This essay is predicated on a direct link between our current moment in the Anthropocene, the concept of “slow violence,” and the notion of silence as it emerges in the work of William Wordsworth and John Cage. The linkage between slow violence and the Anthropocene has been theorized adroitly by Rob Nixon in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011). My own contribution involves bringing Wordsworth, Cage, and pedagogy into the picture, and to that end I trace out three points or positions in what follows. First, I address very provisionally what I take to be an important and largely unremarked link between the compositional strategies of Wordsworth and Cage, specifically the role of silence as envisioned by the two writers. Next, I share a sound recording produced with my students as part of a class on environmental citizenship, a recording whose compositional procedure was inspired by Wordsworth and Cage. Finally, I ask whether silence, as method, ethos, pedagogy, and spiritual practice, constitutes a viable politics, or whether, as seems the case with so many other related aesthetic practices and theories developed within the Anthropocene (e.g., personal “development,” “freedom,” the concept of “nature,” etc.), it ultimately threatens to fold back into itself and become yet another form of solipsism or liberal subjectivism.
A word about the Anthropocene and the concept of liberal subjectivity more broadly figured: as readers of this volume are well aware, the Anthropocene marks our present interval in time, a moment going back (at least) several centuries, during which many geologically significant conditions and processes have been profoundly altered by human activities. As students of Romanticism are similarly aware, its texts and premises occupy an oddly oblique position vis-à-vis the ravages of the Anthropocene. That is, even as Romanticism arises as response to what “man has made of man” (Wordsworth, “Lines Written in Early Spring” ), arguably its privileging of a liberal, democratic subject—autonomous, free, appetitive, propertied, universal, and self-willed—provides the “natural” grounds for global capitalism. Whether silence as a Romantic concept cuts into and denatures this subjectivity, offering in its place a different defamiliarized subject, able in some measure to resist neoliberalism’s thrall, or whether silence merely resounds as yet another form of acquiescence will be one of this essay’s key concerns.
In order to frame what follows and also to set up a kind of resonance, I want to begin with three quotations, from which I derive three propositions. First, the quotations:
- “ . . . there came a pause / Of silence such as baffled his best skill” —Wordsworth, “There Was a Boy”
- “Where none of these other goals [preexisting form, intentionality] is present, silence becomes something else—not silence at all, but sounds . . . ambient sounds” —Cage (1973, 22)
- Chance composition frees “the ego from its taste and memory, its concern for profit and power . . . silencing the ego so that the rest of the world has a chance to enter the ego’s own experience whether that be outside or inside.” —Cage (1979)
And now, the corresponding propositions:
- silence is that which baffles our best skill (that is, our intentions to control outcomes, to commodify, or to force solutions)
- silence is not the absence of sound
- silence allows the sounds of the “world” (that which is outside the ego—screened or merely unnoticed) to enter in
Let me say at the outset that it seems to me an extremely difficult thing to try to put these theorems into practice as a writer, researcher, and teacher. It is my small hope that at least some of the writing and thinking that follows will be attuned to the spirit of silence, even as it attempts to say more clearly what it is and how it functions.
And, When There Came a Pause
One of Romanticism’s primary texts for thinking about silence is, of course, Wordsworth’s “There Was a Boy.” Arguably, the most important recent reading of that poem belongs to Anne-Lise François. For François, neither New Historicist nor psychoanalytic readings can account for the “mood of quiet reception” in the poem (167–68). But I confess that I am interested in a much more vulgar and instrumentalist kind of reading. I want to account not so much for the quiet, receptive mood but rather for the sense of being violently opened up by silence. Here are the pertinent and well-known passages:
And there, with fingers interwoven, both handsPressed closely palm to palm and to his mouthUplifted, he, as through an instrument,Blew mimic hootings to the silent owlsThat they might answer him.—And they would shout5Across the watery vale, and shout again,Responsive to his call,—with quivering peals,And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loudRedoubled and redoubled; concourse wildOf jocund din! And, when there came a pause10Of silence such as baffled his best skill:Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hungListening, a gentle shock of mild surpriseHas carried far into his heart the voiceOf mountain-torrents; or the visible scene15Would enter unawares into his mindWith all its solemn imagery, its rocks,Its woods, and that uncertain heaven receivedInto the bosom of the steady lake. (The Prelude 173)
Like François, I want to resist the impulse to impute traumatic origins or triggers (personal or historical) to the radical opening of the boy’s heart and mind. Instead, I want to address the ambient and objective nature of the violence contained or revealed within Wordsworth’s silence. I borrow the concept of “objective” or ambient violence from Slavoj Žižek, who borrows it from Hannah Arendt, Freud, and Walter Benjamin; I am also indebted to Timothy Morton’s linkage of the Anthropocene to a violent metaphysics of presence (Morton, “How I Learned” 259–60; Žižek 9–14). Objective or slow violence can be correlated with the phenomenon of microaggression and/or microtrauma—a type of ideological violence that is not particularly visible and may not even register for its victims but does its damage nonetheless. Geoffrey Hartman comments on the violent nature of silence in Wordsworth, reminding us that muteness in his poetry is often experienced as “close to a mutilation” (148). Yet what interests me is not only the mutilated and mutilating “shock” and the “surprise,” but also the fact that silence reveals, or maybe silence merely is, the most common everyday sounds and images—the same rivers, rocks, lakes, and trees that the boy would have seen every day of his life. The question, then, is twofold: what kept the boy from seeing and hearing the solemn imagery and sound before the pause; and, what is it in or about this silence that makes the revelation possible?
It is not at all my intention to attempt yet another reading of the poem. Instead I want for now to focus on a single word, a word that both François and Hartman seize upon in their readings of the poem: “unawares.” The shock of encountering a form of silence, which, again, I am arguing is not the absence of sound, leads us into the realm of John Cage’s poetics—Cage, who famously said, “I have nothing to say, and I am saying it” (Silence 109). Thinking Wordsworth through Cage allows us to see that “unawares” in this context means not only without knowledge but also without intentionality. What is more, it reveals something like anamnesis, an uncanny dreamlike state in which “a gentle shock of mild surprise” signals the obliteration of the borders of the everyday self, and with them, everyday temporality. For Cage, as I will show, the desire to compose in a state of nonintentionality leads him to embrace practices of chance composition. For Wordsworth, nonintentionality comes about in two distinctly different ways. In many poems, there seems to be a sensual or emotional overload, a sign perhaps of perceptual or psychic overdetermination—think of the opening stanzas of “Lines Written in Early Spring,” for example (“I heard a thousand blended notes . . .”)—which leads then to a kind of stupor, a hollowed-out state of receptiveness. Alternatively, as in the particular case of “There Was a Boy,” it may be that failure itself provides the catalyst (when one’s own “skill” is baffled), rather than sensual pleasure or overload.
Either way, for both writers, new forms of music or poetry require new forms of listening. Here is Cage in conversation discussing this new mode of attentiveness: ‘When I hear music, it seems to me that someone is talking, and talking about his feelings, or about his ideas, of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic here on sixth avenue for instance, I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound. What it does is it gets louder and quieter, and it gets higher and lower, and it gets longer and shorter . . . it does all those things . . . I’m completely satisfied with that. I don’t need sound to talk to me. ( “John Cage about Silence” )’ Cage’s openness, his attention to the activity of sound (within traffic for example), is contrasted to the sound of someone talking. Here of course we hear echoes of Gertrude Stein, where the intentionality of “resemblance” obscures rather than reveals meaning (175). For Cage, as for Stein, it seems as though the only truly living (one cannot say “meaningful,” since Cage rejects the notion that sound must mean) verbal utterances are those denuded of intention. From his earliest writing, Cage addresses this nonintentionality, arguing that not all silences are equal.
(Silence 22–23)
Building on Bergson’s theories of duration, Cage emphasizes the interrelation of time and space, not as a priori forms of perception, but rather as aspects of sonorous and rhythmic activity (Silence 97; Crnković 180). Cage writes that in traditional composition silence has an important but subservient role to play insofar as it structures the sound into “a strict division of parts” (Silence 18–19). In “new” music, silence is freed from its merely structural aspects; importantly, we are reciprocally freed from the structuring stranglehold of our own intentions (X: Writings ix).
Cage recognizes that in all ambient sound there is pitch, duration, amplitude, etc. It falls back on the listener to pay attention to this activity of sound, not in order to recombine elements in more original and unique ways (e.g., Roland Barthes’s privileging of writerly versus readerly texts), but rather to listen with “mouth shut and . . . ears open,” or, as Wilfred Bion would later suggest to psychoanalysts, to learn to listen without memory or desire (Cage, Silence 49; Bion 41). Thus, in a new awareness of “silence,” there is recognition of something like a radically democratic, egalitarian, and “horizontal” impulse—guided by a willingness to let go of preexisting structure and the need to control and/or possess (Crnković 172–73; Diaz 56).
Contingency and Ambience: A Thousand Blended Notes
It was this awareness, and with it this sense of unknowing, that I hoped to impart to my students in a class on environmental citizenship cotaught in 2016 with a political geographer. The other primary intertext that I asked the students to read, besides “There was a Boy” and some passages from Cage’s Composition in Retrospect (ca. 1983), was Wordsworth’s “Lines Written in Early Spring.” I emphasized to them on the first day the concept of contingency, and in the next class period, ambience. I also handed out Wordsworth’s “Fenwick” note for “Lines Written in Early Spring.” Interestingly, the note supports a more open—we might even call it horizontal—reading of the poem, not at all what one would expect from the poet of reflection.
That is, faced with a poem that seems on one level to be arguing for a deeper meaning at the core of natural pleasure (in contrast to human manufacture), the note seems unconcerned with meaning at all, striving only to recall sensuous detail, that is, “pleasant thoughts” (pleasure) with no “sad thoughts” (ideology) brought to mind. Wordsworth paints a picture of silence whose intense particularity of detail is worthy of his sister: ‘The brook fell down a sloping rock so as to make a waterfall considerable for that country, and across the pool below had fallen a tree, an ash if I rightly remember, from which rose perpendicularly, boughs in search of the light intercepted by the deep shade above. The boughs bore leaves of green that for want of sunshine had faded into almost lily-white; and from the underside of this natural sylvan bridge depended long and beautiful tresses of ivy which waved gently in the breeze that might poetically speaking be called the breath of the waterfall. This motion varied of course in proportion to the power of water in the brook. (Fenwick 36–37)’ Wordsworth’s recollection of the scene, perhaps like the recollection of the poem, is marked by moments of accident and contingency—the fallen tree, the lily-white leaves, the varied motion of the ivy. There also seems to be an erotic element to the note—the blending of “tresses” and “breath” for example—a kind of psychic remainder that does not make it into the poem. Yet perhaps, as Freud would later argue, we are dealing with a mode of memory that functions not so much like a camera with an oversensitive shutter-release button (click, click, click), but rather as a collection of memory-traces, which unconsciously selects an image that comes “halfway” up to meet the remembering subject (318). In other words, the depiction (in the note) of the fallen ash whose branches are “in search of the light” anticipates and retroactively confirms the line (in the poem), “The budding twigs spread out their fan” (Major Works 80). Thus, the visual richness of the scene confirms for us that imagistic quietude, like its aural counterpart silence, is not the absence of information, but is instead the ground and possibility of change.
Attempting to comprehend fully the open and ambient nature of the note and its relation to Wordsworth’s theory of composition led me to offer my students a few impressionistic words about “spontaneous overflow,” basically a gloss of the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads. This seems to me now wholly inadequate, primarily because the “continued influx” of feelings and thoughts that the “Preface” describes seems to have a teleological thrust, an almost physiological drive towards the ultimate and miraculous production of the poet and the poem (Wordsworth, Major Works 598). A much better place to begin would have been the preface to the 1815 collection of poems. In that work, written 13 years after the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth adopts a tone closer to Cage’s. No longer is imaginative coloring “thrown over” raw perception as it was in the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, although meter and associative links may be “superadded.” Instead, the poet represents things “as they are in themselves,” in all of their stubborn facticity (Major Works 597). Thus, an ash tree that has fallen across a brook requires no additional ornament. Like Cage, Wordsworth’s ideal poet does not need nature to talk to him. The “thousand blended notes” of the poem are represented synesthetically, as sound image to be experienced—not, I want to stress, as text to be deciphered or interpreted:
I heard a thousand blended notes,While in a grove I sate reclined,In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughtsBring sad thoughts to the mind.To her fair works did Nature link5The human soul that through me ran;And much it grieved my heart to thinkWhat man has made of man. (Major Works 80)
The “fair works” of nature are linked to the human soul as much through sound and rhythm (“sweet mood,” “sad thoughts,” and “fair works” are all arguably spondaic) as through the supposed psychology or even argument of the poem. Furthermore, it is as though the Fenwick note were itself a musical score for the poem.
That is, we “hear” the brook and rustling leaves not only, or even primarily, by association (for the Wordsworth of 1815, a feature of the imagination and fancy—one of several prerequisite “powers” of the poet), nor by prosodic “invention” (another power), but, more importantly, through observation and description, the first power of the poet in Wordsworth’s new classificatory system: “The ability to observe with accuracy things as they are in themselves, and with fidelity to describe them unmodified by any passion or feeling existing in the mind of the Describer” (Major Works 626). The issue is not whether or not it is possible to observe anything without the mind of the “Describer” from entering in to some degree (it isn’t), but rather, what opens up for us (and for the poem) when we attempt these types of decentered observations.
For twenty-first-century readers, it means rethinking the poet of spontaneous overflow as also the poet of detached observation.
It means recognizing that, for Wordsworth, all the potential elements of the poem are present in the silence of a properly observed scene. Even philosophical consideration—for example, the idea “what man has made of man”—comes neither from the poet’s or speaker’s interior nor from the cultural and social surround; it is not dialectically produced through the speaker’s contemplation of nature. Rather, like early industrial pollution, the effects of enclosure on rural populations, or a waywardly discharged soldier, it is copresent in nature, and thus “linked” to the speaker by unobtrusive observation rather than through busy association. Like the “tresses of ivy” that form part of the sonorous experience of the poem, ideas, for Wordsworth, even philosophical or political ideas, are “dependent”—that is, linked to raw data through the perceptive faculties. One requires a degree of silence in order to be unobtrusively observant.
This is the most benevolent reading I can offer of Wordsworth’s philosophical quandary in this poem. Perhaps this is because being attentive to silence robs us of some of our defensive critical reflexivity. What I mean by this is that much of Wordsworth’s poetry of this period demands to be read and reread with as much naiveté as is manageable. “What man has made of man” seems so naturally self-evident—its iambic evenness reinforces this—that we are not inclined to stop and question what it means. At first, it seems clear that the first “man” is different from the second “man.” If we read it that way, then one reading might be: “what [industrial capitalism] man made of [natural] man.” Or, we might hear: “what [capitalist] man made of [laborer] man,” etc. As I discussed with my students in class—in fact, they pointed it out in the first place—a kind of violence is suggested either way by this line, especially by its fundamental asymmetry. But beyond any empathetic impulse or even well-meaning liberal outrage we might feel in response to that violence, there is nothing in the line that keeps us from reading it as: “what man [as a concept] has made of man [a particular contingent person].” This last reading leads us away from a conceptualized and concretized poet and/or reader, and, like the Winander Boy, towards a decentered observer and percipient.
I am not claiming that Wordsworth’s and Cage’s poetry can be read as part and parcel of a continuous poetics—of course not; in fact, my own slight reading here is tendentious insofar as I leave out any discussion of “I must think, do all I can / That there was pleasure there,” clearly a line that begs to be read in terms of alienation, extreme self-interest, as well as imaginative labor and value, as opposed to mere receptiveness (Major Works 81). Rather, I am merely suggesting that there is, on one level, a similar commitment to disinterested listening involved in the theory and compositional methods of both writers, and a heightened attention to, almost an enthrallment with, ambience.
Hoping to materialize this for my students, I asked a small group of them to go out onto campus and record ambient noise with their smartphones. I then edited them together, trying to allow for chance procedure, in order to recreate something like a Cage composition—or, to put it in Wordsworthian terms, to allow us to hear a thousand blended notes. Here is one mix of that experiment. For students, this was a useful exercise in discovering how to pay attention to environments and to let go of preconceived forms and ideas. That is, we allowed every contingent sound—the wind (it was a windy and unseasonably warm winter day), a ping pong game, muffled voices, the sound of a metal clasp clanging against a metal flagpole, and so on—to enter into and become a part of our mix. Something as seemingly unimportant as solitary footsteps in a corridor or laughter in the food court became an essential part of our recording. It was exhilarating and strange. Yet, we decided after classroom debate about the issue that mere aesthetic attention to, even occupation of, this silence is still an extremely weak form of politics. That is, awareness of environment, when merely aestheticized and not theorized as part of a larger system (i.e., capitalism, the institutional ideologies of higher education, etc.), and especially, when it does not lead to action, doubles back on itself and becomes practice of conformism, a watered-down version of care for the self.
War All the Time; Silence as Container
What then are the political gains, if any, in attending to the activity of sound? Because this question contains within it an unstated assumption about an aesthetic education, namely that it has the power to (even minimally) effect political change, it must be threaded back through the relation between the individual and the collective, the aesthetic and the political, and systematic/symbolic violence and subjective or intersubjective violence as such. With this in mind, let me stipulate that the political dimension of silence as I understand it being theorized through Cage and Wordsworth is something like a container that provides the conditions and the imaginative space for political action.Note: I am using the term “container” in one of the many senses given to it by the psychoanalytic thinker and writer W. S. Bion. Specifically, he suggests the possibility of an unsaturated container, that is, the ability to contain bits and fragments (of experience, dream, etc.) without the need to turn them into a narrative or memory (107–8). That is, it hardly matters if the poem itself has political content. Rather, the formal and compositional strategies of the poem create silences that are, as Cage would say, freed from intention. Unlike, say, a poem that is deeply saturated with political content—for example, Shelley’s “England 1819” —observational poems that are attuned to silence (another obvious example would be “A Slumber Did my Spirit Seal” ) create such containing spaces for the reader. My question then becomes whether or not it is possible to hear also the otherwise unheard gears of neoliberalism and war in our own silences if we listen “unawares.” Wordsworth himself was increasingly insensible to the abstract yet brutal dimension of silence when it came to political matters; as his text “The Convention of Cintra” makes clear, he was not only in favor of war when it augured “liberty,” but also whenever it was merely in the interest of the “nation.” Cage, on the other hand, a pacifist throughout his life, understood that from the perspective of silence, war is as contingent upon the determinate and arbitrary flows of capital as the “thousand blended notes” are upon a fallen ash tree, the wind, or the tresses of ivy in the water. In other words, war forms a part of the symbolically violent background of our experience, and, as such, is always part and parcel of silence: “The world is teeming: anything can / happen . . . The telephone rings . . . / Each person is in the best seat . . . / War begins at any moment” (Silence 96–97).
In a recent conference seminar called “On Worldlessness and Worklessness,” David Clark recalled Spinoza’s statement that peace is not the absence of war. This reverberates with Cage’s (explicit) and Wordsworth’s (implicit) claim that silence is not the absence of sound. In an earlier text on Kant and war, Clark has argued that peace is “not a respite but, quite to the contrary, [it] marks a period of maximal rethinking about the very nature of sociality” (69). He goes on to write: ‘War is not only a punctual event, with a beginning and an end, but also a pervasive milieu of state-sponsored and financialized destruction that penetrates the everyday, that entangles everyone and everything in unredeemable war debts, and whose disfiguring violence extends to the far reaches of the globe. (65)’ Extrapolating from Clark’s remarks, it may be possible that if we listen to the activity of political “peacetime” discourse, we might hear more directly, and without the need for psychological explanation, the activity of war—on the working class, the poor, the planet, in Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, etc.
Just as all silences are not equal, neither are all peacetimes equal. More or less can be at stake, and the citizen may wonder why it feels as though the air is charged with violence. Wordsworth hints at this dissymmetry in the final lines of “There Was a Boy,” lines that challenge the reader to name precisely what or who is being mourned: nature? youth? the boy? an earlier political epoch?
And through that churchyard when my way has ledOn summer-evenings, I believe that thereA long half-hour together I have stoodMute—looking at the grave in which he lies! (The Prelude 175)
Again, as Bergson famously argues, segments of temporality, even when measured carefully, are not equal even to their own durations because some are so saturated with loss and desire. This is how I read the lines “I believe that there / A long half-hour together I have stood / Mute . . .” The speaker cannot determine with accuracy (“I believe”) how long the silent vigil goes on because there is simply no way to measure the durational thickness: how saturated are these reverberations? There is also the instability of the word “together”—to whom does the speaker refer? This uncertainty is attenuated when we consider that, in an early draft, Wordsworth used the first-person singular pronoun in the first verse paragraph, suggesting that the speaker was identical with the boy: “Then, sometimes, in that silence, while I hung / Listening . . .” (The Prelude 492, my emphasis). What we hear in peacetime therefore are conflictual and overlapping temporalities, so saturated with the “pervasive milieu of state-sponsored and financialized destruction” that personal and collective histories and trajectories are conflated (Clark 65). A missed call and the news of a war beginning half a world away consume the same amount of space and data on our screen.
It seems to me that these subjective and collective uncertainties (as well as their effects) form the core of our contemporary experience. Awareness of our own enmeshment within the Anthropocene intensifies as our silences become more and more saturated in late capitalism. Drone strikes, proxy wars, and covert operations take the place of open declarations of war, not to mention Clark’s assertion of our entanglement in the “disfiguring violence” of “unredeemable war debt” (65). Thus, if I were to ask the students in my environmental citizenship class (taught, remember, in the spring of 2016) if they thought that we, as a nation, were currently at war, my guess is that they would say no, or most of them would. I am tempted to say that this is not because they (or we) are too naïve, but rather because we are not naïve enough. We have not stood long enough, “mute—looking at the grave.” We have not learned, that is, to listen “unawares.”
In the silence that emerges from the quietness of the owls, the Winander Boy suddenly discovers his true condition. As though predestined, this discovery prefigures (his death. When read in this way the poem takes on the patina of myth (resonant with the ending of “Strange Fits of Passion” ). That is, it becomes a meta-signifier, in this case reinforcing the romantic linkage between knowledge and death. Perhaps what our current war on terror and immigration (and its liberal backlash) obscures in its own mythologizing hysteria is the fact that the majority of (nonimmigrant) Americans, including most of my students—working class and working poor—are not only entangled in a brutal and violent war, but, “gentle shock of mild surprise,” that they are also its unnamed enemy (The Prelude 173).
Coda: We “May Be Depended Upon to Exist”
Wordsworth and Cage demonstrate that, when listened to through the aperture of silence, the terms “nature” and “music” cease to need to be anything more or less than their mere material components and effects. I find myself coming down on the side of Cage’s wholehearted embrace of this denaturing of representation, not for deep philosophical reasons but rather for pragmatic, political ones. Wordsworth’s liberal handwringing about the destruction of nature seems to feed back so easily into the system: as I suggest above, “what man has made of man” can easily be heard in the vein of a 1970s public service announcement. Interestingly, many if not most of my students disagree. They like the same yearning in Wordsworth that I find distasteful, and they find Cage’s atonal and experimental poetry and music unlistenable and, even more damning by their lights, unintelligible and depressing.
It may be that one of the most important reasons to continue to teach and read Wordsworth is not just that he often transcends his own liberal perspectives, but that entering into the poetry we find ourselves caught up “unawares” by our own liberal identifications. That is, who among us, schooled in and by Wordsworth whether we know it (or like it) or not, has not “lamented” the past in a pious way, or, “in vacant or in pensive mood,” has not looked backwards rather than dealing with the difficulties of the moment (Major Works 81, 304)? In order to resist these intoxicating deflections and to remain in the instability of silence, that is, the instability of my own ambivalence, I’ve taken to reading the final lines of “Lines Written in Early Spring” —“Have I not reason to lament / What man has made of man?”—as more than a rhetorical question. To read them in this open and naïve way is to leave the “thousand blended notes” open, cacophonous, unblended, untranslated, unlamented—and the poem itself unfinished, less sure of itself, and less ideologically contagious.
The conditional clauses that frame the final question take slightly different forms in different published versions. The version in Lyrical Ballads reads “If these my thoughts may not prevent, / If such be of my creed the plan, / Have I not reason . . .” (Lyrical Ballads 66). Yet, in the 1815 collection, interestingly grouped with “Poems of Sentiment and Reflection,” the same stanza reads “If this belief from heaven be sent, / If such be Nature’s holy plan, / Have I not reason . . .” (Major Works 81). It is tempting to find expressed in this revision the tendency within the late Enlightenment to codify conceptualizations, to turn thinking into revelation and personal creed into holy writ—again, meta-signification. While this explanatory narrative makes a kind of sense, it seems to me that both responses (the psychological explanation of 1798 and the ideological concretization of 1815) are both ways to silence the silence, so to speak. That is, “And much it grieved my heart to think / What man has made of man,” the first iteration of the refrain, allows us to feel fully the violence of the aforementioned split between “man” and “man,” a split that calls to be read as both an internal rupture (that is, as a figure for modern subjectivity) and as a historical causal “fact” (industrial capitalism, colonialism, etc.). Therefore, when we focus on the repetition of the phrase in the final stanza, we should approach its question without judgment (do we have reason to lament? or, perhaps, is lamentation another form of evasion, conformism in the guise of empathy?). To resist the impulse to suture “man” and “man” together seems to me the more productive as well as ethical approach. Remember that it is the Winander Boy’s failure, his inability to communicate with nature, to suture subject and object, here and there, past and present, that opens him to this new duration, this new way of being in the world. Perhaps like the speaker in the poem, we will find ourselves, seemingly by accident, standing at numerous gravesites together—shattered subjects of the Anthropocene.
Reading in this naïve yet devastated way, attentive to the silences that arise from failure, we can read the end of the poem as questioning humankind’s monstrousness to itself, or rather, relatedly, one strata or class’s monstrousness to another (ironically, the only reading precluded by this approach is the reading that is so often proffered, namely the fear of nature “red in tooth and claw”). Furthermore, “what man has made of man” anticipates Bertolt Brecht’s Mann ist Mann by hinting at (demonstrating?) humankind’s inability to be equal to itself.
Since, as I wrote earlier, I teach at a regional campus of a large midwestern research university in a mostly poor and working poor area, many of my students have a visceral experience of this inequality. Yet more and more of them approach this material not as bits of cultural capital to be consumed, but rather as a life or death matter. Without knowing what else to do, I encourage them to treat these texts as signposts or road maps for negotiating the intensely difficult terrain of late capitalism, specifically the topography of the working-poor microculture in which they find themselves. Many of my students in fact are training to work in health care or the “criminal justice” system, taking a full load of classes while working full-time at service sector jobs, many of them parents themselves. For them, what “man has made of man” is neither a psychosocial phenomenon nor a one-time historical act. Rather, as Cage teaches us, it is an ongoing and contingent process. Yet while “anything can / happen” and “war [could begin] at any moment,” my students recognize that good things tend to happen much more regularly to people in the upper layers of the socioeconomic scale, and that the costs of bad things happening, including and especially war, are nearly always passed down to the working class and the poor (Cage, Silence 96–97). For them, thinking about and theorizing silence sometimes feels like a luxury; experiencing its shocks to the system, on the other hand, is an inevitable fact of everyday life.
It is not necessarily that the silence is louder or more violent in early twenty-first-century central Ohio than it was, say, in the Lake District around 1800. For example, the recent opioid addiction (all but forgotten in wake of the Covid 19 pandemic), which has ravaged parts of Ohio, West Virginia, Michigan, and other economically impoverished areas, mirrors in some ways the use of opium in nineteenth-century England. And while I am not claiming a direct cause and effect, the devastation created in families and the larger community (what is this if not slow violence?) was preceded by a loss of manufacturing jobs that has resulted in over 50% of the community living below the poverty line in some areas (e.g., Dayton, Ohio). Now, for the first time in recent history, life expectancy is trending downward for middle-aged working-class men in the United States, due primarily to the uptick in overdoses and suicide. A recent report refers to these (perhaps a bit pathetically) as “deaths of despair” (Case and Deaton). I believe that Cage and Wordsworth, albeit from vastly different political positions, call on us to listen to this ambient violence, to recognize its many forms, and to work collectively in our various communities to make its many ravages audible and visible. Listening and attending to silence’s all-pervasive political surround is not at all the same as acquiescence to the “way things [supposedly] are.” A similar Romantic paradox confronts us when we remember Wordsworth’s dictum: we cannot begin to change ourselves or the world without the “ability to observe with accuracy things as they are in themselves” (Major Works 626).
