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ENVIRONMENTAL URGENCY: APOCALYPTIC UNDERCURRENTS IN

APPALACHIAN LITERATURE

including

ALL PLACES THOU: AN EXPERIMENTAL NOVELLA

A Thesis

by

LAURA CLAIRE SCHAFFER

Submitted to the Graduate School

at Appalachian State University

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

May 2018

Department of Appalachian Studies

brought to you by

CORE

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk

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ENVIRONMENTAL URGENCY: APOCALYPTIC UNDERCURRENTS IN

APPALACHIAN LITERATURE

including

ALL PLACES THOU: AN EXPERIMENTAL NOVELLA

A Thesis

by

LAURA CLAIRE SCHAFFER

May 2018

APPROVED BY:

________________________________________________

Zackary Vernon, Ph.D.

Chairperson, Thesis Committee

________________________________________________

Sandra L. Ballard, Ph.D.

Member, Thesis Committee

________________________________________________

Joseph Bathanti, Ph.D.

Member, Thesis Committee

________________________________________________

William Schumann, Ph.D.

Chairperson, Department of Appalachian Studies

________________________________________________

Max C. Poole, Ph.D.

Dean, Cratis D. Williams School of Graduate Studies

Copyright by Laura Claire Schaffer 2018

All Rights Reserved

iv

Abstract

ENVIRONMENTAL URGENCY: APOCALYPTIC UNDERCURRENTS IN

APPALACHIAN LITERATURE

including

ALL PLACES THOU: AN EXPERIMENTAL NOVELLA

Laura Claire Schaffer

B.A., University of Notre Dame

M.A., Appalachian State University

Chairperson: Zackary Vernon, Ph.D.

Apocalyptic imagery and rhetoric appears across a variety of Appalachian literature

and literature with Appalachian settings; however, comparatively little scholarly attention has

been dedicated to exploring this trend, despite its provocative ecological implications. Using

an ecocritical lens, I will first examine the apocalyptic undercurrent in Appalachian literature

by analyzing its thematic significance to Ann Pancake's Strange as this Weather Has Been

(2007) and Louise McNeill's Paradox Hill: From Appalachia to Lunar Shore (1972). I will

then apply original narrative, verse, and selected artwork to a creative examination of these

same thematic and symbolic trends. Ultimately, both critical and creative methodologies will

indicate that apocalypticism - particularly in its contextualization of crisis in past, present,

and future - provides a way for Appalachian literature to negotiate the ecological destruction

and exploitation so prevalent in many parts of the region.

v

Acknowledgments

I would like to offer sincerest thanks to Dr. Zackary Vernon, my thesis advisor, for

his expert guidance and unfailing encouragement. His knowledge, insight, and enthusiasm

were truly invaluable to this project.

I would also like to thank the ever-generous members of my thesis committee: Dr.

Sandra Ballard and Dr. Joseph Bathanti. I have deeply appreciated their expertise and

support during this challenging process.

vi

Table of Contents

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………….i

Acknowledgments....................................................................................................................v

Foreword……………………………………………………………………………………..vii

Chapter 1: Appalachian Apocalypticism………………………………………………...…..1

Chapter 2: Apocalypse in Strange as this Weather Has Been…………………………......27

Chapter 3: Louise McNeill, Apocalyptic Poet……………………………………………...59

Chapter 4: Eschatological Ecology………………………………………………………....99

Chapter 5: All Places Thou: An Experimental Novella…………………………………..104

Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………......268

Vita………………………………………………………………………………………...272

vii

Foreword

Although the first four chapters of this project conform to the prescribed format,

Chapter 5 deviates from this in order to expand the scope of exploration, specifically by

responding in the form of creative synthesis. In this way, I apply original narrative and verse

compositions, accompanied by selected original artwork, to a continued engagement with the

critical and theoretical sources introduced in Chapter 1. Chapter 5's experimental novella

employs chiefly literary, rather than critical, techniques, but it still examines questions of

apocalypticism and ecology in Appalachian place, in conjunction with the ecocritical analysis

of Chapters 1-4.

1

Chapter 1: Appalachian Apocalypticism

As scholars like Henry Shapiro and Allan Batteau have pointed out, Appalachia

occupies a special role in the popular imagination. Colored by characterizations of

otherness - of isolation, primitivity, or preserved heritage in an otherwise "progressive"

society - the region has served a variety of illustrative functions by which the normative,

"mainstream" American culture has reflected on, and reconciled challenges to, its

preferred identity. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, considering this longstanding

appropriation within urban, industrial concepts of progress and "civilization," Appalachia

has also been the site of extensive resource extraction. Exploitative industries, including,

but not limited to, timber and coal, have left environmental, economic, and social damage

in their wakes, leading scholars and activists to suggest that Appalachia represents a

"sacrifice zone," or even an internal colony.

The men and women living in these sometimes severely reconstituted spaces face

a variety of domesticated threats, ranging from intimidation and a loss of the commons to

pollution and the looming possibility of environmental catastrophe. Thus, literature

addressing these realities must often come to terms with both human and environmental

concerns. In her conclusion to The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and

Appalachian Literature (2003), in fact, Elizabeth Engelhardt points out that, "[e]ight

years before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, a text often celebrated as one of the first to

condemn the effects of environmental pollution, (Appalachian novelist) Wilma

Dykeman... similarly criticize[d] industrial poisoning of human and non-human

communities" (170) in her novel, The French Broad (1955).

2

Even in areas less directly affected by resource extraction, moreover, the

relationship between human beings and their environment looms large in Appalachian-

focused literature and scholarship. While Appalachia as a region spans a striking

diversity of spaces and demographics, generalized images of Appalachia tend to

essentialize along a value-laden scale of human engagement with the natural world: at

one end are images of wildness, primitivity, and animal association; at the other, portraits

of down-to-earth communities still in touch with an agrarian past and saturated with the

importance of (typically rural) place. Mountaineers are characterized as ignorant,

degenerate, and violent - or as traditional, nostalgic, and close to the land. Across the

spectrum of such representations, then, nature and environment provide a consistent, if

not all-pervasive, thread, informing not only the stories told about the region, but also

those told from within it, as residents explore questions of identity, history, and self-

assertion in response to, and often conflict with, essentializing, or stereotypically

simplifying, portraits in mainstream American culture.

The environmental undercurrent within Appalachian literature wrestles with a

variety of elements, from historical memory to outside perception to continuing

environmental exploitation. However, having to make sense of local history, local

futures, and personal identity-in-place - often in the light of ecological destruction - tends

not only toward environmental themes generally, but also toward apocalyptic rhetoric.

Examining Appalachian literature, in fact, uncovers a subtle but identifiable apocalyptic

thread, particularly within works dealing with human-instigated environmental change

and resource extraction.

3

Apocalypse and Ecocriticism

Over the past forty years, scholars and critics like David Ketterer, Greg Garrard,

Eric C. Otto, and Gerry Canavan have explored apocalyptic and related environmental

science fiction discourse as an ecocritically charged genre (or subgenre), assessing its

merits and limitations as the body of relevant fiction continues to grow. Stephen

O'Leary, in a related but not exclusively literary vein, has explored apocalyptic rhetoric

as a persuasive mode, and more recently, Anthony Dyer Hoefer has examined

representatives of southern literature through an apocalyptic lens. Ursula K. Heise

briefly addresses related narratives within a chapter of her Sense of Place and Sense of

Planet (2008), while Jimmie Killingsworth, Frederick Buell, and Timothy Morton

continue to explore the modern status and limitations of apocalyptic rhetoric and

literature.

Perhaps most significant of all to the current exploration, Frank Kermode and

Malcolm Bull offer treatments of apocalpytic thought, in literature and social and

philosophic discourse respectively, that provide a strong theoretical basis for exploring

Appalachian literature in light of apocalyptic images and ideas. Although not strictly in

an Appalachian context, multiple scholars cite Kermode as they examine apocalyptic

literature, while Hoefer addresses the more contemporary (and postmodern) Bull in ways

that highlight his relevance to literary theory. Although none of these scholars direct

their analysis at Appalachia or Appalachian-focused literature, the connections they

establish between science fiction, its apocalyptic subgenre, and ecological consciousness

remain deeply relevant to the current exploration.

4

In his 1970's text New Worlds for Old, David Ketterer identifies American

literature with an "apocalyptic imagination" (15), arguing that science fiction, and

particularly apocalypse, stands in special relationship with American literary elements.

Maintaining that "apocalyptic allows for a dialectic, conflict, or tension of oppositions"

(8) - including through its "negative and... positive charge" (7) and "prophetic" (7) and

"historical context" (7) - Ketterer characterizes apocalyptic in terms of "related tensions"

(13):

(Firstly) [t]he destruction of an old world, generally of

mind, is set against the writers' establishment of a new

world, again generally of mind. Secondly, satire comes up

against a prophetic mysticism to provide a form of

'judgment.' Thirdly, the creation of purpose and meaning...

collides with the possibility of non-meaning and chaos...

And fourthly… apocalyptic literature (at least implicitly)

involves a certain magnitude or breadth of vision which

militates against an interest in detailed characterization.

(13)

According to Ketterer, such works "question the fundamental epistemological

assumptions of the human situation" (13) through "a literature of ideas" (13), concerning

itself "with the creation of other worlds which exist... in a credible relationship... with

the 'real' world, thereby causing a metaphorical destruction of that 'real' world in the

reader's head" (13). Having attributed to American literature a "metaphysical" (20)

element, an interest in the "prophetic" (21) or "original" (21), and a preoccupation with

5

the "juxtaposition... of pragmatism and materialism with the transcendental and

speculative" (21), Ketterer further connects biblical and romantic myths to the American

literary imagination, using these varied themes to identify science fiction generally, and

apocalyptic fiction particularly, with American literature. Comparing "the apocalyptic

potential" (31) of extra-terrestrial frontiers with "the colonization of the New World on

Earth" (31), the author situates science fiction itself in the broader arena of "change" (24)

and "crisis" (24) and asserts that the "essential element" (25) joining science fiction with

American literature is "the apocalyptic imagination" (25).

Although Ketterer's is a dated text, it indicates an early interest in the scholarly

application of science fiction and literary apocalypse, relating broader trends in American

literature, based on a national, historic character that has, arguably, persisted in modern

American exceptionalism. The relevance of apocalyptic rhetoric, then, to a literature

engaging with issues of regional American identity, maintains roots in Ketterer's work.

Despite a rhetorical, rather than specifically literary, focus, Stephen O'Leary also

offers valuable insight into apocalyptic rhetoric's persuasive character in Arguing the

Apocalypse (1994). Identifying its particular version of eschatology, O'Leary notes that

"Apocalypse, a Greek word meaning revelation or unveiling, is... the discourse that

reveals or makes manifest a vision of ultimate destiny, rendering immediate to human

audiences the ultimate End of the cosmos in the Last Judgment" (6). As such, it "locates

the problem of evil in time and looks forward to its imminent resolution" (6),

representing "history... (as a) dramatic contest of good and evil" (6). While "time, evil,

and authority" (16) become O'Leary's central apocalyptic themes, then, the "discourse,"

he argues, "is about time" (16), depending, as it does, on "situat[ing] its audience at the

6

end of a particular pattern of historical time" (13) and thereby changing a "perception of

time" (13). Articulating history in relation to its ultimate end becomes a persuasive

response to the problem of evil in present and recorded time, and inasmuch as

apocalyptic literature seeks to warn or challenge its readership (a goal that other scholars

frequently highlight), it entails analogous structures, strategies, and aims.

Dedicating a chapter of his text Ecocriticism to discussions of apocalypse, in fact,

Greg Garrard notes the uses of related rhetorical and narrative techniques in "the green

movement" (93), ultimately problematizing the ways that "eschatological narrative...

tends to polarize responses, prodding skeptics towards scoffing dismissal and potentially

inciting believers to confrontation and even violence" (114). Garrard notes the dualizing

character of apocalyptic texts, given their "emphasis on the 'unveiling' of trans-historical

truth and the corresponding role of believers as the ones to whom, and for whom, the veil

of history is rent" (94); he also highlights the imaginative basis of apocalypse, however,

as something "yet to come into being" (94), in addition to its tendency to both "respon[d]

to and produc[e] 'crisis'" (94). Engaging Stephen O'Leary's treatment of tragic versus

comic apocalypticism, Garrard identifies the former as the more problematic of the two,

with its "predetermined and epochal" (95) nature, "always careering towards some final,

catastrophic conclusion" (95), while "comic time" (95) remains "open-ended and

episodic" (95), less inclined to dualism and more open to the possibility of correcting

mistakes and beginning again. Garrard suggests, in fact, that only this type of

apocalyptic rhetoric, in contrast with the common tragic mode, offers the potential for

environmental engagement, inasmuch as "tak[ing] responsibility for [a future]" (116)

necessitates a belief in such a thing. Ideally, then, "environmental apocalypticism... is

7

not about anticipating the end of the world, but about attempting to avert it by persuasive

means" (107-8). Nevertheless, he continues, "this categorical distinction between

prophecy and exhortation is one that neither the history of apcalypticism nor rhetorical

theory will sustain" (108).

In Green Speculations: Science Fiction and Transformative Environmentalism

(2012), Eric C. Otto continues this exploration by examining the ways in which science

fiction, through "estrangement" (7), "extrapolation" (7), and a "sense of wonder" (11),

engage an environmental movement focused on "the inputs of... destruction" (1), or the

societal contributors to ecological crisis. The essential element of novelty in science

fiction texts effects estrangement in order to prompt a cognitive response comparing the

world of the novel or story to the world of the reader's experience (8). Extrapolation,

then, extends this comparative mode to the temporal realm, "connecting the present now

to a possible then" (11). To these two science fiction elements Otto adds the presence of

the wonderful or marvelous, acknowledging the problematic, even "contradictory

coexistence of nonhuman and artifactual wonders in a work of science fiction" (14) and

ultimately concluding that by contrasting these two types of objects,

environmental science fiction... asks us to consider our

experiences of both, and if those experiences are

indistinguishable, to consider then the ethical dimensions of

a modern world in which we deem the evidence of our

human presence as marvelous as the wonders that make us

contemplate this presence on a deeper, more ecologically

conscious level. (14)

8

He highlights the subversively anti-dualistic vision of deep ecology1 (19) and the

potential for environmental science fiction to "refle[ct] more deeply on ideological

structures that without accident require us to forget about nonhuman nature and our

uncontestable embeddedness in it" (18), eventually "provid[ing] the tools for thinking and

building a new way forward" (126) based on this non-anthropocentric context. Indeed,

despite the fact that he focuses attention on science fiction (and non-Appalachian) texts,

Otto's attention to "embeddedness" and the contrast between "nonhuman and artifactual

wonders" offer an important context for the apocalyptic, ecological strain within

Appalachian literature.

Gerry Canavan introduces Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction (2014) by

exploring the conceptual shift from modernity to post-modernity, articulating "the loss of

political-historical agency in favor of a sense of doomed inevitability" (3-4). Identifying

the role of capitalism in the kinds of crisis familiar to postmodern audiences (in which,

significantly, Appalachian environmental and social realities participate), Canavan

problematizes a "mode of production that insists (culturally) and depends (structurally)

on limitless expansion and permanent growth throughout" (5), but he ends in the hope

that the ecological component of science fiction - as an "archive of the possible" (16) -

may "transfor[m] politics in the present" (17)." Despite the pessimism into which

capitalist growth has led postmodern communities, Canavan suggests that "collaps[ing]"

(16) apocalypse and utopia through a "dialectic of deflation and inflation" (16), or

1 Deep ecology espouses the view that human beings should not afford themselves privileged status in the

complex, ecological network of global life. The wellbeing of the planetary whole becomes the essential

motivator, then, meaning that deep ecology is sometimes used to justify environmental measures

threatening to human life - particularly as the human population exerts a disproportionate and often

damaging influence on the world.

9

warning and hope, may "project the conditions of a possible future - whether good or bad,

ecotopian or apocalyptic" (17) to effect political responses.

Shifting specifically to southern literature, Anthony Dyer Hoefer explores the

contradictory uses of apocalypticism in Apocalypse South: Judgment, Cataclysm, and

Resistance in the Regional Imaginary (2012). Acknowledging the fact that "the rhetoric

of God's judgment is (a) powerful tool of marginalization when it is invoked to condemn

those who might violate the prevailing social order" (3), he contrasts such objectives, and

their problematic social implications, with another prominent use of a "southern

apocalyptic imaginary" (4), namely, as "a reservoir of hope" (4), through which

"deliverance from injustices and worldly suffering remains possible within the daily

experience of place, despite overwhelming evidence otherwise" (4). Engaging Malcolm

Bull's treatment of apocalyptic (discussed later in this chapter) - and even relating it to

Scott Romine's eschatological characterization of southern literature ("brought to life out

of fear of its own, inevitable disappearance" (5)) - Hoefer identifies the application of

"Apocalypse... to conceal and to reveal" (11) within southern history and society. And

although focused on the specifically racial implications of southern "production[s] of

region" (14) that "map" (13) eschatology onto place and invests "cultural practice" (13)

with "historical vision" (13), Hoefer's application of apocalypticism remains deeply

relevant to Appalachian literature as well. His interest, not only in "the apocalyptic

imaginary's capacity to conceal the past and to regulate knowledge that would threaten

(community) stability" (14-15), but also in its potential as "an alternative narrative space

in which silenced or neglected experiences might be imbued with historical meaning"

10

(15), suggests rich possibilities for the literature of ecologically threatened Appalachian

communities, especially in the context of sacrifice zones.

Although not the primary focus of Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, Ursula K.

Heise also challenges dualistic conceptions when she compares narratives of

environmental apocalypse to risk perceptions. Noting that, "to the extent that

[apocalyptic] narrative... articulates quite clear-cut distinctions between good and evil,

desirable and undesirable futures, it... relies on a different mode of projecting the future

than theories of risk" (141), Heise identifies the "ideal socioecological countermodel -

often a pastoral one" (141) either explicitly or implicitly present in such fictional

treatments of crisis. Whereas risk perceptions engage "crises already underway" (142),

"in the apocalyptic perspective, utter destruction lies ahead but can be averted and

replaced by an alternative future society" (142). Heise nevertheless maintains that the

two perceptions are not mutually exclusive, as "apocalyptic scenarios are... a particular

narrativization of risk perceptions" (142), the greatest distinction between them being the

fact that "environmental apocalypses [tend] to hold up, implicitly or explicitly, ideals of

naturally self-regenerating ecosystems and holistic communities in harmony with their

surroundings as countermodel to the visions of exploitation and devastation they

describe" (142), while risk analyses acknowledge no potential future "completely exempt

from risk" (142) in the wide range of possibilities for an "indetermina[te]" (142) and

"uncert[ain]" (142) future.

In keeping with the repeated recognition of problematic dualisms, Jimmie

Killingsworth approaches apocalypticism, particularly in its contributions to

environmental rhetoric, with cautious distrust. Working primarily within the popular

11

conception of apocalypse, from which most of us, admittedly, approach the genre,

Killingsworth, too, warns of the rhetoric's dangerous polarity. Although, rather than "a

flat-out prediction of the future" (160), it offers "a representation of a desire to do

something in the present" (160), this apocalypticism also speaks in "divisive and

destructive" (161) terms, instead of "healing wounds and getting on with solving

environmental problems" (161). Killingsworth argues, "life is scary and getting worse"

(174), and "the question for nature writers and other artists of environmental politics is

how to get people to face it" (174); meanwhile, apocalypticism, at least as it functions in

popular rhetoric and narrative, is "not about facing it; instead [it] feed[s] the old three Ds

of distraction, defensiveness, and denial" (177). Contrasting fantasy and science fiction,

Killingsworth advocates a reflective Romantic, rather than sentimental, attitude toward

the world; he suggests that science fiction, as opposed to fantasy, uses a "scientific

sublime2" (204) to "unfold the mysteries of nature and the discoveries of science" (204).

Moreover, within this form of revelation, "the unveiling is not an end in itself" (204) but

a way to "engage [the imagination]" (204) in the act of "premise-testing" (204), relating

narrative reality to the world experienced in everyday life. Killingsworth asserts the need

for epiphany in union with a particular kind of consciousness: which "opens our eyes to

the postapocalyptic landscapes of our world" (207) without denial, sentimentality, or "the

division of the political world into good and evil that hero worship demands" (207).

Epiphany, unlike apocalypse, "inspires an affirmation of values" (210), and although "the

2 The "sublime" relates to Romantic conceptions of nature, specifically to nature's capacity to inspire fear

and awe through a terrible encounter with beauty. Human beings experience certain environments

(especially mountains or other vast landscapes) with a conviction of their own, comparative vulnerability

and insignificance, consequently attaching almost divine connotations to the encounter. A "scientific

sublime," then, applies this particular, aestheticized fear and awe to the technological strangeness of a

postulated future.

12

two may work together... apocalyptic longing leading to epiphanic affirmation, or the

epiphany affirming values that stand as alternatives to those questioned by end-of-the-

world thinking" (210), epiphany remains central as "the promise of a life worth living, a

world renewed" (210). This promise, finally, is "meant to be shared" (218), in direct

contrast to the divisive character Killingsworth imputes to apocalypticism.

Not unlike this inclination toward epiphany and experiential appreciation,

Frederick Buell adopts an ideal of "environmental mourning" (109) in response to (and as

a culmination of) the varying uses of apocalyptic rhetoric in environmental fiction over

time. Outlining an historic progression of crisis literature, Buell discusses a

"domesticated" (198) form of crisis that belies future-oriented fears of a coming

apocalypse, asserting a view similar to Timothy Morton's (admittedly more drastic) claim

in Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013), namely,

that the world, at least in terms of human conceptions of world, has already ended.3

According to Buell, the current evolution of apocalyptic literature acknowledges

contemporary apocalypse by situating it in the realm of daily experience. Unlike the

impending doom of earlier narratives, this literature addresses the already-present reality

of ecological danger, instead of urging change through visions of future calamity. In a

3 Morton postulates "hyperobjects" as "things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to

humans" (1): things (such as "the biosphere" (1), a "black hole" (1), or even, on a smaller scale, "the

Florida Everglades" (1)) that are not mere human constructs but that exist in and of themselves and at some

distance from the human capacity to conceptualize them in their totality. Individuals become "footprints"

(5) of these "nonlocal" (1) hyperobjects, affected by them and existentially "situate[d]" (5) within them.

Morton argues, in this context, that the idea of a "world" no longer makes sense: that the world, in fact, has

already ended as hyperobjects have "encroach[ed]" (7) on the comprehensible "world" - specifically due to

"the logarithmic increase in the actions of humans as a geophysical force" (7). Hyperobjects necessitate

that we "reflect on our very place on Earth and in the cosmos" (15), while their inaccessibility to our

phenomenologically-oriented reason problematizes our ability to do so in any familiar context. Human

ideas about an accessible, anthropocentric world are, ultimately, exploded in the face of this new scale of

object-relations.

13

sense, then, it extends the science fiction conversation to more familiar environmental

realities, thereby also extending the scope and implications of the issues involved and

blurring the line between ecological science fiction and ecological fiction generally.

In engaging with apocalypticism, both Malcolm Bull and Frank Kermode

concern themselves with the creation of human structures in an undifferentiated, chaotic,

or contradictory world; however, these scholars attribute divergent significances to the

discourse as a whole. In their varied emphases, Bull and Kermode will provide a literary

and theoretical framework within which to explore the intersection between apocalyptic

thought and Appalachian literature.

In his philosophic and critical work, Seeing Things Hidden: Apocalypse, Vision

and Totality (1999), Malcolm Bull argues that apocalypse involves the "coming into

hiding of unknowable true contradiction" (31-2), whereby the paradoxical and

undifferentiated state of reality challenges humanly-established binaries by a reinclusion

of tabooed or scapegoated entities, potentially in "a new order" (79). Relating this

"revelation of undifferentiation" (78) to the recognition of different identities in other and

self, but also to the recognition of other in self and self in other, he further asserts that the

layers of this inclusive vision entail "a gradual progress towards contradiction brought

about by the subtle but irreversible dawning of new aspects on the aspect-blind" (294).

Seemingly exclusive binaries give way to the chaos of both-and, even as the "dawning"

of one aspect necessarily conceals its converse, which nevertheless remains real and

active. For Bull, apocalypse witnesses the "ambivalence and undecidability of social

meanings" (292) in this "necessary hiddenness of true contradiction" (293), insisting on

an epistemologically transformative "return of undifferentiation" (92), an

14

undifferentiation once rejected as the enemy of an ordered understanding of the world. In

the new world of apocalypse, then, "undifferentiation is not excluded but central" (92).

For Frank Kermode, fiction takes on (essentially apocalyptic) significance in the

very way that it translates chronological, "successive" (160) time and "contingent" (160)

experience into a meaningful relation between past, present, and future. Human beings,

he argues, "need fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives

and to poems" (7). These concords, however, must be difficult, acknowledging the same

chaotic, undifferentiated reality Bull discusses, in order to console within the necessary

ordering form. Even beyond its characteristic features, notable among them the ideas of

"crisis" (14), "transition" (114), and "decadence-and-renovation" (114), apocalypse

remains both "type and source" (6) of this human need for epistemic order, for the genre

articulates a meaningful present in significant relation to an origin and an end, situating

the human experience within an essentially narrative context of meaning. Moreover,

tragedy becomes a "successor of" (82), and commentary on, apocalyptic, for "the End

becomes a predicament of the individual" (27), and "to live is to live in crisis" (26).

Kermode discusses Shakespearean tragedy specifically as "apocalypse... translated out of

time into the aevum" (82), or a kind of existence "between time and eternity" (80).

Kermode identifies this qualified immortality with the canonical influence of a great

novel or the political legacy of a king. Narratives are dynamic but also exist as

completed works. The present of a novel relates to its beginning and end always, and any

number of readers can engage with the same significant series of present moments. A

king, as a man, dies, but his identity or legacy extends beyond himself through a kind of

"duality" (83). Species, too, notes Kermode, preserve a kind of immortality through

15

change itself, from generation to generation (79). In tragedy, then, "the world may...

exhibit all the symptoms of decay and change, all the terrors of an approaching end, but

when the end comes it is not an end, and both suffering and the need for patience are

perpetual. We discover a new aspect of our quasi-immortality" (82). Ultimately, "the

apocalyptic times - empire, decadence and renovation, progress and catastrophe - are fed

by history and underlie our ways of making sense of the world from where we stand, in

the middest" (29), or the present moment, which is always meaningfully situated between

past and future.

Although both scholars confront the discrepancies between a human need for

conceptual order and a meaningful arrangement of reality, Bull focuses on the

redemptive, "de-alienat[ing]"(294) implications of reconciled undifferentiation, whereas

Kermode elaborates on the necessary balance, in literature, between formal structures -

which invest the present with meaning by relating it to a beginning and an end - and the

chaos of actual experience. These ideas, then, relate strongly to the kinds of alienation,

estrangement, and wonder that scholars like Eric C. Otto ascribe to environmental

science fiction, responding, moreover, to the dualistic and polarizing tendencies these

same scholars identify within apocalypticism. Both Bull and Kermode, then, offer a rich

context within which to examine the complex environmental and apocalyptic trends

within Appalachian literature.

Appalachia and Science Fiction

Richard Miles Britton's Master's thesis, entitled "Appalachia in Science Fiction:

Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games" provides the

most current - and, in fact, almost the exclusive - scholarly engagement with this

16

specifically regional view of science fiction. In it, the author provides an insightful

synthesis of scholarly explorations at the intersection of science fiction and images of

Appalachia, focusing on the thematic areas surrounding conceptions of "'space',

'otherness' or the mountain sublime,4 and the impact of technology and modernization on

the environment" (16), which he, in turn, borrows from Alessandro Portelli's article

"Appalachia as Science Fiction." These significant topics, Britton argues, provide fruitful

ways to articulate the underappreciated relevance of science fiction, "a genre typically

devoted to technology and an imaginary future" (iv), to Appalachia and Appalachian

fiction, despite the seeming contradiction of its "often (being) celebrated for its roots in

tradition and history" (iv). Whereas Portelli stops short of identifying any Appalachian-

set works of science fiction, limiting himself to tracing the "similarities between

Appalachian local color fiction and science fiction" (Britton 1), Britton applies his

thematic emphases to McCarthy's and Collins's novels (and, to a lesser degree, to Barbara

Kingsolver's Flight Behavior (2012)). Based on these works, Britton convincingly

maintains a "startling and often uneasy convergence of tradition and innovation, of past

and future - of what was, is, and may be" (iv) within ideas about Appalachia,

characteristics that lend themselves all too well to treatment within a science fiction

genre. This "convergence" (iv), then, provides a richly complex space for critical

engagement.

Engaging McCarthy's The Road (2006), Britton underscores "the themes of place,

the mountain sublime, 'otherness,' and the ecological impact of human technology" (18),

selected as particularly relevant to an Appalachian, science fiction narrative. Britton

4 See footnote 2.

17

suggests the ecologically-inflected tension between the novel's post-apocalypse and the

reader's pre-apocalypse, a tension that ultimately engages human responsibility for the

future (38). The presence of the sublime within the text invites readers into a less

anthropocentric reality, Britton suggests, even while The Road presents, to its pre-

apocalyptic readers, a remembered (but no longer existent) Appalachia as treacherous

fantasy.

Shifting his attention to Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games (2008), Britton

teases out its ecological consciousness, grounded in "the science fiction tropes of

advanced technology and estrangement" (58) and specifically contextualized by "current

environmental concerns in Appalachia and the world today" (58). The novel, in fact,

presents a protagonist whose knowledge of nature equips her, in some ways, to

effectively resist a politically oppressive establishment (56). This establishment,

meanwhile, "use[s] nature as a tool for oppressing its citizens, while at the same time

manipulating its citizens to oppress nature" (56). Focusing awareness on the post-

apocalyptic intersection between environment and politics - and the role of nature in

resistance - Collins's novel offers both a warning and a call to environmentally-grounded

action (58).

In the last chapter of his thesis, Britton reiterates the fruitful intersection between

science fiction's attention to "technology and tomorrow" (60) and Appalachia's

association with "deep-felt heritage and strong link[s] to yesterday" (60), identifying

profound "emotional power" (60) with Appalachian science fiction, particularly through

"the startling and often uneasy relationship between past and future - of what was, is, and

may be - and all that can be lost along the way" (60). Acknowledging that The Road and

18

The Hunger Games, respectively, suggest hopeless and redeemable futures, Britton

emphasizes the ecocritical possibilities of Appalachian-set science fiction, ultimately

suggesting that even a novel like Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior fits "at this

fascinating intersection between science fiction and Appalachia,… explor[ing]

environmental concerns through the themes of space or place, otherness, and the impact

of human modernization and technology" (64). In novels like Kingsolver's, Britton

points out, the narrative does not take place in an apocalyptic or technologically-infused

future; rather, it is the contemporary world that situates science fiction themes and

concerns, including the "sublime" (67), and the "other" (68). Calling such works "mid-

apocalyptic science fiction" (66), Britton connects Flight Behavior's modern ecological

crisis to "the post-apocalyptic landscapes depicted in McCarthy's and Collins's novels"

(66), suggesting that Kingsolver's present might well indicate such dangerous futures.

And, in fact, all three novels use "science fiction tropes and Appalachian culture... to

explore the uneasy relationship between past and future and to depict proleptic visions of

worlds in which ecological systems have been destroyed by human technology and

modernization" (70).

Building on this scholarship, which so thoroughly examines those "post-

apocalyptic Appalachian landscapes that emphasize humanity's integral role in the

ecological balance of nature" (2), I hope, particularly, to respond to the "mid-apocalyptic"

(66) literature Britton identifies in the final pages of his thesis. Distinct from the post-

apocalyptic fiction that occupies most of his text, this type of fiction, which includes

Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior and, I would argue, Ann Pancake's Strange as this

Weather Has Been (2007), anticipates the social and environmental futures embodied in

19

apocalyptic science fiction, thus connecting an explicit apocalypse with the language of

domesticated crisis Buell adopts (and others imply). In this context, moreover, I will

continue to explore the specific relevance of apocalyptic rhetoric to Appalachian

literature, both in fiction and poetry, even outside a science fiction categorization:

identifying ways in which projected futures and inherited pasts intersect, whether through

attempts at reconciling the environmental damage of a sacrifice zone, as in Ann Pancake's

novel Strange as this Weather Has Been, or through attention to global threats within a

local space, as in Louise McNeill's poetry - or, more widely, through the continual

necessity of defining Appalachian identity: past, present, and future, against

essentialization and stereotype.

Indeed, the religious and eschatological implications of apocalypticism, within

which traditions of physical destruction and crisis are only a part, seem to participate in

the very ideas and identities inevitably linked to the connotations of "sacrifice" within a

"sacrifice zone." It is fitting, therefore, to explore the sometimes subtle presence of

apocalypse and apocalyptic thought in the environmental consciousness of Appalachian

literature beyond science fiction.

Appalachian Literature

Although certainly not all of Appalachian literature engages apocalyptic themes

or images, the subtle persistence of such elements within a variety of works suggests a

certain kind of environmental consciousness, one particularly present to the idea of

endings in and of a natural order and the consequent uncertainty of future in place.

Among the authors whose works touch on apocalyptic are Ron Rash, Robert Gipe, John

Ehle, Gurney Norman, and Cormac McCarthy, in addition to the (admittedly more

20

problematic) James Dickey, who, nevertheless, articulates apocalyptic scenarios within

an Appalachian context.

Ron Rash, in his novels Above the Waterfall (2015) and One Foot in Eden (2002),

employs extinction and apocalyptic language, respectively, as a way of coming to terms

with different forms of environmental destruction. Above the Waterfall evokes a

mourning for lost species and an ambiguous revelation, in one character's dreams, that

return is possible. The novel ends, moreover, with the following: "in the silence of fast-

filling sand the first words and last words are printed. I was here" (Waterfall 253).

Narrative origins and ends meet in an emphatic validation of the experiential present,

even as the metonymic hourglass nears an implied end, all of which concludes a passage

about the lost mountain lion journeying home. One Foot in Eden, meanwhile, looks

down into a world, and a past, both ended and preserved when a hydroelectric dam floods

Jocassee Valley. Heaven and hell, fire and water, loss and belonging blur in a way that

defies dichotomy in a novel haunted by the somehow eschatological fear that "nothing is

solid and permanent" (Eden 56), and that the experiential past can only confirm this

uncertain future. At one point, a character even explicitly recalls "Preacher Robertson

reading from Revelation how on Judgment Day the dead would raise from earth and sea

and fly to heaven and what a glorious sight that would be," adding, as he raises the body

of a murdered man by pulley into a tree, "But... I reckoned a man might witness no more

terrible sight than the dead resurrected" (Eden 136). The presence of end-times language,

connected with secrets hidden and revealed, only emphasizes this eschatological

uncertainty.

21

Robert Gipe's recent illustrated novel Trampoline (2015) also engages, albeit less

explicitly, with apocalyptic images and ideas. Origins and ends inform a present in

which ecological destruction entails personal and community crisis, in which, in fact, this

crisis has been domesticated. The destruction of place looses Dawn, the protagonist, in a

way that manifests itself in a constant, back-and-forth fleeing from space to space. At

one point, she conjures Cherokee or Shawnee perspectives on changes in the land (121);

at another she evokes a herd of buffalo, returning with apocalyptic vengeance to crush

her human body into the mud (271). And Dawn's Mamaw describes men as "a bunch of

rabbits who woke up one morning with sharp teeth and thought that made them lions.

But... they can tear up the whole world with them sharp teeth, and they still won't be

nothing but rabbits" (173). This quotation, indeed, suggests the subtle apocalypticism of

Gipe's novel, for it identifies, not a purely local threat, but a potentially global one, in

which men, in an impossible attempt to prove themselves more powerful than they are,

may "tear up the whole world." The fruitlessness and waste inherent to the image,

moreover, connects all too easily to Dawn's imagined buffalo, "vengeance in their

humongous hearts for waste and nearsightedness and the sheer mean stupidity of me and

everyone else who ever claimed to be human" (271). The possibility that the past rises up

in condemnation to effect an end implies apocalypse while questioning the meaning of

humanness in the present. Rabbits who conceive themselves as lions, people who

"clai[m] to be human" (271): these suggest that a loss of identity as a species in a larger

ecosystem and a loss of place within that world (as well as local place), evoking

apocalpytic dangers.

22

Relevant texts, however, are not limited to those set in the twentieth and twenty-

first centuries, nor to those addressing contemporary environmental concerns.

Interestingly enough, John Ehle's The Land Breakers (1964), which engages with human-

environment relationships and the consequent power struggle within a late eighteenth-

century, North Carolina frontier context, uses apocalyptic language in describing the

disastrous storm which ruins the agricultural community's immediate prospects. One

character watches, "staring before her as if she were witnessing the end of the world"

(385), while later in the chapter, another contextualizes the chaos and loss in terms of

divine judgement: "All of it, as he saw it, was like the final judgment and was more

awesome than judgment in a courtroom; it was judgment in a high place, and it must be

God as the judge sitting behind the cloud up there, for who else would dare to give out so

many sentences so swiftly" (389). He then considers the possibility of other, human

judges, including himself, as a way of making sense of human causes, but in any case, he

remains "standing alone on the trail... witness[ing] the end of it... here in the highest part

of the wilderness" (389). Ehle employs apocalyptic language at the chaotic imposition of

natural, over human, power. The overwhelming loss of livestock, by wolves and the river

and, over all, the disordering storm, is a world-ending event seemingly fraught with

eschatological implications. The civilizing arm of human beings in this "wilderness"

space, a space both elevated and rendered perilous by its reiterated "[height]," seems to

have transgressed divinely-imposed limits and met with a supremely place-centered

response engaging a confusion and indeterminacy exactly at odds with the order and

affluence sought. Indeed, the terrible power and beauty of this environment evokes the

mountain sublimity with which Britton characterizes Appalachian apocalyptic literature

23

(Britton 16), for the emphasis on this "highest part of the wilderness" (Ehle 389), and

"judgment in a high place" suggests that this landscape characteristic places it in a fitting

position to host apocalyptic judgment.

Even among works explicitly engaging apocalyptic elements, however, the idea of

apocalypse is not universally espoused. In Gurney Norman's Divine Right's Trip (1972),

in fact, the possibility of apocalypse as an explanatory or narrative context is directly

critiqued in favor of the slow, practical healing involved in living everyday life on a

damaged but gradually redeemable homeplace. The focus on recovery challenges

dramatic and irreversible connotations of apocalypse, negating it as a way to critique

prophets of doom and despair, or anyone who ascribes to dramatic, sudden, or epiphanic

conclusions to life's episodic progressions. As D.R. returns home to his uncle's farm,

called to care for Emmitt in his old age and ill health, the young man loses himself in the

dark and the woods, guided only by the light from a drive-in movie, The Bold

Frontiersman (1948) (in which a man and his evil doppelganger struggle in the

wilderness in an image of divided humanness pitted, not only against nature, but also

against itself). Eventually, however, D.R. stumbles into Virgil, the aptly-named, out-of-

work miner who leads him back out of the wood and into town in a playfully Dante-esque

narrative moment. Given the symbolic weight, then, of a guide named Virgil, the reader

appreciates a special significance when he sums up the destructive effects of mining in

the area, especially since his words provide a chapter conclusion: "It's that way

everywhere around here. Some folks call it the end of time but me, I just call it a bunch

of goddam criminals out tearing up the world" (193). By evoking apocalyptic, end-of-

times rhetoric only to reject it, the former miner strips dramatic, world-shaking

24

significance from environmental destructors, but he also implies a smallness and a human

limitation to the effects, thus belying finality. In a sense, he refuses to justify giving up

on the world, without ignoring the real damage being done. Nevertheless, Norman's

decision to address apocalyptic conceptions and rhetoric further underscores its

persistence within Appalachian literature.

Perhaps the most prominent example of apocalypse within Appalachian and

Appalachian-set literature is Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006). In the text, father and

son begin their eschatological and literal journey within an Appalachian landscape.

Moreover, the father's memories remain anchored there even after they traverse the

lowlands on their way to the coast, while the sharp contrast between a colorful,

ecologically vibrant past and a spiritually and environmentally desolate present (and

future) remains essentially grounded in the experience of lost Appalachian place.

McCarthy even ends his novel with the image of a brook trout, a native Appalachian

species now threatened in its natural habitat: "Once there were brook trout in the streams

in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white

edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand" (286).

He goes on to describe the "vermiculate patterns" (287) on their backs like "maps of the

world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back" (287),

and he ends by evoking their specific homes: "In the deep glens where they lived all

things were older than man and they hummed of mystery" (287). Having provided a

dead, gray, and irredeemable world throughout the course of his novel, McCarthy

concludes by evoking an Appalachian past that is, also, his reader's present. Extending

this past even further, however, to nonhuman knowledge of "the world in its becoming"

25

and those things which are "all... older than man," invests the lost, Appalachian space

with a rich past before human beings, connected, by its very presence at the end of the

post-apocalyptic novel, with a bleak future after human beings. In a way, then, McCarthy

situates past and future in the present moment of the novel's reflective end. Concrete

Appalachian space has been transformed around the fulcrum of humankind, connected by

the crisis of their presence to past and future, both vast.

Even in James Dickey's Appalachian-set Deliverance (1970), the protagonist, Ed,

and Lewis, his companion, discuss the latter's post-apocalyptic fantasies on route to their

wilderness canoe trip. These fantasies, however, do not merely occupy Appalachian

space as an incidental setting; rather, they depend, in some sense, on Appalachian place,

albeit an Appalachia replete with assumptions of rugged self-sufficiency and a life close

to the land. "There may be something important in the hills" (40), Lewis says, and later,

"I think the machines are going to fail, the political systems are going to fail, and a few

men are going to take to the hills and start over" (42). For Lewis, it is a matter of bodily

proof, of physical survival as a test of personhood against the demands of wilderness

place and the primitive, independent people already proven within it. The fact that the

space through which Ed, Lewis, and their friends will travel is already appropriated for

the site of a civilizing dam only complicates the association of wild, disappearing lands

with apocalyptic refuge, for it allocates the world-ending element of this metaphor to

fantasy, as something distinct from the concrete realities of human environmental

manipulation.

In these and other texts, the sometimes subtle current of apocalyptic, ecological

discourse insinuates itself through many important works of Appalachian literature. In

26

order to more fully explore the possibilities of apocalypticism as an Appalachian

ecocritical mode, however, we should first examine an exemplary work of regional

fiction in which it functions explicitly and prominently.

27

Chapter 2: Apocalypse in Strange as this Weather Has Been

Ann Pancake's debut novel, Strange as this Weather Has Been (2007), narrates

the local, lived reality of a family just down the mountain from a mountaintop removal

mine. Throughout the course of the text, this family and their neighbors face not only

ecological and interpersonal dissolution, however, but also the apocalyptic intersections

of past and future with a destabilized present. Based on a series of interviews the author

helped to conduct for her sister's documentary film on mountaintop removal mining,

Black Diamonds: Mountaintop Removal and the Fight for Coalfield Justice (2006), the

events and characters of the novel articulate their West Virginia mountain place in a

variety of ways, but apocalyptic language, images, and structures remain prevalent

throughout most of these narrative voices.

Although there is, as yet, comparatively little published scholarship on Ann

Pancake's Strange as this Weather Has Been, Heather Houser and Carmen Rueda-Ramos

address important, ecologically charged themes within the text in their respective essays

"Knowledge Work and the Commons in Barbara Kingsolver's and Ann Pancake's

Appalachia" and "Polluted Land, Polluted Bodies: Mountaintop Removal in Ann

Pancake's Strange as this Weather Has Been"; meanwhile, Lisa Hinrichsen's forthcoming

contribution to Ecocriticism and the Future of Southern Studies examines the critical

intersection between local and global environment in a way that extends Pancake's

themes and significance beyond the individual community, stressing a vaster ecological

network.

David von Schlicten has also published an essay on Pancake's novel in the

Journal of Moral Theology, but its usefulness to the current exploration remains more

28

limited. He does point out that Strange as this Weather Has Been "associates MTR with

apocalyptic language and the death of Christ" (165), further noting the consonance

between "moments of lamentation" within the text and "several biblical books, such as

Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, the Psalms, and some of the prophetic literature" (165). Von

Schlicten also points out that certain elements are "reminiscent of the (Old Testament)

tradition of lamentation" (165), thereby aligning the novel with "a kind of jeremiadic

lament, with Christian evocations" (165). Despite the rich implications of these insights,

however, von Schlicten makes several factual errors regarding character and plot

elsewhere in the essay, while his primary objective focuses on the novel's pedagogical

uses. For both of these reasons, his article will not feature in this project, despite its

ecological focus.

In her personal essay, "Creative Responses to Worlds Unraveling: The Artist in

the 21st Century," Ann Pancake reflects on the process of writing (and deciding to write)

Strange as this Weather Has Been, ultimately drawing broader conclusions about the role

of art, and especially fiction, in responding to real injustices. Asserting the imaginative

and empathetic qualities of literature, Pancake presents her reader with a portrait of

fiction as an integrating space, uniting conscious and unconscious, profane and sacred,

self and other. She identifies, as "literature's most pressing political task," "envisioning

alternative future realities," and she expresses regret at having failed, she believes to

"provide vision beyond the contemporary situation in central Appalachia" in her novel.

As Pancake speaks to literary purposes, characteristics, and potential, however, her

language also suggests the deep relevance of apocalyptic themes to politically responsive

literature in general and to her novel in particular.

29

Having briefly discussed the actual people, events, and context on which Strange

as this Weather Has Been is based, Pancake’s essay continues:

Periods of disintegration most often contain within them

profound possibilities for creation, so an era like this one,

precisely because of the scale and scope of its dissolution,

offers tremendous opportunities for sweeping systemic

change.... I believe we artists must open ourselves wider to

how art performs politically beyond bearing witness,

because I've concluded that the only solution to our current

mess is a radical transformation of how people think and

perceive and value... a revolutionizing of people's interiors.

Characterizing the current "era" - especially as typified by the social and environmental

sacrifice of places like (but not limited to) West Virginia mountaintop removal sites - in

terms of "disintegration" and "dissolution" speaks strongly to the chaos and

indeterminacy of Bull's apocalyptic focus. Moreover, the idea of "radical transformation"

and "revolu[tion]" arising within people, which have been constrained by dualisms of

"conscious and unconscious," "profane and... sacred," suggests a dramatic reassertion of

ambiguous and undifferentiated complexity in a new world, strongly linked to Bull's

articulation of apocalyptic characteristics and purposes. Artists, according to Pancake,

serve as the "translators between the visible and invisible worlds, intermediaries"

between such assumed dualities, in a sense becoming active prophets of a new

ecoapocalyptic rhetoric "beyond bearing witness," by evoking epiphanic change within

divided or alienated human beings.

30

Although Pancake believes herself to have fallen short of expressing future

possibilities, Lisa Hinrichsen, in her forthcoming chapter "Stuck in Place: Affect,

Atmosphere, and the Appalachian World of Ann Pancake," argues that the novelist does,

in fact, offer such a theoretical forecast, or rather, prescription. According to Hinrichsen,

Pancake not only presents "a vision of ecology as relational, made up of material and

virtual geographies crisscrossed by flows of nostalgia, desire, and hope," but also

"complicates the mainstream and celebratory forms of Appalachian self-

conceptualization, positioning them as potentially unsustainable... in the face of the

'strange weather' of massive ecological destruction" (11). The type of revolutionary

community the novel advocates, then, is, in Hinrichsen's view, not "exclusionary" (11)

but connected with other "bioregionally similar spaces" (15). Pancake "seeks to move us

beyond a narcissistic fixation on individual, atomistic identity, destabilizing the

boundaries between object and subject to introduce new ways of feeling about place and

space" (15).

Regardless of its admittedly significant global implications (the urgent

universality of which lend themselves to apocalyptic rhetoric), Pancake does situate her

novel in a particular environment with concrete and historic problems, values, and

circumstances. In fact, Carmen Rueda-Ramos underscores this history when she writes,

"Ann Pancake demonstrates that some Appalachians, as members of a disadvantaged

socioeconomic group, have long and disproportionally suffered from environmental

hazards and injustice at the hands of greedy coal companies and corrupt politicians"

(221). Although Rueda-Ramos's treatment of mountain people verges, at times, on

essentializing, as when she generalizes about "mountaineers' strong sense of place" (225),

31

she validly identifies the problematic "invisib[ility]" (221) of "Appalachians and their

environmental catastrophes" (221) in a broader society dependent on overwhelming

energy consumption. Pancake's novel, then, simultaneously evokes interrelated local and

global crises.

Apocalypse and Time

In keeping with apocalyptic rhetoric, time occupies a significant place in

Pancake's novel. Frank Kermode situates the notion of apocalyptic narratives in the

meaningful relation of events to their origins and ends, while Stephen O'Leary contends

that "apocalyptic discourse is about time" (16), or the "mythical and rhetorical solution to

the problem of evil... through discursive construction of temporality" (14). Even the

urgency and catastrophic imminence of popular apocalyptic narratives suggests a

preoccupation with endings. When Pancake engages ideas of seasonal time, therefore,

especially in the context of backwardness or upside-downness, this indicates a significant

thematic element within the text. The encompassing, experiential evidence of

strangeness in a natural cycle of time places weather imagery and disrupted seasonal

patterns at the center of apocalyptic concerns. Backwardness and upside-downness,

moreover, operate well beyond the evidence of "strange" weather and unseasonal

progressions of time, and this expanding presence of inversion not only evokes the kind

of paradox and contradiction Bull articulates in his treatment of apocalypticism, but also

problematizes the very possibility of a traditional, linear chronology from origin to end in

the face of apocalyptic destruction.

The fact that the novel's presaged catastrophe actually reiterates past disasters

only underscores the importance of narrative and the slow, ever-present reality of

32

apocalypse, tying past to future in a way that suspends the present between the two in a

cyclic, rather than linear, relationship. When "Mrs. Taylor tells the horrors of Buffalo

Creek, February 26, 1972... she doesn't tell them as history or legend. She tells them as

prophecy, as threat" (48), and Dane, "the listener" (48), is filled with these stories, which

churn in his stomach and become "scrawled all over his insides" (48). The "flood inside"

(48) is an internalization that obscures the difference between past and future, blending

them with a physical experience of anxiety in the present. Origins and ends blur as

Dane's dread of what is coming remains irrevocably bound to what has already

transpired, the present in precarious balance between effected and potential reality. In

fact, the inherent uncertainty of this state, and the revelatory role of stories grounded in

environmental and human history, give renewed significance to a reader's reception of the

novel itself. Dane's physicalization of narrative urgency situates threat within his daily

experience, increasing the urgency with which the reader is supposed to appropriate the

text as a real environmental warning.

"After that flood," Mrs. Taylor tells her friend, "I can't begin to tell you. There

never was a time like it. The world just went inside-out" (205). Time is set apart, but

oral narrative breaks down, and space, or place, is "inside-out." Later, when Bant goes to

see the mine site with R.L., she "look[s] around, trying to figure out in what direction

Cherryboy might be, but nothing has no direction. Upside-down peel of moon, skin you

alive, she'd tell us in second grade, and I'd see that inside-out kid, bloody snagged in a

barbed wire fence" (327). "Upside-down," "inside-out," the place connects nightmarishly

to flayed bodies, in which things that should be hidden are exposed, while experientially-

oriented surfaces become plowed-under memories.

33

In Avery's chapter, in fact, the perception of apocalypse and apocalyptic time -

and their influence on personal identity - become explicit in the inevitable relation of past

and future. After Buffalo Creek, there is no more Bucky. He becomes Avery, as though

in an attempt to dissociate himself from a still-threatening, traumatic history, yet despite

the loss of his childhood nickname, Avery still "sees right off the worst in everything,

doomsday in his head. He lives in nonstop knowledge something bad's about to happen"

(238). And as he looks at the present, local destruction caused by mountaintop removal,

Avery reflects that

[t]his is a disaster less spectacular, more invisible, than

Buffalo Creek. This disaster is cumulative, is governed by

a different scale of time.... Because Avery has come to

understand (not learn, but understand, confirming) that the

end times his mother obsesses about won't arrive with a

trumpet and Jesus come back all of a sudden and everybody

jump out of their graves. No. It is a glacial-pace

apocalypse. The end of the world in slow motion. A de-

evolution, like the making of creation in reverse. The End

Times are in progress right now, Avery is walking on

them... (239-240)

Walking "on," rather than "in" the "End Times" (240), he blurs the difference between

physical-spatial and temporal realities. The land is an incarnated apocalypse, living an

unglamorous, painful end as a "place... overlaid with doom" (239). Buell's domesticated

crisis and Britton's assertion of a literature of "mid-apocalyp[se]" (66) arise here, then, in

34

intensified form, as Appalachian place takes on the physical and narrative identity of

ongoing catastrophe in the midst of daily life. The unmaking inversion of "de-evolution,"

moreover, evokes an undifferentiating return to chaos reminiscent of Bull's

apocalypticism.

"It wasn't just people who were sacrificed" (238), Avery notes elsewhere in his

chapter; "this sacrifice of land, what he stands in now, is nothing new, it has been

regularly slaughtered for well over a hundred years... the whole region had been killed at

least once" (238). Recalling many trips home, Avery conjures up the strange, "fragile

reincarnation" (239) of recovering growth, "vegetation, an obscenity or grace, vining over

ruined industry and failed farms" (239), as "adulterated" (239) (essentially cross-bred)

species of deer return to West Virginia. The lack of distinction between sacred and

profane - even the strange, blended species, also cultivates Bull's undifferentiation within

apocalypse; however, here these environmental elements will be defeated "for good"

(239), according to Avery: "this... will finally beat the land for good" (239). Instead of

the coming into hiddenness that implies a new world born of revelation, the wedded

opposition of "plants lush against... the dead rusted metal" (239) seems to be a temporary

state, one ultimately susceptible to a recurring (and one day final) "sacrifice" (238).

From Avery's point of view, there is no living place once the "glacial-pace apocalypse"

(240) reaches its inevitable conclusion, and since time and place are blurred, there is also

no time. Sacrifice, instead of being replaced in a new order of undifferentiated but

complex unity (as Bull envisions), becomes a state of completion in which neither time

nor place have any meaning or any narrative potential.

35

Although this slow state of apocalypse echoes Frederick Buell's discussion of

"domesticat[ion]" (198), then, Avery does not espouse the "full process of mourning,"

which "remembers and imaginatively reexperiences what it has lost" as a means of

opposing "the process of habituation and anesthesia" (Buell 291). Avery does, in fact,

relive his trauma, but his memory-associations with place extend little beyond the

catastrophic experience of Buffalo Creek, suggesting that this event has come to

dominate, not only past, but present and future as well. The environmental mourning

Buell advocates, in contrast, links to an immediate, sensory engagement inaccessible to

Avery, though not, perhaps, to other characters within the novel, who, through it, can

choose to stay and resist community destruction.

When Bant sees the torn-up mountain clearly for the first time, it reminds her of

Calvary: "I'd seen at church a picture of Calvary. Thorn trees set in a bleached earth and

sky" (103). And although she does not draw a direct simile or metaphor between

Yellowroot and the site of Christ's crucifixion, the recalled image immediately evokes

complicated connotations of sacrificed innocence, redemption, and pain - despite the fact

that redemption seems decidedly out of place in Bant's present experience. Indeed,

Calvary's concealment of salvation within death perhaps keeps her from drawing a direct

comparison, although her need to assign some familiar, meaningful context to the

destruction invokes the image. However, while Bant, like Avery, identifies the land in

terms of sacrifice, her presence in this place at the end of the novel leaves the reader

some possibility, at least, of hope.

36

Perception and Apocalypse

The different characters' reception of (or failure to receive) apocalyptic warning,

in fact, ultimately informs the reader's understanding of an experiential engagement with

eco-apocalypticism. By incorporating the word "see" into both Lace See and Bant Ricker

See's names, Pancake establishes distinct thematic roles for these characters in direct

contrast with that of Jimmy Make. Jimmy Make and his admiring son, Corey, take on the

utilitarian, machine-oriented view that values everything in terms of use, or its ability to

answer physical human need. Lace and Bant, however, demonstrate a sensory

engagement of self-in-place that stands in opposition to such simplistic and dichotomous

valuations. Significantly, while Corey and Dane's sections use third-person omniscient

narration (as does Avery's chapter), Lace and Bant maintain their own, first-person prose,

as does Mogey in his single segment The active storytellers, in effect, communicate with

a vocal agency that is ultimately lacking, albeit for different reasons, in both Corey and

Dane, thereby empowering the women's direct, personal retrospections and consequent

evocations of future and past.

In the novel's first chapter, Lace introduces herself by narrating her young adult

life and understandings, looking back on them from an as-yet indeterminate present.

From her retrospective language - "I still do say..." (3) or "By then I'd decided..." (3) - the

reader gathers that this story begins in a past directly relevant to the novel's present.

Origins and history evoke significance from the first pages, then, in a way that suggests

their narrative presence throughout the text. So when Lace states that she had "decided

[she] was newer than all this here" (3), and that "only outside of here would [she], Lace

See, live real life" (3), the importance of such claims, already implicitly distant from her

37

older, narrating self, transcends foreshadowed character development, for the word

"newer" clashes with the structural emphasis on a meaningful past. To assert a freshness

that disclaims history and negates responsibilities to place or home indicates the futile or

short-sighted character of Lace's remembered self-perception. It identifies her past self as

vulnerable and ignorant, and it highlights the underlying purpose of the subtle syntactic

dissonance in "only outside of here would I, Lace See, live real life" (3).

Because it provides the first revelation of the narrator's name, the sentence flow

hesitates with "See," for the reader likely associates this word, until now, primarily with

an act of sight. The previously automatic interpretation intrudes on the word's

significance as a surname, for the clause itself seems to prepare the reader for the

accepted verb: "only outside of here would I, Lace(,) [s]ee..." (3), and the mild

dissonance between expectation and reality encourages a brief hesitation over the missing

comma, a double-take that identifies "See" as a name instead of an action, before

continuing with the rest of the poetically dense sentence: "live real life" (3). The fact

that the final six, monosyllabic words in this difficult clause all receive noticeable stress

in natural speech, compounds the problematic flow already disrupted by expectation and

recovery.

When taken in the context of her asserted "new[ness]" (3), moreover, Lace's name

indicates a deeper thematic significance. Juxtaposing the supposedly fresh self, with all

its connotations of sufficiency and potential, with the past-saturated "here" (3) of her

family, Lace looks back on a self-conception that generates the same discontinuity as the

first encounter with her name. For "[s]ee[ing]" (3), as a sensory engagement with reality,

one with strong connotations of knowledge and understanding, requires presence in a

38

concrete "here" (3), rather than the vague "outside" (3) essentially defined by what, or

where, one is not. The retrospective Lace can comment on how easy it is to "believe

what's on TV is realer than what you feel under your feet" (3), the tangible, actual world.

And by contrasting the abstract color of a daydreamed future - what the child "saw" (3) -

with a name that merges identity with present-tense sight, the author suggests that place,

and "real life" (3) lived in it, can be a source of authentic and identity-forging, if painful,

revelation.

As she continues to narrate her past, in fact, Lace demonstrates this dawning sight

in explicitly sensory, and particularly visual, ways. When Mogey coaxes her to go

wildcrafting with him after her three months of depression and isolation, Lace

remembers, "it was like light in your eyes after a long darkness, only it was not just my

eyes, but my self felt that way. A squint with my whole body, and I pulled my jacket

closer" (91). She has been closed off from the world and from others throughout her

pregnancy thus far, and the result of coming into contact with that world again evokes a

distinctly visual simile. Her whole self is overwhelmed with the visual vitality of

experience, to the point that she tenses into a "body-long squint" (92) that strains after an

overwhelming sensory engagement. Grammatically connected, in fact, to this image of

sensory overload, even the act of drawing her jacket closer indicates a protective gesture

against contact, not only with the cold, but also with the immediate world. It is not until

she kneels on the ground, her "knees... pushing deeper into the black loam under [the

dead damp leaves]" (92) and her trowel forgotten as she digs with her bare hands, that

Lace first comes into authentic, active contact with the "here" of her mountain place. The

"body-long squint" (92) relaxes into a new kind of sensory sight, physically connected to

39

the earth, and in the subsequent months, as she goes back into the woods with her mother

again and again, Lace is able to "[relearn]" (139), essentially, how to "[pay] other kinds

of attention" (139).

If Bant, then, is Lace's "side, [her] echo" (333), her "death and then [her] borning"

(333) (a characterization significantly tied to both origins and ends), it seems fitting that

she, too, should share the name "See" (33). "I made up Bant's name not just for the pretty

in it," Lace says, "but because it made her more singular mine. And I called her Ricker

See because it made her more of this place" (137). Bant herself, in fact, connects her full

name to her grandma, "a Ricker" (33), and her pap, "a See" (33), maintaining that "Ricker

mean[s] the most because Rickers [have] been on this piece of ground... for more than

two hundred years" (34). Her name connects her to "[her] places" (35) by drawing her

identity in a line of continuity with her family's situated past. Bant's name draws, then,

not only on the same connotations of sensory attentiveness belonging to Lace, but also on

the heritage of ancestral place. In a sense, the full significance of "Ricker See" (33) is the

implied capacity to witness an inherited belonging. It is the continuity of past in present

in a way that connotes an active form of comprehension, a conscious vision that opens up

questions of the future and its own relationship to past and present. Kermode's emphasis

on a present informed by origin and end, then, becomes embodied, to a certain extent, in

Bant.

"I liked the longer name a secret kept" (33), Bant maintains, meaning more than

the strange "Bantella" (33). "The other part of the secret" (34) is that "now [she is] the

only one in the family who carrie[s] either name" (33-4), Ricker or See. Continuity is, in

this sense, then, strained or threatened, but it persists in the "secret" part of Bant's

40

identity, "held inside" (34). The hiddenness of complex truth, of multi-faceted identity,

evokes Bull's discussion of apocalypse and the importance of revelation as the dawning

of one aspect, even as it veils another. The way that truth contains a non-binary chaos of

contradiction, onto which human beings seek to impose order, thus, introduces even

greater significance to Bant's witnessing role in its complex connection to past, present,

and, ultimately, future. She must seek things that are literally hidden (namely, the truth

about the Yellowroot mine); meanwhile her own, hidden name reminds the reader that

identity, or reality, itself is not singular, and not to be taken at face value. Bant is not

only Bant but contains the history of her family and her place in her "secret kept" (33)

name.

Lace speaks of Bant as "fused to [her] ribs" (333) - of being able to "feel her

there" (333) - in a bodily metaphor of shared space and sensory unity. So when she tells

her daughter that she "Want[s her] to see" (15) what Jimmy Make can show her of the

mine on Yellowroot, this becomes a deeply significant communication. As Lace and

Bant share the name "See" and the witnessing role that this implies, however, Bant feels

the profound need to "look" (58) and to "listen" (78) even without her mother's urging,

and even against her own will to self-preservation. As the novel progresses, Bant

"start[s] having to listen" (78) to her mother's news regarding the mountain's destruction.

She "ha[s] to listen" (83), "ha[s] to hear" (83), even though the messages make her pull

away, put a "wide river" (83) between her mother, still speaking, and herself.

Indeed, Bant wrestles with an inner divide that only emphasizing the complex

hiddenness with which Bull characterizes identity and relationship. Although arising in

Bant's simultaneous desire and revulsion for R.L., perhaps the most revealing

41

manifestation of this inner conflict occurs when Bant sees printed images of mountaintop

removal mines on the counter at the Dairy Queen. "I wanted to look longer, and I didn't

want to look longer, and I for sure didn't want Lace to see me looking, although I also

knew that didn't make sense" (58), Bant relates, and the visual language, even in this

single sentence, saturates her narrative. The simultaneous desire to "look longer" (58)

and not to "look longer" (58) not only highlights inner tension and an impossibly true

contradiction (reminiscent of Bull), but it also indicates the images' undeniable draw, for

the choice is not between looking and not looking. Bant has already glimpsed the reality.

Rather, the choice is between looking "longer" or not. This may seem an artificial

distinction, but the fact remains that Bant's rhetoric stresses her perpetuated act of vision.

She might have expressed herself differently, as in "looking" versus "looking away," but

in her language as it stands, there is no such deceptive implication that avoidance is even

possible. She must see, and her deliberate, even lengthy, antithesis maintains as much.

Significantly enough, the centrality of sight and looking to this passage is not

confined to Bant's own actions, for she emphatically wishes to remain unobserved

herself. "I for sure didn't want Lace to see me looking" (58), she insists, as though a

desire for hiddenness might protect her from having to communicate what she sees.

Someone hidden may witness the truth, but no one can impose the responsibility for

speech on such a person. There is also, moreover, an implication of the taboo in Bant's

perception of the photos, for she describes them "like dirty pictures" (58), reiterating this

later in the paragraph: "like looking at pictures of naked people. Like looking at pictures

of dead bodies" (58). The deliberate repetition occurs again here, although not, this time,

antithetically. It stresses the desire to "go back... look harder, get it clear in [her] for

42

sure" (58), but it also pounds home the forbiddenness of the images themselves.

Nakedness and death evoke exposure, victimization, and essential, even eschatological,

human fear, and the simultaneous lack of and increase in hiddenness (by equating a too-

revealing nakedness with that mysterious impassivity, death) generates the

contradictions, concealment, and taboos bound up in Bull's treatment of apocalyptic

thought. Moreover, as Bant struggles to preserve her personal closeness to the mountain

woods, the significance of internal contradiction and the paradox of necessary hiddenness

become all the more apparent.

Both Lace and Bant serve a witnessing role contained in their shared name "See."

This focus on sensory attentiveness, however, is not limited to mere recognition, for in

both cases, at least by the end of the novel, the witnessing role becomes oriented toward

speaking out. While Jimmy Make, Dane, and Tommy drive away, Bant turns and goes

deeper into the truth of her home place. She goes to see the full mining reality once and

for all, then pushes into the woods with a renewed sense of belonging. This is the context

for her last words in the novel, which also conclude the narrative as a whole: "I headed

toward home to tell Lace what I'd found" (357). In the end, sight is not enough. It also

requires communication, as Killingsworth advocates in Facing It. Bant occupies almost

the role of prophet, for she comes down from the mountain with a message of destruction

and, by the resistance entailed in the telling, hope.

Reception and Perception

This, in fact, is the great difference between Bant and Dane. Dane receives

stories. He is "good at listening" (43), even explicitly "the listener" (48), and he is

acutely conscious of the presence of "stories in him" (336), even if he has no outlet for

43

these narratives. Indeed, although he shares his sister's sensory attentiveness, Dane is

unable to speak his fears or relay the prophetic significance he perceives in the juncture

of past, present, and future. Lace herself notes that he "pulls into him everything, then

closes like a mussel" (333), that he "feels too much" (333), informed by the loss and grief

that his mother experienced while he was inside her (152). Dane reacts physically,

paralyzed or nauseated, to events and stories in the world around him, able to understand

"only in a way before word, before memory" (167). He cannot tell stories himself, unlike

Bant or Lace.

Dane sees himself as different, even physically different, from others. He is "out

of proportion" (110), "strangely shaped" (110), "peculiar" (111), even "strangely woman-

shaped" (111), yet it is this perceived mismatch of forms that "makes a scary kind of

sense" (49) to Dane, when he considers that he "must take and carry the stories" (49).

And it is not coincidental that Dane, who occupies this ambivalent, apparently

mismatched body both receives stories "as prophecy, as threat" (48) and receives the

scapegoating rejection of his peers. In fact, Dane evokes apocalypticism with a personal

immediacy of which no other character but Mogey is capable. This immediacy, however,

lodges inside him without outlet. His body becomes the site of othering and alienation,

and instead of speaking his premonitions of danger and dread, he absorbs them like a

poison. The past and future crowd out the present, in a sense precluding communication

by crowding out the temporal space necessary for engagement with others. Dane craves

order, but he cannot make use of memory or stories to control the chaos, aptly embodied

by the fish he imagines roiling in his stomach.

44

Dane sees the dreaded pamphlet as a "way to organize the End of the World" (73).

Indeed, his interest in order and process is perhaps related to his self-perception,

considering its relationship to blurred categories and improperly combined forMs. He

mentally orders the space in which he hides his "pieces of God" (115) and ritualizes,

moreover, the process of uncovering them. "There was an order to it," according to

Dane, centering on threes: "(three's a charm. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, three crosses

on a hill, on the third day he rose. Rosebox)" (115). The lunchbox sits within the tv box,

which sits within the rosebox outline of the old trailer, and those narrowing layers

articulate a space defined by absence, that is, by Grandma's barely-remembered presence,

or the symbolic shadow of her hiddenness. From the smallest of these nested "boxes,"

then, Dane removes each piece in its proper order: an acorn from an oak by the church, a

broken leg from a toy horse, and lastly, a page from a magazine: "Face of God in clouds

over T-, Oklahoma" (116), "by far the most powerful" (115) of the three. Before looking,

in fact, which must be an intentional looking and not "[accidental]" (115), he must pray

"good, a proper beginning, middle, and end" (116) with a specified form. And when he

does remove the page, revealing the tear "in its middle... through the face of God" (117),

the order itself becomes useless, as though the tear exemplifies an alienated present, in

which "God wasn't working around here anymore. God had been leaving ahead of time

to get safe from this mess. Save Himself" (117). The inversion of the usual direction of

God's saving reach creates a sense of salvation as a circuit beginning and ending at the

same point, a circuit which bypasses human beings in a dark interpretation of fallenness.

In light of Bull's apocalyptic conception, this need for an extra, humanly-imposed

level of order - and this internalized (scapegoating) shame over his physically

45

undifferentiated body - situates Dane in a pre-apocalyptic space. Arguably, his

entrapment within compulsively ordered conceptions and processes creates a barrier

between himself and the revelatory, revolutionary change entailed by apocalypse. Unlike

Lace and Bant, he cannot remain in this place, which is perpetually oriented by past and

future destruction; he does not have the resources to stay and oppose it because his means

of coping tend, not toward memory or experience, but instead toward repeatable,

abstracted processes imposed on chaotic physical and temporal realities.

In contrast to Bant, Lace, and Dane, Jimmy Make and Corey recognize a use-

oriented world. "Of course Corey didn't understand," Bant reflects, "and Dane

understood only in a way before word, before memory, and what did Jimmy Make

understand" (167)? Bant's thoughts draw clear lines between these characters, even as

she acknowledges the need "to see it (the mining site) before" she can make a decision

about her own future in this place. "Corey did not understand," she says simply, "Jimmy

Make copycat did not understand" (154). In Corey and his father's world, as Rueda-

Ramos indicates, "natural space [is transformed] into a constructed one due to the

intrusion of the machine in the Appalachian garden" (228). Corey, in fact, the "main

victim of [this] transformation" (Rueda-Ramos 228), "[dreams] of the body as machine,

of melting into it" (Rueda-Ramos 228) and extending his self beyond physical limits in a

way that directly counters Mogey's transcendental experience with the buck.

Corey's assessment of the place in which he lives centers exclusively on its

utilitarian, material value. According to Corey, "there are only two good things about

Yellowroot Hollow... The stuff in the creek... (and) the way the hardtop road breaks

down before their house, leaving a big asphalt lip... you can use to do bike tricks" (26).

46

His very criteria for value remains limited to what he can use himself, or, by extension,

what indicates, characterizes, or enables the extended power of human beings through the

machine. Essentially, the capacity to use, to drive, or to shape governs Corey's

understanding of what is good. The junk in the creek is good because he hopes to use it

to build a four-wheeler of his own. The asphalt lip is good because he can use it to make

himself (or at least to seem) faster, more skilled, or more powerful. His "talent with

machines" Dane conceives as "man-talent. Metal-made" (341), and the very association

of masculinity with "[making]" connects him with his father, Jimmy Make. The parts

Corey drags from the flood-glutted creek are valuable for their very "unmade, unbuilt"

(25) quality of usefulness to a "man" (341) who can "[make]" (341) something with them.

When Bant takes Corey to see the destruction at the mountaintop removal mine,

he does, in fact, see. However, Corey's sight is distinct from Bant's, and the ways in

which it echoes her own only serve to highlight the profound contrast between them. "As

soon as he sees," the narrator states, "he can't see enough" (162). The difference between

seeing something on television or in magazines and seeing it in front of him shocks

Corey, evoking desire akin to a physical hunger, for "he wants to stretch his eyes wide

like you can do your lips, for a big ole hamburger, for three-layer cake" (162). The

dragline, "Big John" (163) is "a great grand giant thing, here in this place of puny things"

(162); he "can tell how big by the D-9 dozers and haul trucks antcrawling under" (163) it.

Half-personified, Big John has a "neck (that) looks like one of those huge power

transmitters that straddle the mountains" (163), a "neck... planted in a pivoting base the

size and even the shape of sixty army tanks welded together" (163), a "neck... (with a)

shovel... roomy enough to hold twenty or so of those monster rock trucks... themselves

47

so big Dad's truck... would only come halfway up one tire" (163). The personifying

name and the repetitive metaphor "neck" are themselves constantly contextualized by

trucks, tanks, and machinery. The dragline's very size is quantifiable only because of

other, smaller machines moving in its vicinity, a fact that directly highlights Corey's

utilitarian, machine-oriented valuations and assessments. Big John's scope is not

something to be measured in human dimensions. Even "Dad's" brief appearance in the

paragraph remains tangential. Jimmy Make is important as truck-owner rather than

father, machine-operator rather than man.

Similarly, Corey can only give himself dimension and importance in relation to

the machine. "He wouldn't just look at the machinery. He'd go on and climb right in"

(164), imagining what it might feel like to "scale... that vast mountain-handling piece of

gorgeous machinery" (164). Corey daydreams its "good grease... on his clothes" (164),

in the next sentence imagining "cut[ting] himself a little... bleed[ing] a little" (164) as he

climbs, as though the mixture of blood and grease were a kind of union between man and

machine, a union fully realized in the last two sentences of the chapter: "That giant, his

body in that gigantic body, his body running that body, and the size, the power of that

machine: inside Big John, Corey can change the shape of the world. Corey can" (164).

The merging of bodies to which Rueda-Ramos refers (228) evokes the kind of closeness

to which Corey aspires. He is not interested in Bant's or Mogey's intimacy with nature-

centered places. Instead, he wants a unity that magnifies himself and his own,

"mountain-handling" (164) power. Looking, and the receptivity or mutuality ideally

implicit in the act, is not enough. Use-value, instrumentality, and the power to "change

the shape of the world" (164) motivate Corey in ways nothing else does.

48

Having provided Corey's reaction to the dragline and the mountaintop removal

site, Pancake then offers Bant's first person account. She, too, strains to see, but whereas

her brother hungers to take it all in, she must "[push her] eyes harder… let come in the

hurt" (165) before the physical reality of destroyed place can come into "focu[s]" (165).

The loss, in a paradoxical sense, precedes authentic sight in a manner that foreshadows

the tragic hope of the novel's end, the contradictory revelation. Whereas Corey's vision is

filled with the dragline itself, which he personifies in qualified, mechanistic ways, Bant

takes in the whole of the scene, blending the personified, even empathetically

experienced, pain of an "amputated" (165) mountain, "stumps... limping" (165):

"Monster shovel clawed the dirt and you felt it in your arm, your leg, your belly" (165).

And Rueda-Ramos, who has already pointed out Bant's own "embodiment of the

mountain" (223), notes that "the author's use of words like amputation, guts, and limbs...

to refer to the Earth clearly seeks to reinforce the interrelation between the human body

and the Earth's body" (224).

Corey's gaze relates itself to "shap[ing] the world" (164) by his own, machine-

enhanced power. It leads to ability and force beyond mere looking. Bant's gaze,

however, far from asserting or seeking a world-shaping order, identifies nothing so much

as confusion, chaos, and the lack of meaning. Rather than borrow even the bleak

"moonscape" (165) metaphor, she evokes "airiness emptying [her]" (165), "nothing"

(166), and sheer absence. "Because a moonscape was still something made by God and

this was not, this was the moon upside down" (165), she maintains. Both Bant and Corey

acknowledge the human impact at work in this mountaintop removal site, but they arrive

at opposite conceptions of this impact. World-shaping potential juxtaposes itself with the

49

inversion inherent to destruction, particularly of something living. Staring at the "killed

ground" (166), Bant "[can't] tell anything about size or distance... because... this was

nothing. And you cannot measure nothing" (166). While Corey estimates size and

power with reference to trucks, tanks, and machinery, Bant has lost all sense of scale and

relation, including her relation to the land itself. "The distance between me and the land

had set in, complete" (167), she states. "Just like you couldn't measure the site because it

was nothing, you couldn't feel for it either, because there was nothing to feel for.

Nothing stirs nothing" (167). Bant can only relate to the still-living land, to Cherryboy

behind her, which has not yet been destroyed. Yellowroot can no longer combat the

emptiness and meaninglessness of destruction in memory: "Everything in these woods

was put here for a reason" (166), Bant recalls her grandmother's words. The memory of

"what Yellowroot had been" (166) is the only meaningful space left within the mine site,

where the complex, concrete and associational life of an ended place persists.

The "upside down" (165), "emptying" (165) site, then, in Bant's words, is "the

ass-end of the world" (165). And although there is a kind of bitter humor in the

vulgarized relationship between this despairingly, emphatically colloquial phrase and the

personification in the rest of the paragraph, this serves only to highlight the indignity of

tragedy, and even apocalypse, in a sacrifice zone. "The ass-end of the world" (165)

refuses to associate nobility or necessity to the world-ending destruction Bant witnesses.

Indeed, such language effectively divorces the revelatory context of apocalypse, its literal

meaning, with the devastation so often conceived of as replacing it. The end of the world

as a physical end may be in the power of Big John and his masters; however, the

unveiling of hiddenness and the possibility of a new world have their origins elsewhere.

50

Thus, when Bant maintains that she can "still feel [Cherryboy] behind [her] the way you

can feel an animal hiding close by in the woods" (167), the essentially relational and

sensory-yet-hidden nature of this statement suggests the apocalyptic heart of the novel.

In fact, it precedes, almost immediately, Mogey's chapter, which, more than any other,

evokes authentic revelation.

Mogey's Ecological Vision

Significantly, Mogey's chapter occupies the exact center of Pancake's novel. The

literal and thematic heart of the book, this section takes on apocalyptic significance

through the dream-revelation of natural unity and the fusion of strange or paradoxical

elements, each of which engage with the apocalyptic tradition and problematize

simplistic dichotomies. According to Rueda-Ramos, "Mogey represents the spiritual

aspect of the land and the communion with all the living creatures in the woods" (227).

Not only does he "embod[y] the sick mountain" (227), but he also "[offers] a holistic

view of both religion and the landscape" (227), "sens[ing] the interdependent relationship

with the land and the blending of his body with [it]" (227), essentially as "a part of God's

body" (227). It is, therefore, significant that his chapter begins with one Christianized

form of use-value against which both Mogey and Pancake ultimately protest.

Quoting a conversation he once had with a respected pastor, Mogey remembers

the man's words: "'God gave man the earth and its natural resources for our own use.

We are its caretakers, and we have dominion over it...' And he went on like that, saying

stuff I'd heard since I was little" (168). Articulating his original deference to authority,

Mogey goes on to maintain a different kind of knowledge, one that could coexist with the

dichotomous, rational separations by which, as Bull and others note, human beings seek

51

to make sense of the world: "Part of me knew, even back then, that's not what it is. I

knew we wasn't separate from it like that" (168). And with this simple statement - the

subject, "it" (168), so encompassingly vague - Mogey challenges the very idea of

compartmentalization, of us/them and I/It and the related use-values that obscure an

ecological (and apocalyptically-implicated) whole.

The essential strangeness of Mogey's childhood encounter with the buck

destabilizes the reader and thus facilitates openness. By defying expectation in so many

small and large ways, the episode takes on a sense of revelation, of the coming into

hiding of that which is not simple but, rather, a multifaceted reality. In listening to

Mogey's mystical experience, the reader is not only given a message, but is also

equipped, by the message's very communication, to receive revelation in its

undifferentiated, manifold character.

Mogey's encounter occurs, significantly, in "a place they called the Ribs" (169).

By evoking the protective bones encasing the heart, the name suggests that this place

conceals an ecologically central organ, some essential, metaphorical force circulating life

through an ecosystemic body. Moreover, the skeletal image also alludes to Christian

narratives of original creation, wherein Eve is formed from Adam's rib. This place thus

takes on a subtly originary (and feminine) character, as though the experience occurring

here might participate, somehow, in an as yet unrevealed creation myth and thereby

indicate a meaningful relation between present and past or source, origin and experience,

in a way that evokes Kermode's engagement with narrative time.

"That buck come out after the last drive," Mogey recalls, "I don't mean he was

driven to us. He was not, he come out on his own" (169). Even as he begins to recount

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his experience, Mogey attributes an agency to nature that is essentially lacking in a use-

value, or I-it, perception. The buck "come out on his own" (169), while the pronoun "he"

(169) further rejects an object-subject relationship that might privilege a human observer.

Moreover, the way that Mogey "[feels]" (169) the creature's presence "without seeing"

(169) or hearing, implies a real but extra-sensory connection, an identity with the other

that establishes affinity in more interior ways than the usual environmental perceptions:

blurring the lines between self and external space by closing the distance implied by

typical means of sensory accessibility.

This sense of dissolving boundaries only increases as the passage and the

encounter continue: "When I felt the buck and turned and saw, I thought at first he was a

doe, his antlers blurred in the branches like they were" (169). Not only does this create a

strange, ambiguous gender space, but it does so specifically through the buck's

relationship with his background, his environment. In a sense, this image of the creature

evokes a kind of permeability that ebbs and flows with his movement in place as "the

antlers focused, come clear" (169). Continuing to defy perceived rules of logic, of

nature, the buck "held himself still, like he should not have done" (169). Even after being

shot, "he didn't just crash and come to rest on the next outcrop like he was supposed to.

No. He went to rolling. It was the third strange thing he done that day, after showing

himself to boys with a gun and then standing still, practically posing for the shot" (170).

His very strangeness becomes an image of cyclic movement, "hooping down that

mountain end over end" (170), suggestive, in fact, of the cycles of age Mogey evokes

when he remarks that it's "as though [deer] age by seasons instead of years" (169). The

nonlinear movement through time creates different, more immediate relations between

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past, present and future, and the nonlinear movement downhill, into the "Ribs" (169) of

the mountain, brings about a physical disappearance and a consequent "coming into

hiding" (Bull 31) of temporal and relational significance.

Seeking the buck, Mogey discovers "a little sunk-down place like a room" (172),

and he "knew that beyond it, the buck would be there. Somehow [he] knew" (173).

Stepping inside,

something layered down over [his] self. At first it seemed

to wrap [him]. But then it was somehow in the center of

[him], starting there, and then it washed on out through all

of [his] parts.... And the thing was, once it had currented

all the way through [him] and reached [his] very ends, it

kept on going (172).

The boundaries between self and other, human and nature-other not only blur but dissolve

until both halves of the apparent dichotomy fill external space:

It melted my edges. It blended me, I don't know how else

to say it, right on out in to the woods. It took me beyond

myself and kept going, so I wasn't no longer holed up in my

body, hidden, I saw then how before I'd been hidden, how

I'd believed myself smaller than I really was. It made me

feel bigger in myself, and it made me feel more here even

though you might have expected such a thing to make me

feel gone. (172-3)

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Mogey's experience deeply engages the ideas of hiddenness, of indeterminacy, identity,

and relationship so significant to Bull's exploration of apocalypticism. Through his

encounter with this non-corporeal presence, Mogey communicates a revelation that

extends and challenges his very experience of self in real and particular place.

Like Dane, Mogey receives destructive realities into his body, albeit through a

mining accident and its endless aftermath. Unlike Dane, however, Mogey can express

apocalyptic vision and thereby expand himself, without loss of identity, into the world

around him. His receptivity does not preclude communication or communion.

Conversely, Dane reaches out for comfort in prayer, careful to follow the proper

formulas, but he cannot escape his fear or the conviction of absence: eventually both

God's and Grandma's. In the end, Dane leaves with his father and surviving brother,

physically removing himself from a space which, for him, has lost all sacredness but not

all "threat" (48).

Also in contrast to Mogey, whose narrative evokes identity in unity through a

blending of opposites and the consequent possibility of hope, Avery's story demonstrates

the loss of place and the alienated identity that look back on apocalyptic disaster without

being anchored, by memory, in a past defined by communion with nature in particular

space. Avery does not have the resources to hope in the way that Mogey does; he cannot

access the knowledge contained in loss because, in order to do so, there had to have been

a deep, sensory engagement with the lost thing, prior to its loss. This is why Lace, Bant,

and Mogey all retain the capacity to hope, despite the tangled, painful experience of loss

in the present. They can personally relate to a past union with particular place, and,

through it, with all of the natural world. Avery is forced to rely on books, on the history

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he never learned until after the fact. And although these things are crucial (they do save

him, in the sense that they allow him to continue his life outside the lost place), they do

not equip him to remain in his childhood home once his experience of it is informed

exclusively by catastrophe.

Hope and Identity

Indeed, Heather Houser, although she never explicitly connects the name "See" to

identity-informing action, does stress the visual roles of both Lace and Bant in her article

"Knowledge Work and the Commons in Barbara Kingsolver's and Ann Pancake's

Appalachia," arguing that "the novel conceives of activism as a process of making

visible" (108), implicitly treading on apocalyptic turf with this language of unveiling.

Ultimately, Houser suggests that the "knowledge work" in which these women participate

effects a potentially "remade commons," based on "regional experiential and global

expert epistemologies" (113). "To counter the precariousness of Appalachia's

environmental and economic futures..., Strange... revive[s] the commons as (a) sit[e] for

intellectual and political formation predicated on losses that encircle home, region, and a

world becoming strange" (113), but "work" itself relies on the ways that Lace and Bant

"mak[e] visible the ecological and social fragmentation" (108). Identifying the visual

impressions and actions of mother and daughter within the text, Houser emphasizes their

roles in terms of "inhabiting, witnessing, and living-through" (109). Bant "becomes a

vehicle for sight" (109) by the end of the novel, enabling, if not a "utopian" (109)

eventuality, at least the potential for "activism and knowledge production opening onto

hope" (109).

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Only after coming face to face with the full reality of the threat can Bant return to

a space of hope, "moving the way [she] used to in the woods.... feel[ing] what [is]

nearby" (355). Inserting Mogey's remembered words between Bant's discovery and

reburial of Dane's box forces the reader to view the tragedy, on which Rueda-Ramos

focuses, as a frame, or a box itself, containing the necessity of "hold[ing] both the loss

and the hope" (357). The experience of closeness returns to Bant after she witnesses the

full scope of destruction, acknowledging loss and opening herself up to a sensory present

on the mountain, in the woods, despite the inherent vulnerability of such a position.

"[L]oss and... hope" (357) are both situated in place and time, contradictory aspects of

the same experiential reality, the same whole, although one directs attention to the past

while the other points to the future. Bull would say that each comes into hiding as the

other is revealed, together comprising the "necessary hiddenness of true contradiction"

(293) revealed by apocalypticism.

In the end, when Bant goes to the mountaintop removal site, "completely

exposed" (351) now herself, she climbs the "tree slaughter" (352) inside the valley fill. In

a landscape already described in terms of the upside-down and inside-out, the exposed

hiddenness and the disrupted, even chaotic disorder of anthropocenic seasons, Bant

climbs down and back up among trees no longer rooted in anything like place. She

climbs "limb, trunk, roots" (353) down into the fill, where she is unable to gauge the

depths of water in the impoundment; climbing back up the other side, then, reversing her

descent through the disconnected limbs and roots, evokes a bitter sense of baptism, of

coming back up from the water, through death to a life informed by new identity and new

belonging.

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According to Carmen Rueda-Ramos in her essay "Polluted Land, Polluted Bodies:

Mountaintop Removal in Ann Pancake's Strange As This Weather Has Been," "Pancake

presents Bant as the embodiment of the mountain" (223), as "one with the land" (223).

By Bant's own admission, Rueda-Ramos notes, as a child she "never saw [her]self, never

felt [her]self, as separate from it" (100), from "this land" (100) and this place. (Although

Rueda-Ramos does not address the visual language of self-recognition, the fact that Bant

reiterates sensory, particularly visual, ways of coming-to-know further highlights her role

as active witness and the effect of this role on her understanding of the connection

between self and world, between what is felt or observed and the "I" at the site of sensory

engagement and comprehension.) Bant's closeness to, or rather inseparability from, the

land, of course, grows complicated and challenged, given the destruction threatening her

home as she grows older, and Rueda-Ramos clearly identifies the "distance" (Pancake

101) Bant begins to feel as a result of "the devastation caused by mountaintop removal"

(Rueda-Ramos 223), even drawing parallels "between the exploitation of the land and

that of Bant's body" (224). However, Rueda-Ramos does not address the paradoxical

rejuvenation of closeness that occurs at the end of the novel, for she discusses the end in

terms of "Bant reflect[ing] on the loss (of mountain land and culture) as she tries to retain

hope to continue fighting" (229). Although Pancake's ending is certainly bleak, Rueda-

Ramos neglects the vital paradox presiding over this conclusion.

Appalachian, mountain place thus takes on the significance of an apocalyptic text

within Pancake's novel. Destruction, even of this particular, physical space, expands

implicitly beyond itself, in fact, as it borrows the universal connotations of

apocalypticism. Moreover, as the author interrogates the purpose and revelatory urgency

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of narrative itself, especially past-oriented narrative, Pancake insists on the reader's

responsibility to his or her own place, time, and world. She uses apocalyptic rhetoric as a

way of mourning and challenging the loss, not only of place, but also of time, which is

entailed by a loss of place. Destroying the memory-saturated mountain threatens, also, its

narrative past, while mine-related health problems and looming catastrophe destabilize

the present and the future. Heather Houser points out the loss of commons, indeed, in

terms, not only of "what was once shared space (being converted) into enclosed, private

property" (100), but also of the "bodily damage that makes trekking into the woods and

spending long hours bent with a trowel impossible" (100), even before the "plants,

animals, and earth" (101) are themselves destroyed. A kind of spatial and temporal

displacement lends itself to apocaplypticism as a way of making sense of loss, even

perhaps legitimizing suffering by investing it with the dramatic, eschatological

connotations that bind the present moment in meaningful relationship with an otherwise

destabilized past and future.

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Chapter 3: Louise McNeill, Apocalyptic Poet

Shifting from Pancake's novel, with its exploration of ecological apocalypse in

West Virginia's mountaintop removal mining, we should also examine poetry as a

medium for apocalyptic expressions within Appalachian literature. To this end, we will

explore Louise McNeill's collection Paradox Hill: From Appalachia to Lunar Shore

(1972), through which the reader engages with historic past and apocalyptic future within

Appalachian verse.

Louise McNeill and Poetry as History

As the poet laureate of West Virginia from 1979 until her death in 1993

(Harshman), Louise McNeill was specifically selected to be a cultural representative of

her state, an artist whose work was officially identified as contributing to its historical

and cultural tradition. McNeill's poetry, much of which makes use of formal structures

and rhyme schemes suggestive of the ballad or, more generally, of an oral tradition, are

deceptively accessible in that they deal with human experience and the natural world in

often simple images and language, even sometimes with informal elements of dialect

(Stringer 2). In Gauley Mountain: A History in Verse (1939), for example, the poet

recreates individual Appalachian voices and perspectives in ways that invoke a humble

local reality, as opposed to the epic sweep of international events. Family names such as

O'Kane, MacElmain, and Verner recur, drawing lines of ancestral continuity with the

present in order to stress both the complex relevance of the past and, within it, the

interplay between individual and collective influence. Here, then, as in most of her

poetry, McNeill privileges the personal and the experiential, especially in conjunction

with an authentic (by which the poet means non-industrialized) natural world. In fact,

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despite the objective, wide-ranging connotations of history proper, the poet's insistence

on identifying Gauley Mountain as “A History” proffers a kind of thesis regarding not

only the relationship between poetry and history but also the reality of what history is and

does. Implicit in the poetry of Louise McNeill is the understanding that all history arises

from the organic experiences of individual men and women on a local level. The act of

connecting the present to the past, then, becomes a practice in empathy and imagination,

facilitated by the sensory and evocative quality of poetry. Inasmuch as poetry invites a

personal and sensory experience through language, it aids the modern reader in accessing

the equally personal and sensory past consisting in other, remembered, experience.

Most of Louise McNeill's poems use formal verse structures, retaining a

recognizable poetic character while engaging simple, even colloquial speech. By

demanding this aesthetic consideration in a prominent way, namely in the apparent

simplicity of language, meter, and rhyme scheme, McNeill is actually demanding

recognition of a West Virginia Appalachian history built on the experiences of those who

might otherwise be overlooked or stereotyped into essentialized insignificance or

practical invisibility. She communicates local and personal histories as no less authentic

than the stories of lawmakers, generals and presidents handed down by accepted

authorities. When she begins to address apocalyptic futures, then, she does so from this

local perspective on history and the past, one which accords Kermode's conceptions of

narrative significance to a present informed by domestic, colloquial origins as well as

threatening ends. In order to appreciate McNeill's future vision, therefore, we should first

examine her own Appalachian past and (then) present.

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Past and Present

Throughout her memoir, Louise McNeill reflects on her personal experience of

growing up in Appalachian West Virginia. Within its beautifully-composed and

nostalgic encounters with family and nature, however, The Milkweed Ladies (1988)

articulates the reality and legitimacy of personal experience as a means of coming to

terms with history, both as something past and as something always-becoming. In this

legitimization, moreover, McNeill resists essentialization and stereotype. The

particularity of personal experience, combined with the author's consciousness of her

own nostalgia, belies an Appalachia which is either isolated from outside reality and

experience or reducible to a single understanding. Instead, the Appalachia portrayed in

The Milkweed Ladies speaks with poignancy and relevance in the context of past, present,

and future, linked, ultimately, by continuity in nature. Coming to terms with

environmental destruction, therefore, both in its local manifestations and its global

(nuclear) threat, involves, for McNeill, an apocalyptic consciousness closely (and

personally) tied to temporal and material Appalachian realities.

Writing of her childhood, McNeill describes the “green meadows and hilly

pastures, [the] storied old men, the great rolling seasons of moon and sunlight, [the]

limestone cliffs and trickling springs” (5). She invites the reader to smell the boiling sap

at “sugar-makin” (41) and to hear her grandmother's “thin monotone” (86) singing "All

the Pretty Horses." She writes in detail of “Decoration Day” (53) when her whole family

would gather to work over graves of their kin, and she recounts the different kinds of

snakes, apples, flowers, and superstitions that factored in her understanding of the world.

Indeed, McNeill's childhood seems to revolve around the “thorn broom handle” (24) of

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her Granny Fanny, that “old, pioneer woman, thin and wrinkled as a dried apple, and with

her secret in her that she always kept from everyone” (24). The broom handle serves as

an anchor, keeping her family back, it would seem, from the stream of modernizing life.

“We could sense,” she writes:

just beyond our broken-down line fences, the great reach of

the American continent flowing outward. Because we

stood so long in one place, our rocky old farm and the

abundant earth of the continent were linked together in the

long tides of the past. Because the land kept us, never

budging from its rock-hold, we held to our pioneer ways

the longest, the strongest; and we saw the passing of time

from a place called solid, from our own slow, archean, and

peculiar stance. (8)

As McNeill grows up and departs for college, the newly paved roads bring new cars and

new buildings to Swago, her home, even shifting the physical layout of the community:

“It was almost as though Granny Fanny had jerked her thorn broom handle out of the

world's axis and the whole contraption began to rattle and whirl” (105). The chestnut

trees have sickened and died, and the lumber industry has poisoned the fish and stripped

the land over the mountain. Industrialization and modernization have come to McNeill's

corner of West Virginia, and the farms are largely abandoned. In spite of all this,

however, The Milkweed Ladies is not, or not entirely, a narrative of an isolated rural way

of life being forced into the modern world.

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Throughout her narrative, McNeill relates not an isolated, backward Appalachia

but an Appalachia both distinct from and connected to the rest of the country and the rest

of the world. She describes her grandfather selling timber to a lumber company long

before the loggers move into the area in earnest. Her father has traveled the country

giving prepared orations and even traversed the world with Theodore Roosevelt's Navy,

and her mother sometimes wears the kimono her father brought back in these travels.

Even within her community, furthermore, McNeill's experiences belie the perception of

Appalachia as either isolated or stuck in the past, despite the image of the broom handle

anchoring them in time. She and her siblings visit their cousins in Chautauqua, eat ice

cream, and play hopscotch, and Granny Fanny even bobs her hair with “the Flappers”

(30). Although rural, McNeill's family is anything but isolated from the rest of the world,

and her memoirs are thus able to situate Appalachia in more immediate contexts: not

divorced from but contributing to history as a whole. In fact, even as a child, McNeill is

made acutely conscious of the way her home and her family are viewed by the outside

world when a young woman, who comes to teach Vacation Bible School in Swago, later

publishes a magazine article about the “ignorant and crude” (78) mountain people.

As she relates the events and images of her childhood and young adult life, Louise

McNeill resists a strictly consistent chronological organization, just as she resists the

geographical division of Appalachia from the rest of the world. Dividing The Milkweed

Ladies instead by theme and image, she sometimes recounts memories partially out of

order. Standing over her father's grave gives way to visiting with him in life, and a full

introduction to Aunt Malindy comes after events and memories of which she would

already have been a part. The result of this gently unchronological narration is to blur the

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strict separation of past and present by blurring the linear structure of that past. In

reminiscence, all of the past is equally present to McNeill through the interconnections of

personal experience. A personal history, then, is oriented more by perspective than by

timeline, and this perspective remains active in the present, thus illuminating memory

with wonderful immediacy and casting its significance also into the future. There,

however, this locally-informed (but not isolated) past must engage with the realities of a

global threat.

It is thus with particular poignancy that McNeil ends her memoir. Having

wistfully narrated the details of her Appalachian childhood and the pain of watching a

beloved landscape being ravaged by the timber industry, the author directs attention to

the future by relating one more set of images from the past. The Northern Lights gleam

weirdly over a West Virginia porch three months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Then

planes stream incessantly over a faculty cottage in South Carolina. And finally, two

words stand out in a New York headline: “A-T-O-M-I-C B-O-M-B” (121). “That was

the night the world changed,” concludes McNeill:

It wasn't joy that died, or faith, or resolution; for all these

come back. It was something else, something deep and

earth-given that died that night in the Commodore (Hotel).

Never again would I be able to say with such infinite

certainty that the earth would always green in the

springtime, and the purple hepaticas come to bloom on my

woodland rock. For these, the earth and its seasons, had

always been my certainty - going beyond death, beyond the

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death of all my people, even beyond the death of the farm;

the sun in the morning, the darkness at night, the certain

roll of the seasons, the 'old blue misties' sweeping out of

the north. (122)

Nature, for McNeill, is at the heart of the continuity between past and present. It links the

two even as personal, sensory experience and individual history play out within and

across it. In fact, it is the means by which this very experience can contextualize past and

present, present and future since all human life is a part of the natural world. The

importance of literature, then, moves beyond the ability to give access to history and the

past. Literature in general, and poetry in particular, should bring the past close in order to

shed light on the future, giving warning as well as hope and grounding an entire view of

history in the unifying needs and revelations of personal experience, ultimately linking

past and future (as Kermode suggests) in their meaningful relationship with the present.

Throughout her poetry, and not merely in her narratively rich Gauley Mountain,

McNeill asserts the essentially fruitful conversation between poetry and history. Using

the sensory experience of poetic language, she provides access to the past within a

framework of critical, experiential engagement on the part of the reader and thereby

demonstrates the possibilities inherent in poetry as a means of exploring Appalachian

history, and indeed, history in general. In Paradox Hill: From Appalachia to Lunar

Shore, however, "the major collection of McNeill's mature career" (Stringer 1),

moreover, the poet brings past and future into conversation with each other in a way that

explores the full paradox of apocalypticism. Examining a poem from the first section of

Paradox Hill will allow us to compare past- and future-oriented conceptions within the

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collection, specifically in light of McNeill's interest in an Appalachian historical place

and its relationship to the possible (nuclear) end of history.

“Arrow Grasses By Greenbrier River:” A Critical Expression of Continuity

In her ode entitled “Arrow Grasses By Greenbrier River,” Louise McNeill

demonstrates poetry's potential to engage with history in fruitful and critical ways, using

strategic ambiguities in order to open up a limited historical perspective to critical

attention. However, McNeill also creates a sense of continuity between past and present

through which she invites the reader to consider the future, thus evoking, even in work

more straightforwardly associated with an historical Appalachian past, the significant

relationship of past, present, and future that Kermode identifies. In developing this

continuity, then, not only does the poet offer a profound access to history through

experience in the here and now (including that of reading the poem itself), but she also

inherently contradicts the Western notion of history as linear progress. In this way, she

ultimately invites both a critical and a personal engagement with the past.

Arrow grasses by the river,

Phalanx, spear by spear arrayed,

Teach us that we may remember

Others here have walked afraid.

Teach us - all our generation -

We are not the first to know

Death and war and red transgression

Where these quiet waters flow.

Long ago our father's father

Here in springtime dropped his corn,

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Died and fell, an arrow winging

In his heart that April morn -

Dead as you or I will ever

Lie beneath the atom's burst -

Arrow grasses by the river,

Teach us we are not the first,

Nor the last to live in danger,

Live in wonder and in woe,

Here on earth beside the river,

Where the quiet waters flow. (Paradox 34)

In the first two stanzas of her poem, Louise McNeill cultivates an ambiguity by which

something apparently straightforward creates a critical tension within itself. Although

ostensibly the poet is speaking of the (white) settlers who were her ancestors (an

assumption borne out by the fact that Cherokee women, not men, traditionally engaged in

agricultural pursuits such as planting corn, and, therefore, the farmer in the poem is most

likely of European descent), subtler connotative aspects of the poem invite a more

nuanced reading.

When McNeill writes “Teach us that we may remember / Others here have

walked afraid,” her choice of “others” is deliberately vague. The word itself gives no

explicit indication of reference to ancestors or to any other specified group or groups. In

fact, if anything, the word evokes connotations of those cast as outsiders in opposition to

one's own culture and ethnicity. The effect of this ambiguity is twofold. Inasmuch as

“others” refers to the “father's father” depicted in the third stanza, it suggests the distance

we tend to place between ourselves and those in our past, even our own ancestors;

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inasmuch as “others” broadens to invoke ideas of groups distinct from those with which

we identify, however, it implies an essential unity of human experience. In both cases,

the effect of the ambiguity is to establish a type of continuity, whether between past and

present or self and other (a blurring of distinctions which allies her later apocalypticism

with that of Bull).

By way of increasing this ambiguity, moreover, the poet reiterates that “We are

not the first to know / Death and war and red transgression,” a clause emphasized by the

first strong instance of enjambment within the poem. In these lines, beyond the refusal,

again, to specify whom is meant by “the first,” it is the use of the descriptor “red” that

most builds on the subtle ambiguity of the first stanza. Although the word certainly

evokes ideas of blood and violence, it also makes a connotative connection, particularly

in the context of this poem, to derogatory labels and descriptions of Native Americans.

In this way, the poet uses the suggestive potential of “red” to subtly invoke a tradition of

subjection and injustice directed against a specific “other.” In this light, the meaning of

“red transgression” takes on an added ambiguity. This ambiguity ultimately serves to

open a critical space for reflection; however, it also implies a blurred boundary between

self and other, whether “otherness” is predicated on social or temporal boundaries.

McNeill's gentle reminder that “we are not the first” obscures the distinction between our

own experiences and the past experiences of others, an effect strengthened by the fact

that reading a poem is itself a sensory experience and thus not divorced from the

experiential way in which we explore and discover the world. This essential continuity

emerges throughout the poem, especially through rhyme, metric structure, diction, and

repetition.

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“Arrow Grasses” is written in quatrains of trochaic tetrameter, with every second

and fourth line of the stanza missing its final, unstressed syllable. This creates a sense of

closure for the reader at the end of each stanza, a completeness that effects distinctness in

time: one stanza, moment, or generation from another. However, these verse units are

also connected to each other through repeated elements, rhyme scheme, and an

overarching narrative, and this creates a structural framework through which the poet

formally suggests, as well as thematically indicates, the continuity of people and

generations in time. This interplay of unity and variety thus evokes the specificity of the

individual as something distinct from and united to a continuous historical narrative.

The poet also suggests, through diction and rhyme, that nature performs a

unifying role in our experience of continuity with the past. Asking the arrow grasses to

“teach us so we may remember” not only engages the significance of memory itself but

also invests nature with authority as an observer in whom everything is preserved, albeit

in ways that require the investigation inherent in “asking.” McNeill's use of rhyme further

echoes this reality. Although the rhyme scheme might be described as ABCB, with only

the second and fourth lines of any given stanza providing a full rhyme, it is the first and

third lines that are of interest. The pairs of these end words are as follows: “river” and

“remember,” “generation” and “transgression,” “father” and “winging,” “ever” and

“river,” and finally “danger” and “river.” Each of these pairs, with the exception of the

third, uses the hint of a feminine rhyme to emphasize the unity and variety inherent in the

tension between the individual moment and history as a whole. The lack of harmony,

moreover, between “father” and “winging” marks the death of the ancestor in a specific

context most likely alien to the modern reader. The difficulty of relating to a concrete

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past temporarily dissolves the continuity until, at the beginning of the next stanza, the

poet continues to contextualize the event with “Dead as you and I will ever / Lie beneath

the atom's burst.” Indeed, the enjambment here insists on an essential continuity of

experience, death with death, even as the specific fear of a modern age is juxtaposed with

the farmer shot in his field by an invisible enemy. It is also significant that “river”

reappears in the last two of the above pairs. Coupled with the repetition that echoes in

lines like “Arrow grasses by the river, / Teach us we are not the first,” and “Where the

quiet waters flow,” this use of the river links the sense of continuity to nature. A river,

furthermore, itself connotes the subtle tension between continuity and change, movement

and stillness. The Heraclitean idea that all is in flux - and that one can never step into the

same river twice - contrasts with the connotation of peace, continuity, and steadiness.

The river, then, becomes the ideal background in an appeal of this kind to nature.

It is perhaps the last stanza, however, and its flowing connection to the

penultimate one, that takes the sense of continuity already established and extends it to

the future. “Teach us we are not the first,” ends stanza four with the least indication of a

pause before stanza five's, “Nor the last to live in danger, / Live in wonder and in woe.”

The poet's decision to split “the first” from “the last” by stanza (which, as we have seen,

subtly imply distinct moments in time), while also deliberately minimizing this

separation, effectively recreates the unity and variety of time and generation.

Furthermore, it implies that our assumed separation from the past relies on an artificial

distinction which does not even exist between past and future. Indeed, linking the idea of

those who came before us to those coming after, and linking them, moreover, through the

continuity of human experience, ultimately even refuses to privilege us with regards to

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them. We become the link between equalized moments of past and future, flowing in

river-like continuity. History, then, acquires an evenness that makes all time equally

relevant and equally connected.

In light of this continuity, the division between "Appalachia" and "To Lunar

Shore" (implicitly characterized as "paradox" by the poet's choice of title) embodies the

problematic crisis of a present that must stand in relation to both past and future.

Although she implicitly aims "Arrow Grasses" toward a future by refusing to dissociate it

from the past, the beginning and ending sections of Paradox Hill more explicitly position

the reader, within his or her present, in relation to a past and future respectively. This

structural linearity becomes blurred by the ways that "Appalachia" also invokes both

present and future and "To Lunar Shore" additionally references present and past;

however, the real but problematized division between origin and end continues to

highlight a paradox ultimately evocative of Bull's contradictory truths coming into

hiding.

To Lunar Shore

The third and final section of Paradox Hill, "To Lunar Shore," engages paradox

and explores ideas of time - of origins and ends - in ways that evoke apocalypticism,

especially the apocalyptic thought which Bull articulates in his philosophic and critical

text. In her "Foreword to the First Edition," moreover, Louise McNeill herself notes that

she has, while still "[writing] the lore and language of [her] people, the Appalachian

mountaineers" (vii), moved also "through the atomic age" (vii). Articulating the shift

from her explorations of local history to her struggles with a modernity both connected to

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and distinct from its past, McNeill states that she "[has] written again of 'Gauley' (as in

Gauley Mountain), but not of 'Gauley' alone" (vii). She adds:

Where the subconscious mind runs deep - all of our

experiences are blended and whirled: the Indian signal

smoke, the atomic mushroom; the spinning wheel and the

cyclotron; the winding wood path and the orbit flame. So

Appalachia is not a consistent land... For Appalachia is

life, and life is not - cannot be, surely should not be -

consistent. Yet the life thread is strong. And here in our

mountains it runs from the green savannahs to atom fire.

(vii-viii)

In her conception of history, then, in 1972 when Paradox Hill was first published,

McNeill identifies the profound existence of paradox, of undifferentiation and the

apocalyptic revelation and anxiety simultaneously implicit in such a portrait of past,

present, and future.

In the untitled, italicized poem which serves almost as an epigraph, and certainly

as an introduction, for "To Lunar Shore," the poet speaks directly to her reader:

If somewhere in the cooling rocks

Of cosmic seas, of cosmic dunes,

You find this thing of paradox

And can decipher out the runes

Upon these pages edged with scorch,

Forgive their tinges of the fire;

I flung them like a riven torch

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Above the rupture of the pyre;

They billowed in a greenish blast;

And, with them, belling far away,

I heard the hound dogs of the past

Upon the burning mountains bay. (Paradox 77)

Beginning this section in such a way not only highlights the essential character of

paradox within her work, but it also confronts the reader with the immediate, sensory

presence of a past with which McNeill has been specifically concerned throughout her

poetic career. Identifying, if with intentional ambiguity, the meaningful relation between

past, present, and future, the poet brings her most prevalent themes to bear in these

apparently simple verses.

Indeed, in their very simplicity, or seeming simplicity, these lines actually

challenge the possibility of any message being either straightforward or comprehensible.

For by making contingent, not only the discovery, but also the "decipher[ing]" (77) of

"these pages" (77), specifically their "runes" (77), with their connotations of occult and

ancient impenetrability, the speaker belies the kind of consistency implied by standard

meters or rhyme schemes. By choosing to continue in formal, even deceptively simple,

verse while asserting expectations of interpretive difficulty, the poet creates a subtly

contradictory space, in which no statement can be glossed over or taken for granted, and,

by extension, no reflective experience of the present.

Even within a metric consistency, then, evocative of symmetry and tradition,

images of severing destruction confront those of continuity. Difference confronts

indistinctness; recovery confronts loss. "Cosmic seas" (77) are syntactically equivalent to

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"cosmic dunes" (77), water to aridity; the character of interest in either is chaos and

indeterminacy, together with the subtle implication of eroding forces, given the

temporally vast "cosmic" (77) and the relation of these wild, unpredictable spaces with

"cooling rocks" (77). Finding "these pages" (77), which have been "flung" (77) over a

funeral fire, places the very act of reading these poems in an improbable context and an

uncertain connection with past intention; moreover, the poet's act of casting words into

(also chaotic and consuming) fire appropriates a language of severing loss through

"riven" (77) and "rupture" (77). Even the auditory presence of "the hound dogs of the

past" (77) becomes ambiguous, since it arises with the "[flinging]" (77) over a "pyre"

(77) and the uncertainty of anyone "find[ing]" (77) and "decipher[ing]" (77) the truth.

The "bay[ing]" (77) is real; it even evokes a sense of the hunt, of movement and

progression toward some unseen goal, perhaps something that requires a conscious use of

the past in order to catch it. The intangible sensory presence of sound, however,

particularly distant sound, preserves the interplay between accessibility or continuity and

loss, connection or unity and isolation. McNeill simultaneously problematizes and

necessitates the meaningful relationship of past with present, thereby generating the

future's chaotic, even violent uncertainty. The fact, if not the content, of the past's

significance is clear, as is the reality of imminent crisis, and the reader takes this, not only

into the subsequent pages of poetry, but also into the present within which he or she

encounters them.

Throughout these poems, then, paradox and problematized dichotomy repeatedly

arise: images of cyclic versus linear time, of unity versus isolation, and of sensory or

experiential comprehension versus the statistical analyses that draw lines and boundaries

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across indeterminate reality. Of the collected poems in "To Lunar Shore," however,

perhaps the most significant evidence of such apocalyptic reflections occurs in "Chain

Reaction" (97), "Quadrille of the Naked Contours" (99), and "Fireseed" (79-82).

In "Chain Reaction," McNeill articulates origin as a continuing, dynamic process.

Indeed, the title itself suggests causation in a way that highlights individual reactions

within a linked continuity extending in both directions, past and future, evocative of

Kermode's discussion of contingent versus narrative time. The title's connotations of

explicit causality might seem well suited to McNeill's predilection for formal verse and

strong patterns of rhyme; after all, a "chain reaction" (97) implies verifiable, scientific

connections in an ordered, possibly inevitable, progression of time. The poet's decision

to forgo her typical reliance on rhyme, then, if not on meter, provides a more nuanced

structure, combining the underlying, ordering principle of often enjambed blank verse

with the unpredictable continuity of internal rhyme, repetition, and alliteration. By

presenting "chain reaction[s]" in this ambiguous way, indeed, McNeill subtly engages

with another connotational element particularly present to her contemporary (1970's)

readers: the nuclear threat.

The poem runs:

Primordial space - before there first was light -

And in the dark one utter density

Lost as a seed but concentrated down

To heaviness and potency, its weight

Hung in the iron night; and outward burst -

And burst again - and farther bursting still.

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A chain reaction flaming forth the worlds

That spin and flash and thunder and expand

Forever outward in exploding blooms. (Paradox 97)

Beginning with an image of total, even ineffable indeterminacy, the poet generates the

"before" of space, a "primordial" dark that nevertheless contains "one utter density,"

defined in terms of "concentrated" potential without situated place, "lost as a seed" and

thus evocative of an origin before identity-revealing growth. By establishing a beginning

"before... light," moreover, McNeill alludes to the biblical origins of an "earth... without

form, and void" (KJV 1:2), where "darkness was upon the face of the deep" (KJV 1:2).

Suggesting such a connection, indeed, subtly elides "the Spirit of God" (KJV 1:2), as the

original "mov[ement]" (KJV 1:2), preceding even speech, with the dynamic "burst[ing]"

of the poem's chain reaction. The blurred division between the scientific and the divine,

then, infuses theoretically observable actuality with connotations of mystical, even

eschatological import, specifically connected to a distant, and therefore somehow occult,

past.

Having rejected a consistent rhyme scheme, McNeill uses repetition, internal

rhyme, and alliteration in order to draw, in a sense, on the dynamic hiddenness of

harmony. As the final words of the first and second lines, "light" and "density" should,

by the usual rules of Louise McNeill's poems, find answering rhymes in the next two

lines; however, the poet's third line meets no such expectation, and the reader must wait

until the fourth for even the partial concession of "potency" to "density." And although

"light" and line five's "weight" echo each other in playful paradox, the poet offers a full

rhyme only with "night" in the middle of line six, before launching the forceful repetition

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of "burst... burst... bursting still," which ends the stanza. By stretching and muffling an

ABBA progression of rhyme, McNeill problematizes the very traceability of the chain

reaction she describes, engaging the possibility that human impositions of order neglect

more subtle and dynamic symmetries within the fabric of reality. Furthermore, the

pairing of "light" and "night," "density" and "potency," respectively engage with paradox

and with the manner in which past and present somehow contain, even physically, the

future's rich, compact dynamism. McNeill draws a line of hidden but inevitable

continuity from past to present to future, thus establishing a sense of meaningful

(Kermodean) connection along a full range of distinct events within "forever," but she

also attributes to these events, these present moments, a condensed, even dangerous,

power with real implications for the entire span of time, a power suggestive of nuclear

reactions. Although her characterization of time, then, does evoke Kermode's interest in

the present as event or crisis - and in a narrative present related to past (origin) and future

(end) - McNeill's use of paradox and ambiguity implies, also, the seriousness and caution

these very ideas require.

The paradox of origins and futures, moreover, only widens when one considers

the fact that an inward, secret "seed," containing all potentiality, is also the source of the

"forever outward" "expan[sion]" of myriad worlds. The unexplained cause of such a

transition, or "burst," only emphasizes paradox by preserving the essential hiddenness of

mystery (subtly anticipating Bull's theory), while reiterating its inherent dangers. The

repetition of the word "burst," in fact, by its refusal to offer any additional mode of

description, whereby the process might be better understood, signifies a linguistic barrier

and a perpetuated hiddenness even within the implicit distinction between points in

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continuing time, which "burst" to "bursting still" effects. And the loss of even internal

rhymes in favor of more subtle, alliterative harmonies carries this mysterious

connectedness into the last three lines of the poem. "Flaming forth" and "flash,"

"expand" and "exploding," however, also create a faint chiasmus that problematizes the

temporal distinctions inherent to "burst... burst... bursting still," for the gerund form here

associates itself with a sense of time that blurs the difference between past and present,

present and future. The present tense of "flash" and "expand," meanwhile, with its

connotations of completeness, remain framed within these expansive, "-ing" actions,

seeming to situate even our observations of present events within a wider, more

ambiguous continuity, itself characterized by powers of explosive potential. The

(essentially sublime) implications of such power, such ambiguous temporal causality, and

such mystery, then, problematize the very possibility of human control.

Having offered paradox and ambiguity as subtle checks to human power, McNeill

returns her reader to formal rhyme and images of artistic order in her poem, "Quadrille of

the Naked Contours:"

At the end of night, and at the end of day,

When the substance burns till it burns away,

And nothing stands by our burned-out seas

But some birches stripped to the soul of trees;

And nothing hangs in the upper zones

Of the crystal clear but the neutron bones

Of the white dwarf stars, like a ring of stones -

Then the Absolutes in their lucent cords

Will rise and dance on the burned-out swards.

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Then the Theorems come, with their lines made clear

And the Formulae from the dark appear -

Then the Postulates and Hypotheses -

And the Zero drift from behind the trees

With its minus sign - and the Circle roll

And close itself, in itself made whole....

Then the constant "h" with its frigid thews -

And the Quanta flow with their retinues -

Transparent forms - in that utter still

Will move and dance in their cold quadrille -

Abstractions' host - and the neutron bones

Of the white dwarf stars, like a ring of stones -

And then, and then, from the neutron rocks

Will rise the skein of the Paradox. (Paradox 99)

"Quadrille of the Naked Contours" begins with the twice repeated word "end," thus

connecting the complementary halves of experienced time. Balancing the first line with

these equal halves of night and day, dark and light, and essentially negating the relevance

of such distinctions by placing each at its "end," the poet continues to engage with

blurred dualities, this time in a projected, eschatological context. In a sense, by situating

daily, experiential time at an end, McNeill evokes an indeterminacy only emphasized by

a "burn[ed] away (substance)" that leaves almost "nothing" behind it. Using anaphora to

reiterate this near-complete void ("and nothing stands... but," "and nothing hangs...

but"), the poet turns a definite, almost singsong meter - with its simple pairs (and one

trio) of straightforward end rhymes - to something ominous in its very apocalyptic

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simplicity. The plain, repetitive mode of communication, almost like a child's nursery

rhyme, essentially describes a dance at the end of the world, in which importantly

capitalized figures and concepts, intended to order human reality, move through an

empty, "burned-out" space in engagement with only each other.

Even as she evokes a bleak future in simple, musical verse, the poet shifts into

present tense: "Then the Absolutes... / will..." becoming "Then the Theorems come... /

and the Formulae... appear." The anaphoric use of "then" delineates this strange

consonance between future and present, the blurred distinction between which allows

McNeill to describe the abstract dance as though it were already in process. In the next

(third) stanza, moreover, the speaker engages both present and future, for although

"Quanta flow" in present tense, an unclear, plural subject, tangled in hyphenated sentence

divisions, also "will move and dance," despite being, or seeming to be, in the same

temporal space.

In the poem's final pair of lines, therefore, the repeated "And then, and then"

necessarily arises within a blurred chronology. In light of this context, in fact, this final

event has to demand emphatic placement on an otherwise confused timeline, asserting its

very finality by repetition. However, the necessity of such rhetorically simple insistence

ultimately suggests a childlike plea for credulity which, in connotation, if not denotation,

belies the authority of a meaningful end. The poet, then, leaves her reader with a sense of

dissatisfaction, even as she reduces all human concepts and abstract knowledge into the

indistinct "skein of the Paradox," as though we cannot approach even this logic-defying

concept with any surety.

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While the poems examined thus far situate apocalypticism within Appalachia

primarily through the poet's professed belonging, and in conversation with her more

traditional poems (a conversation clearly intended by collecting them within Paradox

Hill: From Appalachia to Lunar Shore), other poems in "To Lunar Shore" make this

indwelling, Appalachian apocalypticism somewhat more explicit. For example,

"Potherbs: (Of the edible wild plants my granny taught me.)" (Paradox 85) offers a

situated, literally rooted kind of "hunting": "I will hunt for pokeweed upon that burnt

hill," the poet writes, specifically calling on an inherited, wildcrafting ethic, by no means

guaranteed but at least answering "hunger" in a time of encircling "fire." Likewise,

"Life-Force" (Paradox 84) paints a post-apocalyptic vision of one "alone on the rubble of

earth - all alone" and turning to "woundwort," "bindweed," "thorn," and "sheath of the

man-root"5 for survival. Although subtler in this regard, "Fireseed" (Paradox 79-82), too,

ties McNeill's portrait of Appalachia to more universal spaces and themes, particularly to

the meaningful connection between past and future, realized in every present moment.

Providing perhaps the most complex, eschatological vision, "Fireseed" invokes the

paradox of multiplicity in unity so relevant to Bull's conception of hiddenness and

undifferentiation while engaging Kermode's sense of narrative/apocalyptic time, wherein

crisis and continuity meet in literary space.

5 Significantly enough, "man-root" alludes to ginseng, whose name means "Man Root" or "Root of Person"

in Chinese (Sivula 33). The fusion effected by this compound, in fact, suggests the undifferentiation of

Bull's apocalyptic in telling ways.

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Fireseed

The longest poem in Paradox Hill, "Fireseed" begins:

Primordial space, Primordial dark -

One atom spinning in its arc,

The worldseed lonely as a spark -

Spinning and growing till it grew

Great in the silence; then it blew;

Out of the oneness, there were two -

Two in the vastness burned and whirled;

Four in the void forth were hurled:

Eight in the thunder - so a world -

Thousands to millions; billions flame -

Out of the oneness, trillions came;

Out of the sameness, none the same.

Trillions to trillions split and glowed;

All in accordance, out they rode;

Circle in circle burned and flowed... (Paradox 79)

Significantly, the first stanza offers a different metric structure than the four that follow

it, all of which remain essentially, rhythmically consistent. In fact, this establishment of

predictable patterns conveys, as the "worldseed" divides in exponential multiplicity, an

underlying unity: of process and source. From the origin of "primordial space" and

undifferentiatable "dark" comes "one atom," and "one" cannot make a pattern. Order and

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patterns require multiplicity, but also connote a connectedness, or continuity over time.

The metric pattern, then, imitates the increase from one atom to two, four, eight, and

eventually to "thousands," "millions," and "billions." Moreover, all but the first line of

these four connected stanzas (following the first) eschew enjambment in favor of an even

more pronounced, rhythmic repetition. Indeed, the presence of enjambment in this first

line: "growing till it grew / Great in the silence," is, in a sense, the exception that proves

the rule. It precedes the expanding pattern as the singular, "lonely" seed, the "one atom,"

swells with potentiality. The reader is drawn irresistibly into the next line in a way that

builds anticipation, even as the language itself suggests pregnancy and the rounding

development implicit in it. (Moreover, "then it blew" evokes not only the force of an

explosion (suggestively nuclear) but also the bursting fecundity of blossoms.)

Thus, moving from a "lonely," atomic "worldseed," which conveys absolute unity

as something inherently lacking, the poet initiates a chain reaction evocative of nuclear

explosions and equally irreversible. "Out of the oneness, there were two-" just as, a few

lines later, "Out of the oneness, trillions came." This anaphora, in fact, by offering such

starkly divergent multiplicities as arising from the same statement of unity, creates a

paradoxical similarity rooted in process and form, a paradox almost immediately

intensified in the next line, when "Out of the sameness, none the same" both contradicts

and validates the unity and complexity that continues to expand. Not only does the line

itself shift from "oneness" to "sameness," a word less limited to indivisible wholeness,

but it also plays with echoes of the "oneness" dropped from the line since "none" differs

from "one" by a single letter.

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As "time beg[ins]" (Paradox 79), then, the poem's meter changes, becoming

slightly less consistent, as though in response to the random, disordered extension of time

that Kermode identifies in daily, human experience:

Earth in its orbit cooled and spun

One first circle with time begun,

So forever to ring the Sun.

Fire winds passing spilt down a cell;

Ancient of oceans rose and fell

Washing branches of coral shell.

There in the swamplands fern seed blew -

Xylem and cortex slowly grew,

Giant rushes and strange bamboo.

Eons passing - the great trees died,

Fell and rotted; the serpents plied

Over that jungle undefied.

Ancient of oceans ebbed, returned -

Into the jungle sunlight burned,

Black, in its measures, coal was turned.

Ferned in its blackness, branched and veined

Trapping the sunlight, so contained

Fire forever with darkness skeined. (Paradox 79-80)

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Using much more enjambment than the previous stanzas, this next section of the poem

nevertheless maintains a kind of order. Significantly, this six-stanza segment continues

to address the idea of paradox through change and continuity.

The earth "cooled and spun / One first circle with time begun, / So forever to ring

the Sun" (79), and the poet evokes a sense of slowing, or hardening, into consistency, a

settling into "orbit" (79) that will continue indefinitely in "ring[s]" and "circle[s]," which

themselves connote infinity. The centrality of the Sun, of light and heat in contrast with a

"cooled" Earth, then, decenters the blue planet itself and, by extension, humankind.

Despite this, however, Earth remains at the imagistic center of the poem, as the poet

documents its development; indeed, its agency extends even to "trapping the sunlight"

(80), if not exerting power over the Sun itself, while the contradictory darkness of coal

takes on a "branched and veined" (80) form in implicit contrast to the planetary, circle

imagery. Furthermore, as "ancient of oceans" (79, 80) "rose and fell" (79), "ebbed,

returned" (80) in images of cyclic continuity, the revolving "forever" (79) of Earth's orbit

gives way to the "forever" (80) of "fire... with darkness skeined" (80). The intermixture

of dark and light, given a specific origin in the "turn[ing]" (80) of coal, extends

indefinitely, but considering the finite nature of this resource and the more general,

metonymic use of "fire," this sense of infinite continuation implies an almost Edenic loss,

a Fall. The fact that "serpents plied / Over that jungle undefied" (80) has already

challenged a biblical narrative of creation, albeit subtly, so that the line, "fire forever with

darkness skeined," becomes a statement about the inevitable admixture of light and dark,

of opposites melded by an inherent paradox of reality. The moral dimension of

conflicting forces becomes obscured in a way that complicates and problematizes our

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dualizing conceptions of a paradox-rich reality. In the next section of the poem,

however, McNeill ultimately problematizes this moral ambiguity with the first

metonymic signs of human presence:

Gold, gold, and golden -

Golden monstrous snakes

Turning to oil, and winding through the earth,

Amber and iridescent through the caves,

Black, green, and tawny serpentines of oil

Enfolding waves of sunlight in their coil -

Gold, gold, and golden -

Trapped to flame again,

Wild on the steeps of derricks in the sky. (Paradox 80)

Here, again, the meter changes, this time much more drastically. Lines vary in

length and pattern of stress, while the only end rhymes are "oil" and "coil" in the stanza's

center. In fact, the poet uses these differences to create a new kind of order, one less

immediately apparent, for lines one, two, and three, although differing from each other,

find metric echoes in the last three lines of the stanza, cued by the exact repetition of

"Gold, gold, and golden -." Furthermore, in between these framing segments, the fourth

line matches the third, while the fifth and sixth lines at least rhyme, even if their rhythms

vary somewhat from the rest. Human beings' appearance in history, then, occurs in the

least metrically consistent stanza thus far, while still maintaining some degree of internal

order.

As the "golden monstrous snakes [turn] to oil," the poet calls to mind those

"serpents (who) plied / over that jungle undefied" (80) three stanzas earlier. Evoking

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snakes and "serpentines of oil" thus revives connotations of a biblical Fall, this time in

connection with the human use of energy resources. Just as the coal "trapp[ed] the

sunlight" (80), so "tawny serpentines of oil / enfold[ed] waves of sunlight in their coil...

trapped to flame again," taking the central source of heat and light, around which earthly

life revolves, and channeling it. Considering the subtle undercurrents of a Genesis

narrative, then, this transformation of serpent-like oil to useable energy potentially

problematizes the amoral portrait of creation, not because human beings "trapped" the

fire themselves, but because, in forcing its manifestation "wild on the steeps of derricks

in the sky," they purport to control an energy traceable, across stanzas, to universal

origins. The "derricks," constructed to channel and control, produce, nevertheless, a

"wild[ness]" and therefore an implicit contradiction between human intention and volatile

reality. Moreover, inasmuch as they seek to harness a trapped form of the sun's energy,

the implications inherent to a "skeined [darkness]" of coal, or to oil's "amber,"

"iridescent," "black, green and tawny" ambiguity, color the fact that human beings

appropriate a morally indeterminate resource for their own needs. This fire is present in

the "seed" (79) of the world and will continue to unfold in a life larger than any

individual creature or species. The possibility of controlling such a resource, which

informs recorded and unrecorded time in complex unity, seems problematic at best. Of

course, the fact that sunlight has been captured in order to "flame again" also suggests

continuity with the past, complicating the paradox and the implied warning and

emphasizing the fact that humans, too, belong to the course of nature as a part, rather than

a defining culmination, of it.

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The focus on carbon-emitting sources of energy, moreover, and their use or

misuse, accesses a special narrative for the West Virginia poet, whose home state

witnessed (and continues to witness) the coal industry's environmental destruction. The

fact that McNeill situates coal at the heart of a subtle Fall narrative, then, implies, not an

inherent evil, but an inherent chaos, a mingling of opposites that can be read, in a sense,

as a source of forbidden fruit, a symbol of the human potential for corruption, when

forcing a wild, natural energy, a "fire forever with darkness skeined" (80), into

destructive human use. Coal is the first resource identified in this way, but following it

so closely with "serpentines of oil" extends the reader's gaze from a symbol associated

with McNeill's homeplace to one that evokes related controversies in a variety of

disparate and distant, global locations. Certainly coal - and the problems associated with

its removal and uses - exists far outside Appalachia; however, within the context of this

collection, From Appalachia to Lunar Shore, its local connotations remain prevalent.

The poet's use of oil imagery, then, serves to forcibly expand thematic implications to a

global community, in a subtly similar way to the intentions Lisa Hinrichsen reads in Ann

Pancake's novel: "put[ting] bioregionally similar spaces and places into an integral

conversation" (15).

Explicitly delineating a new "time" (80), the poet continues to address human

history within the broader history of the universe; however, the new stanza's structure

continues to play with paradox, with unity and difference, in a way that belies a truly

separate era:

Another time - the years and days

In circles moving, and the rays

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Of great wheels moving down the ways

Of sunlight; oxen in their yokes,

The great hubs turning and the spokes -

The oxen like a fire that stokes

The shining grasses of the plans;

The horse a fire that burns the grains

Of golden oat seed as he strains

To pull the plow. The Diesel turns

The oil of serpents as it churns,

So cycle into cycle burns. (Paradox 80-81)

Shifting from the italics of the previous stanza, "another time" (80) is offset from the rest

of the line, indicating at least a claim to qualitative difference from the undifferentiated

"begun" (79) time that came before. In fact, it is as though, with the metonymic entrance

of human beings and their attempts to harness primal energies, something changes in the

very progression of time. "Years and days" (80), for one thing, apply human conceptions

of measurement to still cyclic, natural processes, or "circles moving" (80). The sympathy

between human work and natural revolutions, then, initially remains. It appears in "the

rays / of great wheels moving down the ways / of sunlight" (80), which connects the

spokes of a wheel with light imagery, "moving," furthermore, "down the ways of

sunlight," and thus in harmony with the sun's implicit orientation. Offering first the

simile of "oxen like a fire" (80) and then the metaphor of "horse a fire" (80) generates

further consonance between unifying, universal energies and human work, even

establishing an essentially biological energy transfer from sunlight to "shining grasses"

(80) and "golden [grains]" (81) to the horse and the human. This unity with natural

processes and primal energies, however, is quickly challenged.

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The form of this stanza articulates the tension, in fact, between participation

within and appropriation of natural and even essential sources of energy. For the

continuity with origins, which is implied by the re-adoption of the poem's initial (AAA,

BBB, etc.) rhyme scheme, becomes compressed into a single stanza - and also heavily

enjambed. Whereas the beginning of the poem builds, from stanza to stanza, these tercets

are pushed together, with the end of every trio of end rhymes pressing on into the next

line. It is not that order becomes obscured, but that movement and development are

condensed, even rushed, in a sense, abandoning the clarity of rhythmic progression,

exponential as it was, in order to squeeze energy from its natural sources. Even the

horse's "strai[n] / to pull the plow" (81) problematizes human ambition somewhat,

evoking the stress of effort transferred onto another, literally harnessed, creature. Finally,

at the end of the stanza, the "Diesel (engine) turns / the oil of serpents as it churns, / so

cycle into cycle burns" (81). The machine, which succeeds the oxen and the horse, uses

energy to condense revolutions, "[burning] cycle into cycle" with the same insistence on

power pressed into service at the expense of the unfolding of natural, unifying

revolutions. Despite the stanza's apparent formal unity, indeed, a "strain" arises in it, like

an overtaxed engine.

It is particularly significant, then, that in the next stanza, which repeats the "Gold,

gold, and golden" (80, 81) of the stanza before last, the rhyme scheme dissolves entirely:

Gold, gold, and golden - golden cyclotrons

Throb in the leadshields, while around the Earth

The kilowatts and ergs and quanta move

Intricate webs of fiber from the sun

Pulsing the engines. From the wilds of space

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The satellite relays the colored forms

That burn and posture on our TV screens;

And down the dusty craters of the moon

Men stumble drunken, picking up the rocks. (Paradox 81)

This return to italics, combined with the "golden" repetition, highlights the continued

harnessing of energies; now, however, this has accelerated tremendously with the use of

language evoking nuclear processes and characterizing energy-extraction spaces in terms

of non-earth imagery.

This return to space echoes the poem's beginning without offering that beginning's

structure. The earth, which was "forever to ring the sun" (79), now sits at the center of

"the kilowatts and ergs and quanta (that) move / intricate webs of fiber from sun" (81).

The planet becomes conceptually central even as energy removal becomes less cyclic,

more extractive. The images of "shining grasses" (80) and "oxen like a fire" (80), even

"serpentines of oil" (80), give way to drawing power directly from the sun in the "wilds

of space" (81). The only "burn[ing]" (81) in this entire stanza, moreover, describes the

"colored forms / that burn and posture on our TV screens" (81), essentially trivializing

the essential energies evoked throughout the poem. This technologically-projected

shadow-show evokes Plato's cave, in fact, as images and façades, nonspecific "forms"

from the "wilds of space," divert attention from the events now expanded beyond the

realm of sensory observation. This removal of Earth-defined place, indeed, becomes all

the more powerful in the final two lines of the stanza.

As the inclusive "our" of "our TV screens" envelopes the reader in a collectedly

distracted humanity, an other appears, for "down the dusty craters of the moon / men

stumble drunken, picking up the rocks" (81). Here McNeill returns subtly to her native

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place by choosing a metaphor often attached to coal mining, especially strip mining,

operations. Such used-up land is often described as a moonscape, and the poet

deliberately engages this image to conclude the portrait of a nuclear and satellite age.

Following such advanced and in some sense abstract energy-consumption, the

moonscape metaphor both resituates and alienates the reader simultaneously. Lunar

language fits all too well with the "wilds of space" and its planetary scale; however, the

"stumbl[ing]" (81) presence of "men... picking up the rocks" (81) connects this

desolation to a specifically Earthly context. The contrast of abstract space with physical

labor, especially labor directly and tangibly involved with removing pieces of the Earth,

problematizes any conception of distance between energy technologies and lived,

experiential place. The same ambitions that move beyond a concrete, Earthly sphere at

the beginning of the stanza, far from situating all change in the ether, actually transform

observable reality on the planet's surface, making it resemble the desolate and

inhospitable landscapes of space. Moreover, the "drunken [stumbling]" (81) indicates a

glutted kind of ignorance, an incomprehension resulting from too much intoxicating use,

in this case, of power. Similarly, "picking up the rocks" (81) connotes more careless

aimlessness than intentional purpose.

In the few stanzas remaining, end rhyme reappears, but its patterns change from

segment to segment. The rest of the poem, in fact, can be divided into two more sections,

the first attempting stanzas of four and three lines, as though echoing the poem's

beginning, and the second concluding with a single stanza of three combined quatrains.

In the first of these sections, the poet writes:

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Singing and seething from the core of wonder,

Consuming, unconsumed,

I pass undying through these globes of tinder

Candescent and illumed.

Gold, gold, gold, and gold -

Nothing is ever still and cold;

God is the fire made manifold -

Flames in the wind and flowers in the quasar -

The quasars outward roar

Expanding worlds, and from my falling gratefire

Primordial sunsets pour - (Paradox 81)

Here the poet uses "I" (81) for the first time, but rather than perpetuating a connection

with the reader (as in "our TV screens" (81)), this voice actually seems to speak for the

Earth as a whole. Indeed, this makes the previous use of first person (plural) read almost

as an irony, for the poem's broader, planetary identification traces itself from "fireseed"

origins.

Considering that this is the first explicit "I" within the poem, this Earth-voice

offers consciousness as a kind of response to the anthropocenic era articulated by the two

previous stanzas. "Singing and seething" (81) evokes a strange combination of joy and

anger, but "consuming, unconsumed" (81) expresses a sense of totality beyond human

power, even paradoxically "consuming," rather than being consumed by human efforts.

To "pass undying" (81), furthermore, enhances this paradox by coupling a euphemistic

word for death with ideas of immortality. The Earth is "candescent and illumed" (81),

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lighting and being lit, in a contradictory blend of unifying difference that suggests the

function of wonder in knowledge, even as the Earth speaks "from the core of wonder"

(81) itself.

"Gold, gold, gold, and gold," then, takes similar language from the opening of

both italicized stanzas and removes the explicitly adjectival "golden" (80, 81) in favor of

a list of ambiguous noun/adjectives offered in sequence, as though each were also

different from the others. Its connection to the fire and energy images throughout the

poem, in fact, implies the unified difference of their manifestations, from "serpentines of

oil" (80) to the coal that "fire forever with darkness skeined" (80). So when the poet

continues this three line stanza - significantly enough, the last attempt at echoing

structures from the poem's beginning - she fittingly (that is, paradoxically) brings void

language, or definition by negation, into contact with ideas of bright, inclusive totality:

"Nothing is ever still and cold" (81). "God," McNeill maintains, "is the fire made

manifold" (81), moving from the second line's negative revelation into this explicitly

epiphanic divinization of "the fire" (81), in its "manifold" (81) unity (evocative,

incidentally, of Trinitarian theology). The similarity between the very word "God" and

the repeated "Gold" of the first line highlights this unity-in-difference and even indicates

the possibility of seeing this revelation for oneself, albeit indistinctly.

As the reader approaches the final stanza, "expanding worlds" (81) connects him

or her to the beginning of the poem, conveying the continued action of origins, the echo

of creation, yet "from my falling gratefire," the speaker states, "primordial sunsets pour"

(81). Paradox links origins and ends without drawing a clear line between them. The

persisting expansion coincides with a "falling" fire, while "primordial sunsets" evoke

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both distant origins and immediate (if not final) ends. Indeed, the simultaneous

connotations of conclusion and continuing cycle, with which "sunsets" are invested,

places human destruction in a universal context, in which time and space "consum[e]" the

anthropocene as a small, if dangerously ambitious, participation in its wider life, its

continually expanding spiral.

From one form to another I am passing -

I change but do not go -

Foxfire and firefly and pitchblende seethe within me -

Volcanoes through me flow -

The snakes of golden oil burn in my body,

My flesh is veined and branching with the fire,

From form to form I pass, forever burning

Along this arc, and filamented wire

Magnetic holds me to the sun's turning.

From path to path I, too, can pull the sun -

The seedfire is of life, and we are burning, burning

Within the burning ONE. (Paradox 81-2)

In this final stanza, the speaker-as-Earth becomes still more explicit as McNeill layers

change and consistency on each other in permeating paradox. Passing "from one form to

another" (81), "chang[ing] but... not go[ing]" (82), the Earth contains organic and

inorganic fire, "foxfire and firefly... volcanoes... (and) snakes of golden oil" (82), even

as it, itself, is contained by "magnetic [hold]" (82) in its solar revolutions. Consistency of

orbit gives form to the burning, changing, "veined and branching" (82) variety within

Earth as it "[passes] from form to form" (82), "forever burning" (82) in an image of

unconsumed consumption significantly more essential than the human use of energy

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resources (although references to oil and coal do involve these uses as well). This eternal

fire might, at first, seem to shrug at human activity on the grounds that the world changes

continually but also continually survives; however, the last quatrain of the poem

problematize this in a subtle but powerful way, ultimately leaving the reader with both

warning and apocalyptic promise.

The Earth inevitability "rings the sun" (79) from its origins to the present. The

ordered revolutions provide an image of unity, of predictable movement in time and even

a rootedness to real space and heat and light, a source of energy and stability. In this last

quatrain, however, the relationship between Earth and its anchor is characterized

differently. The planet is "[held]... to the sun's turning" (82), but whereas before,

movement is ascribed to the Earth, here it also pertains to the sun itself, which is also

"turning." Even this simple shift implies a widening pattern of interrelations ranging far

beyond the Earth and effectively de-centering it. More significant still, however, the

orbiting planet, "too, can pull the sun [from path to path]" (82). What has been

understood as an image of consistency, order, and power throughout the entire poem can

suddenly, in a simple and unelaborated assertion of agency, be shifted to another path by

the very planet it anchors and sustains. The uncertainty inherent in this brings an

unlooked-for chaos into the poem's conclusion and immediately raises a host of

unanswered questions about the impacts of interrelated elements on each other. The

reader is left only with the speaker's enigmatic conviction, now fraught with future

uncertainty, that "the seedfire is of life, and we are burning, burning / within the burning

ONE" (82).

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In the end, "we" obscures the division between planet and person, connecting both

in an indeterminate whole that sheds new light on the metamorphosis imagery of the

stanza as a whole. Changing forms, which remain connected to origins and moving

toward and through individual ends in collective continuation, indicate the indeterminacy

of Bull's apocalypse: its undifferentiated character and its revelation of a new world

without the comfort of dualistic certainties. "We" are burning, and the resulting

transformations are not without their effects, despite the intricately related whole with its

capitalized, primary unity. "The seedfire is of life" (82), meaning that it, in its essential

energy and its expanding force, will continue; however, the form that it may take remains

as uncertain as the "path[s]" to which the Earth "can pull the sun." The survival of no

single creature or species - or planetary form of life - can be anchored to the future, any

more than the Earth can be anchored to a star on which it exerts, in turn, its own

influence. The apocalyptic promise, then, of an end that initiates newness, always

continuing in consonance with a "fireseed" (82) origin, provides a serious warning to the

reader as well.

Louise McNeill: Poet, Prophet, Place

In her collection, Paradox Hill: From Appalachia to Lunar Shore, McNeill

transitions from the recognizable rhythms and narratives of her West Virginia home (so

often associated with the past) to seemingly less Appalachia-centric reflections on the

course of science and history in their progression toward a future end. In placing

between "Appalachia" and "Lunar Shore," however, a section entitled "Scattered

Leaves," she appropriates for herself the suggestive identity of Sibyl-esque prophet. Past

and future meet in relation to the reader's present because McNeill situates both in the

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same flow of narrative, poetic time. And although her preoccupation with apocalypse

articulates itself primarily in nuclear terms, the pervasiveness of energy and resource use

within her "Lunar Shore" poems suggests a connection to the West Virginia spaces she

and her family witnessed in transformation. Apocalypticism, then, is the mode through

which she, too, makes sense of change and destructive threat in a place anchored in

connotative and real tradition.

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Chapter 4: Eschatological Ecology

In both Pancake's novel and McNeill's poems, apocalyptic images and motifs

become a way of conceptualizing a future that threatens past-saturated place lived in the

present. The relationship between origins and ends takes on eschatological significance

with cultural, social, and ecological implications of environmental destruction,

particularly through nonsustainable resource use. The exploitative appropriation of place

for human gain involves connotations of divine and earthy significance by evoking

apocalyptic ends; in fact, the distinction between a spiritual and a physical realm blur

when situated, even metaphorically, within sight of an End Time. Eschatological drama

raises the metaphysical stakes, and narratives that identify origins and ends as directly

relevant to an occupied present invest that present with meanings fraught with the

emotional power of memory, hope, and fear. But examining the apocalyptic

undercurrents within Appalachian literature - whether in their contributions to a

specifically science fiction genre or, more inclusively, in their manifestations as

eschatologically-inflected rhetoric and imagery - ultimately raises questions as to why

these trends continue to surface in such a body of regional literature.

Elizabeth Engelhardt identifies a related, environmental consciousness,

specifically "the roots of ecological feminism" (8), in The Tangled Roots of Feminism,

Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature, tracing ecological and gender themes

through women's writing in and about Appalachia at the turn of the last century.

"Although I am not claiming an original uniqueness for Appalachia," she writes in her

Introduction, "its stark divisions between classes, highly charged and constructed

discussions of race, and peopled wilderness are particularly illuminating" (8), and

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"Appalachian women's literature... can reveal changing attitudes toward gender and

environmental justice in the United States" (9). Her treatment of early ecological

feminism relates to this apocalyptic investigation, then, in the connections it illuminates

between a literature increasingly attuned to human and nonhuman community members

and its historical, social, and environmental context. Because Appalachia, at the turn of

the last century, was the focus of so much mainstream attention - including resource

extraction and essentialized perceptions of mountain residents and natural spaces - its

literature (in this case women's literature) gradually developed an ecologically-charged

response that has carried through to more recent authors. In her Afterword, Engelhardt

argues that "the roots of ecological feminism... continued to grow throughout the century

in Appalachia" (171), and that the contemporary region, still "struggl[ing] with

environmental and social justice issues" (171) and often "still... subjected to the voyeur's

gaze" (171), may continue to provide fertile ground for an ecologically and socially

responsive literature.

Ann Pancake, Louise McNeill, and others have demonstrated that this is, indeed,

the case; however, their work also implies that the kinds of exploitative conditions, under

which significant parts of Appalachia still struggle, now also lend themselves to a

specifically apocalyptic perspective. Arguably because Appalachian history is too often

inflected by essentialization and environmental damage, the intersection of past and

present readily evokes a heritage of peripheralization with dark future implications. The

effects of exploitative industry, for example, carry forward into the present and build

toward a future in ways that Appalachian literature must address and negotiate. Carmen

Rueda-Ramos points out that "some Appalachians... have long and disproportionally

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suffered from environmental hazards and injustice at the hands of greedy coal companies

and corrupt politicians" (221), while Ronald Eller, in his critical text Uneven Ground:

Appalachia Since 1945 (2008), attributes persistent Appalachian poverty to economic and

political structural inequalities, which tend to privilege outside industry and preserve the

status quo. When apocalyptic undercurrents appear, then, in a range of Appalachian

literature, they provide a means of coming to terms, both with the experientially present

evidence of past and present injustice and with the real implications these have for the

future. For Pancake, this entails the role of vision, of presence and resistance in the face

of an apocalypse already underway; for McNeill, this vision encompasses past and future

to their remotest extensions, shrinking all of human experience, immediate and inherited,

to that point of precarious balance: the paradox of simultaneous influence and

insignificance. Both writers hint at an elusive (comic) apocalypse-as-transformation in

the possibility of life after the "end," but both also problematize this by articulating the

world-destroying processes already in motion. Engaging issues of technology,

environment, and human ambition, both Pancake and McNeill identify apocalypse as a

fearfully appropriate end to the trajectory of their Appalachian (West Virginia) place - in

its relationship to a personal and historic past.

Whether or not such eschatological drama offers a constructive response to

admittedly problematic social and environmental conditions is another question entirely.

Scholars like Jimmie Killingsworth argue that the divisive rhetoric of mainstream (tragic)

apocalypse polarizes a discourse that ought to focus, instead, on the positive value of

personal engagements with (and thus responsibility for) the natural world. Indeed, Ron

Rash's Above the Waterfall and Gurney Norman's Divine Right's Trip implicitly respond

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to this very critique, as they offer strategies for ecological recovery that center on active,

engaged appreciation and regenerated human-nonhuman cooperation, respectively. Other

works, however, including Cormac McCarthy's The Road and, indeed, Pancake's Strange

as this Weather Has Been, use explicit eschatological drama as a primary narrative

context. They characterize ecological and social dangers as in some sense apocalyptic,

and without denigrating nature appreciation, they suggest that the crises facing our

contemporary world now demand a more drastic reorientation of priorities. Ultimately,

the rhetorical strength of apocalypse narratives lies in their insistence that imminent

endings, even globally-implicated endings, cannot be contained in religious texts,

metaphors, and studies any longer. Moreover, the possibilities inherent to comic

apocalypse, especially the undifferentiating coming-into-hiding of Bull's explication,

actually offer powerful tools for writers, scholars, and activists interested in the future of

human-environment relationships in the crisis-rich Anthropocene. Indeed, Anthony Dyer

Hoefer suggests a similar potential with regards to racial justice. And regardless of

apocalypticism's comic or tragic manifestation, the urgency and scope of warning

involved in apocalyptic narratives might well justify the risk of discourse polarization,

considering that less dramatically articulated concerns risk a potentially greater evil:

complacency.

Although this study has surveyed important critical and literary texts, it cannot

address the full range of Appalachian literature. Moreover, I have not addressed possible

connections between apocalypticism in Appalachian religion and literature, as Anthony

Dyer Hoefer has done for southern literature. Nor have I made a comparative study of

Appalachian-set and Appalachian literature or traced the development of apocalyptic

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rhetoric chronologically through fiction and poetry. Ultimately, there is real need for

additional scholarship in many of these areas. Future academic inquiries could press

questions of rhetorical negotiation further still, identifying and elaborating on the

ecological implications of apocalyptic language within Appalachia: a region too often

sacrificed to exploitative industry and consequent environmental destruction.

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Chapter 5: All Places Thou: An Experimental Novella

Preface

In composing All Places Thou, I hoped to engage, via synthesis, with the

apocalyptic, thematic undercurrents present in Appalachian-centered literature. I chose a

fragmented narrative form, interspersed with poetry and selected artwork, in order to

explore the ways that we make sense of place, especially place that has been lost (in this

case, to apocalyptic degeneration and eventual death). A stagnating, or dying, present

entails not only an (at best) uncertain future, but it also brings the past into necessary

conversation with these experienced (present) and projected (future) times. Time itself

no longer makes sense in the same way, so this apocalyptic narrative relies on no certain

closure (except, perhaps, a feared, tragic closure), while untethered time becomes less a

linear movement than a scattered, spiral consideration of causes and effects, wherein past

is never truly divided from present or future, nor they from it. Apocalyptic uncertainty

precludes the fantasy of clean, linear time and gathers this narrative, instead, into clusters

of what Frank Kermode calls kairos, crises informed by relationships of temporal

significance.

Although implying a tragic apocalypse, I hope to engage Malcolm Bull's more

hopeful, transformative model in the underlying, thematic appeal to readers. Specifically,

I construct an apocalyptic event based on meiotic interruptions, which preclude sexual

reproduction and, thereby, cut off genetic diversity. The consequent disappearance of

species and flattening of heterogeneous potential is supposed to suggest the use-

orientation that interprets a diverse, ecological world as little more, sometimes, than the

sum of resources available for production or extraction (or, conversely, as obstacles to

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such use). Although the specific cause of the ongoing apocalypse remains intentionally

obscure, then, its mechanism is meant to problematize anthropocentric utilitarianism and

advocate a consciousness of diverse human and non-human vantages on, and

engagements with, the ecosystem. I would argue that the kind of exploitative social and

environmental evils, within which context many Appalachian communities have

historically struggled, entail a deep essentialization that ignores authentic variety (and

alternative perspectives) in dangerous ways. Imposing, on any place, the character of an

overriding instrumentality (as a source of some specific commodity, or as a validating,

hierarchical mythos to an outside elite) enables exploitation, but it also establishes an

unsustainable fiction. All Places Thou is meant to explore the possibility of this fiction

becoming symbolic reality, while the only hope for the future lies in a responsively

symbolic diversity of life and ecological purpose (in implicit extension of Bull's

apocalyptic return of previously-rejected but now integrated elements).

Involving fiction, poetry, and visual art is intended to convey the necessity of

varied means of coming-to-know - and varied levels of accessibility - in the experience of

a fragmented world. Moreover, within each medium, I have tried to provide a range of

formal and thematic approaches to highlight this same variety. The original acrylic

paintings, for example, punctuate the novella's past, present, and future by identifying

different levels of abstractness or accessibility within each. Paradox Present (see 106)

conveys a broken ecology and a consequently fragmented perspective on what should be

seamless and cyclical time. Paradox Future (see 109) indicates a blurred, skyward

vantage to communicate an ambiguous perspective and orientation, while Paradox Past

(see 164) portrays the clearest visual representation: mountains under a foreboding sky.

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The novella's final image, Paradox (see 266), is a close-up of the sky in the past painting;

depicting a single piece of cloud, this image is meant to explore the way that pieces

participate in a whole. Narrative and poetic fragments, in conversation with these visual

elements, are intended to communicate this theme of unity in variety and variety in unity

- specifically within an apocalyptic time and place resistant to interpretation. All places

now require a thou, an experientially validated other, within and through whom to

negotiate a broken reality.6

6 The title is an allusion to line 618 of Milton's Paradise Lost, Book 12:

Wearied I fell asleep: but now lead on;

In mee is no delay; with thee to goe,

Is to stay here; without thee here to stay,

Is to go hence unwilling; thou to mee

Art all things under Heav'n, all places thou,

Who for my wilful crime art banisht hence. (614-619)

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Paradox Present

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Part One

Shutting the book, she pushed it across the desk and leaned back, staring. This almost-

silence like sitting on cold stone, the seizure of it, went deeper every second. And though

she knew the generator was working - fluorescence still hummed faintly overhead - there

was no filtration sound now, so her breathing would be filling up the space, the

smothering quiet. Nothing would hold its shape for long.

She dragged open the drawer and glanced down, then leaned forward abruptly, snatching

up the foil packet. Granddaddy must have been keeping it as a surprise. When she

swallowed, the walls of her throat scraped together, struck matchspark images that flared

and flickered out, but her eyes were wide open, and the cool, red-and-gold foil was

warming to the heat of her palm.

last favorites fastened, ridiculous,

to numb insides, to friction-numbed

stomach distension or stuttered nerves

The coffee machine made a creaking gurgle as she poured the murky water and depressed

the “on” switch. A little like animal protest. Close enough.

The smell set incoherent comfort loose in her joints as she watched the liquid fill; she

could turn the blank idea of it over and over, but the scent was so overpowering that it

refused association. Pouring coffee into his Atlanta Braves mug, she slurped and scalded

her tongue. Thought of acidic soil runoff down the backyard. Her taste buds felt rough

and thick under deadened layers, and someone started humming blackbird has spoken

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like the first bird, way back in her brain. That sharp pain in her nose and throat, which

usually meant tears, came and went. She wondered about the horrible blankness between

sips.

Caffeine buzzing inside the walls of her body, scratching like wasps, every cell inside her

jostled the others. But when she looked around at the bunker, it didn’t seem to register

that she was leaving; what was left of it was too caught up in the rich coffee smell, so

much like old identity, to notice the way she’d been sharpened and shaken across its

wide-eyed surface. But her insides knew. She could feel them trying to rearrange

themselves, the gears and edges catching against each other while her brain braced itself

against the inside of her skull. She wanted to feel the sound shell of it between

caffeinated tremors, but she couldn’t keep still enough in any sense that mattered, not to

her mollusk brain.

We know all about the expiration dates attached to places. And now that the bunker was

over too, there was no part of it that she could touch, except in passing. The quilt lay

across him, over his face: a barricade. This was it, then.

Finis

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Paradox Future

***

Quilt to keep warm

Just like the mountain, roots and all,

the story in the pattern in the skin sketched

over a bed, diamond fields meeting

at pressed edges.

It reaches down to a past like rock veins

and wormy chestnut and fire roaming

lost over the rise between green summers.

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And the weight of it like the dead weight

of generations congealed

with forgetting the proximate past.

***

A can stood empty on the picnic table. Someone had held it too tight, and the

shape of it teetered, slightly off but not so crushed it couldn’t stand. The dull pattern of

orange trees, anyway, acted like a mildly damaged matrix of support. If the ants hadn’t

discovered it yet, she thought, they would soon. 25% juice from concentrate, half of it

orange, half blood-orange: so the sugars, at least, were real.

The gray, pocked table, square in the center of the campsite, threw everything off.

Em could never figure out how, but it did, even with the empty juice can carefully off-

center, which should have helped. The bench was cool through her thin blouse as she

leaned back along the seat, and when she turned her head, she could see Lucas across the

underside of the table, lying on the other bench. He’d dared her to cut his hair last night.

And now it looked stiff, rust-brown and too close to the skull, with his eyebrows relaxed

in ironic punctuation. He’d drawn his knees up so that the soles of his boots were flat

against the surface; she imagined him standing without pushing up, feet anchored and the

rest of him swinging up out of sight like some bad effect in a stop-animation film.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey, yourself.”

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“Ready to get going?”

“If you are.”

But she didn’t sit up. If it hadn’t been so overcast, there would have been dappled

shade sliding across the two of them. A catbird fluttered out of its glide to land on the

table, and she reached up instinctively to shield her face, sitting up so fast the matte light

dissolved in dizzying planets, myriad retrograde. When they cleared, the bird was gone,

but Lucas was standing beside the table, stretching.

“What was that?” he asked.

“What?”

“You spazzed.”

“Just startled.”

“Birds, the sneaky bastards.” He grinned, "I guess I'd be shell shocked too,

teaching third graders all year."

She remembered another day, here in this same place. And for a slivered second,

Emily’s glance shot between possibilities and overhead movements of light. Tempered

spaces burned in bits and starts, time came up in conversation with color, and the bones

ached in her wrists and hands. Reversed patterns on her retinas met the world exactly,

and the remembered shapes and edges connected inside her kaleidoscope brain.

In jigsaw summer, light holds together,

edge to edge between leaves.

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Between granulated fissures of bark,

the mutual displacement stands complete, complex,

fitted to the riddle of populous quiet

in interlocking unison, until

a single leaf extricates itself, impossibly,

and begins unravelling autumn.

That time wasn’t this time.

“We should get going.”

They drove all night, with the mountains constantly swerving away, circling back,

and coming at them again from every angle, eerily. There was no predictable encounter

with that rock ocean, teeming with leaf-scaled bodies and nocturnal eyes and haunted in

shape like nothing else, or nothing living. Em and Lucas moved alone inside it; they

were like bats zipping away from just-lit dark, deflecting an otherwise incontrovertible

choice: whether to run off the edge of ahistorical space or smash to pieces on centuries

of stone still in motion.

They had never come this far along the Parkway before. The rush of their parallel

selves over the road met geographic surfaces and made something entirely new: they

sensed it with the parts of their brains and fingertips not directly engaged in surviving

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hairpin turns and pitched-aside spaces into blackness. Em wished they could climb out of

their skins and dissolve themselves in the dark.

“How many times you think your parents’ve driven the Parkway?” He pulled the

car left, the weight of his hand falling down the wheel like water.

“I don’t know.”

They passed a sign like a snapshot flashing, legible only in afterthought. Peaks of

Otter. Strange names superimposed.

“Didn’t they honeymoon up this way?”

“No,” she lied. This wasn't like that. They weren't them.

When she looked at him in profile against the moving world, the broken bridge of

his nose startled her, his sharp face slicing open the darkness at the headlights’ edge.

***

Looking ahead, through the tiny, wire-grid window and the equally tiny kitchen,

Em was already smiling. Meeting a smile made it easy. "Come in, come in," Lena

gestured expansively as the door swung open, almost against her knees, then shut. Lena

called their little room "the clown car." Teachers' lounge pseudo-space. Felt like the

beginning of a bad joke, all those desperate adults crowding away from their students -

but Lena taught kindergarten, so somewhere between scissor fits and alphabet

meltdowns, she'd developed the requisite humor to survive what she called "the lesser

tragedi-comedies," which, of course, included coffin-sized teachers' retreats.

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"So." Lena always tipped her chair, and Em could see the spidery shadow of her

hair like a halo, close against the wall. She'd done it up in a sock bun, with the flyaway

wisps coming loose already, not even noon yet. "Tell me."

Emily twisted the excitement up like bits of wrapping paper, little pyramids of

foil-sharp color, nerve-bright. "We're just going hiking," she said, smiling the lie into

"just."

Lena clapped once, loud in the confined space, then laughed at the jump in her

friend's shoulders. "Awesome. When?"

"Friday night."

"A night hike?" Lena's eyebrows were laughing now. Short jumps, mock-severe.

"Yeah, apparently there's some kind of meteor shower, so we're packing, like a

picnic, kind of. With wine and some fruit. Not much." Emily swallowed, tried to

swallow her smile, but it wouldn't go. And the thought of being out in the dark with him,

and in a dark that might feel like home, almost might. She could swear her heart was

beating xylophone music up and down her ribs. The impossible, ache-sharp

homesickness filled out her anticipation, like inflating an origami shell of something -

some crushable object - a snail. She could see the mountains. But this time without her

parents' flat, little house, the things her father had said, the shove of it, words down her

throat. She paused, opened the refrigerator - "sorry" - in Lena's face, and took out the

tupperware with her name half rubbed-off. Chicken salad. Canned chicken, grapes, and

walnuts, like Mama used. "Something smells weird in here," she said, wrinkling her face

as the door swung shut. That suction sound.

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"Vincent left shrimp over the weekend. So, but I wanna hear more about the

'perfect gentleman.'" The way she said it, Em couldn’t help picturing a monocle and

waxed moustaches.

"He's... nice." She shrugged, still smiling. Inched around the tiny table and sat

across from Lena, who was rolling her eyes.

"Nice."

"Ok, so he's really nice. What do you want me to say?" she laughed.

"I want you to admit you were wrong."

"About Lucas?"

"No. Well, yes. But not just Lucas. You said you weren't interested in all that. I

so don't need a man, right? The pact and all? You totally gave up." Lena kicked her

accidentally, swinging her foot, then pretended she'd meant it. "Right?"

Emily rolled her eyes.

"And...?"

"And ok, I did find someone who's kind of nice and who is just taking me hiking,

Lena. This isn't marriage. He might be a total jackass."

"I think you'd know that by now."

"What, three weeks?"

"Um, yeah."

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"You're ridiculous."

"Thank you."

***

A memory fell apart somewhere overhead as the old man half-muttered, half-sang

something low and indecipherable in his sleep. She looked at him, watched the

tremendous rise and fall of the breath inside him slow and sink again into wheezing quiet.

Then she turned to look at the unfinished canvas on the wall of the bunker. A faint runnel

of rust had dripped past it, down the panel, maybe last night, certainly recently. Anything

that defied the glacial sameness of this place flashed out like lightning, like shining from

shook foil. She crossed to the sink, wet a rag, and wiped away the meager trail.

Granddaddy shouldn’t see it. It would mean weakness to him, and death: the world, or

what was left, trickling, drop by drop, in a last, slow runoff.

In another lifetime, he had been the first one up in the morning, puttering around the

kitchen with that ubiquitous sense of activity and the vague, dry whistling through

cabinets. Breakfast had been his responsibility, always, and even standing up to rinse out

a bowl might bring him swooping down. They’d called him Pancake Ben. There was

even a song.

She filled a saucepan and slid it onto the stove, dropping the rag inside before setting it to

boil. It released an uneasy smell of stagnant heat into the room, and the old man cleared

his throat and grunted, pushing himself upright on the bed. He moved with geologic

slowness like a mountain falling over.

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“You sleep good?” he asked finally, patting down the wiry hair atop his head. Hurricane

hair, Grandmomma’d call it. Ben and Bell. The names rang against each other.

“I did. You?”

“Can’t complain.” He didn’t stand immediately but sat looking at nothing, leaning

forward with his arms anchored in the threadbare quilt. He cleared his throat again. “I

think we should open the blackberries today.” Canned whole so they weighted the spoon

like singular planets.

“I think maybe that’d be good.” She’d expected him to say they should wait for

Christmas, which was soon now.

“I hope that’s not breakfast,” he added, nodding at the stovetop and grinning

momentarily, his sandpaper cheeks grating faintly.

“No, just a rag,” she smiled.

He tottered slightly as he stood but regained his balance with a hitch of the elbows and

hobbled out of the room. “You need to use the bathroom ‘fore I go?” he called back.

“No, go ahead.”

She could hear the curtain dragging on its rod and the cold sudden settling of porcelain.

An anticipated waver of steam from the stove collected her gaze like flypaper, and she

followed it, dissipating upward, for a handful of seconds. It released her against the low

ceiling, so she glanced back toward the unfinished canvas on the wall, then up where the

trail of rust had come from, imagining the weight of the cabin and the mountaintop and

over that the sky, also a heavy thing now, and inanimate. The difficulty lay in everything

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belonging outside, overhead, still. There was memory, but it ran like the ladder up

against the hatch, where you could either bash your brains out or turn back. Her own

trajectory could only be downward, into the heart of the mountain: it ground out every

second without a sign of recognition that she was there, huddled in the cavity of its side.

Where the blood and water flowed out.

The old man murmured something from the other room.

“What?”

“Nothin.”

She remembered Grandmomma painting, maybe humming her own, wandering version

of Lift Thine Eyes over and over.

He shuffled back in, hitching up ashen sweatpants with the grease stain like a bruise on

one knee. “You get the blackberries out?”

“Not yet. You hungry?”

“Little bit.” He was already hobbling toward the other door, but she moved faster. “I’ll

get it,” she said. He paused to watch her pass him, turned, and pulled out the folding

chair at the table. But before he could sit, she was back with a jar of blackberries cradled

in one hand.

He reached out, taking the jar. “How many left?” he asked.

“Just the one after this,” she said, and he nodded.

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“Christmas,” he said, moving toward the stove.

“Yep.”

“You done with that?” He stopped and looked back at her over his shoulder, gesturing at

the now-boiling water.

“Oh, yeah,” she said and dodged around him to slide the saucepan off the burner. “All

yours.” The nod bent downward as he gripped the jar lid and braced himself to open it,

drawing his body up in a line from one shoulder, head hunched into the effort. She

watched him stop and replant his feet, grunting. Saw him holding his breath,

compressing it into something hard and forceful in his lungs like aerosol pressure, levered

into the wrenching motion. His breath leaked out, and he set the jar in the sink, still

sealed, to drag open the utensil drawer and pull out a table knife. She watched him bring

the handle down hard around the edges of the lid, dents like little teeth-marks crimping it.

Then the second twist. “Can I try?” she asked, but he was already banging on the lid

again. The grunt was like crushed paper now, with a torn edge, and there was a dark spot

under his thumbnail.

She could tell when the lid came loose because his shoulder swung back into almost-

symmetry. The walls witnessed the circular, scraping sound of the jar opening, and he

wiped his face with his palm before leaning back against the sink, breathing hard.

“Those better be damn good,” he laughed with difficulty.

***

“Yeah, well, that’s what they said in ’45, and we’re still going to shit, far as I’m

concerned.” Russ tilted his chair back, crossing arms over his chest and running his

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tongue over gray front teeth. He’d gone wrong buttoning his shirt, and the collar made a

lopsided V.

“We’ll be alright,” said Ben, but not because he believed it. He could hear the

tense whir of Bell’s sewing machine through the door, and he imagined quilt squares

coming together under her hands.

Russ shook his head. They both looked out the window, where moths made

nervous constellations on the glass. Silent like dust and behind them the black,

unavailable world. “I been working on something.” He jerked his head, “at my place, up

the hill.”

“What’s that?” The whir stopped, started again.

“Way I see it, things are even worse than they like to say," Russ said, squinting,

like trying to read the future. "Or will be soon. You never get a straight answer out of

scientists or politicians, and - God help us - they’re the ones in charge. So I’m going to

be ready, now. Building me a bunker underground, down from the spring. I got pipes

running to it and a battery generator - or will have, when it’s done.”

“Don’t you think that’s a little much?” asked Ben. A luna moth beat the dark

away from itself to rest, weird with suddenness and size, against the glass, and both men

felt it, like the puff of air from those palm-sized wings had passed through to them, sitting

at the table in their island of light. The wing-markings were like tiny, open mouths.

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Russ watched it for a minute. “No,” he said.

Most people hadn’t known much of anything was wrong back then. But Russ had

known. There’d been days when he’d been unable to talk about anything else. Russ, the

Prophet of Doom, Bell had called him. Not that she hadn’t humored him, too, probably

more than most people. She’d helped outfit the bunker, painted and picked out books.

Stacked cans and quilts and toilet paper. Said if the world did come to an end, they’d

need a library at least. A “little Shangri la.” And Russ had let her add whatever she

liked. “When it comes down to it,” he’d said, “the three of us will just go to ground.

Snug down for as long as it takes.”

***

Manroot money, inseparable art

from economic need.

The folk go gathering.

(How different, really, from sewing up quilt-sides

against the cold?)

There's a price for everything,

certainly, certainty wedded

to a kind of cost,

and living means eating, drinking,

breathing air,

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remembering.

we buy the things that tell us how,

sell them like secrets.

***

The planet wasn’t the problem. We’d tested bite-sized pieces of the moon to

confirm it, and the earth had been around for 4.6 billion years. Enough to know itself the

way shale and chloroplasts do. And bats, learning it as they go.

The crawl of it had built, on and on: bare and chitinous from blind horizons, and

propelled God knows how, it the filled corners of staggering time. Atom by millennial

atom. Molecule by paramecium by mollusk. Down to us.

As much as we had the right to say so about anything, earth had stood the test of

time.

And, from before earth, our instruments suggested extension, mass: infinitely

combustible matter sparking up in the vacuum of space.

So that eons before ourselves or our questions or our secret springs of things, we

postulated a dizzying density, from one scaleless second to the next, hurtling outward in

limitless ambition.

To us, we still imagined.

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***

“Hey, what’s wrong, honey?” Emily peeled a marker-saturated page off the

bench and sat down next to Becky. The paper was still wet; it felt like a petal just starting

to wilt. But Becky watched her to make sure she didn’t lay it on the sidewalk. Emily

draped it gingerly over her lap. “You had such a great morning. So what’s up?”

A pair of third-grade eyes blinked, still murky with tears. “I don’t want to tell

you.”

Uh oh. She reached an arm around Becky, keeping one part of her brain tuned to

the kickball game going on across the field. “Hm? Ok, but if you don’t tell me what’s

wrong, how can we make it better?”

Becky just watched the drooping edges of her marker drawing, like she’d already

considered this. Her jumper was starch-stiff, except where she had been gripping the

skirt. Emily could see the anxious, crumpled lines like wastepaper in palm-sized spots

across the child’s lap.

“I like your picture,” she said finally.

“Thank you. It’s my dog,” Becky sniffed.

“Looks like a good buddy you got there.”

“She’s dead.”

Em stopped paying attention to the kickball game, which seemed to be

maintaining equilibrium so far, at least, and turned to face Becky. “Oh, sweetheart, I’m

so sorry. Was it over Easter?”

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Becky nodded. “Then we got a new puppy. His name is Fitz.”

“I bet he’s nice.”

“Yes. But I miss Lizzy, too.” Becky’s eyes followed the kickball in a wide arc.

“Of course you do, honey. Is that why you were crying?”

She shook her head.

“Oh. Um, are you feeling ok? I should have asked that first, huh?” She felt the

girl’s forehead with the back of her hand. “You need to see the nurse?”

“No. I feel fine.”

“Well, then,” Em glanced at the field in time to make eye contact with Augy, all

set to peg Max in the back of the head. She lowered her gaze, shaking her head slowly,

and he danced backward, threw the ball straight up, and made a goofy cartwheel, as much

as to say, See? And YOU thought… Em just gave him her angled, teacher smile and

turned her eyes back to Becky.

“Mom said I can’t go play on the playground today.” The waterworks starting up.

“Did she say why?” asked Em carefully, as Becky crumpled another handful of

skirt.

“She said if I wanted to wear my nice dress, I couldn’t go run around and play at

recess.”

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Em’s face twitched. She glanced down at the colorful epitaph in her lap. “Well,

you look real nice, Becky.”

The child looked down. “But then Max called me the most boring girl in class.

He said it was stupid to sit on the bench. And then he laughed.”

“He did, huh?" She glanced back at the field. "That wasn't very nice. But, you

know, he probably said it because he wishes you could go play too. And you know

you're not stupid."

Becky nodded.

"I'll talk to him, Becks.” Em patted her shoulder with as little levity as she could

manage, then stood up and set the drawing back on the bench. “It’s a great picture.” She

could hear someone calling from the field.

“It won’t bring her back, though,” Becky sighed, like she was repeating

something she’d heard a grown-up say, and Emily paused.

“It’ll be ok,” she said again.

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Part Two

Myotis

Echo-layers mount, mean resistance, mass:

a shriek-breaking barrier wall in animate dark, in the dark

I read in the folds of my face, my funnel ears, make

sense of shape by the bounce of bounded waves

as rock and shell and bark go teeming, too,

down furred sides and affectionate, fingerbone wings.

I sharpen to the chase and the singular shout, chitinous, the wing

crunched out of that surrounding space that sings mass

back at me. Ah the gulp and the sensitive, limb-tangled flash. Self, too,

in the moving, in air that fleshes and finds my moving in the dark,

spells it back to my sisters, who hear enough to wave

inside the pattern: swing and clutch down slopes of their own make.

We hear us, still melt behind shrill silhouettes, the shapes we make

sliding from themselves in shivers, shingles, plates wing-

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stuttered in seraphic pairs; they play between voices and so slip the taught wave

of gazing, like a net. So I riddle myself, so many aimed angles of mass

cast back. And speed makes a guess of me inside indirect dark

to the other who speaks, falling, time-broken too.

It’s the wholeness of rock, of me, that insists, tricks my brain, a game building two

of one and three of two and all shifted sly of the axis we make

in movement. So I play my sisters down the sky, down the mountain box dark

with sediment sides: his linings humming black vibrations, wing to wing.

And each dodge loose of rock remembers the huddled muteness massed

under, so softly, cave-settled selves completing the daylight dark in waves.

Because we keep it, sleeping, dip bodies well in waves

of it, stir like leaves. And the yielding totality, envelopment soaks down to

our bones, to the roots of each echoing synapse, while stone shrugs mass

back down to night, shoulders over us stars, and we scatter, remake

the universe in the dense space of seconds as unweaving wings

wake to separateness, shovel layered lines in the wet-sand, outside shore of dark.

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As I run the game, the slight, fierce, furrowed smattering of self, of dark

me, swings under and under the song-deciphered shapes like backlit waves,

and I stir the particulate air. And the thrum, my stealthy breathing, my wings,

flows in articulate dark as we shout the discernible forms, speak to

them the tune of bodies in our knowing of foreknown shapes, make

sure to ring the truest outline of prey in the flare of nerve-bright mass.

How is it I create them from the dark: the image, mass,

matched in sound totality? While waves, to which we each respond, make

the shape of voice, wings, own eyes, lit sounds of the self, sing evidence too?

***

Jigsaw puzzles made her think of the “upstairs,” the old world before the bunker, maybe

in the rain: seams showing through where granite moved, geologic fissures blending into

the striped shadows of trees, the earth held upright like hands knit in prayer, and

mountains fitted under each other in dire complexity. The pieces made each other fit in

the darkness of silent time, and you trusted it. All the seams in the dark spaces were

things that you could trust because, though you couldn’t see them, you saw the places

they made, the gaps of hiddenness and sloped mystery like ridges in a hive. Everything

fitted to the light or the absence of light.

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The puzzle pieces came together slowly, more slowly than she’d expected, and the

laborious jigsaw edges crammed deftly among memories so that she had difficulty

distinguishing, for moments together, the pieces she fitted together now with the ones, the

same ones, she’d made to fit last month or last year, when the changes overhead were

different, though still unknown, from the changes going on today. Upstairs. Around the

corner. What did that mean anymore? Something alive, surely, if only in the mingled

brokenness inside a box.

She swirled the familiar, fragmented pieces in the lid. She wouldn’t look at the picture.

Hints would spoil it, since the gradual discovery of place was as close as she could come

to arriving anywhere new. There was no puzzle image of the bunker, except the one

she’d formed over and over in her mind, between the spines of Grandmomma’s books

and the corners of tables and chairs.

He was moving in the next room, and she listened, her fingers twitching shut over a piece

of sky. Like an ‘X’ marking some inconsequential segment of space that might hold

stars, or did, invisibly. He coughed, and she almost said, “God bless you,” but stopped

herself and scanned the gaps in the puzzle-place spread over the table. It felt like seven

o’clock, she decided, and stood to make herself a cup of tea.

***

It had been a long drive, the rain spinning off the truckers’ wheels in fractured

clouds like an automatic car wash, and with comparable visibility. She could feel the

tense buzz at the back of her eyes, the surreal thinness of focus that came from straining

down obscure roadways, pounding with shrouded traffic, for too long. Just turning to

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glance over her shoulder before changing lanes, it took her a second to catch and record

the swung fragment of road. Temperature on the dash said 48: cold for October, she

thought, dragging back to the grinding mess of spray.

She stopped for coffee in Staunton, then again in Christiansburg, thinking caffeine

could at least prop open her brain. When she hurtled back onto 81 South, Emily realized

she was halfway to the cabin if she just changed her mind and went there instead. No

Gran now. First no Grandmomma, then no Gran - just generations retracting into time.

But for a minute she was there: and a smaller Emily could tuck her fingers in the

crook of Gran’s arm, burrow into the loose skin while head and shoulders wriggled up

under the elbow. “Sing the favorite song,” came the snaggle-tooth voice, hair going out

like feelers with the static electricity. Standing on the promises of God. And the voice

and the rough, white hair, the corded hands, would hold the same quavered conviction.

Em had sung too, coming up under the words without understanding them. Just chirped

them over and over, up and down the ladder to the attic, where she wasn’t allowed inside.

Someone gunned past her, and Emily jumped, heart thud flushing her with a

strange kind of embarrassment. She'd slowed down without meaning to. Swallowing,

she pressed the accelerator and came up to speed, kept going. Not far now.

The storm, at least, was starting to wear out, though the used-up air still leaned

against her windshield as she gripped the wheel and pulled off the interstate. Close now.

And she shrugged against the seat, watching the street signs swing past, in slow, definite

sequence.

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Her parents’ road had been widened and repaved recently, the lines bright on wet

asphalt and a new, raw ditch tracing unsteady edges. The rust-dark dirt looked naked

under scattered straw and spray-green grass seed, but the chicory and ragweed were gone.

Day lilies, too. The mailbox at the end of the gravel drive, still hanging open, had been

moved back and resettled slightly a kilter, but someone had stenciled a border of smog-

gray lace down the sides of the post. When she pulled in past it, the rocks crunched

under her tires, and yanking the parking break felt like dropping an anchor.

Mama knew that Emily wouldn’t have come back for any other reason. But there

she stood in the doorway now, barefoot in a black cotton dress, trying to hide the biggest

smile Em had ever seen. It flickered on and off, her grief like intermittent static with

some Gospel song playing along behind it. “You made it.” She was reaching before Em

could put down the overnight bag, and as soft arms snapped shut around her, the house

smell sifted over them: mildew and disinfectant, beer and burnt caramel and pine

flooring. When she pulled back, Mama’s hands kneaded her arms, gripping and flexing

distractedly. “You look older.” Emily frowned and her mother blushed faintly,

embarrassed by the vague, insinuated guilt between them. “So when did you cut your

hair so short?”

“I don’t know. Sometime last year.”

“Oh. Well, it looks real nice.”

“Thanks.”

They stared at each other without speaking for a minute. Mama’s waist-long

ponytail had finally gone gray.

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“Come on in and sit. Can I get you anything? Some water? It’s such a long

drive.”

“No thanks, Mama.”

“Funeral’s tomorrow morning, and then the reception.”

“Ok. Do you need help with anything?”

“Oh, I got everything under control. Already have about fifty chess squares in the

fridge. Sylvia and the other ladies are taking care of the rest. You sure I can’t get you a

snack or something?”

Em followed her into the kitchen and stood on the curling linoleum, watching her

straighten things that were already straight, take out and put back a tupperware full of

unshelled peanuts, and minutely adjust the porcelain nativity scene on the counter. “This

has been so hard on your daddy.” She poured half the water from her glass into a potted

plant; its soil was rimmed with a tentative fuzz. When she looked up, there was an

impossible tremor under her left eye.

“I know.”

“We just didn’t expect it like this.”

“What happened?”

“Heart attack. After her Wednesday night game.”

“She still played Progressive Gin,” said Emily, unsure whether or not it was a

question.

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“Said it kept her sharp.”

“What time is the service?”

“Ten. You bring a dress?”

“Yes. I haven’t forgotten the rules.”

Mama frowned. The light coming through the kitchen blinds made stripes across

the floor. “Well, how’s Lucas?” The question was so thin it could have fit into one of

those stripes.

“I wouldn’t know.” A catbird startled in her brain.

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“It’s ok. He was a jackass.” And there was the silence that burned inside words

like that, here in this house. Jackass. Bitch. Fuck it. “When’s Dad getting back?” But

she could already hear the cold, crunching roll of tires on gravel.

“That’ll be him.” The refrigerator rattled as Mama opened it, and a trail of

condensation slid down the edge of the door. She snapped a beer off its plastic ring.

“Here, you go visit. I’ll start on dinner.”

By the time Emily had reached the door, she could already hear him clearing his

throat on the other side, boots scraping on the mat with the American flag on it. There

was no sound of keys in the lock; her parents hadn’t locked their door in the thirty-five

years they’d been married, and it always came up at least twice:

“It’s not like the city. We’ve never locked our house; never given us a minute’s

hesitation. Fact, one night Ed Shaner came in and used the phone to call in his wife’s

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stroke. Saved her life, and not a minute too soon. If he’d had to wake us up to get in,

she’d have been cold in her grave, guaranteed.”

“Ed should have had his own phone line. Then he wouldn’t have had to waste all

that time getting next door.”

“He did have; they disconnected it. And you know, Emily Grace, that’s what

neighbors are for.”

“To call in medical emergencies?”

“Don’t be smart.”

The door swung open, and she moved back to let him step in off the porch, but he

stayed put for a minute. “You made it,” he said, and for one uncomfortable second she

thought he was tearing up, but instead he set down the casserole dish he’d been carrying

and gathered her up in a swift, massive hug. Dad was a big man; his affection, when it

came, was like brisk, emphatic punctuation. “We weren’t sure. With the end of school,

you know.”

“I wouldn’t miss this.” She handed him the beer. “Mama’s in the kitchen.”

“I figured,” he nodded, pulling the tab with the metallic, sucking sound that

brought back too much. “That woman is tireless.” Then, after a pause, “Service is ten

tomorrow.”

“I know.”

He finally stepped inside, and they stood there for a minute with the sound of the

stovetop ticking through the walls as the gas caught and flared up. Mama always held

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her breath lighting the stove, like breathing would suck away the fumes before the flame

could settle. One of the burners hadn’t worked for years, and one had to be lit by hand,

but the other two could still be coaxed to life.

“So how was the drive?”

“Not too bad,” she said, nodding. She caught herself crossing her arms the same

way he did and forced them down to her sides. He didn’t ask about Lucas, and she didn’t

volunteer anything.

“Your Aunt Grace is coming in the morning.”

“I’m glad.”

“Not sure, though, how many cousins can make it.”

“I’m sure they’ll come.”

“Yeah, I don’t know about that.” They were both moving toward the kitchen now,

and Em could hear the outline of the pot sloshing across the stove. “You never know

with these kids. They just don’t feel the same about family anymore.”

She pressed her lips tight over the answer, reminded herself that he’d lost his

mother already. And now his grandmother, now Gran. But she couldn’t say the things

she knew he wanted.

***

I’m sure they forgot me. Everything so quiet. I was going home today, and now

it’s already night and I can’t find my robe. They must have packed it and taken it with

them, thinking I was there. It all comes from silence, from being too quiet too long in the

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background while they’re playing backgammon and progressive gin and the other game

with the missing pieces in the cabinet. Not like bingo at all. Stuffed prizes in bags like

suffocated kittens and things you have to claim, loudly. All gone now.

The hallway is too dark, like I thought. No one could see anything between the

mountain walls if they tried. Canyon or cavern. Is it bats moving?

The flesh-edged, darting shape moved back and forth across the hall; the bones in

her feet rocked on their narrow contact with tile, ground her heels unevenly into the floor

in a tentative staccato like stilts of fear or furtiveness. She was naked, but she thought it

might be better this way. Nothing to close her off from the dark hallway shooting off to

the exit. She could ride the direction of it this way, unsteady herself.

Birds at the window remind me of the chickadees making an art of smallness up

on the mountain. They used to flicker in and out of spaces only just larger than they were

between the leaves, the light. They could see things that I couldn’t, opening spaces

between spaces, and knowing which would shift to let them through. Bats can see things,

too, with their voices, and that draped abruptness: wings like bunting in caught,

flickered waves - there’s more purpose to it than people think. Things we can’t see. And

my feet on the floor make one of those things: some meaning.

“Mrs. Eller?”

Naked in their light, for a minute she turned her eyes toward the exit, downhill

from the static capture of that flashlight beam. “They left without me,” was the sound

that startled her: words in her voice, but not steady like the thoughts they echoed. That’s

what came from voicing a moment that was gone. Seconds or hours, the past fell equally

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out of reach, and speaking it could only waver, disconnected. "Ben. My son left without

me."

“Alright, let’s get you back to your room, now.”

The bat shapes would wait until the hall was empty again and the lights had left.

When the woman in soft grays came back out into the hall, closing the door

behind her, she didn’t speak. Mason was still holding the flashlight, but he had switched

it off, and with it their weird, swallowing shadows. Instead he’d engaged the low

overheads, and they were standing now in the dim, purple underside of fluorescence, a

dull ache. “We’re going to have to start locking her in,” he said.

“You know we can’t do that.”

“Yeah.”

He walked back toward the lobby, but she looked down the hall one more time

before following. Laurel Hill was nice enough, but every time she caught that woman

running around at night, it just sank the knowledge deeper: she’d never let them take her

to a nursing home. Half-hotel, half-hospital. It sent your voice back to you, wrapped in

gauze.

***

She sat down and opened to the first blank page, slid the cap off her pen, and stopped.

I’ve been thinking about Gran. Being here with Granddaddy, shut in the

bunker, makes me think of her - of her being one step closer to a time before

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terminal velocity. She comes up behind our conversations every time. Has to.

Gemma Lane Eller is more than a name.

The last time I went to visit her at Laurel Hill, I think she was watching for

me. Soon as I’d cleared the slow swing of automatic doors and stepped into the

lobby, her eyes that were always moving grabbed hold, and she raised her hand

like she was hailing a cab. Told Granddaddy to go wait outside.

“I have to tell you something,” she’d said. Her hand was soft and cold

over mine, but the edge of one, hard nail bit into the side of my thumb. “You may

not like it.”

I waited, and a man with a fanny pack and long, drooping eyes stared at

me through an ornamental fern.

“I’m getting married again. Marrying a Catholic.”

I remember blinking, then trying not to smile. “Oh. Really?” Wondering

if she was thinking about Mama, remembering and forgetting in exactly the right

gradations to make it all new.

“It’ll shame the family.”

The man behind the fern scratched a yellowed patch of skin under his jaw

and moved closer to the entrance. Sat down. The rug under his shoes was worn

to almost nothing. I remember that. The comings-and-goings bald spot.

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“Well, I can help you plan the wedding, if you want,” I remember saying,

but I was still watching the man watching me across the empty, travelled places

on the rug.

She looked up quickly. “Would you?”

I did smile then. “Sure.”

“I think we should consider that Catholic church down the mountain.

Something of the Hills. You know?”

I couldn’t remember the name, but she kept going anyway, about the

bridesmaids and the cake and the best time to tell the rest of the family. She

wasn’t looking at me anymore, but every so often, she’d shake her head. “Shame

the family.” When I’d got back home that night, I’d thought about all the places

she’d been in her life, and where she’d gone to now, with the words making things

real that made sense only to her, and only while she was saying them.

I still dream about her sometimes. Walk her down the aisle, with bats

hanging in the rafters and a mute, massive fern hiding the altar from sight.

She put down the pen, sat still for a minute. If she waited for the words to dry down into

the paper, at least she could read it over again, convince herself it had happened as it had.

***

The last time I stepped into her eyes that were always moving,

her hand was soft and cold over mine.

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The edge of one, ornamental smile, remembering and forgetting,

was worn to almost nothing. I remember that.

And I was still the empty place on the mountain.

Something of the Hills. You know?

The words still dream about her.

Walk her down the aisle.

***

We few, fewer, measure them most by absence now

by space, try, strain vibrations through the closing dark

and the falling folds of our bodies. Few, fewest, last,

with the dark darker for the gone drum of wings, the drone of prey.

Hunger and skeletal motions chase us down the sky -

hungry, fall-from-the-stone hungry - we are heavy with it,

with remembering what it felt to make more from us,

from the bound-inside stir, mine. No more myriad.

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No mate not gone before me, last, last,

the dark sunk deeper than my words.

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Part Three

Dry strands of grass, like ortolan bones, articulated the graveyard space, building

rough, crunched footprints under her as Rebecca pushed through the heat. Sun glare like

the final word. Like life gets sucked down underneath when you start putting bodies in

the ground, parceling out their possessions - somehow you end up at the chthonic fringe

of place, with the ground tamped down between you and an unknown past. Suddenly

occurred to her how names get leveled when you become Mama, Honey, Love. Maybe

the past goes too, with Rebecca. When you take a man's name, give it to your daughter:

supplant yourself with Emily, Honey, Love.

She had worn the wrong shoes, too thin, so the leftover shards of grass snagged

her steps. But there was a strange satisfaction, too, in the dry, underfoot sound, the

decisive crush that at least meant no one else had stepped here yet, not for a long time.

The sound reminded her of autumn leaves - that same fragile, underfoot reproach - while

her feet flexed the thin, rubber soles of her shoes, felt every blade burnt and crumbling.

And even though she knew someone from the church behind her had seeded this grass

and mown it and reseeded over each grave, Rebecca imagined Cherokee words, that were

sound and substance before Sequoya, going out in search of balance with every fractured

spire underfoot. The bones in her feet warmed to the solid, ruined ground, and there was

a kind of mercy in it, in the pressed close heat and the solidity.

This church had been built over and over in vicarious memory, in the stories her

Papa had told about his: the ambidextrous pitcher, conscientious Quaker, nicknamed

“Possum” who knew why. Stole himself a Catholic bride from Iowa, and Papa born five

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months after the wedding. Not a story you told your kids, at least not if you could help it,

but Em never asked those questions anyway.

They’d helped build the church behind her, Papa and his father, though it wasn’t

theirs. Jacked the old, frame building up and slid stubborn logs underneath to roll it away

like the Ancient Egyptians might have done, making space for the brick rows of

substance going up in its place: Grace United Methodist. Said someone bought the

original church when the congregation decide