Ubi Sunt

Yes, most of us on rusty on our Latin and our medieval poetry tropes, so here's the quick note on Ubi sunt from wikipedia:  "Ubi sunt (literally "where are... [they]") is a phrase taken from the Latin Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?, meaning "Where are those who were before us?". Ubi nunc...? ("Where now?") is a common variant. Sometimes thought to indicate nostalgia, the ubi sunt motif is actually a meditation on mortality and life's transience."

The usefulness of this trope struck me recently when re-reading the Anglo-Saxon poem, The Wanderer, in which the now solitary warrior has lost his tribe, his lord, all the communal aspects that would have defined a meaningful life (written down in 975 AD, though probably composed much earlier, in reference to earlier, pre-Christian centuries). 

This sense of loss echoed when I was reading about Basho's poetics today (Sam Hamill's translator's intro to Narrow Road to the Interior).  The Buddhist sense of impermance deals with loss but with the fleetingness of all things, aiming at a calm acceptance and finally the realization of the limits/nothingness of self--essentially an a-responsible stance.  I'm always drawn to this, but always jerk back from that acceptance, from that grain of light in my dark rage.  I remain Western, discontent, unwilling to watch the world decay.

What Ubi sunt suggests to me is a trope to deploy from a future stance in writing an ecological poetry.  The elegaic tone could carry beyond the simple enthusiasms of a nature poetry and past the often too-blunt rage of political poetry.

What makes environmental novels successful, works like Woman on the Edge of Time or The Fifth Sacred Thing, is how they sketch out a future temporal platform, envisioning/extrapolating through one series of consequences.  I need that platform, that sense of possible future world--future Missouri--to write that certain type of poetry.

I've tried some visions, though seldom complete enough to feel solid and make the losses we will have experienced credible.

Long-windedly...I imagine a 'game' of futures that geographers could play:  setting certain temporal platforms, and based on climate, culture, economics, polity, creating the lines of some futures.  I would hope not just for my poetry, but for fiction, for essays, for a serious window into accepting responsbilities, and seeing where the lines of those responsibilities begin.  Recall Yeats' line, which Delmore Schwartz borrowed:  In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.

bob