Gabriel Gudding, Literature for Nonhumans, Ahsahta Press 2015
Not really a book of essays, per se, as its “essays” are hardly straightforwardly written, being as they are irregularly typeset, as well as interspersed here and there with the odd section in stanzas or cascading waterfalls of verse, Gabriel Gudding’s latest book, Literature for Nonhumans, is, for lack of a better word, a screed. Which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “A long roll or list; a lengthy discourse or harangue; a gossiping letter or piece of writing.”
A book-length argument in favor of both veganism and ecological stewardship (as the two are inextricably linked, in Gudding’s telling), LfN’s many topics include the history of Illinois, resource management in said state, Chicago’s role in the sordid history of mechanized animal slaughter, concentrated animal feeding operations, rivers and topography, and above all the effect eating meat has on the environment. Here at length, from page 51—nearly halfway through this thin book—is the paragraph that may be the book’s mission statement:
The animal-industrial complex (which includes the transportation and service industries as well as agriculture and the pharmaceutical industries) is an empire of animal suffering—an economy built expressly on the suffering of nonhuman bodies and the pleasures of human convenience and leisure—and it is the most dominant economy, in terms of planetary ecology, in the history of human commerce. It is the single most impactful driver of global climate change since the advent of the Holocene. But its global dimensions are not limited to the planetary scale: even at the minute level of thoughts and convictions held by individual human persons and communities, the consumption of animals has markedly damaging ethical effects on the worlds of humans and nonhumans alike.
So there you more of less have it: Literature for Nonhumans, while hardly always as direct as the above, is a meditation upon and reaction to the ethical and ecological damage done both to our souls and the earth by the practice of eating animals’ flesh, a practice driven as it is by an economy built on “the trade and sale of items that (a) are either sentient themselves, or (b) alter somatic perception and aid in the regulation of somatic expectation.” Including, as Gudding goes on to say, “the harvest of trees and hunting of whales” being driven by the “wish to extend the active use of eyesight past sundown.” His targets, therefore, are all of us.
Given the current climate—meteorological and political—this is strong, strong, necessary stuff. One does not hear as much as one should about modern animal husbandry’s ecological effects—see this Journal of Geophysical Atmospheres study that found “U.S. livestock emissions are 70% greater than the oil and gas emissions.” And so books like Literature for Nonhumans should be applauded.
But alas, Literature for Nonhumans was not written by a particularly well-lettered climatologist or animal rights activist but instead by a poet-cum-kayak enthusiast-cum essayist-cum philosopher who can’t stop himself from imbuing all of his work with an artistic insouciance. After all, Gudding’s previous books—A Defense of Poetry and the quasi-memoir Rhode Island Notebook, which he supposedly wrote longhand while actually driving between Bloomington, IL, and Providence, RI—are marked by a puckish tone. Gudding has always struck me as someone who profoundly loves and knows literature but who can’t help calling bullshit on it frequently; he seems the sort of guffaw to himself while obsessively hate-reading Jane Austen, yet again.
An excellent example of this tendency from Literature for Nonhumans is the section beginning on page 76 that was originally published in Gutcult as “Praise to the Swiss Federation.” An amazing retelling of the history of watches, in LfN Gudding ties it loosely to his overall project by interspersing it with sections from a grim handbook titled “Baby Pig Management,” the subject of which is obvious. Here’s a sample:
Praise be therefore to the wristwatch
which is a kind of teat or buttock,
and I’m sorry for that kind of
language but it’s a suitable meta-
phor, in that a watch is composed
of subtle hidden mechanisms that
perform a most essential function
by at once parceling energy and
releasing it in small units, such that
each tick is a kind of sonic dung,
or such that each tick is a parcel of
milk, depending on whether time’s
passing is ill used or well
And while I enjoy, aesthetically, such lyric goofiness (I have been a big fan of Gudding’s work for years; when in grad school the poet Mark Novak gave me a copy of Rhode Island Notebook because he knew I was a big fan of A Defense of Poetry, a book I have taught and forced undergraduates to purchase), in the context of writing like this review’s first quote such poetical discursiveness serves to undermine rather than reinforce the book’s overall project.
Rather than jamming all of the many strange parts of this book together—the baby pig management text, the Chicago slaughterhouse-related documents from the nineteenth century, the history of white men discovering an Illinois that when they discovered it was a flower-festooned wetland stretching as far as the eye could see, only to transform over the years into the otherworldly and somewhat ominously featureless “outdoor factory” of soy and industrial corn that it is today—and doing so by mixing genres seemingly at random, I wish instead Gudding had published two books: one a new book of verse, replete with odd histories of the watch, and the second an angry vegan tract that maintains its initial fury unabated.
To wit: Just after one opens Literature for Nonhuman’s cover, before one reaches the title and Library of Congress pages, there are two facing pages with the following text printed large across them: THERE CAN BE NO PASTORAL / AS LONG AS THERE IS A SLAUGHTERHOUSE. Maybe that would have been impossible to sustain, but goddamnit, we’d better start getting truly angry—and active—soon because who knows, we may be running out of time and what people, what, what the fuck are our kids going to do?
…
Kevin O’Rourke lives in Seattle, where he works at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. His first book, the essay collection As If Seen at an Angle, is forthcoming from Tinderbox Editions.
Top image via the World Bank Photo collection flickr photostream, August 2007
And what, for us, is called a long-distance relationship? If there are friends, or any two people separated purposefully by a distance, whose history of interaction is characterized by misunderstanding, frequent fighting and interpersonal pain, such that the factors of their differences of age, culture, their styles of temperament and the scripts they were taught (in which they may seem imprisoned) have exercised them to a distance, of say eleven hundred miles, and who despite compatibilities, find themselves frustrated yet willing to try. This, friends, is called a long-distance relationship.
Gabriel Gudding, And What, Friends, Is Called a Road?
I have too many of these.
A little note: Right now I'm reading The Best American Poetry: 2010, where I found this prose-poem. Read it with me?
