Machine in the Garden: On Marty Cain’s “The Prelude”
Marty Cain | The Prelude | Action Books | March 2023 | 106 Pages
Can water write? Can water author a text? The act of writing in a particular place implicates the surround in your writing. The act of being enmeshes you in, to use Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s term, the collective Flesh. The philosopher David Abram elaborates on this Flesh in his book The Spell of the Sensuous: “[It] is the mysterious tissue or matrix that underlies and gives rise to both the perceiver and the perceived as interdependent aspects of its own spontaneous activity.” The Flesh is what is. It’s a web of perceiving and being perceived by a sensuous surround. The rigamarole of sensing is the rigamarole of the experience of being sensed, and this reciprocity implies the animacy of the supposedly inanimate.
The Flesh bookends Marty Cain’s The Prelude. Cain writes in the epigraph, “Over time, I learned that the creek had an unconscious. In the summertime, covered in sweat, in the void of diversion, we spoke to each other. This is what it said to me.” And he writes in the first sentence of the acknowledgements page, “This book was written at 627 Hudson Street, Ithaca, NY, and at the First Dam of Ithaca’s Six-Mile Creek.” The Prelude is a text produced by sustained interaction between a writer and a site. Even if Cain would not admit Six-Mile Creek as a co-author, the creek is an indispensable actor in the production of the text. The intensely personal nature of this interaction’s result only highlights its relational origins—we become ourselves through being in relation to others. Attunement to this reciprocity in turn changes the kinds of writing that the writer can (co)produce. It makes and remakes horizons, it uncovers different possibilities at the same time that it forecloses prior options. The reconfiguration of writing’s horizon is in turn key to Cain’s intention.
The Prelude is a deformation of Wordsworth’s The Prelude. It’s a production of an unscenic and unruly rurality. It’s illegible, it’s unintelligible. Cain has written that he wants to produce a rural poetics with “an opaque, inassimilable surface that resists the surveilling, colonial gaze.” He continues, “my favorite rural poets do not theorize their own geographies through the lens of rubbernecking tourists; rather, they say fuck you to extraction and fuck you to property, evoking region as a complex, variegated tapestry suffused with feeling, histories of sociopolitical struggle, and the language of locality.” In “WHAT I TRANSCRIBE I DO BADLY” he writes
Is there a center to what I’m saying
A regional arboreal
Or sociohistorical context
Framing the dewy utterance
Fuck you
Rather than a rurality for tourists, a land recast as a bourgeois playground pervaded by natural and cultural heritage, Cain attempts a rurality that is grotesque and potent. He performs a pastoral contaminated by history.
He writes later in that same poem, “The rain is a process and has an unconscious”. Many ostensibly inanimate “things” in Cains work have such an unconscious. The creek, the rain, the Romantic mode itself. About “WHAT I TRANSCRIBE I DO BADLY,” Cain asserts the poem is “an attempt to read the unconscious of the Romantic surface; I call this unconscious the ‘subgarden,’ a space that flouts enclosure and the Law and attempts to burn down the Arcadian garden from underneath.” I should probably say something about Lacan here, or Freud maybe. Cain, in an interview, claims both a perverse fascination with and dislike of psychoanalytic theory and mentions Lacan. But I’m not going to. Instead, with the anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli in her essay Petroleum, I’d like to ask what “might be the unconscious of a train, a train track, and the landscape flowing past the windows if all of them were freed from the logos-based logic of critical approaches to the unconscious—both the Freudian unconscious and the Lacanian Symbolic?” What is the unconscious of rain? Povinelli draws on indigenous understandings of communication between “human and nonhuman materialities” to suggest what, writing that it includes, in addition to language, other emanations from the body. “Sweat and sensation.” The mode in which Cain experiences the sites he traverses, sits in, smells or whatever, contains and exceeds language. It can be read but it can’t. So to read the unconscious of Arcadia, the Romantic surface, is to fail, to obscure, to fragment. As Cain asserts, what he transcribes he does badly. To represent the subgarden is to deform it into something that can sate and inflame consumer desires, and later will destroy it. Conversely, to refuse to represent it but instead deform is to evince it.
He writes in FUCK THE FREE MARKET:
& the creek mirroring the shape of the poem
I stick my feet in it
I STICK MY FEET IN IT
& make a more skin-like language
This poetics of deformity is a technique for writing with, writing in relation, and writing against what would otherwise sever relation. The creek and the poem correspond to each other, or the creek contains the poem, it’s ambiguous, but in either case the creek and poem live in relation to each other, and Cain’s act of entering the creek creates a more sensuous, relational, embodied language. It’s from the position of the creek, and the creek enveloping Cain, that they produce this discursive practice.
I mean “discursive practice,” here, in the sense that the feminist theorist Karen Barad articulates in her essay “Posthumanist Performativity”: “Discourse is not what is said; it is that which constrains and enables what can be said. Discursive practices define what counts as meaningful statements.” Cain and the creek being in relation, then, is a discursive practice that produces the import of the deformation of rurality and forecloses the possibility of its neat representation in aesthetic forms, at least insofar as that production is understood as meaningful and worthwhile. Being in relation, here, produces derangement. The poetic technique exceeds the act of writing. It’s a mode of being and becoming, of the open-endedness and indeterminacy of being in the world.
The contents of derangement are the introduction of the inadmissible and the mutual disorganization of the archetypally pure and polluting. Roadkilled deer, wildlife slaughtered by the machine in the garden, mass disintegration:
when the law crushes the skull of the deer on the highway, dragging it to the shoulder in the interest of public safety, the gnat cloud erupts and the division between “center” and “periphery” momentarily ruptures as its pyloric artery splits and fluid congeals with cigarette butts and sediment. the deer becomes infrastructure—a bridge, a guardrail, a bottomless tunnel—then disappears, neither outside nor in.
Violence erupts from the grotesque co-becomings of the constituents of the rural—machines, the woods, toxins, bacteria. They become indistinguishable, just as the metropole and the periphery become indistinguishable through their constant interpenetrations across difference. Their differences originate in the way they relate.
Violence is also an imposition in this disfigured rural:
in a space
i call the subgarden
a meadow the Menace has tried to poison
they lay down orange peels and pennies to try and catch it
they pour down Drano to try and kill it
The Menace must be the same phenomenon demanding transparency, a legible landscape, a library of cadastral maps that can enable the understanding of the world as a conglomeration of properties. “Within subgarden communities, Drano is considered to be a form of chemical warfare, and is a frequent tool of the Menace in its police and military raids.” The subgarden may be the underside of the middle class leisurescape, its antagonist, its defracted image suggesting that it is, in actuality, a toxic veneer. The Menace organizes the landscape against disorganization, against the subgarden, through violences of all kinds. “What is power? It’s a garden. A gallery. A golf course.” What’s underneath power? It’s violence.
Against this organizing violence is disorganization, disintegration. Violence induces disorganization. The highway induces roadkill. The deer, splattered on the highway, intrudes on the highway, becomes a part of it, contaminates it, becomes hidden, undetectable. Organization inevitably slides towards disorganization, the organized seeks to produce rifts in the rational world, the organizer attempts to reorganize, it can’t happen, the rift has fallen off the grid, organization continues disorganized, and so on.
This ineluctable relationship between the organized and the disorganized produces incongruous results. “the West River churned and the economy flowed. ski shops & heroin deaths. pubs painted red and white like barns”. Leisurescapes and poverty imbricate. Maybe they are each other. Neoliberal development strategies entail incorporating the periphery into liberal capitalism via the attempted inflammation of growth. Lately growth specifically orbits natural and cultural heritage—the centers of touristic leisure. The engines of growth, however, are the engines of dispossession and immiseration. Golf courses gestate together with, as Cain enumerates in “IN THE COUNTRY,” “heroin / or innovative multilevel marketing solutions / or suicide”. This phenomenon is endemic across capitalist territories. In my own corner of rural Ohio, neoliberal development efforts, many originating with NGOs, proliferate. Some are trying to commodify toxicity. Craft breweries gestate with exploding meth labs. Wealth co-becomes with poverty, and maybe could not live without it. Organization inexorably disorganizes.
The Prelude’s performance of a disorganized Arcadia entails concrete changes exceeding the representational. Discourse, in delineating the meaningful, changes the material. Barad asserts that “discursive practices are specific material (re)configurings of the world.” Meaning itself “is not ideational but rather specific material (re)configurings of the worlds.” I return, recursively, to Six-Mile Creek, about which Cain writes in the opening poem, “I look in the creek / I see my body”. If Cain and Six-Mile Creek began this review as independent entities with discrete attributes, by now they’ve disintegrated into each other, an apparatus which has produced a discrete material phenomenon: The Prelude. On the physical form of the book, Cain writes:
when you read this, according to the law, you are reading the “inside,” a dichotomy that retains coherence through the presence of various formal traits: a cover; a barcode; an author; a spine.
by form, I mean: the tangible entities that separate meaning from obliteration.
I would like to die. I would like for you to grasp the nearest sharp object, forcing it into the meat of the spine and pushing until the object emerges on the other side of the text
If the book is the material (re)configuration of the world resulting from the apparatus of Cain and the creek, it’s not a very inspiring one. The barcode (and presumably the ISBN) freezes the text into commodity, registering it in the global field of consumer goods. The open-endedness of the textual performance ceases at the point of copyright. This book is less (re)configuration than reproduction. No wonder Cain wants it destroyed. When he says “this is what the state does” later that same poem, he’s not describing the act of violence but the act of production. The state makes books.
What, then, is the point of the book? How is it potent? In “ROMANTICISM IS” Cain writes, “to produce something for the first and last time in this world not involving an exchange of currency or worldly goods”. The desire is to escape the commodity form. So the physical form of the book, just like the physical fact of poetry, is inadequate. The poet Sean Bonney, in “Letter on Poetics,” writes, “obviously a rant against the government, even delivered via a brick through the window, is not nearly enough.” Poetry, insofar as it represents, is worthless. Instead of being a revolutionary act in and of itself, poetry discloses new techniques which gesture towards the possibility of the revolutionary. Bonney, in his essay “Comets & Barricades: Insurrectionary Imagination in Exile,” writes that “the task of poetic labour is to suggest methods to bring about the derangement of the ‘entire history of the world’.” Or alternatively, the derangement of bourgeois subjectivity, the “systematic derangement of the senses.” Poetry submits to the commodity form, severing the apparatus formed by Cain and the creek, but in doing so conveys the frozen image of a performance of a reconfigured subjectivity. The meaning conveyed exceeds language, exceeds intelligibility, is a practice of disintegration through co-becoming.
The book’s existence points not towards the represented but the performed: the authors’ intracommunication across human and inhuman materialities. An unruly performance. Yet this practice is arrested by the commodity form even as the commodity form manages to gesture at it. So, finally, the realization of its performance by necessity entails, incongruously, destroying the book. Organization slides towards disorganization.