Hell Hath No Limits
After Wendell Berry's "Faustian Economics"
When we give language limits, we call it “form.” When we share language, we create a common world. If word and world were mutually faithful, the edges of one could be found in the other.
But consider the text before you: unfurling interminably, out of and back into oblivion. Housed by an infinite architecture full of light with no source. There’s little on this screen to suggest that the world is made of stuff, that it can only provide so much at once.
(…while elsewhere, square miles of humming servers veined with coolants and glutted with rare earths hunker out of view...)
We are entering a time of inescapable limits.
Since our language has failed to represent the bounds of our webbed life, we find those bounds presented to us in the form of orange skies, absent rivers, winters of birdsong. Our writing describes the spectacles, but its form denies their original logic. Infinite texts cannot contain finitude.
An art does not propose to enlarge itself by limitless expansion, but rather to enrich itself within the bounds that are accepted prior to the work.
The arts are a long chronicle of the limitations that define us. A sonnet has fourteen lines; the haiku seventeen syllables. Perec wrote a novel without the letter e.
Instructive efforts.
But to carry their lessons through the climate crisis means to embrace planetary constraints as well as stylistic ones: soil, water, atmosphere. These finitudes are just as much the condition of our humanity.
Imagine: language that lies fallow. Poems like a tired well. Sentences halted by receding shores or by fires on the ridge. Novels of untimely ends.
(Didn’t pages used to burn?)
Forget survival; re-forming our literature is a matter of truth. It is, in fact, the truth of matter.
For the danger is in forgetting that our writing — and the world we build from it — is material, that it bears at most one degree of remove from the body.
To evade a great failure, we can commit ourselves to a lesser one: essay means to test. Implied is the possibility of submitting to one’s limitations. Lack of space, lack of time. Some earthly efforts come up short.
I write this on the single sheet of a spiral-bound notebook.