The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas has given us a definition of European culture which resonates, in a sinister way, with the naming of the new epoch. “Culture,” he says, “can be interpreted as an intention to remove the otherness of Nature, which, alien and previous, surprises and strikes the immediate identity which is the same of the human self.” As an intention which converts the otherness of nature into the sameness of humanity, Levinas’s culture sounds alarmingly like Calgary, eating its way steadily toward the Rockies, converting foothills into dismal suburbs of itself. It is against such reduction to the Same that poetry works, introducing otherness, or wilderness, into consciousness without insisting that it be turned wholly into knowledge, into what we know, what we own. Within poetic attention, we might say, what we behold is always “alien and previous,” whether it’s an exceptional fossil or an “ordinary” rock or chickadee. In poetry there is no “been there, done that”; everything is wilderness. The arrival of the Anthropocene would be an acknowledgement that the intention of culture, as Levinas sees it, has been all too richly realized, that there is little hope for an other that remains other, for wilderness that remains wild.

- Don McKay, "Ediacaran and Anthropocene: poetry as a reader of deep time"

By relating to beings in the openness of being, understanding finds a meaning for them in terms of being. In this sense, understanding does not invoke them, but only names them. And thus, with regard to beings, understanding carries out an act of violence and of negation. A partial negation, which is violence. And this partialness can be described by the fact that, without disappearing, beings are in my power. The partial negation which is violence denies the independence of beings: they are mine. Possession is the mode by which a being, while existing, is partially denied. It is not merely the fact that the being is an instrument and a tool—that is to say, a means; it is also an end—consumable, it is food, and, in enjoyment, offers itself, gives itself, is mine. Vision certainly exercises power over the object, but vision is already enjoyment. The meeting with the other person consists in the fact that, despite the extent of my domination over him and his submission, I do not possess him. He does not enter entirely into the opening of being in which I already stand as in the field of my freedom. It is not in terms of being in general that he comes toward me. Everything from him that comes to me in terms of being in general certainly offers itself to my understanding and my possession. I understand him in terms of his history, his environment his habits. What escapes understanding in him is himself, the being. I cannot deny him partially, in violence, by grasping him in terms of being in general, and by possessing him. The other is the only being whose negation can be declared only as total: a murder. The other is the only being I can want to kill. 

I can want to. Yet this power is the complete opposite of power. The triumph of this power is its defeat as power. At the very moment when my power to kill is realized, the other has escaped. In killing, I can cer­tainly attain a goal, I can kill the way I hunt, or cut down trees, or slaughter animals—but then I have grasped the other in the opening of being in general, as an element of the world in which I stand. I have seen him on the horizon. I have not looked straight at him. I have not looked him in the face. The temptation of total negation, which spans the infinity of that attempt and its impossibility—is the presence of the face. To be in relation with the other face to face—is to be unable to kill. This is also the situation of discourse.

- Emmanuel Lévinas, "Is Ontology Fundamental?" Entre Nous: On Thinking-Of-The-Other - pp. 9-10

Mapping the descent

Reading is a complicated, profound, silent, very personal, very private, a very solitary, yet civilizing activity. Nothing is more social than speech—we are bound together by our common sounds more securely than even by our laws—nevertheless, no one is more aware of the isolated self than the reader; for a reader communes with the word heard immaterially in that hollow of the head made only for hearing, a room nowhere in the body in any ordinary sense. On the bus, every one of us may be deep in something different. Sitting next to a priest, I can still enjoy my pornography, although I may keep a thumb discreetly on top of the title: The Cancan Girls Celebrate Christmas. It doesn't matter to me that Father McIvie is reading about investments, or that the kid with rusty hair in the seat ahead is devouring a book about handicapping horses. Yet while all of us, in our verbal recreations, are full of respect for the privacy of our neighbors, the placards advertising perfrume or footware invade the public space like a visual smell; Muzak fills every unstoppered ear the way the static of the street does. The movies, radio, TV, theater, orchestra: all run on at their own rate, and the listener or the viewer must attend, keep up, or lose out; but not the reader. The reader is free. The reader is in charge, and pedals the cycle. It is easy for a reader to announce that his present run of Proust has been postponed until the holidays.

Reading, that is, is not a public imposition. Of course, when we read, many of us squirm and fidget. One of the closest friends of my youth would sensuously wind and unwind on his forefinger the long blond strands of his hair. How he read: that is how I remember him. Yes, our postures are often provocative, perverse. Yet these outward movements of the body really testify to the importance of the inner movements of the mind; and even those rapid flickers of the eye, as we shift from word to word, phrase to phrase, and clause to clause, hoping to keep our head afloat on a flood of Faulkner or Proust or Joyce or James, are registers of reason: for reading is reasoning, figuring things out through thoughts, making arrangements out of arrangements until we've understood a text so fully it is nothing but feeling and pure response; until its conceptual turns are like the reversals of mood in a marriage: petty, sad, ecstatic, commonplace, foreseeable, amazing.

In order to have this experience, however, one must learn to perform the text, say, sing, shout the words to oneself, give them, with our minds, their body: otherwise the eye skates over every syllable like the speeder. There can be no doubt that often what we read should be skimmed, as what we are frequently asked to drink should be spilled; but the speeding reader is alone in another, less satisfactory way, one quite different from that of the reader who says the words to herself, because as we read we divide into a theater: there is the performer who shapes these silent sounds, moving the muscles of the larynx almost invisibly; and there is the listener who hears them said, and who responds to their passion or their wisdom.

Such a reader sees every text as unique; greets every work as a familiar stranger. Such a reader is willing to allow another's words to become hers, his.

[...]

So this reading will be like living, then; the living each of you will be off in a moment to be busy with; not always speedily, I hope, or in the continuous anxiety of consequence, the sullenness of inattention, the annoying static of distraction. But it will only be a semblance of living—this living—nevertheless, the way unspoken reading is a semblance, unless, from time to time, you perform the outer world and let it live within; because only in that manner can it deliver itself to us. As Rainer Maria Rilke once commanded: "dance the taste of the fruit you have been tasting. Dance the orange." I should like to multiply that charge, even past all possibility. Speak the street to yourself sometimes, hear the horns in the forest, read the breeze aloud, and make that inner world yours, because, whether Nature, Man, or God, has given us the text, we independently possess the ability to read, to read really well, and to move our own mind freely in tune to the moving world.

- William H. Gass, "On Reading to Oneself," Habitations of the Word: Essays - pp. 227-8

I left poetry for history in my youth. A terrible turning. I've no excuse. I could have pressed harder. Put the point down upon my paper with more exalted purpose. Perhaps, then, a poem would have written its indented way onto the next page. No, that's inexact. I tried as hard as any archer to have an aim, overhear a calling. I remember the effort, the resolve to be high-minded, the sober choice of models; I remember reading only what would do my genius good, the straining for greatness; and I remember watching every word I wrote unravel like a poorly knitted sleeve. My rhymes clanged predictably, my meters were military, my metaphors fled the mind like frightened mice, assonance set good sense to sleep, and though my alliteration was lively, its lilt always arrived when there was actually nothing to fear, peppering pages which had planned on being bland with a sudden seasoning, mumbling when the night was supposed to be clear.

- William H. Gass, The Tunnel - p. 635

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.

- Susan Sontag, On Photography - p. 4

England was alive, throbbing through all her estuaries, crying for joy through the mouths of all her gulls, and the north wind, with contrary motion, blew stronger against her rising seas.  What did it mean?  For what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her sinuous coast?  Does she belong to those who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who have added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing as a ship of souls, with all the brave world's fleet accompanying her towards eternity?

- E. M. Forster, Howards End - pp. 162-3