Robert Root

 

Cal Flyn's Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape records the breadth of her travels to sites around the world where the landscape once inhabited and exploited by human populations has been altered and become occupied by other creatures. The sites she visits include three in Scotland, her home country, three in the United States, and others in Cyprus, Estonia, the Ukraine, France, Tanzania, and Montserrat. Associations no doubt arise in readers who recognize certain locations—Chernobyl, of course, probably Detroit and the Salton Sea—and locate others on a mental world atlas with less concrete assumptions of what might be abandoned there.

 

Flyn spent two years researching and exploring these places and in each chapter we learn what once was there and what is no longer there and what, if anything, occupies it now. The book's Invocation, set on Inchkeith, an island in the Firth of Forth, was formerly a fortress isle with a centuries-old political history and now, "fallen into obscurity, it has risen in environmental significance." Once only nested on by eiders, it is now a breeding ground for a dozen more species and intermittently visited by countless others. When she steps out onto "what once was a gun turret" she sees "the birds rise up as one great moving, wheeling mass [. . .] outraged to see me—here, now, on this island of abandonment."

 

She warns readers that she will be visiting "some of the eeriest and most desolate places on Earth. A no man's land between razor-wire fences where passenger jets rust on the runway after four decades of neglect. A clearing in the woods so poisoned with arsenic that no trees can grow there. An exclusion zone thrown up around the smouldering ruin of a nuclear reactor." These and others are abandoned places, each "left to its own device," where "nature has been allowed to work unfettered." She believes they offer "invaluable insight into the wisdom of environments in flux."

 

I dog-eared a great many pages in the book, consulting them later to see connections. In each chapter she anchors her reflections on the past and the likely future of a locale in an observant and vivid narrative of personal exploration at the present site. In Detroit she enters and surveys an abandoned but easily accessible church and its adjacent deserted school before describing Detroit as "a city shrunk from its shell [. . .] in terminal decline for seventy years, its population reduced by almost two-thirds." She explains, "What that means, in practice, is that to drive through the city is to spin through streets and sometimes whole neighborhoods in a state of what looks like decomposition. Tens of thousands of homes stand empty and falling apart, shingles melting from roofs like hot icing, [. . .] sharp-edged gaps where rotten buildings have been pulled like teeth."

 

In contrast, she reports staying overnight in the deserted Rose Cottage on the Scottish island of Swona, where decades ago people about to abandon the island opened fence gates to let cattle run free, allowing creatures that had long been domesticated to begin leading feral lives. Flyn notes that here, the "process we call natural selection is coming back into play." All the rabbits on Swona, "initially black and white [. . .] now appear brown, like their wild forebears." She continually wrestles with understanding what the aftermath of industrial abandonment and military devastation and climate change mean in terms of what will replace everything that, inevitably, has been and will be lost.

 

Extinction has happened—repeatedly—throughout the history of Earth; after all, that's how we got here, as an adjustment, an accidental replacement for what was eliminated by a meteoric collision or a change in climate and atmosphere. One of her visits takes her to the ash-coated remains of Plymouth on the volcanic Caribbean island Montserrat where the landscape is reminiscent of Pompeii or Krakatoa or the supervolcano believed to have triggered the Permian extinction of 252 million years ago that eradicated "more than 95 percent of marine species and three-quarters of land species [. . .] leaving a vacuum in which dinosaurs would later come to the fore."

 

In the end she tries to consider the present planet reasonably. If the planet, "with its warming climate, has mass extinction ahead," she reminds us, "Every major extinction event on the planet has been succeeded by a burst of evolutionary creativity: rapid diversification as heretofore insignificant species take on the roles left empty by those wiped out by meteor or climate change or supervolcano." Her book asks us to consider that inevitability and hopes that, by seeing change in our own islands of abandonment, we will endeavor to resist it, delay it, be active in slowing it down.

 

 

Note: Cal Flyn. Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape. New York: Viking, 2021.

 

 

I've lately been noticing people in their eighties and beyond, particularly celebrities that Facebook highlights. Often an obituary or a commemoration appears on the date of their births or deaths. Annually in November my two sons-in-law and I observe and mostly celebrate our birthdays, their ages far lower than mine, but this year I'm often reminded that aging is, inevitably, linked to mortality. As some of your powers dwindle, pondering the eventuality of losing them all is occasionally unavoidable.

 

Carl Klaus, tracking his own aging in The Ninth Decade: An Octogenarian's Chronicle—"octogenarian" is a word I run across more frequently these days—mentions reading, in his eighty-second year, Essays After Eighty by Donald Hall, published in 2014. Klaus' own book will take him into his eighty-eighth year, but he doesn't mention whether he encountered Hall's final book, A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety; it was published in 2018, the year Hall died three months shy of his ninetieth birthday. Klaus had read Hall because he was "curious about his octogenarian experiences, as well as his way of recalling and writing about it." He credits Hall with being "very frank and self-deprecating about his recent physical mishaps, bodily infirmities, and mental lapses, but he never mentions memory problems," an issue then troubling Klaus. Acknowledging that Hall "writes extensively and vividly about his past, much more so than about his octogenarian experience," he refers to moments in Hall's life that Hall's readers over the years are likely to be very familiar with.

 

As it happens, I've been such a reader, not only of those two final books but also of some of his poetry collections and many of his books of essays and memoir, starting with Seasons at Eagle Pond in 1987. Both Henry Thoreau and E. B. White had aroused my interest in New England essays and memoirs and Hall and his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon (whom I'd also read), had left Michigan to live on a family farm in New Hampshire. Hall's memoirs and his final books of essays are set at Eagle Pond. Thinking about everything I'd read by him, it took me awhile to recall publishing a review of his memoir Life Work in a 1995 issue of The English Journal.

 

At the start of the review I claimed, "I keep Donald Hall's Life Work on my bedside table because I take it personally. I first read it for insights into Hall's work habits (and perhaps my own); I now reread it to bring perspective to the intimations of mortality tolling around me." To me, the first half of the book was "a personal meditation on the nature of work" and Hall admits that the idea for the book arose from his saying, in his analyst's office, "'work' where he meant to say 'life'." But the second half of Life Work deals with his concern about his own mortality as a cancer survivor who had "discovered a growth in his liver, and the implications of the title changed again." The book became more "open and intimate" from that point on. I wrote, "So movingly does Hall portray his clear-eyed awareness of imminent loss that we sense our own inevitable losses as well as his."

 

In fact, at 64, Donald Hall had another 25 years to live, enduring the loss of Jane Kenyon to leukemia only two years later and weathering a host of "physical mishaps, bodily infirmities, and mental lapses" (in Klaus's terms) into his eighties. Essays After Eighty and A Carnival of Losses are very much evidence of Hall's tendency to make "life" and "work" mean the same thing. Near the end of the final book, in the next to last chapter, he claims to have "admitted to myself that I had stopped writing my new book, notes and essays of memoir and meditation, as I shuffled towards ninety." He finds himself unable to "add a sentence to the manuscript, which was hard, because I had written or tried to write every day since I was twelve." He says he knows he won't have another birthday. He died a month before A Carnival of Losses was published. His life and his work ended close together.

 

While I've been composing this, I've been sitting in a local library with high windows that let me view autumn-hued trees where a brisk wind swirls yellowed leaves across the lawn. Driving away from our condo this morning, I noticed that almost all the trees in front of our complex were entirely bare. It's November in Wisconsin and snow is predicted for the weekend. The seasons will change, the weather reminds me. It's time for me to shelve those aging books, make sure we celebrate those birthdays, and find more work to do in coming days.

 

 

Notes: Carl H. Klaus. The Ninth Decade: An Octogenarian's Chronicle. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2021: 52-53.

 

Robert L Root, Jr. "A Poet on Why We Work." The English Journal. 84:2 (Feb 1995): 125-126

 

Amanda Petrusich."Postscript: Donald Hall." The New Yorker. June 26, 2018.

 

Hannah Aizenman. "Page-Turner: Donald Hall in the New Yorker." The New Yorker. June 26, 2018.

 

 

I'm not certain when my son, the writer for animated television programs and occasionally comic books, and I started talking about graphic novels. We probably shared reactions to Maus: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman, where Jewish mice are oppressed by Nazi cats, and Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi, where female children in Iran struggle with political oppressions; we've likely conversed about their sequels and adaptations—Persepolis eventually became a movie. Memory tells me that one of my gifts from him was the graphic memoir They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, an actor best known for his role as Sulu on multiple seasons of Star Trek but also a memoirist.

 

Sulu's family were of Japanese descent, his father born in Japan, his mother, his siblings, and himself born in the United States. The memoir centers on his childhood experiences with his family while, because of their family background, they were incarcerated in concentration camps in Arkansas and California during World War II. I've read it a few times now. Initially, by paying more attention to the nature of graphic storytelling, I considered finding a way to think more about Takei's book and compare the political nature of it to those by Spiegelman and Satrapi, all centered on troubling historical moments. The oppressors in Takei's memoir are not quite as villainous as the Nazis and Jihadis in those other books, but they are certainly callous, oppressive, and unjust, and Takei's mention in the final pages of recent bans on Muslim immigration to the United States as on a par with the treatment of Japanese Americans in the 1940s brings his readers into the present.

 

But then I started connecting Takei's graphic memoir to other visual presentations that have haunted me, specifically Dorothea Lange's internment camp photos that caught my attention over a year ago. I'm tempted to focus on two aspects of Takei's book: its internal narrative and graphic representation of the internment camp and its effort to make the book almost like a scene-by-scene reproduction of a film. On one page there are two almost-identical pictures depicting the Japanese-American internees in the context of two problematic items on a form they were asked to sign, the first making them feel complicit in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the second making them deny an allegiance to an emperor they never felt to begin with. Another page had three images of military trucks in increasing sizes, each with sounds labeled on them, each larger (and louder) in succession. The sequence suggests to me one of the aspects of the book's narrative composition, the graphics working almost like clips from a movie or television series. In an expanded version of the book published a year later, additional pages explain how the illustrator, Harmony Becker, worked with Takei and two co-authors, Justin Eisinger and Steve Scott, to visualize the moments and develop them in an almost cinematic way. One could imagine the book as a graphic screenplay. Throughout the book we are aware that Takei is narrating the story as if it were a TEDx talk—in fact, he is sometimes portrayed on the TEDx stage, sometimes in close-up, sometimes at a distance, the way the speakers on those telecasts are filmed.

 

So what is the difference between a Lange photograph and a Takei-Becker graphic, between a static image and a hand-drawn illustration? I've seen a series of black-and-white photographs that Lange took at the internment camp. They are not sequential or serial, but essentially random and individual and cumulative in their often ironic impact on the viewer. The images in Takei's graphic memoir, also in black-and-white, are less explicit in terms of background and close-up details; they emphasize expressions on individual faces and establish sequences of action and re-action in the characters they depict. Narrative insertions tend to contextualize the images. The book is cinematic in its visuals and sound-effects and virtually provides a voice-over narration as well as dialogue in prose rather than in sound.

 

In the expanded edition Takei explains how the book came together through the efforts of himself and his team. They essentially provided a screenplay for a graphic production of the story Takei was essentially telling on his TED talk in Kyoto. Does this alter our sense of how a graphic novel or graphic memoir (or comic book) operates? A sequence of narrative images that might readily be transferred to cinematic animation? I've seen (and enjoyed) Marjane Satrapi's film version of Persepolis. I suspect that Maus could make the transfer readily. Maybe we yet will get the chance to see They Called Me Enemy as an animated film and reading the graphic memoir will be even more emphatically like reading the screenplay of the film.

 

Notes: George Takei, Justin Eisinger, Steve Scott, and Harmony Becker. They Called Us Enemy. Expanded Edition. IDW Printing, 2020.

 

Dorothea Lange, Pledge of Allegiance Internment Image is viewable here.

 

Nearly fifty years ago, Carl Klaus introduced me to English Restoration drama in a graduate course at the University of Iowa. Good paperback editions existed of plays by the best- known dramatists—Dryden, Etherege, Wycherley, Congreve—but only a library copy was available for Thomas Southerne's The Wives Excuse. Carl assigned me to report on it in class. That began my immersion in Restoration drama and eventually led to my wide-ranging dissertation, The Problematics of Marriage: English Comedy 1688-1710, directed by Carl in the English Department and Judith Milhous in Theatre. I remember Carl sticking up for my approach to the subject matter at my dissertation defense. My first scholarly book, Thomas Southerne, followed a few years later.

 

Academic Jobs for Restoration specialists were few, and when I became an unemployed Ph.D., Carl advised me to pursue a year of post-doctoral study, concentrating on composition, rhetorical theory, and nonfiction literature, courses that would eventually become a Masters Program. Though my employment at Central Michigan University initially began as a result of my having taught Ancient and Biblical Literature at Iowa as a teaching assistant, composition and nonfiction became the major focus of my academic career. I wrote a a textbook for composition classes, a book on nonfiction writers, and, with Carl's editorial input, a study of a major essayist, E. B. White. Eventually, I became an essayist and memoirist.

 

Carl had co-written or co-edited several textbooks and anthologies—Elements of the Essay was a favorite of mine—but as he neared retirement, he focused more on his own nonfiction narratives. An avid gardener, he published My Vegetable Love: A Journal of a Growing Season (1996) and Weathering Winter: A Gardener's Daybook (1997)—the second book, drawn from a portion of the first book that his commercial publisher preferred to omit, was published by University of Iowa Press. Later it also published Taking Retirement: A Beginners Diary (1999). All three books grew out of frequent journaling, the process of thinking by writing constantly—often daily—rather than standing back from composition in hopes of something eventually rising to demand expression. I don't use that method often enough but relied on it for portions of my first travel memoir and for writing weekly radio essays years ago and, presently, for composing weekly blog posts (like this one).

 

Everything I've written here was set in motion by discovering Carl Klaus' newest book, The Ninth Decade: An Octogenarian's Chronicle, covering his thoughts about aging. Each chapter focuses on a six-month period in his life from his eightieth birthday to his eighty-eighth. The book, he claims, is "a product of good luck and irrepressible curiosity" that grew out of his desire to learn what others had written about their eighties and, unable to locate "personal books on the subject," encouraged recording his own experiences and reactions. The format resembles his approach to composing the gardening and retirement books as well as Letters to Kate, centered on the loss of his wife, the writer Kate Franks. His letters updating Kate about his efforts to adjust to her absence are a form of confessional grief therapy that helps him arrive at a place where he can continue to live a life without her, a life he never wanted to be living.

 

In The Ninth Decade he sets out to chronicle his adjustment to his eighties by recording not only what he thinks and feels about his health and his most intimate relationships but also by noting "the experiences of other octogenarians—loved ones, friends, acquaintances—and thereby produce a collective depiction of life after eighty." Each essay is based on notes made throughout a six-month period and recounts encounters with friends, family members, and acquaintances, health issues for him and his beloved, experiences during brief vacations or excursions. Throughout he expresses his innermost reactions to moments of pleasure, pain, and, inevitably, grief, as many of the people he worked with and socialized with pass away.

 

My copy of The Ninth Decade now has about a dozen dogeared pages, some of them reminding me of people I knew in Iowa, mostly my professors or advisors, tactfully identified by first names only, and some of them reminding me of aspects of aging I'm beginning to be too aware of myself. I'm a decade younger than Carl, and though I suffer from few of his ailments, I identify with certain aspects of his life: his efforts at and resistance to decluttering, his problems with hearing or with mobility or, most familiar, with memory. I'm not that far from eighty. I'll keep Carl's book handy for when I reach it, to give myself notice of what I might expect, what likely lies ahead of me. I'll also hope to face up to aging as well as he has.

 

 

Note: Carl H. Klaus, The Ninth Decade: An Octogenarian's Chronicle. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2021.

 

Laura Farmer. "Writing is a 'mind-altering endeavor' for Carl Klaus." The Gazette. Oct. 21, 2021. 7:00 am

 

Root, Robert. Interview with Carl Klaus, Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction 14.1 (Spring 2012): 125-145.