Table Of ContentElemental Ecocriticism
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Elemental Ecocriticism
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Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and
LoweLL DuCkert, Editors
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London
The University of Minnesota Press acknowledges permission to reprint the
following poetry in this book. William Carlos Williams, “A Smiling Dane,” in
The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, vol. 2, 1939– 1962, ed. Christopher
MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986), 306; copyright 1962 by William
Carlos Williams; reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing
Corporation. Seamus Heaney, “Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces” and “Kinship,” in
Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966– 1996 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1998), 178 and 196; copyright 1998 by Seamus Heaney; reprinted by permission
of Farrar, Straus and Giroux LLC. Brenda Hillman, “The Elements Are Mixed in
Childhood,” in Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan
University Press, 2013), 55; reprinted by permission of the author. Wallace Stevens,
“Of Mere Being,” in The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play,
ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 398; copyright 1967 by
Wallace Stevens and renewed 1971 by Holly Stevens; reprinted by permission
of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a
division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Copyright 2015 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Elemental ecocriticism : thinking with earth, air, water, and fire / Jeffrey Jerome
Cohen and Lowell Duckert, editors.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-9307-8 (hc)—ISBN 978-0-8166-9309-2 (pb)
1. Environmental ethics. 2. Four elements (Philosophy). 3. Materialism—Moral
and ethical aspects.
I. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, editor. II. Duckert, Lowell, editor.
GE42.E44 2015
179’.1—dc23 2015008721
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
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I ntroduction Eleven Principles of the Elements 1
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and LoweLL DuCkert
one Pyromena Fire’s Doing 27
Anne hArris
two Phlogiston 55
steve mentz
three Airy Something 77
vALerie ALLen
four The Sea Above 105
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
five Muddy Thinking 134
shAron o’DAir
six The Quintessence of Wit 158
Chris BArrett
seven Wet? 183
JuLiAn yAtes
eight Creeping Things Spontaneous Generation 209
and Material Creativity
kArL steeL
nine Earth’s Prospects 237
LoweLL DuCkert
Love AnD Strife Response Essays 269
E lementality 271
timothy morton
Elemental Relations at the Edge 286
CAry woLfe
Elemental Love in the Anthropocene 298
stACy ALAimo
Coda Wandering Elements and Natures to Come 310
serpiL oppermAnn and sereneLLA iovino
Acknowledgments 319
Contributors 323
Index 327
introduction
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Eleven Principles of
the Elements
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
and LoweLL DuCkert
The elements are never easy.
A chain of helices rotates in a pond, chemical corkscrews extruded
by a paper mill. Industrial aerators churn air and water through fire’s force,
forging vibrant rounds, poisonous beauty. Photographed from the sky, this
congregation of volutes resembles a surgical cross section, neurons in an
intimacy of memory- making, or jellyfish wandering a depleted sea. Mean-
while, a patch of plastic larger than Texas spins in the Pacific, swirling salt
water, sea life, and the disowned detritus of human industry into choked
cacophony. Over the Atlantic a vast convolution of air and water rotates, its
satellite image rendering its spiral a miniature Milky Way, formed of drench-
ing winds, not blazing stars. The hurricane arrives through the marine trans-
port machine of the North Atlantic Gyre, a conveyer belt of currents that
whirls Saharan storms against American coasts. The popular film The Day
after Tomorrow (2004) predicted the end of the world would arrive in the
eye of an erratic vortex whose cryogenic force instantly, lethally immobi-
lizes. Yet as photographer J. Henry Fair suggests in a sumptuous book also
named The Day after Tomorrow, catastrophe’s playthings are never frozen
in place.1 Environmental violence might be slow, but it is not still.2 We
compose this introduction in the midst of what has been called the “Win-
ter of the Polar Vortex”: snowed into Washington, D.C., because of roving
1
2 introDuCtion
figure i.1. “Baton Rouge, Louisiana.” Image copyright J Henry Fair, 2014. www
.IndustrialScars.com.
arctic chill, brief reprieve from relentless global warming. The hairy ball
theorem of algebraic topology holds that at any given moment at least one
vortex spins in earth’s atmosphere, even if we cannot know precisely where
that spiral turns. The polar vortex— earth’s most persistent cyclone, enor-
mous in scale— is only one such presence. The day after tomorrow always
seems to arrive too early, temporal and material intimacy that has been
there all along. To evade Scylla, daughter of a poisoned spring, is to haz-
ard the whirlpools of Charybdis, rocky straits of catastrophic engulfment.
Lethal and alluring, toxic and lyrical, force of cohesion and strife, a vortex
is elemental: ubiquitous, generative matter for a transhistorical ecopoetics,
involute origin for words and worlds.
And philosophy. The cosmologist, physicist, and poet Empedocles (ca.
495– 435 BCE) argued that all matter consists of four elements in shifting
combination: earth, air, fire, water. Held together by chains of love (philia),
pulled apart through endemic strife (neikos), these primal “roots” (rhizom-
ata) are enduring and unstill.3 Empedocles wondered why the cosmos is
not some immobile sphere (the lethal triumph of love, seeking to bind and
introDuCtion 3
to fix), nor a chaos of the unconjoined (strife’s striving, a universal itiner-
acy), but an impure expanse of ardently connective matter, hybrid prolif-
erations, and fecund- destructive breaks. This disharmonious simultaneity
of desire and discord includes the human without centering itself around
so small a figure. Elemental matter is inherently creative, motile, experi-
mental, impure because fire, water, air, and earth are never inert.4 In their
ardor for combinatory novelty, the four rhizomata fashion ephemeral things
that wander for a while, seeking embrace. A kinetic intermingling at every
scale, the Empedoclean cosmos offers (in Drew Daniel’s apt description)
a “psychomachia of Love and Strife as rival, dynamic forces in which the
world itself is a material assemblage constantly under (re)construction,” a
machine for the production of hybrid objects, bodies, forces.5 Sometimes
these compositions arise with no hope of futurity. Empedocles imagined
arms seeking shoulders, eyes in search of foreheads, misfit burgeonings
of tragic beauty and ambulatory desire. Sometimes these elemental cre-
ations engender unanticipated forms, indiscriminately crossbred things,
queer ecologies of unnatural flourishing: “creatures compounded partly
of male, partly of the nature of female, and fitted with shadowy parts.”6
Charles Darwin observed of nature’s biological generativity that “from so
simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have
been, and are being, evolved.”7 Empedocles went further, insisting that in
the form of the elements, matter itself is ceaselessly productive, heedless
of the partitionings that will in future days dismiss the inorganic to life-
lessness. Elements connect or wander. Love fastens, strife divides. Through
the push- pull of philia and neikos the cosmos begins to whirl, assuming in
this movement its distinctive vorticular form. Unlike René Descartes, who
thought all space to be occupied by vortices, interlocked but singular, for
Empedocles the elements themselves are vortex- spawning, without parti-
tion, from micro- to macrocosm. Dense earth and weighty water sink, air
and fire rise, and all matter spirals, a gyre of renewal and catastrophe.8
For millennia the Empedoclean elements offered a mode of conceptu-
alizing materiality that conveys how difference underlays all substance,
how nature covets entanglement, how entropy promises universal ruin as
well as unceasing regeneration. The physician Hippocrates medicalized
this quadratic schema, adding cold, wet, hot and dry to the equation and
