Katarina Luther
Stream Worlding: Diffractive River Poetics in Alice Oswald’s Dart
You don’t know what goes into water. Tiny particles of acids and
salts. Cryptospiridion smaller than a fleck of talcum powder
which squashes and elongates and bursts in the warmth of the
gut. Everything is measured twice and we have stand-bys and
shut-offs. This is what keeps you and me alive, this is the real
work of the river. -The Water Abstractor in Alice Oswald’s Dart
Diffraction/intra-action – cutting together-apart (one move) in the
(re)configuring of spacetimemattering; differencing/differing/
différenacing. - Karen Barad, “Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together Apart”
Water is one of the clearest, most transparent, natural elements. So transparent that it almost appears empty. But do we really know “what goes into water”? Can we perceive these “[t]iny particles of acids and / salts” (Oswald 25)? While the water abstractor’s voice claims that we cannot, Alice Oswald’s long poem Dart as a whole unveils water’s transparency as false to show every (non)human material component of the river Dart, in Devon, England, as it flows from its source into the ocean. In Oswald’s long poem, it is within and along the river streams through which Dart dwellers, local myths, science, and social realist systems materialize and even speak. Through the flow of different voices, which re- and disappear throughout the poem, Dart rhizomatically maps multiple agential processes through which the river Dart creates relations between water, soil, plants, animals, humans, and ultimately literature itself in endless, radically open feedback-loops. Here, the “real work / of the river” is to constitute entangled objects, subjects, meanings, and words. Thus, Dart’s river streams do nothing less than create worlds off and on the page, “float[ing] a world up like a cork / out of its body’s liquid dark” (Oswald 28). The basic problem that Dart’s creative force then proposes is how a river on the ground in Devon, England, can be materially entangled with the voices of Dart dwellers on the page in Oswald’s long poem. In short: how can river-matter come into literature and out again? I suggest that one (of many!) answers to this question can be found by entangling it with the concept of diffraction[1].
In Classical Optics, to diffract translates into the motion of “breaking apart, in different directions” (Barad 2014, 168). Experimenting with this optical phenomenon from Classical Physics, Karen Barad reads this phenomenon quantum-mechanically as a “cutting together-apart (one move)” (2014, 168), which creates differentiating entanglements that are in a constant flow on the one hand, while, on the other hand, still forming slight separations that matter[2]. But these differentiating entanglements are never stable, always at risk of collapsing, due to a continual flow. In a Baradesque understanding of diffraction no absolute isolated distinction or absolute separation between two or more entities can occur, which “troubles the very notion of dicho-tomy – cutting into two – as a singular act of an absolute differentiation, fracturing this from that, now from then” (Barad 2014, 168). Within Barad’s diffraction framework of no isolation, one is intra-actively constituted through the specific other. In Dart, we encounter the swimmer’s voice flooding over the page blubbing, “water with my bones, water in my mouth and my / understanding / when my body was in some way a wave to swim in” (Oswald 22)). The swimmer – and with that the swimmer’s bones, body openings, and his making sense of this river world – is materially entangled with the water to such a degree that the swimmer’s body’s inside and the river’s outside are diffracted. Inside and outside - there in Devon and here on the page - become inseparable. Dart practices diffractive writing and reading, which I call quantum entangled wreading (a fusion of writing and reading), through adapting the natural water movement of flow as a meta-poetics, through specific people (the swimmer), through specific voices (the river’s, scientists’, workers’ etc.), through the book Dart, and through the reader to create a transmission of matter from Dart to Dart and out again into the reader’s world. Returning to the earlier question (How can river-matter come into literature and out again?) one answer seems to be: Through diffraction.
This process of composing one through the specific other breaks with the ontological distinction between the Cartesian subject and object and a Hegelian dialectics of self and other. While diffraction disrupts these traditional Western identity theories, the quantum phenomena correspond with ideas of a so-called New Materialist intervention in cultural studies, taking the materiality that we as humans consist of and the material reality that surrounds us in their generative powers seriously. It is at this ontological and epistemological intermission that I would like to bring feminist & science studies scholar Karen Barad’s diffraction metaphor (2007, 2008, 2012, 2014) into conversation with Alice Oswald’s Dart. Staying true to Karen Barad’s diffractive reading (2007), I aim to formulate a poetics of diffraction through Dart and to discuss in how far this specifically local material engagement with a river can precisely serve as one of the defining qualities of poetry itself.
Diffracting Dart and the Human Voice
Right after opening the book, Dart acts on the reader by applying its “cutting together-apart,” a technique that does not allow for independent relatings, texts or the separation of space and time. Here, I will develop how Dart’s diffraction consequently restrains the reader from developing a detachment from the river or a self-determined reading method. Instead, I will show how this practice quantum-entangles the reader immediately with the will of the river - Dart’s diffraction connects two things, the reader and the river, separated by space and time to be, at least momentarily, the same: thus Dart’s desire to flow and to take all its voices with that flow into the sea becomes our desire as well. We, Dart’s readers, are drifting, “meaning driven, deposited by a / current of air or water” (Oswald 33). We become all of Dart’s and Dart’s mumblings and close reading becomes river-reading.
For the reader to become Dart’s mumblings, the Western myth that voice, speech, and poetry are exclusively human(ist) projects must be broken by exposing this human(ist) process of meaning-making as a boundary-drawing practice itself. Before the poem formally begins, then, Dart presents us with a humanist trap through this author-fiction:
The poem is made from the language of people who live
and work on the Dart. Over the past two years I’ve been
recording conversations with people who know the
river. ……………………………………………….
……………… There are indications in the margin
where one voice changes into the another. These do not refer
to real people or even fixed fictions. All voices should be
read as the river’s mutterings.
A.O. (n.p.)
Firstly, the poem acts by exposing itself as materially and semantically existing of voices on the ground in Devon, and their transmission into ink traces on the page “of people who live / and work on the Dart.” Existing, rather than consisting, is one of the key words here, since poetry functions not just as a mere container of voices, but comes into material existence through the voices itself. The poem goes on to diffract the question of existence or non-existence, future or past, here on the page or there on the ground into one, namely into Dart. Language, here, acts not exclusively as a human tool, but exposes itself as an independent agent which can spring from the depth of a river to jump into a book, only to flee from Dart’s pages again into the reader’s mind. Once the reader opens Dart as apparatus, s/he is quantum-entangled with the river’s voice, trespassing the physical boundaries of the book and, thus, exposing these physical boundaries which materialize via the paper edges of the pages as collapsible. Dichotomies between a text (a) in the grander sense of the landscape and voices in Devon, and a traditional text (b) the book Dart, are transfused into one flow of river-voices without an in-between space.
Within the fluid oscillation of fictive and real voice, our reception is directed towards the complicated network of authorships of the poem that we are about to encounter; here we have something like an imagined implicit author “A.O.,” whose initials seem to reference the existing author of Dart Alice Oswald out there, the voice of the Dart dwellers (a swimmer, a ferryman, a Naturalist, a tin-extractor), local myths (Jan Coo), Western myths (Christ, Brutus, King of the Oakwood, Zeus), scientists (Theodor Schwenk), and finally the river Dart itself, asking “who’s this moving in the dark? Me. / This is me, anonymous, water’s soliloquy” (48). All these voices flush into the text as, so we are told, “the river’s muttering.” Such a confusion regarding the authority over meaning triggers the questions whether the river can in fact speak. Dart demonstrates that this question is a trap based on human exceptionalism. “The Dart, lying low in darkness calls out Who is it? Trying to summon itself by speaking…” (1). This attempt “to summon itself by speaking” remains unsuccessful because the Dart knows that no single entity speaks individually, but diffractively as one through the other. And thus, the river allows a multitude of human and non-human voices to emerge and materialize from its streams and flows to form the mutterings of the Dart: “this secret buried in reeds at the beginning of sound I / won’t let go of man, under / his soakaway ears and his eye ledges working / into the drift of his thinking …” (1). Once Dart’s voices drift into our human thinking through our entanglement by reading and tactile experiences with the book as apparatus, we become of Dart wordings[3]. Or, as Barad puts it “’We’ are not outside observers of the world. Nor are we simply located at particular places in the world; rather, we are part of the world in its on-going intra-activity” (2008, 148).
Dart’s Flow-Methodology
In Dart, water is also “part of the world.” Here, water does not function in an esoteric or fantastic manner, but its dynamics are deeply embedded in the physics of flow and surface tension “through which water strives to attain / a spherical form” (Oswald 20). By performing the dynamics of water flow on the page, Dart distributes the diffracted voices as well as the moments of diffraction, where one voice bends into the other and back again, over the page. Hence, in Dart, flow functions as the vehicle to circulate sound, time, space, and material-semantic diffractions, including their unsteady borders, which sometimes even dissolve and interfere with each other. Just as Dart’s water as surface can render soundwaves visible so can Dart’s ink on the page render these diffractive movements and interferences visible “in a constant irregular pattern” (Oswald 21):
……………………………………………………….. worker at Buckfast
……………………………………………………….. Woollen Mills
……………………………………………………….
… and we end up with two-ply, a balanced twist, like the
river Theodore Schwenke (sic)
‘whenever currents of water meet the confluence is
always the place
where rhythmical and spiraling movements may arise,
spiraling surfaces which glide past one another in
manifold winding and curving forms
new water keeps flowing through each single strand of
water
whole surfaces interweaving spatially and flowing past
each other
in surface tension, through which water strives to attain
a spherical drop form’
wound onto reels and packed into bales
tied with polypropylene and cling film to keep it dry on
the sea.
all day my voice is being washed away at Staverton Ford,
out of a lapse in my throat. (Oswald 18-20) John Edmunds being
Washed away, 1840
The meta-dynamic of flow allows Dart to drift from a social realist voice of the wool mill worker, speaking about the spinning frame for the wool and how the frame twists the wool into “a balanced twist, like the / river,” into an intra-textuality with Theodore Schwenk’s scientific account. This “balanced twist” performed by Dart is intra-textual and not inter-textual since the text produced through the voice of the mill work is neither syntactically isolated by a period from Schwenk’s text (river / whenever), nor is it material-semantically independent from Schwenk’s account on the dynamics of water-flow. Each text is not “inter-textual”, so a textual incorporation between two texts, but interferes from within each other on Dart’s page, hence it is intra-textual, “intra-,” from within the different textures via the force of flow.
If Dart is an apparatus and the diffraction surface for the river’s voices, we can see where one voice diffracts into the other as indicated by the comments in the margins citing “the Woollen Mill” (19), preceded by “Theodor Schwenk” (20) merging into “John Edmund” (20). Yet, it is also on the page where these voices start to interfere with one another to become one voice of the river. “[A] spherical drop-form,’” Schwenk’s voice, interferes with the wool mill worker voice stating that the wool is “wound into reels and packed into bales” before it gets “tied with polypropylene” (Oswald 20) to stay dry on the water, and drifts into John Edmund’s voice. Schwenk’s and the mill worker’s voices intermingle one through the other despite the indication in the margins, which states that we are still reading only Theodor Schwenk’s voice. Here, language, writing and citing conventions are metaphorically subordinated to the will of the water to flow. Flow, then, also creates a Dart-esque time-space-matter dimension, when we read John Edmund’s voice, who was “washed away [in] 1840” (Oswald 20) in Dart’s 2002 edition. Linear time markers of past-future-present dissolve to intra-act with the thick present of Dart as text. Dart’s diffracted texture allows for a literary consciousness, a material awareness, on the page, which creates a present-as-river thickness that collects all human and non-human river voices into an enriched now as we read the text.
But, where do the river voices flow to? The complete interference of each knowledge tradition and voice into the river’s consciousness is finally achieved in the reader’s mind, as the final destination where Dart’s voice flows. Within the reader’s material neurological structures, for example within “the circuit of cells that form mirror neurons” (The Mirror Neuron Revolution), which help us to connect to others and conflate the dichotomy between seeing and doing, we finally become quantum-entangled with the river Dart in Devon – we become Dart. According to Marco Iacoboni, these neurons are the “only brain cells we know of that seem specialized to code the actions of [others] and also our own. … The way mirror neurons likely let us understand others is by providing some kind of inner imitation of the actions of other people, which in turn leads us to “simulate” the intentions and emotions associated with those actions” (The Mirror Neuron Revolution). Dart then does not only meta-poetically simulate the physical phenomena of diffraction and flow, but quantum-entangles us by using the simulation powers of our brains cells to form connections and relations to the river Dart. Here, we can see (the ultimate!) collapse of the traditional distinction between nature and culture as well as literature and science. In Sensitive Chaos: The Creation of Flowing Forms in Water and Air, Theodor Schwenk’s goal is to read water beyond phenomenology: Schwenk writes, “[t]hrough watching water and air with an unprejudiced eye, our way of thinking becomes changed and more suited to the understanding of what is alive” (10-11). What Schwenk addresses in this single sentence is quite spooky: he suggests that we can physically – within us – comprehend and experience water by applying our vision. Schwenk fuses two senses, namely experiencing/touching with seeing and suggests that thought is in itself material. Here, material thoughts can have a ripple effect. By observing water “with an unprejudiced eye” our material thoughts about water can ripple off material water molecules to physically connect, merge, flow around, and finally change nothing less but our “thinking” (WOW!). Thus, we can not only contract human and non-human physicality, but also experience and knowledge. Returning to the process of becoming river, it is the reader’s material mind where all the river-voices flow into, need to be traced, and disambiguated, and interpreted. Schwenk reminds us “whether born by air currents or falling to the earth as rain or snow – water is always on the way somewhere” (Schwenk 14). While reading, the river’s consciousness floods our mind: metaphorically speaking, “new water keeps flowing through each single strand / of water.” Reading then is a very intimate way of materially slipping into another being. Reading establishes a quantum-entanglement, an invisible connection to a river in Devon, which becomes visible and tangible on the page through the poem. Diffraction – “this cutting together apart” – is doubled here through the reading process towards a diffracted diffraction. While the reader has a tactile experience with the material-semantics of a river named Dart out there in Devon, England, through the material (ex)change of reading the river’s voices (first transfusion and metaphorical diffraction), the reader also becomes aware of this material connection because Dart renders it visible through the material book in the reader’s hand (second transfusion and metaphorical diffraction).
This diffracted diffraction is complicated even more in Dart since reading and writing are in themselves entangled into a diffracted wreading. This diffractive wreading allows for the reader to become an active participant in Dart’s worlding. In each edition, Dart leaves a couple of blank pages after the river has flown into the sea on page 48. In the poem’s last stanza the river speaks “all names, all voices, Slip-Shape, this is Proteus, / whoever that is, the shepherd of the seals, driving my many selves from cave to cave …” (48). Just as water has many selves and changing qualities, it also resides in us humans, reminding us that we are already material just as nature is always already material. Water as an element is a matter we all share. Dart forces a “response-ability” (Haraway), the ability to respond, upon us. Within the book’s structure, we can respond to Dart in reading and writing (wreading), filling the last pages with our personal water-stories ourselves – hence the “…”. These last pages are not empty, no vacuum, but create a momentary silence that we as readers can fill until we close Dart to end our quantum-entanglement. Yet, our relationship to water is not as reciprocal as it seems. The river’s currents and Dart’s specific flow do not just pull us and flush us with its voices. In leaving these blank pages, Dart also forces the question upon us whether we need water – rivers, the sea, rain, tears, blood etc. – more than it needs us. The poems suggest an answer by asking “Have you forgotten the force that orders the world” (Oswald 29)? We simply biologically as well as culturally necessarily depend on water. These last empty pages finally draw us into the depth of the sea, where the river currents flow so deep under the sea’s surface that they remain invisible to the human eye. Dart now leaves it to our hands to diffractively wread its stories back to the surface and onto the page, asking once more: “when the lithe water turns / and its tongue flatters the ferns / do you speak this kind of sound: whirlpool whisking round?” (Oswald 11).
Conclusion: Situated Poetry
In Dart, reading and writing the river translates into creating knowledge that is scientific, mythopoetic, and socially realistic diffractively through one another. The poem intra-actively emerges through different tones, stories, vocabularies, and knowledge practices from the depth of the river and materializes on the page. In this poem’s diffractive methodology, the speakers investigate each boundary-making practice, without taking “the boundaries of any other subjects or objects of these studies for granted” (Barad 2007, 93). Here, poetry has a method because it touches upon critical theory and science, and through Dart’s diffraction method science, myth and (social-)realism can find a lyric voice. Hence, Dart’s methodology pushes boundaries by rendering their peripheries visible only to dissolve them again. Method and matter are transformed into poetry and poetry is converted into method and matter at the same time. Within this transformative relationality, words and genres are formulated. Here, the act of “forming” wor(l)ds, a molding, which is included in the term “formulation,” is not only reserved for human language, but can also be acted out from within a natural phenomenon such as the river. Thus, linguistic descriptions do not stand in an antithesis to natural phenomena, but they actually reach a material wholehearted plurality of voices together through their numerous reciprocal relations. More importantly, this enactment of boundaries is not static. Just like water, which always wants to flow, either from the heavens to earth or from a mountain into the sea, boundaries as well as differences are momentarily drawn only to collapse again. The pedagogy of Dart lies in the practice of making the shadows of these differences visible through each stanza-formation and by exposing their instability through the natural flow of water. In doing so, water as matter and element becomes an active worlding participant.
But, as a worlding actant, how does the river Dart materially come into the poem to flow out again into our minds? In the beginning, I suggested that this material transfusion can be best explained by entering into play with diffraction. This play, this production of diffraction as a phenomenon occurs out there when waves go through a slit or face an obstacle, resulting in a specific diffraction pattern within which specific parts of the waves can even interfere. This play, though, also results in a metaphoricity of diffraction – in a consistent resemblance between metaphor and diffraction. Just as waves are split in a diffraction, metaphors are always split into one abstract and concrete component and one grounded and as it were material one. The metaphor as a stylistic device blurs these formal dividing lines between the abstract and the real to produce something new. In Dart as in Devon, the river is in itself metaphorical. “[W]ater with my bones, water with my mouth and my / understanding / when my body was in some way a wave to swim in” (22-23). Here, the swimmer demonstrates that there is no fixed and stable wall of water molecules, which does not penetrate our interior, but water is in his/her “bones… mouth … [and even in his/her] understanding.” By the same logic, speech and voice are merely sound waves as well which are not exclusively human, but penetrate and flood a river, too. The river is just as metaphorical as speech and quantum diffraction or humanity and physical phenomena in general; all agents somehow connect the abstract with the concrete, the flesh with meaning. Evolution, this being on a journey, is doubled here in the river as metaphor. A river, materially situated in a specific local terrain, flows through space, time, and matter, and its characteristic turns and shapes, the river’s visual identity, becomes only perceivable from afar, just as evolutionary changes – something new – becomes noticeable only later on. Hence, not everything flows, but some things (metaphorically) flow from one specific locale into/through/to another.
In Dart, this metaphoricity of diffraction is textually woven together with the metaphoricity of a material reality in Devon, namely the “river’s mutterings,” as A.O. writes in Dart’s author fiction. It is specifically this situatedness of the poem, this earthy watery muddiness of the river current and its dwellers, which transforms “the songline from the source to the sea” (A.O. n.p.) into poetry. It develops through the poem’s overcoming of temporal, spatial, and genre markers such as here/there, past/future, science/myth/realism, reality/fiction into a transmission from the actual existing river Dart into Dart. It is this material translation of a real local place on the ground onto the page, which transforms Dart from song into poetry, soaking readers everywhere in the world, once they open Oswald’s book. Without this creation of worlds and physical tactile transmission, Dart would not be poetry, but just a collection of words scattered on a page, creating a semantic network of words without a material connection from us to Dart. This collection of words, then, either represented as a chart or written within the conventions of scientific or cultural theory (like Karen Barad’s diffractive writing), denies the creation of a sense that is common. Words would here function as evidence, but fail to touch us by affecting our senses or miss out to connect us to the observable world. Abstract words represent something, but do not act upon us. Poetry, as derived from the Greek word poēma, an early variant of poiēma, which means ‘fiction, poem’, however, translates into ‘to create’ (OED) and is substantial. Literally and actually poetry performs and does something: Dart creates worlds by forming river dwellers on and off the page – it creates substantial relations. By adapting the natural currents of the river, the long-poem pulls the reader into reading nothing less than the consciousness of the river while holding a material transmission of the river Dart in their hands – the book, becoming the river’s consciousness itself. Thus, when in the end the seals ask “Who is this moving in the dark?,” we all answer “Me. … water” (Oswald 48).
Bibliography:
Barad, Karen. “Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart.” Paralax, Vol. 20, No. 3. 2014, pp. 168-187, Tandfonline https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623. Accessed 23 December 2017.
---. MEETING THE UNIVERSE HALFWAY. quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham & London: Duke UP, 2007.
---. “Posthumanist Performativity. Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Material Feminsim. Eds. Stacey Alaimo and Susan Hekman. Bloomington: Indiana UP. 2008. 120-154.
---. “Interview with Karen Barad.” Dolphijn, Rick, and Iris van der Tuin, editors. Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2012. 48-70.
Haraway, Donna. “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.” In The Haraway Reader, 63-124. New York and London: Routledge, 1994/2002.
---. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience.New York: Routledge, 1997.
Iacoboni, Marco and Jonah Lehrer. “The Mirror Neuron Revolution: Explaining What Makes Humans Social” Scientific American, Springer Nature, 2018, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mirror-neuron-revolut/. Accessed 11 February 2018.
Minh-ha, Trinh T. “Not You/Like You: Postcolonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference.” In Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, 415-149. Edited by Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997/1988.
Oswald, Alice. Dart. London: faber & faber, 2002.
“Poetry” Oxford English Dictionary, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/146552?redirectedFrom=poetry&. Accessed 27 December 2017.
Schwenk, Theodor. Sensitive Chaos: The Creation of Flowing Forms in Water and Air. East Sussex: Rudolf Setiner Press, 1996.
Snow, CP. “The Two Cultures” (1956). New Statesmen, 02 January 2013, https://www.newstatesman.com/cultural-capital/2013/01/c-p-snow-two-cultures. Accessed 17 February 2018.
[1] Diffraction as a concept started to bridge the divide between the so called “Two Cultures” (Snow) of science and the humanities in the West in the late 1980s. Classical Optics’ notion of diffraction was introduced and written into critical theory by literary and feminist theorist Trinh Minh-ha (1988, 1997) and feminist science study scholar Donna Haraway (1992, 1997), whose interest in notions of differences and boundary-drawing practices were influenced by diffraction patterns and their abilities to record where the consequences of differences materialize (c.f. Haraway 1992, 300).
[2] In Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007) – itself a product of Barad’s methodology of diffractive reading – Barad makes sure to draw a clear distinction between the behavior of waves and particles in Classical Physics and the ones in Quantum Mechanics. In Classical Physics, “[p]articles are materialities which occupy a point in space at a given moment in time” (76) and waves are not categorized as things, but as disturbances which “cannot be localized to a point” (76). Thus, particles and waves exhibit fundamentally different behaviors. In Quantum Physics, however, particles can produce wave patterns and restrain from linearity and causality patterns.
[3] Hence, we readers materialize as river-readers and river-dwellers the moment we meet the book with our eyes and touch it with our hands, creating a common material intra-face of skin-cells, ink, particles of chemicals, water, and wood. This initiation of the reading process is also the initiation of an intra-action. The reader, Alice Oswald, the river Dart, and Dart, fictional and real voices, scientific and activist discourses surrounding waterways all act together to form Dart as a “phenomenon” (Barad 2008, 138). And while Dart unites us all as river-dwellers, it also separates into different groups: the ones who live off the Dart and the ones who do not; the ones who drowned in it and the ones who survived it; the ones who love this local waterway and the ones who fear it; the ones who talk through this river and about it and the ones who read through and about it - into differences that matter and specific “entanglements of which we are part” (Barad 2012, 52). Importantly so, these differences in Dart can always collapse and be folded into another through the current of the water.
Quotations from “Dart” by Alice Oswald reprinted with permission from Faber and Faber.
salts. Cryptospiridion smaller than a fleck of talcum powder
which squashes and elongates and bursts in the warmth of the
gut. Everything is measured twice and we have stand-bys and
shut-offs. This is what keeps you and me alive, this is the real
work of the river. -The Water Abstractor in Alice Oswald’s Dart
Diffraction/intra-action – cutting together-apart (one move) in the
(re)configuring of spacetimemattering; differencing/differing/
différenacing. - Karen Barad, “Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together Apart”
Water is one of the clearest, most transparent, natural elements. So transparent that it almost appears empty. But do we really know “what goes into water”? Can we perceive these “[t]iny particles of acids and / salts” (Oswald 25)? While the water abstractor’s voice claims that we cannot, Alice Oswald’s long poem Dart as a whole unveils water’s transparency as false to show every (non)human material component of the river Dart, in Devon, England, as it flows from its source into the ocean. In Oswald’s long poem, it is within and along the river streams through which Dart dwellers, local myths, science, and social realist systems materialize and even speak. Through the flow of different voices, which re- and disappear throughout the poem, Dart rhizomatically maps multiple agential processes through which the river Dart creates relations between water, soil, plants, animals, humans, and ultimately literature itself in endless, radically open feedback-loops. Here, the “real work / of the river” is to constitute entangled objects, subjects, meanings, and words. Thus, Dart’s river streams do nothing less than create worlds off and on the page, “float[ing] a world up like a cork / out of its body’s liquid dark” (Oswald 28). The basic problem that Dart’s creative force then proposes is how a river on the ground in Devon, England, can be materially entangled with the voices of Dart dwellers on the page in Oswald’s long poem. In short: how can river-matter come into literature and out again? I suggest that one (of many!) answers to this question can be found by entangling it with the concept of diffraction[1].
In Classical Optics, to diffract translates into the motion of “breaking apart, in different directions” (Barad 2014, 168). Experimenting with this optical phenomenon from Classical Physics, Karen Barad reads this phenomenon quantum-mechanically as a “cutting together-apart (one move)” (2014, 168), which creates differentiating entanglements that are in a constant flow on the one hand, while, on the other hand, still forming slight separations that matter[2]. But these differentiating entanglements are never stable, always at risk of collapsing, due to a continual flow. In a Baradesque understanding of diffraction no absolute isolated distinction or absolute separation between two or more entities can occur, which “troubles the very notion of dicho-tomy – cutting into two – as a singular act of an absolute differentiation, fracturing this from that, now from then” (Barad 2014, 168). Within Barad’s diffraction framework of no isolation, one is intra-actively constituted through the specific other. In Dart, we encounter the swimmer’s voice flooding over the page blubbing, “water with my bones, water in my mouth and my / understanding / when my body was in some way a wave to swim in” (Oswald 22)). The swimmer – and with that the swimmer’s bones, body openings, and his making sense of this river world – is materially entangled with the water to such a degree that the swimmer’s body’s inside and the river’s outside are diffracted. Inside and outside - there in Devon and here on the page - become inseparable. Dart practices diffractive writing and reading, which I call quantum entangled wreading (a fusion of writing and reading), through adapting the natural water movement of flow as a meta-poetics, through specific people (the swimmer), through specific voices (the river’s, scientists’, workers’ etc.), through the book Dart, and through the reader to create a transmission of matter from Dart to Dart and out again into the reader’s world. Returning to the earlier question (How can river-matter come into literature and out again?) one answer seems to be: Through diffraction.
This process of composing one through the specific other breaks with the ontological distinction between the Cartesian subject and object and a Hegelian dialectics of self and other. While diffraction disrupts these traditional Western identity theories, the quantum phenomena correspond with ideas of a so-called New Materialist intervention in cultural studies, taking the materiality that we as humans consist of and the material reality that surrounds us in their generative powers seriously. It is at this ontological and epistemological intermission that I would like to bring feminist & science studies scholar Karen Barad’s diffraction metaphor (2007, 2008, 2012, 2014) into conversation with Alice Oswald’s Dart. Staying true to Karen Barad’s diffractive reading (2007), I aim to formulate a poetics of diffraction through Dart and to discuss in how far this specifically local material engagement with a river can precisely serve as one of the defining qualities of poetry itself.
Diffracting Dart and the Human Voice
Right after opening the book, Dart acts on the reader by applying its “cutting together-apart,” a technique that does not allow for independent relatings, texts or the separation of space and time. Here, I will develop how Dart’s diffraction consequently restrains the reader from developing a detachment from the river or a self-determined reading method. Instead, I will show how this practice quantum-entangles the reader immediately with the will of the river - Dart’s diffraction connects two things, the reader and the river, separated by space and time to be, at least momentarily, the same: thus Dart’s desire to flow and to take all its voices with that flow into the sea becomes our desire as well. We, Dart’s readers, are drifting, “meaning driven, deposited by a / current of air or water” (Oswald 33). We become all of Dart’s and Dart’s mumblings and close reading becomes river-reading.
For the reader to become Dart’s mumblings, the Western myth that voice, speech, and poetry are exclusively human(ist) projects must be broken by exposing this human(ist) process of meaning-making as a boundary-drawing practice itself. Before the poem formally begins, then, Dart presents us with a humanist trap through this author-fiction:
The poem is made from the language of people who live
and work on the Dart. Over the past two years I’ve been
recording conversations with people who know the
river. ……………………………………………….
……………… There are indications in the margin
where one voice changes into the another. These do not refer
to real people or even fixed fictions. All voices should be
read as the river’s mutterings.
A.O. (n.p.)
Firstly, the poem acts by exposing itself as materially and semantically existing of voices on the ground in Devon, and their transmission into ink traces on the page “of people who live / and work on the Dart.” Existing, rather than consisting, is one of the key words here, since poetry functions not just as a mere container of voices, but comes into material existence through the voices itself. The poem goes on to diffract the question of existence or non-existence, future or past, here on the page or there on the ground into one, namely into Dart. Language, here, acts not exclusively as a human tool, but exposes itself as an independent agent which can spring from the depth of a river to jump into a book, only to flee from Dart’s pages again into the reader’s mind. Once the reader opens Dart as apparatus, s/he is quantum-entangled with the river’s voice, trespassing the physical boundaries of the book and, thus, exposing these physical boundaries which materialize via the paper edges of the pages as collapsible. Dichotomies between a text (a) in the grander sense of the landscape and voices in Devon, and a traditional text (b) the book Dart, are transfused into one flow of river-voices without an in-between space.
Within the fluid oscillation of fictive and real voice, our reception is directed towards the complicated network of authorships of the poem that we are about to encounter; here we have something like an imagined implicit author “A.O.,” whose initials seem to reference the existing author of Dart Alice Oswald out there, the voice of the Dart dwellers (a swimmer, a ferryman, a Naturalist, a tin-extractor), local myths (Jan Coo), Western myths (Christ, Brutus, King of the Oakwood, Zeus), scientists (Theodor Schwenk), and finally the river Dart itself, asking “who’s this moving in the dark? Me. / This is me, anonymous, water’s soliloquy” (48). All these voices flush into the text as, so we are told, “the river’s muttering.” Such a confusion regarding the authority over meaning triggers the questions whether the river can in fact speak. Dart demonstrates that this question is a trap based on human exceptionalism. “The Dart, lying low in darkness calls out Who is it? Trying to summon itself by speaking…” (1). This attempt “to summon itself by speaking” remains unsuccessful because the Dart knows that no single entity speaks individually, but diffractively as one through the other. And thus, the river allows a multitude of human and non-human voices to emerge and materialize from its streams and flows to form the mutterings of the Dart: “this secret buried in reeds at the beginning of sound I / won’t let go of man, under / his soakaway ears and his eye ledges working / into the drift of his thinking …” (1). Once Dart’s voices drift into our human thinking through our entanglement by reading and tactile experiences with the book as apparatus, we become of Dart wordings[3]. Or, as Barad puts it “’We’ are not outside observers of the world. Nor are we simply located at particular places in the world; rather, we are part of the world in its on-going intra-activity” (2008, 148).
Dart’s Flow-Methodology
In Dart, water is also “part of the world.” Here, water does not function in an esoteric or fantastic manner, but its dynamics are deeply embedded in the physics of flow and surface tension “through which water strives to attain / a spherical form” (Oswald 20). By performing the dynamics of water flow on the page, Dart distributes the diffracted voices as well as the moments of diffraction, where one voice bends into the other and back again, over the page. Hence, in Dart, flow functions as the vehicle to circulate sound, time, space, and material-semantic diffractions, including their unsteady borders, which sometimes even dissolve and interfere with each other. Just as Dart’s water as surface can render soundwaves visible so can Dart’s ink on the page render these diffractive movements and interferences visible “in a constant irregular pattern” (Oswald 21):
……………………………………………………….. worker at Buckfast
……………………………………………………….. Woollen Mills
……………………………………………………….
… and we end up with two-ply, a balanced twist, like the
river Theodore Schwenke (sic)
‘whenever currents of water meet the confluence is
always the place
where rhythmical and spiraling movements may arise,
spiraling surfaces which glide past one another in
manifold winding and curving forms
new water keeps flowing through each single strand of
water
whole surfaces interweaving spatially and flowing past
each other
in surface tension, through which water strives to attain
a spherical drop form’
wound onto reels and packed into bales
tied with polypropylene and cling film to keep it dry on
the sea.
all day my voice is being washed away at Staverton Ford,
out of a lapse in my throat. (Oswald 18-20) John Edmunds being
Washed away, 1840
The meta-dynamic of flow allows Dart to drift from a social realist voice of the wool mill worker, speaking about the spinning frame for the wool and how the frame twists the wool into “a balanced twist, like the / river,” into an intra-textuality with Theodore Schwenk’s scientific account. This “balanced twist” performed by Dart is intra-textual and not inter-textual since the text produced through the voice of the mill work is neither syntactically isolated by a period from Schwenk’s text (river / whenever), nor is it material-semantically independent from Schwenk’s account on the dynamics of water-flow. Each text is not “inter-textual”, so a textual incorporation between two texts, but interferes from within each other on Dart’s page, hence it is intra-textual, “intra-,” from within the different textures via the force of flow.
If Dart is an apparatus and the diffraction surface for the river’s voices, we can see where one voice diffracts into the other as indicated by the comments in the margins citing “the Woollen Mill” (19), preceded by “Theodor Schwenk” (20) merging into “John Edmund” (20). Yet, it is also on the page where these voices start to interfere with one another to become one voice of the river. “[A] spherical drop-form,’” Schwenk’s voice, interferes with the wool mill worker voice stating that the wool is “wound into reels and packed into bales” before it gets “tied with polypropylene” (Oswald 20) to stay dry on the water, and drifts into John Edmund’s voice. Schwenk’s and the mill worker’s voices intermingle one through the other despite the indication in the margins, which states that we are still reading only Theodor Schwenk’s voice. Here, language, writing and citing conventions are metaphorically subordinated to the will of the water to flow. Flow, then, also creates a Dart-esque time-space-matter dimension, when we read John Edmund’s voice, who was “washed away [in] 1840” (Oswald 20) in Dart’s 2002 edition. Linear time markers of past-future-present dissolve to intra-act with the thick present of Dart as text. Dart’s diffracted texture allows for a literary consciousness, a material awareness, on the page, which creates a present-as-river thickness that collects all human and non-human river voices into an enriched now as we read the text.
But, where do the river voices flow to? The complete interference of each knowledge tradition and voice into the river’s consciousness is finally achieved in the reader’s mind, as the final destination where Dart’s voice flows. Within the reader’s material neurological structures, for example within “the circuit of cells that form mirror neurons” (The Mirror Neuron Revolution), which help us to connect to others and conflate the dichotomy between seeing and doing, we finally become quantum-entangled with the river Dart in Devon – we become Dart. According to Marco Iacoboni, these neurons are the “only brain cells we know of that seem specialized to code the actions of [others] and also our own. … The way mirror neurons likely let us understand others is by providing some kind of inner imitation of the actions of other people, which in turn leads us to “simulate” the intentions and emotions associated with those actions” (The Mirror Neuron Revolution). Dart then does not only meta-poetically simulate the physical phenomena of diffraction and flow, but quantum-entangles us by using the simulation powers of our brains cells to form connections and relations to the river Dart. Here, we can see (the ultimate!) collapse of the traditional distinction between nature and culture as well as literature and science. In Sensitive Chaos: The Creation of Flowing Forms in Water and Air, Theodor Schwenk’s goal is to read water beyond phenomenology: Schwenk writes, “[t]hrough watching water and air with an unprejudiced eye, our way of thinking becomes changed and more suited to the understanding of what is alive” (10-11). What Schwenk addresses in this single sentence is quite spooky: he suggests that we can physically – within us – comprehend and experience water by applying our vision. Schwenk fuses two senses, namely experiencing/touching with seeing and suggests that thought is in itself material. Here, material thoughts can have a ripple effect. By observing water “with an unprejudiced eye” our material thoughts about water can ripple off material water molecules to physically connect, merge, flow around, and finally change nothing less but our “thinking” (WOW!). Thus, we can not only contract human and non-human physicality, but also experience and knowledge. Returning to the process of becoming river, it is the reader’s material mind where all the river-voices flow into, need to be traced, and disambiguated, and interpreted. Schwenk reminds us “whether born by air currents or falling to the earth as rain or snow – water is always on the way somewhere” (Schwenk 14). While reading, the river’s consciousness floods our mind: metaphorically speaking, “new water keeps flowing through each single strand / of water.” Reading then is a very intimate way of materially slipping into another being. Reading establishes a quantum-entanglement, an invisible connection to a river in Devon, which becomes visible and tangible on the page through the poem. Diffraction – “this cutting together apart” – is doubled here through the reading process towards a diffracted diffraction. While the reader has a tactile experience with the material-semantics of a river named Dart out there in Devon, England, through the material (ex)change of reading the river’s voices (first transfusion and metaphorical diffraction), the reader also becomes aware of this material connection because Dart renders it visible through the material book in the reader’s hand (second transfusion and metaphorical diffraction).
This diffracted diffraction is complicated even more in Dart since reading and writing are in themselves entangled into a diffracted wreading. This diffractive wreading allows for the reader to become an active participant in Dart’s worlding. In each edition, Dart leaves a couple of blank pages after the river has flown into the sea on page 48. In the poem’s last stanza the river speaks “all names, all voices, Slip-Shape, this is Proteus, / whoever that is, the shepherd of the seals, driving my many selves from cave to cave …” (48). Just as water has many selves and changing qualities, it also resides in us humans, reminding us that we are already material just as nature is always already material. Water as an element is a matter we all share. Dart forces a “response-ability” (Haraway), the ability to respond, upon us. Within the book’s structure, we can respond to Dart in reading and writing (wreading), filling the last pages with our personal water-stories ourselves – hence the “…”. These last pages are not empty, no vacuum, but create a momentary silence that we as readers can fill until we close Dart to end our quantum-entanglement. Yet, our relationship to water is not as reciprocal as it seems. The river’s currents and Dart’s specific flow do not just pull us and flush us with its voices. In leaving these blank pages, Dart also forces the question upon us whether we need water – rivers, the sea, rain, tears, blood etc. – more than it needs us. The poems suggest an answer by asking “Have you forgotten the force that orders the world” (Oswald 29)? We simply biologically as well as culturally necessarily depend on water. These last empty pages finally draw us into the depth of the sea, where the river currents flow so deep under the sea’s surface that they remain invisible to the human eye. Dart now leaves it to our hands to diffractively wread its stories back to the surface and onto the page, asking once more: “when the lithe water turns / and its tongue flatters the ferns / do you speak this kind of sound: whirlpool whisking round?” (Oswald 11).
Conclusion: Situated Poetry
In Dart, reading and writing the river translates into creating knowledge that is scientific, mythopoetic, and socially realistic diffractively through one another. The poem intra-actively emerges through different tones, stories, vocabularies, and knowledge practices from the depth of the river and materializes on the page. In this poem’s diffractive methodology, the speakers investigate each boundary-making practice, without taking “the boundaries of any other subjects or objects of these studies for granted” (Barad 2007, 93). Here, poetry has a method because it touches upon critical theory and science, and through Dart’s diffraction method science, myth and (social-)realism can find a lyric voice. Hence, Dart’s methodology pushes boundaries by rendering their peripheries visible only to dissolve them again. Method and matter are transformed into poetry and poetry is converted into method and matter at the same time. Within this transformative relationality, words and genres are formulated. Here, the act of “forming” wor(l)ds, a molding, which is included in the term “formulation,” is not only reserved for human language, but can also be acted out from within a natural phenomenon such as the river. Thus, linguistic descriptions do not stand in an antithesis to natural phenomena, but they actually reach a material wholehearted plurality of voices together through their numerous reciprocal relations. More importantly, this enactment of boundaries is not static. Just like water, which always wants to flow, either from the heavens to earth or from a mountain into the sea, boundaries as well as differences are momentarily drawn only to collapse again. The pedagogy of Dart lies in the practice of making the shadows of these differences visible through each stanza-formation and by exposing their instability through the natural flow of water. In doing so, water as matter and element becomes an active worlding participant.
But, as a worlding actant, how does the river Dart materially come into the poem to flow out again into our minds? In the beginning, I suggested that this material transfusion can be best explained by entering into play with diffraction. This play, this production of diffraction as a phenomenon occurs out there when waves go through a slit or face an obstacle, resulting in a specific diffraction pattern within which specific parts of the waves can even interfere. This play, though, also results in a metaphoricity of diffraction – in a consistent resemblance between metaphor and diffraction. Just as waves are split in a diffraction, metaphors are always split into one abstract and concrete component and one grounded and as it were material one. The metaphor as a stylistic device blurs these formal dividing lines between the abstract and the real to produce something new. In Dart as in Devon, the river is in itself metaphorical. “[W]ater with my bones, water with my mouth and my / understanding / when my body was in some way a wave to swim in” (22-23). Here, the swimmer demonstrates that there is no fixed and stable wall of water molecules, which does not penetrate our interior, but water is in his/her “bones… mouth … [and even in his/her] understanding.” By the same logic, speech and voice are merely sound waves as well which are not exclusively human, but penetrate and flood a river, too. The river is just as metaphorical as speech and quantum diffraction or humanity and physical phenomena in general; all agents somehow connect the abstract with the concrete, the flesh with meaning. Evolution, this being on a journey, is doubled here in the river as metaphor. A river, materially situated in a specific local terrain, flows through space, time, and matter, and its characteristic turns and shapes, the river’s visual identity, becomes only perceivable from afar, just as evolutionary changes – something new – becomes noticeable only later on. Hence, not everything flows, but some things (metaphorically) flow from one specific locale into/through/to another.
In Dart, this metaphoricity of diffraction is textually woven together with the metaphoricity of a material reality in Devon, namely the “river’s mutterings,” as A.O. writes in Dart’s author fiction. It is specifically this situatedness of the poem, this earthy watery muddiness of the river current and its dwellers, which transforms “the songline from the source to the sea” (A.O. n.p.) into poetry. It develops through the poem’s overcoming of temporal, spatial, and genre markers such as here/there, past/future, science/myth/realism, reality/fiction into a transmission from the actual existing river Dart into Dart. It is this material translation of a real local place on the ground onto the page, which transforms Dart from song into poetry, soaking readers everywhere in the world, once they open Oswald’s book. Without this creation of worlds and physical tactile transmission, Dart would not be poetry, but just a collection of words scattered on a page, creating a semantic network of words without a material connection from us to Dart. This collection of words, then, either represented as a chart or written within the conventions of scientific or cultural theory (like Karen Barad’s diffractive writing), denies the creation of a sense that is common. Words would here function as evidence, but fail to touch us by affecting our senses or miss out to connect us to the observable world. Abstract words represent something, but do not act upon us. Poetry, as derived from the Greek word poēma, an early variant of poiēma, which means ‘fiction, poem’, however, translates into ‘to create’ (OED) and is substantial. Literally and actually poetry performs and does something: Dart creates worlds by forming river dwellers on and off the page – it creates substantial relations. By adapting the natural currents of the river, the long-poem pulls the reader into reading nothing less than the consciousness of the river while holding a material transmission of the river Dart in their hands – the book, becoming the river’s consciousness itself. Thus, when in the end the seals ask “Who is this moving in the dark?,” we all answer “Me. … water” (Oswald 48).
Bibliography:
Barad, Karen. “Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart.” Paralax, Vol. 20, No. 3. 2014, pp. 168-187, Tandfonline https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623. Accessed 23 December 2017.
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Haraway, Donna. “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.” In The Haraway Reader, 63-124. New York and London: Routledge, 1994/2002.
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[1] Diffraction as a concept started to bridge the divide between the so called “Two Cultures” (Snow) of science and the humanities in the West in the late 1980s. Classical Optics’ notion of diffraction was introduced and written into critical theory by literary and feminist theorist Trinh Minh-ha (1988, 1997) and feminist science study scholar Donna Haraway (1992, 1997), whose interest in notions of differences and boundary-drawing practices were influenced by diffraction patterns and their abilities to record where the consequences of differences materialize (c.f. Haraway 1992, 300).
[2] In Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007) – itself a product of Barad’s methodology of diffractive reading – Barad makes sure to draw a clear distinction between the behavior of waves and particles in Classical Physics and the ones in Quantum Mechanics. In Classical Physics, “[p]articles are materialities which occupy a point in space at a given moment in time” (76) and waves are not categorized as things, but as disturbances which “cannot be localized to a point” (76). Thus, particles and waves exhibit fundamentally different behaviors. In Quantum Physics, however, particles can produce wave patterns and restrain from linearity and causality patterns.
[3] Hence, we readers materialize as river-readers and river-dwellers the moment we meet the book with our eyes and touch it with our hands, creating a common material intra-face of skin-cells, ink, particles of chemicals, water, and wood. This initiation of the reading process is also the initiation of an intra-action. The reader, Alice Oswald, the river Dart, and Dart, fictional and real voices, scientific and activist discourses surrounding waterways all act together to form Dart as a “phenomenon” (Barad 2008, 138). And while Dart unites us all as river-dwellers, it also separates into different groups: the ones who live off the Dart and the ones who do not; the ones who drowned in it and the ones who survived it; the ones who love this local waterway and the ones who fear it; the ones who talk through this river and about it and the ones who read through and about it - into differences that matter and specific “entanglements of which we are part” (Barad 2012, 52). Importantly so, these differences in Dart can always collapse and be folded into another through the current of the water.
Quotations from “Dart” by Alice Oswald reprinted with permission from Faber and Faber.