World On Fire
Michael Brownstein
publisher: Open City Books, 2002
isbn: 1-890447-29-3
price: $14
Apocalyptic grandstanding, even after the turn into the new millennium and especially in the Crusader-like light of the "war on terror," will not go out of fashion soon, but it may never find a more passionate, lyrical, and moodily entertaining outlet than Brownstein in this eleven-chapter litany of pre-mortem griefs, post-modern anxieties and poetic calls to higher consciousness.
Recalling some of the urbanized Old Testament rhetoric of the Beat writers in their peak -- Ginsberg in "Kaddish," Corso in his "happy birthday of death" days -- but lacking their Dada whimsy or decadent posturing -- not to mention their innovations in form -- World on Fire struggles to reconnect a floundering humanity with the gaea, or "earth spirit," and to sever our inexplicable, but all too salient, pact with death as manifest in our wholesale pilfering of natural resources, our toxification everything from the atmosphere to the sperm cell, and our lack of diversification -- in mind and body -- through such phenomena as the reptilian mind-meld of global monoculture and the commercialization of genetic cloning.
Wavering between documentary (quotes from Chomsky, Shiva, and other renegade thinkers abound), an erotic love letter to an unnamed other who could be the gaea itself, violent stand-up tragedy in which the reader is confronted directly with her own indifference ("Your life's fish tank a Mobius strip vista of degraded landscapes projected on ever-larger TV screens." [89]), and an inexhaustible, volcanic vent ("Rage -- how can I control it?") that would traumatize any op-ed page, World is also incredibly readable, stopping no place for very long and yet honed in on one -- potentially grating, but sickly cathartic -- theme: how defeat social and political indifference when fear and self-loathing are the engines of the economy itself.
Brownstein's method is primarily through the negative charge of "look what's happening now" than with the positive of "look what we can do," though he occasionally hits this latter note, as when he salivates over the vulnerability of the oil industries to "hardly unproven or experimental" ethyl-alcohol fuel technologies, painting the "house of cards" image of their inevitable downfall.
World occasionally plays to oft-discredited tropes, such as that of the natural fitness of "primitive" peoples to the environment, even while later acknowledging -- as in the anecdote of Pego, the Huaorani warrior who killed women even as the population of females was dangerously low -- that these peoples were no wiser than the moderns.
World's Socratic moments never wend far into the speculative adversary's court, and a note of obsessiveness suggests the associative fluidity is more the by-product of insomnia than the fruits of Brownstein's labors since the 70s as the author of several collections of fiction and poetry.
Nonetheless, this is one of the first serious works of poetic literature to open itself up to all of the downsides of social progress during the nineties, and to cry out for a counterpunch -- to call for a negating, spontaneous consensus out of those who know and do nothing -- against the manipulations of humanity by the "empire" of today, the transnational corporation. This could be the little black book for responsible protests of decades to come.
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