My problem with this is not so much to do with the ideas behind the Dark
Mountain Project as the language and manner in which they are expressed. Let's
have a look at some typical bits of phraseology:
Deeper than oil, steel or bullets, a civilisation is built on stories: on the
myths that shape it and the tales told of its origins and destiny. We have
herded ourselves to the edge of a precipice with the stories we have told
ourselves about who we are... Our literature has been dominated for too long by
those who inhabit the cosmopolitan citadels... There is an underlying darkness
at the root of everything we have built. Outside the cities, beyond the
blurring edges of our civilisation, at the mercy of the machine but not under
its control, lies something... upon which that thin crust of lava is balanced;
which feeds the machine and all the people who run it...
For one thing the language is rather old-fashioned ("the tales told",
"destiny", "citadels"); for another it's rather grandiose ("there is an
underlying darkness at the root of everything"); and it also has a strong
tendency towards rhetorical devices, such as repeating the same thing several
times with variations instead of saying it just once ("outside the cities...
beyond the blurring edges... at the mercy of the machine..."). Furthermore it
tends to deal in symbolic generalisations rather than specifics: "a precipice",
"citadels", "the machine". Not a specific precipice like the chalk cliff at
Dover, or a specific city like Birmingham, or a specific machine like a
lawn-mower, but their non-specific counterparts, which are charged with a kind
of gloomy grandeur and super-significance, precisely by virtue of the fact that
they seem to insist we should interpret them symbolically rather than imagine
them with any precision.
One problem with this is that it's directly in conflict with the call for
specific and detailed observation which is made in the "Eight Principles" - "By
careful attention, we will reengage with the non-human world" and "We will
celebrate writing and art which is grounded in a sense of place and of time".
And although the Dark Mountain manifesto declares itself to be set against
human self-importance ("Humans are not the point and purpose of the planet. Our
art will begin with the attempt to step outside the human bubble") it does so
in such grandiose and self-important language that it's hard to take it
seriously. "Our words will be elemental" declare the authors. For "elemental"
read "archaic and pompous".
For a project which seems to have initially regarded itself as mainly literary
in character - its first planned offering being "a book-length collection of
uncivilised writing" - the manifesto seems extremely long on sweeping
pronouncements about the state of civilisation, and extremely short on ideas
about literary style. Contrast, for example, Ezra Pound's very definite ideas
about style at the time when he was associated with the Imagist movement: "Use
no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something. Go in fear
of abstractions. Don't chop your stuff into separate iambs. Don't make each
line stop dead at the end, and then begin every next line with a heave." By
contrast, the Dark Mountain project has the example of its own style, and one
talismanic figure - the American poet Robinson Jeffers.
A few details about Robinson Jeffers himself will help to set both the literary
style and the cultural ancestry of the Dark Mountain project in their proper
context. Jeffers originally studied medicine, but then enrolled as a forestry
student. He soon gave this up, but when he became a successful writer he was,
according to Wikipedia, "famous for being a tough outdoorsman, living in
relative solitude and writing of the difficulty and beauty of the wild." He
lived in Carmel, California (now, of course, homeplace of the equally gritty
and outdoorsy Clint Eastwood) in a house called "Tor House and Hawk Tower". Tor
is the Celtic term for a large outcrop of rock. "He built a large four-story
stone tower on the site called Hawk Tower, based on similar structures he had
seen while traveling through Ireland... The romantic Gothic tower... was a gift
for his wife Una, who had a fascination for Irish literature and stone towers."
All of this identifies Jeffers as a disciple of the Celtic Revival, and in
particular W B Yeats, who also lived in a stone tower and wrote poetry with
lots of allusions to fierce heraldic beasts such as hawks.
Yeats himself was fixated with the importance of willpower, and with the idea
that history was shaped not by mass movements or deterministic forces but by
strong-willed individuals. The hawk is symbolic of this viewpoint when it is
projected into the natural world - it gives us a particular idea of nature as
fierce, amoral and merciless as well as wild and beautiful - in contrast, for
example, to the idea we might receive from poetry about mushrooms, hedgehogs or
ants. Yeats was influenced, in other words, by the ideas of writers such as
Carlisle and Nietzsche, with their interest in heroically nonconformist
individuals and their contempt for conventional social values and morality.
Robinson Jeffers clearly ploughed much the same furrow: according to Wikipedia,
in the nineteen-twenties he "began to articulate themes that contributed to
what he later identified as Inhumanism. Mankind was too self-centered, he
complained, and too indifferent to the "astonishing beauty of things".
Jeffers's longest and most ambitious narrative, The Women at Point Sur (1927),
startled many of his readers, heavily loaded as it was with Nietzschean
philosophy." Jeffers' poetry, in other words, asks us to set aside our
conventional values in favour of a re-examination of the natural world: but it
is the natural world seen from a particular angle: the natural world as the
arena of unfettered willpower, the amoral, unsentimental and merciless struggle
for existence. In "Hurt Hawks", one of his most famous poems, he mentions "the
wild God of the world" and adds "You do not know him, you communal people, or
you have forgotten him;/Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him..." The
words "intemperate and savage", it will be noted, can be equally well
interpreted as applying to the hawk or to the "wild God" the hawk remembers;
the savagery and intemperance are held up to us as a kind of virtue; and they
are contrasted, by implication, with the conventional virtues of "communal"
people such as ourselves - ordinary people who live communal lives, most
probably urban lives, instead of lonely, wild and individualistic ones.
This kind of writing isn't necessarily bad. Its most famous modern
representative is Ted Hughes, and I'm a big admirer of Ted Hughes' poetry. But
the weakness of writing of this kind, because of its emphasis on willpower and
thus clarity of purpose, is that it finds it very difficult to convey certain
types of experience - for example hesitation, misinterpretation or ignorance.
Those who write in this style never seem to be plagued by uncertainties about
their own beliefs and intuitions. Their descriptive style is limited because it
seems to lack a certain type of honesty - a fidelity to what it actually feels
like to inhabit a world which we only partly understand. In a way, despite its
attempt to get beyond the limitations of the human bubble of self-importance,
it is simply moving that bubble to a new place.
What I would advocate is a style which is less sure of itself, something more
hesitant and provisional, more multifaceted and fragmentary, less grandly
unified. More specifics and less bombast.
- Edward Picot_______________________________________________
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