify herself? She can't tell which one of the ninety-nine she actually is.

The loss of the older idea of nature is acute. When we're told "There's a rollicking kindness / That looks like malice," we've got to wonder about the good things, the very good things, hiding behind cruel guises. Gabbert wonders if the cruelty actually is illusory. She puts "kindness" in scare quotes and says fate is responsible for it. Maybe what feels terrible is terrible. In this case, we've traded "nature" for information about nature. Useful information, powerful information. Anyone coming to the Permian Basin and seeing endless numbers of pumpjacks can marvel at our energy economy. Note that we use specialized geologists to locate sand perfect for fracking.

Is this what we're fated to do? To progress at the expense of everything else? Thing is, the natural world is real and will overthrow our most ironclad analysis. A breeze blows, carrying "unknown pathogens." We only see it as undeath, "Information that doesn't want to die / Because it's not alive." But it doesn't matter how we see it. Germs have undone untold numbers of civilizations, structures of rationality which implicitly promised being the solution to every problem presented.

"What it wants is desire. / A barrier to crossing / The chasm of day." The germs, the "unknown pathogens," point to us. "Nature" as it was in the past disappeared as a conversational mode, but our desires, natural and unnatural, did not. And as long as we want, days will be a challenge, never solved by all the data and information we use as a lens. We're back to the question of nature, back to wondering how we can accumulate near endless power but not able to understand what to do with it.