Coda
Commons in Motion: Walking and Refuge, from Wordsworth to the Anthropocene
Le commun en mouvement : la marche et le refuge, de Wordsworth à l’anthropocène
p. 129-141
Résumés
This chapter takes up the author’s relationship to the work of William Wordsworth, and employs a poetics of entanglement to inquire into the role of the human / non-human relation and human and non-human mobility in re-framing the question of the commons. Under conditions of geophysical capitalism and the Anthropocene, what form can the commons now take? This question is posed amidst the reality that the historical commons is largely already enclosed; nonetheless, the argument presented here is that the commons remains a fruitful conceptual frame for thinking our way out of the entanglements of the Anthropocene. Framing this argument is an investigation of the dialectic of stasis and mobility in Wordsworth’s life and poetry, and the structures, in Wordsworth’s day and our own, that inhibit and enclose the commons of life in motion.
Partant d’une réflexion personnelle sur l’œuvre de William Wordsworth, ce chapitre s’appuie sur l’idée d’une poétique de l’« emmêlement » (entanglement) afin d’examiner les rapports entre l’humain et le non-humain (et ceux de la mobilité humaine et non humaine) pour mieux comprendre les enjeux du commun (commons) aujourd’hui. Quelle(s) forme(s) peut prendre le commun à une époque – l’anthropocène – soumise au régime capitaliste géophysique ? Malgré la distance historique qui nous sépare des biens communs (et des enclosures) du passé, le commun reste un cadre théorique utile pour penser les défis « emmêlés » de notre présent. Ce chapitre interroge la dialectique de la mobilité et de l’immobilité qui traverse la vie et la poésie de Wordsworth, ainsi que les structures qui réfrènent et qui circonscrivent, à notre époque comme à celle du poète romantique, le commun de la vie en mouvement.
Texte intégral
This is where we walked
(This is where we swam)
Wrapped animal bone in
Sweet vernal grass offering
And now stand in vernal grass
Beside the road offering
Prayer on this first stop walking
First of four directions west
Second stop north drumming
Singing between two tailings
Ponds (not ponds metallic sands)
That came and went like
A bird to its grave in the water
(Not water / burnt oil sands) third
Stop east past refinery climbing
Smoke fourth stop south fourth
Direction still drumming still
Singing the elders praying
Should earth be wrenched
Throughout or fire wither all
Her pleasant habitations and
Dry up ocean left singed and
Bare or the sombre waters
Of the deep gather over us
Fleet waters of the drowning
World – know that kindlings
Like the morning still foretell
Though slow a returning day lodged
In the frail shrine of us aglow.1
1In June 2014 I participated in a “Healing Walk” organised by Indigenous peoples in Northern Alberta.2 The walk took place in the Tar Sands, the world’s largest industrial development, where the boreal forest is removed whole-cloth to expose layers of bitumen – oil clogged sand – which then must be cooked in heated water and a cocktail of liquid gas and various chemicals before being forced through high pressure pipelines and so to market, so to the planet’s overheating atmosphere. On our “Healing Walk”, several hundred of us followed Indigenous elders as we beat the bounds of a single, now dry tailings pond – a circumference of some fourteen kilometers. The scene was literally a desert, where a boggy forest alongside the Athabasca River should have been. The poem – really a fragment of a longer poem – which comes from my own book is called “Reading Wordsworth in the Tar Sands” – something I did indeed endeavour to do while I was there. And so the passage incorporates material, slightly condensed, from the opening of Book V of William Wordsworth’s epic autobiographical poem The Prelude – the apocalyptic dream vision of the desert wanderer – which seemed fitting, given the man-made desert I had encountered in northern Canada.
2I will return to this passage in Wordsworth in due course. I have begun with a poem, of my own no less, in part to emphasise how I will be reading and thinking here, and that is as a poet considering another poet. And to me this involves what I will call entanglement: poetry’s task, if not the critic’s, as I see it, is not to separate, not to clearly demarcate or discern or even order – not to disentangle what has become knotted, fouled, enmeshed – but to further entangle. Poetry is a means of identifying our entanglements – of articulating that complexity from which, for better or for worse, we are inseparable. The poetic line is no Ariadne’s thread to follow out of the labyrinth – it is a labyrinthine tangle of lines that inevitably only ever lead back into the maze. In this essay I am returning to a life-long entanglement with Wordsworth – which is to say, Wordsworth is a poet whose work I cannot stop thinking through as I write. But I am also intent on following lines that run into other entanglements, across space and time, with the so-called Anthropocene and the contemporary, unfolding climate catastrophe, with human displacement and movement (also driven by a warming world), and ultimately with the commons as a conceptual mode for rethinking the entanglement of the human and the non-human and the cross-threading lines of transnational and transspecies mobility. My question is this: how can we think commons as a mode of entanglement and a means of mobility?
3For an entanglement to form, lines need to intersect, run afoul of one another – and something needs to be in motion, inscribing those lines. Tim Ingold offers a “comparative anthropology of the line” in his book Lines: A Brief History.3 Ingold’s proposition runs as follows: What if we imagined life “as a manifold woven from the countless threads spun by beings of all sorts, both human and non-human, as they find their ways through the tangle of relationships in which they are enmeshed”.4 The shift here is provocatively ontological: “[…] people inhabit a world that consists […] not of things but of lines. After all, what is a thing, or indeed a person, if not a tying together of the lines – the paths of growth and movement – of all the many constituents gathered there?”.5 The implications for how we might approach human mobility are instructive; Ingold quotes Roy Wagner: “The life of a person is the sum of his tracks, the total inscription of his movements”.6
4My return to Wordsworth, this time, is mediated by Jonathan Bate’s recent book Radical Wordsworth, and what struck me was the attention Bate brought to Wordsworth’s mobility – to motion as a theme in both the life and the poetry. It would not be difficult to imagine this poet’s life as a sum of tracks – and his spatially dynamic poetry as the inscription of his movements. Early on, Bate sites the tracing of lines, from both the opening and concluding books of The Prelude. First there is the “rapid line of motion” the ice-skating young Wordsworth carves across the surface of a frozen lake, intersecting “the image of a star”, above and below becoming entangled.7 Second, Bate offers the poet’s declaration of his “love” for “a public road”, a sight that
Hath wrought on my imagination since the morn
Of childhood, when a disappearing line,
One daily present to my eyes, that crossed
The naked summit of a far-off hill
Beyond the limits that my feet had trod,
Was like an invitation into space
Boundless […].8
5Bate comments that Wordsworth “did not want to be bound”;9 I will circle back in a moment to complicate this. The ice-skating scene can be connected to numerous references the poet makes to motion and mobility – often in the context of his most fundamental and metaphysical declarations of basic principles. So we have the “everlasting motion […] intertwin[ing]” human being and natural world (I, 431-433) – so similar to the “motion […] that impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought” in “Tintern Abbey”10 – and, returning to the first book of The Prelude, “Those hallowed and pure motions of the sense” which the poet links to “affinities that fit / Our new existence to existing things” (I, 578-583). We also have the parallactic and relational movement of observer and environment – most famously, the young Wordsworth in his stolen boat at night striking out into the lake pursued by the “measured motion” of “the huge Cliff” rising from the “bound of the horizon” “As if with voluntary power” (I, 406-411). This type of biogeographical mobility can be linked back to the ice-skating scene in which, as Bate writes, there is a “simultaneously comforting and terrifying […] collocation of those words ‘earth’, ‘rolled’, ‘motion’, ‘diurnal’ and ‘round’”,11 as the skating poet, “stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs / Wheeled by […]” (I, 484-485).
6Movement as entangling (Wordsworth’s word is “intertwin[ing]”) observer and world, the tensions of being at once “still” and yet somehow in (or in relation to) motion – it is not that Wordsworth would not be bound, but rather, that there is a foundational and I think never fully resolved dialectic of stasis and mobility, figured as a desire for both the protective, hill-encircled vale (a “home” at Grasmere or anywhere else), and the world-linking and entangling disappearing line of a road, that maps onto, and goes to the heart of, what I want to say about the commons as well. Wordsworth remains a productive source because of his unresolved contradictions; for Wordsworth, the commons was always at least in part conceptual – a matter of poetics, a question of one’s relationship, as a human being, to the non-human surround – whereas for a poet like John Clare, the commons was a lived material reality. Clare’s commons is largely gone – enclosed by capital, as most of the planet is now indeed enclosed (one definition of the Anthropocene being that it is the age of planetary enclosures – of geophysical capitalism). While debates about land use and access at the local level continue to invoke the commons, my interest is in what resources remain in the commons for thinking the fact of our shared, planetary human (and non-human) mobility.
7“The principle of movement”, writes historian Peter Linebaugh, “was opposed to the principle of enclosure”.12 In what ways, then, might movement be on the side of the commons? The historical commons comprised an open field system crisscrossed by rights of way and common tracks, providing wide access – “lanes in nature’s freedom dropt”, as Clare writes in The Village Minstrel – with “paths that every valley wound”, until “Enclosure came and every path was stopped”.13 And yet commons were bound – they depended, in Elinor Ostrom’s interpretation, on “clearly defined boundaries”14 – and those bounds were regularly beat in order to verify their margins. Wordsworth’s Lake District is itself marked by open grazing grounds and discrete, almost self-contained vales. It may be no accident then that his poetic vision is stretched taut by the “disappearing line” of the public road with its entanglement in the “boundless”, and the “Vale” that provides safe “harbour” – invoked in the opening lines of The Prelude. For the commons too is both well-trod locality and potential campsite for “travelling gypsy communities” and mobile “boisterous fairs”15; both preserve of the local, and, in the case of pastoral commons, component part of widely dispersed transhumance.
8Or we might say that the road is the line that entangles the commons in the boundless realms beyond the parish. In an early Wordsworth poem a discharged soldier is encountered on a “public way” that, in the soldier’s travels, is connected to distant “tropic isles”; the poem’s speaker proceeds to guide the wanderer to a labourer’s cottage which lies on the common, “along an open field”.16 In a passage of The Prelude that records what is perhaps Wordsworth’s most explicitly radical credo, the poet, in revolutionary France, recounts his companion Michael Beaupuy’s “agitated” response to their encountering “a hunger-bitten Girl”, attached by a “cord” to “a Heifer’s motion”, “busy knitting” as she is led slowly along a “lane” (IX, 512-517). All here is entangled mobility, a “manifold woven from the countless threads” (in Ingold’s words, quoted above) – cord, road, knitting wool –, human / non-human interdependence – even “agitation”, Bate notes, invoking Dr Johnson’s definition, is a “violent motion of the mind”.17 The substance of Beaupuy’s agitated effusion could just as well be a clarion call for a return of the disappearing commons, a time in which all “legalized exclusion” would be “[a]bolished” (IX, 528-529).
9I will step out of line here – or, grasping at a thread I see dangling in my peripheral vision, take up another line that I find entangled with this business of Wordsworth and the commons and mobility – and consider the long lines of flight of the contemporary refugee – today’s most pressing claimant of common right. Each summer for five years, from 2015 until the COVID pandemic brought us to a halt, I joined a group of refugees, asylum seekers, and immigration detainees and their supporters on a five-day walk across the English countryside. We followed public tracks and crossed large private farms on traditional rights of way. Every evening in a different community we would share stories of the travellers’ journeys, before laying our mats out on the floors of churches and town halls. Poet David Herd, one of the organisers of this project and editor of four volumes of Refugee Tales, notes that the claim for refuge the group puts forward is made, in part, “by virtue of walking which / We call our commons”.18 “Walking”, Donna Landry writes in Radical Walking, echoing Herd, “means aligning oneself to some extent with a rebellious reclaiming of common rights”.19
10The accusation of vagrancy levelled at former commoners thrown off their enclosed lands and the accusation of illegal immigration levelled at contemporary asylum seekers expelled from their lands – due in large part to the lingering after-effects of colonisation – align. The entangled relations of mobility and fixity run throughout our modern histories; from the 1388 Statute of Cambridge to the Hostile Environment fomented by recent UK immigration bills, quoting Nick Hayes’s The Book of Trespass, this paradox ensnares: “[…] if you owned land, you could move; if you were landless, you had to stay where you were”.20 Hayes goes on to argue that “national borders were the direct extrapolation of the enclosure of common land”,21 further noting that “[t]he migration crisis is an international iteration of the cult of exclusion, dividing those with rights to land from those without, rights which are defined by the line of the border”.22
11Somewhere in our social and intellectual evolution, Hayes suggests, the line as vector travelling through land became the line as territorial marker encircling land. If the commons continues to matter and mean in the world today, it imbricates two strands: the commons of our shared human movement – our need, often desperate, to move freely, sometimes over large stretches of the earth – and our relationship to the earth as necessarily shared and deeply interconnected biosphere. Commons have meaning at local and planetary scale; they do not function at the national scale; nation states are always already enclosures; nation states are amongst the highest expression of private property, and “Property”, Hayes writes, “simply cannot comprehend mobility”.23
12I see the recursive line of this essay – like any knot you cannot disentangle – leading back to where I began, back to Wordsworth’s and my shared apocalyptic vision of desert wanderings. But before that, the thread I now pick up runs afoul of property, and the entanglement of poetry with both commons and enclosure as modalities of property and ways of relating to land. Consider, for instance, Wordsworth’s description of the recently published second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, this in a letter (14 January 1801) to Charles James Fox (one of the more radical parliamentarians of his day):
Several of the poems contained in these volumes are written upon subjects, which are the common property of all Poets.24
Son of a lawyer and land agent, the poet’s use of the phrase “common property” is entirely unambiguous and legally specific; Wordsworth knew exactly what he was saying; at the apex of parliamentary enclosure, the disappearing commons was being translated into poetry. Just a few years later, and in another letter (14 October 1803) – this to his patron, Sir George Beaumont –, Wordsworth is a little more ambiguous:
The writings are at present in my possession, and what I sh[ould] wish is, that I might at present be considered as Steward of the land with liberty to lay out rent in plant[ing] or any other improvement which might be thought [advi]sable with a view to building upon it. And if it should [be] out of my power to pitch my own tent there, I would then request that you would give me leave [to] restore the property to your own hands.25
“Writings”, here, refers to a deed to property – the gift of a cottage and several acres near Applethwaite, given to Wordsworth by his patron. Text and terrain are entangled once again – I think of Hayes here noting that during parliamentary enclosure, “The fence lines that were rolled out across England were the manifestation of lines of legal prose”.26 Wordsworth is no poet-commoner here, but the “steward” of the land’s true owner, to whom the land rightly belongs. Wordsworth’s father, as noted, was himself a great landowner’s “law-agent”; Bate glosses this fact: “The traditional role for the steward and law-agent of a great landowner was to oversee the estates, collect rents and handle disputes”.27 This is exactly how the poet presents himself to his patron. Not only is he no advocate of the commons, he is a prime encloser, seeking to “improve” the land – “improvement” being the encloser’s watch-word, code for making more profitable – laying out and, we can only assume, collecting rents, as his father did, as well.
13And yet Wordsworth’s occupancy of the land is tentative – a euphemistic pitching of his nomadic tent. If enclosure is a disentanglement from a connected world – a severing and a bordering – the tent connects the poet to mobility and the common road, tangling back into the world beyond the vale. The tension between common mobility and private, propertied stasis is unresolved in Wordsworth’s poetry, even if in life he took up the role of country gentleman presiding over his ancient seat at Rydal. In the poetry there is, in Robin Jarvis’s words, a “mixed moral economy embracing vagrancy and wanderlust, on the one hand, and domesticity and retirement, on the other”.28 Nowhere is the “retirement” side of the ledger given more free reign than in “Home at Grasmere” – Wordsworth’s celebration of his settling down with his sister Dorothy at Dove Cottage, “A pair seceding from the common world”.29 It might be notable that the two insisted on a pedestrian approach to their new home, walking paths and common roads over the fells from Richmond, in the dead of winter (December 1799) and amidst sleet and snow – as though bidding adieu to the road with one final and cauterising traverse.
14Once the Vale of Grasmere is reached and it has welcomed the poet into its “embrace”,30 the language of property and enclosure (a word he frequently deploys to describe the valley’s containment) completely takes over. The poet now resides in “A centre without dependence or defect”,31 and embraces the sort of conservative values we often associate with the propertied classes:
In this enclosure many of the old
Substantial virtues have a firmer tone
Than in the base and ordinary world.32
Rarely has home ownership (although in truth Wordsworth was a renter) been so enthusiastically expressed – one wonders whether this is a script for a home reno or house hunting show, rather than Romantic poetry: “Possessions have I wholly, solely, mine”, the poet bubbles, “Something within, which yet is shared by none”,33 and then, in full ecstasy:
This solitude is mine; the distant thought
Is fetched out of the heaven in which it was.
The unappropriated bliss hath found
An owner, and that owner I am he.
The Lord of this enjoyment is on Earth
And in my breast. What wonder if I speak
With fervour, am exalted with the thought
Of my possessions, of my genuine wealth
Inward and outward?34
15Perhaps I am being too hard on Wordsworth; certainly the focus is as much on “inward” as it is “outward” wealth. Jarvis, commenting on the poem, suggests that Wordsworth’s “seigniorial rights are of the heart and mind only”.35 Perhaps what historian Jeanette M. Neeson says of Clare’s relation to Helpston is comparable: “He owned this world because it was open to him”.36 But Grasmere enraptures Wordsworth not because of its openness – to the contrary, it is its closure and disconnection that he celebrates. Taken at its word, “Home at Grasmere” is a poem of disentanglement and a refusal of the common and commons.
16We are not done with tent pitching yet. Wordsworth turns to this image once again, in Book VII of The Prelude, when, in describing his graduation from Cambridge, he refers to having “pitched my vagrant tent, / A casual dweller and at large, among / The unfenced regions of society” (VII, 60-62). Retrospective as it is, this passage is likely written after “Home at Grasmere”’s celebration of fixity; “vagrancy”, casual “dwelling”, and the “unfenced” and common “regions” remain positive aspects of the poet’s spatial imaginary. It is not certain to me, at least, whether Wordsworth ever himself bivouacked in an actual tent; nonetheless, the figure of the tent is woven into the poet’s meditations on the mobile commons and the commoning involved in mobility.
17I would link this passage, coming, in Wordsworth’s autobiographical narrative, at the end of his time at Cambridge, to another scene from the very middle of his studies – the scene at the beginning of Book V where the poet recounts the dream of the desert wanderer and the apocalyptic deluge, to which we can now at last return. This dream figure is a much more likely nomadic tent dweller – being described by the dreamer as “an Arab of the Bedouin tribes” (V, 78)37 – but let me set this scene a little more clearly first.
18Book V bears the descriptive subtitle, “Books”, and it begins with melancholic intimations of mortality and the brevity of life’s “sojourn”, with references to Shakespeare and, no doubt, to the biblical Revelation in the apocalyptic vision that begins at line 29. Here is Wordsworth’s version, which I compressed in my own poem with which I began this essay:
Should earth by inward throes be wrenched throughout,
Or fire be sent from far to wither all
Her pleasant habitations and dry up
Old Ocean in his bed left singed and bare,
Yet would the living Presence still subsist
Victorious; and composure would ensue,
And kindlings like the morning; presage sure,
Though slow, perhaps, of a returning day.(V, 29-36)
While it might be relatively easy to reconcile this vision with the biblical source, this whole section of the poem is bound up with considerations of the student’s knowledge and learning that are pulled between the poles “of earth and heaven” (V, 12), “reason” and “passion” (V, 39), the “works of Bard [poetry] and Sage [philosophy]” (V, 41) – a dialectic that, in the subsequent narrative of the Arabian dream, boils down to the polarity of “Poetry and geometric Truth” (V, 64). Thus, the wrenched, withered, and singed earth of the Wordsworthian apocalypse – as well as the vision’s cyclical “kindlings […] of a returning day” – could suggest as much 17th and 18th-century theories of the earth’s history and ultimate fate (Thomas Burnet and James Hutton seem likely reference points), as they suggested to me, walking in the man-made petro-desert of the Alberta Tar Sands, the all-too-real horizons of the Anthropocene.
19The Arabian dream comes on the heels of this prefatory meditation and vision, and deepens the theme. Having been reading Cervantes by the seaside, and “listlessly” musing on “Poetry and geometric Truth”, the narrator falls asleep and sees “before him an Arabian waste” (V, 71) and the figure of the Arab, mounted “Upon a dromedary” and bearing a lance “and underneath one arm / A Stone, and, in the opposite hand, a Shell” (V, 76-79). These latter objects, the dreamer is told, are books: the stone “Euclid’s Elements”, and the shell “something of more worth” – a visionary text which, when held to the dreamer’s ear, transmits “an Ode […] which foretold / Destruction to the Children of the Earth / By deluge now at hand” (V, 88-99). The desert wanderer – who, we are told, is and is not Quixote – then tells the dreamer that he intended “to bury those two Books” (V, 103), in order to protect them from “the waters of the deep / Gathering upon us” (V, 130-131).
20How tempting it is to read into this figure a singular horseman of the climate apocalypse! It may in fact be that an actual historical person, one who happened to have much to say about the human relationship to the natural world and our apocalyptic fate, hovers behind Wordsworth’s desert dream rambler. Poet Kelly Grovier argues that the “prototype” of the figure in question is none other than John “Walking” Stewart, eccentric philosopher and famed long-distance pedestrian wanderer of the Romantic era, whom Wordsworth met in revolutionary Paris and who, according to Thomas De Quincey, Wordsworth thought “‘the most eloquent man’ on the subject of nature” the poet ever met.38 If a person is the sum of their tracks and the total inscription of their movements, Stewart’s would fill multiple hefty volumes – he covered most of the world’s continents on foot over the course of several decades, including Arabian and African deserts (he spoke Arabic as well). In the books he did write, such as The Apocalypse of Nature (1790), Stewart expounded his materialist philosophy and called upon his readers to bury his books in order to preserve them from a looming “universal empire of revolutionary police terror” that would “bestialize the human species and desolate the earth”.39 It is this combination of book burying and apocalyptic warning that leads Grovier to link Stewart to the Prelude dream sequence. The image of the wanderer adrift in apocalyptic deserts, warning of deluge, was as appealing to Wordsworth in his Napoleonic era of endless wars as it is to us on the cusp of ecological collapse.
21Stewart’s philosophy, which Grovier, Bate, and others see as foundational to Wordsworth’s own, is one in which the human and natural worlds form an inseparable tangle. Grovier summarises the key point: “[…] every material body whether sentient or inert, active or passive, living or dead participates in a process of continual material interchange with every other body”.40 Bate, for his part, directs us to Stewart’s privileging of motion: “MOTION”, Stewart writes, “is the force or soul of matter, and cause of all action”, and “self”, the human element, “pervades all Nature in its revolutions”.41 “Kindred” is the word Wordsworth often uses in The Prelude to describe the human / non-human relationship; “I saw them feel”, he writes of “every natural form, rock, fruit or flower”, “Or linked them to some feeling” (III, 124-127). The state the poet finds himself in here is one of being “wakeful, even, as waters are / To the sky’s motion” (III, 135-136) – and this liquid and mobile sensibility is to be found in Stewart as well:
The mode of being called man can have no positive or absolute identity; it resembles the river whose mode of existence is the form of its channel. The flux of water in the river, like the flux of matter in the body, can have no identity or sameness, but is incessantly on the movement, caused by evacuation and repletion.42
22The human and the natural worlds cannot be disentangled – and their entanglement involves their co-mobility: to bring this into the contemporary moment, nature is in motion (air and ocean currents, glaciers, continental drift, all migratory species, all species fluid in their relations to oscillating local climates) – and the human being, as is the case for most species, is necessarily in motion through it, forming what French gardener Gilles Clément has called “the planetary garden”, “where all of life together, including humanity, interacts without borders”.43 “Life”, Tim Ingold insists, “will not be contained, but rather threads its way through the world along the myriad lines of its relations”.44
23What becomes clear in the Anthropocene is that the planetary commons is currently being enclosed and the lines of all our relations cut. The Anthropocene is the effect of biospheric disentanglement. It is the result of the scaling up of enclosure – of the regime of private property made absolute. On the Tar Sands Healing Walk, with Wordsworth’s own wending together of mobility and apocalypse in mind, it was difficult not to see ourselves as madly beating the bounds of our own destruction – a desert where no desert belonged. And the sign in the desert, capturing this madness, reads: private property. This is the logic of property rights taken to their full extent: the right to property is also jus abutendi, the right to destroy. If everything is property, everything can be destroyed.
24What we think is fixed is actually in motion. Climate change is a disaster, but the excess mobility it triggers is actually fairly normal – standard biogeographical procedure (when the climate changes, life gets moving). The second-order crime of the orchestrators of geophysical capitalism is to double down, following their wrecking of the climate with the rigidifying of national borders – as though the intention all along was that no one gets out alive.
25I will end by introducing another desert-crosser, Arabic-speaker and long-distance walker – one who in fact got himself out alive. He began his journey digging his way out of an underground Eritrean prison; crossing a mountain range at night, pursued by his captors and guided by the stars, he made his way across the border. Later, he moved on again, all of this largely afoot – crossing the Sahara Desert to Libya, where he was imprisoned again. Then the Mediterranean, on a crowded and sinking boat. Then detention in Italy, then crossing Europe on foot, to Calais, to the Jungle, and then at last, after – by his count – twenty-six attempts, he crosses to the UK, having successfully leapt onto a moving train. Then detention once again. Only this walker does not bring news of the apocalypse – he brings hope and optimism and a desire to help others similarly afoot in these times of excess displacement. He has become a dear friend, and I think of him as the herald of a new commons, a new claim on a new common right – call it common of movement, common of refuge –, it is a form of the commons we have yet to build, but on which our very survival may depend. A common counter to the privacy and privations of the Anthropocene – one Wordsworth, in his more mobile moments, might have been able to recognise and welcome as well.
Bibliographie
Bate J. (2020), Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World, New Haven, Yale University Press.
Bollier D. (2014), Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons, Gabriola Island, New Society Publishers.
Clare J. (2003), “I Am”: The Selected Poetry of John Clare, J. Bate (ed.), New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Clément G. ([2002] 2011), “In Praise of Vagabonds”, J. Skinner (trans.), Qui Parle, vol. 19, no. 2, p. 275-297.
Collis S. (2016), Once in Blockadia, Vancouver, Talonbooks.
Grovier K. (2007), “Dream Walker: A Wordsworth Mystery Solved”, Romanticism, vol. 13, no. 2, p. 156-163.
Hayes N. (2020), The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines That Divide Us, London, Bloomsbury Publishing.
Herd D., Pincus A. (eds.) (2016), Refugee Tales, Manchester, Comma Press, vol. 1.
Ingold T. ([2007] 2016), Lines: A Brief History, New York, Routledge.
Jarvis R. (1997), Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel, Basingstoke, Macmillan.
Linebaugh P. (2014), Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance, Oakland, PM Press.
Neeson J. M. (1993), Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
O’Rourke K. (2013), Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers, Cambridge, The MIT Press, 2013.
Wall D. (2014), The Commons in History: Culture, Conflict, and Ecology, Cambridge, The MIT Press.
Wordsworth W. (1984a), Letters of William Wordsworth: A New Selection, A. G. Hill (ed.), Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Wordsworth W. (1984b), William Wordsworth: The Major Works, S. Gill (ed.), Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Notes de bas de page
1From “Reading Wordsworth in the Tar Sands”, in Collis 2016, 70.
2The walk, which ran for five consecutive years, 2010-2014, was organised and hosted by the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, Fort McMurray First Nation, Chipewyan Prairie First Nation, Fort McKay First Nation and the Metis Nation. These communities have been heavily, and negatively, impacted by the development of the Tar Sands.
3Ingold [2017] 2016, xv.
4Ibid., 3.
5Ibid., 5.
6Ibid., 82.
7W. Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805 version), Book I, l. 477-482, in Wordsworth 1984b, 375-590. Unless otherwise noted, subsequent references to this version of the poem will be cited parenthetically.
8From the 1850 version of The Prelude (Book XIII, l. 144-150), quoted in Bate 2020, 22-23.
9Bate 2020, 23.
10W. Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey”, l. 101-102, in Wordsworth 1984b, 134.
11Bate 2020, 29.
12Linebaugh 2014, 25.
13Clare 2003, 36-37.
14Bollier 2014, 29.
15Wall 2014, 69.
16W. Wordsworth, “The Discharged Soldier”, l. 2, 100, 150, in Wordsworth 1984b, 45-49.
17Bate 2020, 104 (emphasis mine).
18Herd & Pincus 2016, vi.
19Quoted in O’Rourke 2013, 19.
20Hayes 2020, 66.
21Ibid., 250.
22Ibid., 239.
23Ibid., 80.
24Wordsworth 1984a, 40 (emphasis mine).
25Ibid., 64 (emphasis mine).
26Hayes 2020, 36.
27Bate 2020, 20.
28Jarvis 1997, 109. Jarvis also characterises this as “the dialectical relation between mobility and emplacement” (ibid., 37).
29W. Wordsworth, “Home at Grasmere”, l. 249, in Wordsworth 1984b, 174-199.
30Ibid., l. 129.
31Ibid., l. 168.
32Ibid., l. 466-468.
33Ibid., l. 897-898.
34Ibid., l. 83-91 (emphasis mine).
35Jarvis 1997, 113.
36Neeson 1993, 3.
37In the 1805 Prelude the dream is attributed to “a friend”, while in the 1850 version the narrative is rendered in the first person.
38Quoted in Grovier 2007, 157.
39Quoted in Bate 2020, 117.
40Grovier 2007, 159.
41Quoted in Bate 2020, 118.
42Quoted in Grovier 2007, 159.
43See Clément [2002] 2011, 281. Clément refers to mobile plants as “vagabonds”, and the abandoned urban zones those plants take root in as “undocumented” spaces, so weaving the language of human displacement throughout his understanding of plant mobility.
44Ingold [2007] 2016, 106.
Auteur
-
Stephen Collis
Simon Fraser University
Stephen Collis is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Commons (2008), the BC Book Prize winning On the Material (2010), Once in Blockadia (2016), Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten (2018), and A History of the Theories of Rain (2021) – all published by Talonbooks. In 2015 he was awarded the Nora and Ted Sterling Prize in Support of Controversy, and in 2019 he was the recipient of the Latner Writers’ Trust of Canada Poetry Prize. He lives near Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Creative Commons - Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International - CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
Les voyages de Gulliver
Mondes lointains ou mondes proches
François Boulaire et Daniel Carey (dir.)
2002
Le Tigre celtique en question
L'Irlande contemporaine : économie, État, société
Catherine Maignant (dir.)
2007
Le processus de création chez les écrivains irlandais contemporains
Jacqueline Genet et Elizabeth Hellegouarc’h (dir.)
1994