Bestiality of the Involved

by Spring Ulmer

Overview

"Spring Ulmer takes, as a starting point for this essay collection, Theodor Adorno's accusation that a life "purely as a fact will strangle other life." As she throws herself this way and that in her search for love and meaning, Ulmer refuses to shirk her own complicity in the terror and suffering of the present era. Here is a book that interrogates its own form. How, Ulmer asks, does one render the real, and what is the relationship between art and activism? On an odyssey to become a mother, she doggedly surveys what it means not only to create, but also to mother in this day and age. In this self-portrait as seen through disparate encounters, Ulmer talks with respective neighbors-a hunter in the Vermont woods, a Rwandan ex-soldier online, an immigrant in a subway car, cadets at a military school, a stranger at an airport-and invites us along as she works as farmhand, secretary, and professor. Waylaid by tragedy, Ulmer questions how we might move beyond Adornoian guilt into another ethical paradigm-one that cultivates emotional intelligence. The impulse to see and what it means to lay claim to anyone or anything is troubled water-marred by the stirring up of social memory and the brutal human imprint on the natural world, yet Ulmer learns, after the death of her father, that a returned gaze portends the joining of souls she has just eschewed. A life, Ulmer intimates, can also honor other life. Such is Ulmer's labor"--

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781733674126
Publisher:	Etruscan Press
Publication date:	10/31/2020
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

Read an Excerpt

I lean into Heart's rib cage and press her hip up against the agricultural mesh to try to calm her. It hurts to give milk. It hurts, too, to tell one's life story to a stranger who thinks your parents are crazy, believes in some other political purpose, and calls your home interesting. She does not shake my hand when she leaves-this arbiter who will present my childless case and intent to adopt to the State. She says some people think too much of their genetic makeup. I rage on about eugenics. She and I share certain opinions when it comes to race. But I sob after she's gone because I feel I've prostituted myself. What is this game of wanting a child? What is this needfor milk? Heart, tell me: Is there a better way? How should I approach when you are on your knees? You are tired, are you not? If it were up to me, I would let you dry up immediately.

My parents once subscribed to the 'far out isn't far enough' back-to-the-land movement. I was reared without electricity in the woods. Today, however, my generation isn't attempting to revel in nature; those of us who care are attempting to save its remnants, archiving seeds and freezing the eggs and sperm of mammals that are going extinct faster than we can harvest their unborn. Alan Weisman in The World Without Us, however, is hopeful: without us, life will continue. We invasives, we serpentine creatures, we haters of our own species, we owners of everything can only be so destructive. Our demise promises new life.

The night before receiving this phone call announcing your existence, I had read an essay­ "Take Me To the Water" by James Baldwin that had shaken me to the core. His description of a certain beautiful white man who lost his child to divorce and was virtually adopting another one, black, this time, included an observation that the man had emotionally ceased to exist and appeared to be able to love only the helpless. It took me a while to piece together the fact that Baldwin's essay was about the emotional poverty not just of a particular white man, but, rather, of this country's total white populous. What he was writing, in other words, was that this is a nation afraid of its own soul.

Table of Contents

A Short History of the Distance Between Art and Life 15

An Era of Postmemory 21

A Short History of Greek Blues 25

A Short History of Bubbles 43

An Era of the Terror of Terror 57

A Short History of Reading Anti-War Literature with Cadets 59

A Short History of Our Flesh and Blood 77

A Short History of Revolution 91

A Short History of Reluctant Fundamentalism 93

An Era of the American Taliban 99

A Short History of Torture 105

A Short History of Make Believe 109

A Short History of Black Death 111

A Short History of Genetics 117

A Short History of Labor 121

A Short History of the White Gaze 139

A Short History of the Black Impulse to See 149

A Short History of Insect Lessons 157

An Era of Poppies 165

A Short History of Hostile Soil 175

A Short History of the Soul 191

Acknowledgments 195