(ESSAY) ‘Apocalyptics: Via by Claire DeVoogd & A Feeling Called Heaven by Joey Yearous-Algozin’ by Aiden Farrell

In this essay, Aiden Farrell explores two approaches to apocalypse in the work of Claire DeVoogd and Joey Yearous-Algozin. Through close reading and poethical attention, Farrell analyses conceptualisations of annihilation, death and aporia as they occur as temporal, spiritual and metaphysical events.

The intimacy and the immediacy with which Claire DeVoogd and Joey Yearous-Algozin speculate on annihilation in their respective books, Via (2023) and A Feeling Called Heaven (2021), introduce the conviction that apocalypse is not speculative but present, at hand, nor can we continue conceiving of it as otherwise. Neither of these poetics prescribe. Neither moralise the nature of apocalypse nor the nature of our relationship to its coming to pass. To do so would be to continue to speculate. There’s an acknowledgment of the human’s role but in lieu of the nihilistic stance that it is a human responsibility and within our power to ‘save the planet’, the human is decentred—a participant rather than martyr, victim, or saviour of cataclysm. The human subject takes part in ecological crisis, ecological crisis takes part in apocalypse, but ecological crisis isn’t reducible to saviour narratives, and apocalypse is not reducible to anything. Via and A Feeling Called Heaven engage the paradox of conceiving of absence from positions limited to presence.

From both texts, it’s clear that, as we speculate, we lose time to appreciate that we’re dying, to experience the small ideals we’re capable of realizing, to notice that what’s happening is truly inconceivable. Even or those of us with the luxury of time, we’ve been unable to pause, acknowledge, and accept that apocalypse is occurring and has been for some time. We lose time to consider, too, that this inconceivable dying isn’t necessarily the loss we think it is. Believing that it is entirely a loss bespeaks a culture whose devout faith in fear can only bring it to the place of despair, violence, and incoherence where it finds itself. It’s a change, no doubt, but the loss is proportional to what we can accept of our situation while we’re in these bodies. It’s proportional, too, to what we imagine or pretend we possess. The more we resist the reality of our existence, the graver the loss.

Our loss isn’t proportional to whether change will occur, but to our acceptance that change will absolutely occur, that apocalypse isn’t about us even if it happens to be of us. We assume loss so long as we refuse to abandon the narrative that we won’t die. Or, we collectively adapt the belief in death as a ‘dead end’ into death as another threshold—lack as opportunity instead of irredeemable poverty. It’s less bleak when we don’t relate the present to the future as we would a means to an end—consciously engaging in the present as both means and ends such that there are no ends, just means, as though there’s nothing to hedge our bets on, as though we inherently have everything we need despite our inability to identify what that everything is.

Hypothetically, were death to consist of this inability to identify, this powerlessness over our environment, and were we unable to interrupt the course of our current apocalypse(s), wouldn’t we already be inside of death? If so, wouldn’t it be more like living than the original hypothesis? This would mean that apocalypse is always everywhere, but also that fantasy and speculation filter our engagement with the ecosystem.

A Feeling Called Heaven advocates for a practice of faith. ‘Faith’, here, is simply the principle of trust that leads us to take certain actions, often new actions, that will effect uncertain results, often new results, despite their uncertainty. It’s at least rare for us to readily sit and be told gently that

                        this patience is really all that’s necessary

                        not saying how the world could be better

                        it can’t be better

                        a better world isn’t possible

                        but patience is possible

                        …

                        or a feeling called heaven

                        that speaks to itself

                        of nothing but a final annihilation

                        that arrives quietly

                        though it remains perhaps forever in the distance… (Yearous-Algozin 4)

The last line implies that ‘final annihilation’ is a red herring. Speaking of ‘final annihilation’ removes it from immanence to the imaginal world where it ‘remains perhaps forever in the distance’, a place of speculation. All the while, beneath our feet, above our heads, in water and light, annihilation is slowly occurring on time frames we can’t perceive. The apocalypse is happening right now.

Both A Feeling Called Heaven and Via depend on language and rhetoric, the material of the poem, as their hinge, swinging us between at least two realities, two means of reading the books and the world. Yearous-Algozin and DeVoogd are aware of their limited means of representing apocalypse, especially when said means are language, rhetoric, and narrative. Apocalypse’s terror is its inconceivability: it is extra-human and therefore unknown. These worlds are worlds of change—passage between two modes of being-in-relation—not worlds of finality.

A Feeling Called Heaven straddles the boundary between sincerity and artifice, or, to use another perhaps false dichotomy, authenticity and sarcasm, so much so that after a while the two become the same thing. When I read, I feel asked to hold both poles at once. On one side, the vocabulary and tonality of guided meditation is so emphasised as to be a caricature. But this gentle, almost contrived voice asks us to be calm as it describes a purported end of our species, along with the occasional violent image of ‘a video of lions and hyenas / fighting over the carcass of a wildebeest / or antelope / or some other dead animal’ (Yearous-Algozin 54). The concurrence of calmness and violence becomes that threshold between two realities: sincerity and artifice, begging that the extent to which apocalypse consists exclusively of preconception or flesh be questioned. Apocalypse consists of that threshold.

‘Threshold’ is an important word for Via. From its title, we know that Via is going to consider different ‘ways’: roads, methods, doors, portholes, transitions, or even styles, stratagems, workings-through, changes where and when and with what, births, berths. Thresholds.

The title of Via’s opening poem, Siste Viator, Latin for ‘Stop, Traveler’, which Google says was a common inscription on Roman roadside tombs, is a lightly veiled, immediate address to the reader, referred to as a ‘traveler’, drawing attention to itself as a point specifically representing both death and a point on a path: a place where that threshold has been crossed. The book begins in the context not of death but of the road to and from death. The title asserts the poem itself as a threshold.

Yearous-Algozin doesn’t use the word ‘traveler’, but a number of moments characterise the reader as a kind of traveler, as well as the poem as a kind of ‘monument’:

                        there’s nothing to be done now

                        besides wait

                        building these little monuments to ourselves

                        …

                        but we know that there’s nowhere left for us to go

                        that we’ve already arrived where we were headed—

                        this peripheral and inconsequential space

                        we’ve found

                        together… (Yearous-Algozin 18)

and also, on pages 53 and 54: ‘…I want you to remember that all you are doing / is preparation for this journey ahead…’.

Notice the bit about the ‘peripheral and inconsequential space’ that has been arrived at collectively. The simultaneous contrast and confluence of here and there is present—there being speculation and here being material, implying that this is one place on a continuum, one threshold on an indefinite sequence of the same.

DeVoogd doesn’t waste a breath in Siste Viator: ‘Today shaking wakes me at four, dream / I take you to my hometown…’ (DeVoogd 9). We awaken into an at once opaque and transparent state of in-betweenness—are we waking or dreaming? It’s opaque because we don’t know and transparent because both sides are visible. We enter the text through its own doorway, unable to determine whether what’s happening is real, speculative, or inside an unconscious expression, unable to determine if even the speaker knows. Apocalypse could also be both and neither—waiting inside a doorway and looking for the doorway and only finding a doorway.

This is only if looking for the doorway is something one cares to do, though, if the idea of ‘finding it all out’ persists as a goal. The speaker in this stanza doesn’t make it evident whether understanding their situation is of particular value to them. Moving through a space doesn’t require understanding. It only requires moving through it, an action, which is what makes it a threshold in the first place: its transgression.

Later in the stanza, the speaker expresses this lack of understanding, offering a dispassionate apology:

                                                            Sorry I didn’t

                        Realize it was like this. I don’t know how to

                        Lead you to the water’s edge my friends go across

                        To die in. Sorry. The English is bad. (DeVoogd 9)

I’m interested in the double apology. The fact that this repetition happens at the opening of not just the poem but the whole book is a little unorthodox as it’s essentially a challenge to the authority of the speaker—another way of communicating that this voyage is not about knowledge. DeVoogd reduces the register and the stakes feel lowered, despite the ‘traveler’ not yet understanding what the stakes are. We can’t become accustomed to these waters because we don’t know which waters they are. Like in A Feeling Called Heaven, there’s a lot to be said for the slippage between high and low registers. Such rhetorical shifting is a passing back and forth over the threshold between at least two ‘ways’ the texts present themselves to the reader: sincerity and artifice.

Each ‘sorry’ refers to something different. First, that the speaker ‘didn’t / realize it was like this’, and ‘[doesn’t] know how to / lead you to the water’s edge my friends go across / to die in’. Second, that ‘The English is bad’. The first identifies a passage from obscurity into realization. This is an instance of aporia, a narrative device that distinctly marks Greek tragedy. Aporia, insufficiently translated as impasse, is a lack of expedience, a loss of resources following a change of environment and perspective. Poria shares roots with the English words ‘porous’ and ‘port’, both of which are not so distant synonyms for ‘way’ or ‘opening’ or ‘permeable’, while a- is a prefix that functions in ancient Greek as a negation, the same way it does in today’s English: a-moral, a-theist, a-typical. Aporia is most often used to describe a sudden change of perspective after new information has become available, the response to which is often represented in Greek tragedy as terror, doom—when Oedipus discovers what he’s done, it’s so opposite to what he believed was the case that he’s forced to distrust his own logic, identity, and ultimately his own vision, what with the gouging out of his own eyes. His orientation within the world as he knows it is completely destroyed. To finish off this detour: this moment is an apocalypse for Oedipus, defined by psychic change, a new understanding, or lack thereof. This apocalypse is aporetic.

DeVoogd’s speaker admits that the current circumstance is not as they expected. They lack the resources to navigate ‘the water’s edge my friends go across / to die in’. It describes a flip into the unforeseen, an argument for the nature of apocalypse.

The fact that A Feeling Called Heaven consists entirely of a direct address to the reader, and that the speaker is a ‘guide’ of sorts, puts the reader in a similar position. Led through uncertain terrain, our preconceptions challenged at least in performance, it’s uncertain if we should consider it sincere. I still can’t tell with Yearous-Algozin’s speaker whether the guide’s position is truly one of authority, or if it just sounds that way. The latter would be sophistry, which would complement apocalypse’s perspectival polyphony. The ‘guide’ maintains ambivalence, whereas DeVoogd’s speaker suggests the certitude of incertitude, inevitability’s inevitability.

There’s an aspect of A Feeling Called Heaven that flirts with spectacle. The fact of not knowing either way seems to be the nature and maybe even the intent of spectacle. Where Yearous-Algozin curates uncertainty for the reader through an uncertain speaker, DeVoogd invites the reader into the speaker’s uncertainty. Do they end up being the same thing, different means of finding the same speculation, even if haphazardly?

The second sorry complicates the transition DeVoogd takes as a point of departure: ‘Sorry. The English is bad’. Because of the symmetry of the syntax between the two sorrys, my reading is that knowing ‘how to / lead you to the water’s edge’ and ‘The English is bad’ are intimately associated. Both described means of transition—first of motion, second of meaning. It’s ‘The English’, the poem’s literal medium, that’s unable to lead us to ‘the water’s edge my friends go across / to die in’. Language, the poem itself, and the materiality of the text can be seen as thresholds, the transgression of which I’d like to read as apocalypse. Rhetorical shifts identify the poem itself as a way, a ‘via’, that loosely divides the spaces of here and there, sincerity and artifice, reality and fiction.

DeVoogd turns the artifice of language into the road to aporia and takes it further in a later stanza:

                        This picture, proof. Pictures, bindings:

                        These constitute the truth. Why must there be

                        Something underneath this flower

                        In thought, there is not: the flower is soil, each root

                        A petal of it… (DeVoogd 10)

If pictures (representations) and bindings (linkages) ‘constitute the truth’, then ‘truth’ is both speculation and the paths that lead to and from it. Representations are speculative because they disembody their subjects. Spectral is a better word than speculative. The flower is only an emblem of something in thought. The emblem can only be the flower’s specter, it can’t be the flower, though it’s very easy to confuse the two, possibly even dangerous. The flower is the aspects which give rise to it: its soil, its roots, each ‘a petal of it’, as opposed to the name it has been assigned. Again, it isn’t the sincere or artificial states that are addressed but the occurrence of aporetic realization, the subject’s passage as opposed to their arrival, of which lack is a symptom. Language consists of understudies, useful impostors of the world. Language, insofar as it mediates meaning, is spectral. I see in DeVoogd’s treatment that apocalypse is passage from the artifice of a once-believed truth into the truth of artifice, from lack of awareness to awareness of lack. The object of the poem, in both Via and A Feeling Called Heaven, is uncertain representation and, as such, one site of apocalypse.

I’m reminded of a moment in A Feeling Called Heaven that comes just after an excerpt referenced earlier. Yearous-Algozin reflects DeVoogd’s layering of reality, if a bit closer to what we might sooner associate with ‘spectacle’ in the 21st century:

                        then visualize a still image projected on a sheet

                        that hangs in front of the wall

                        moving slightly in the air conditioner’s breeze

                        a screencapped google image

                        of the sun reflecting off standing water

                        …

                        notice how it doesn’t glitch

                        but moves in unison with the sheet

                        and in doing so

                        becomes not unlike “nature”—

                        both act as immersive backdrops or non-mediums

                        like the human voice 

                        or my voice

                        speaking out loud to you now

                        describing or rather staging

                        a series of altars (Yearous-Algozin 54-55)

The passage contains the description of a representation. Actually, since the guide speaks directly to us in the imperative, it’s a representation of a description of a representation on an elongating chain. We are brought into a fabrication with more thresholds than first meet the eye, which then asks the traveler to enter this speculative state of envisioning nature. Notice how the focus isn’t the contents of the image but the means of its presentation, details like a projector, a sheet hanging in front of a wall, an air conditioner in the room, that the image doesn’t glitch, but moves on the sheet. We’re not talking about ‘the sun reflecting off standing water’. We’re talking about technology, much in the same way that DeVoogd speaks about language, which becomes newly insufficient at a certain point in Siste Viator. Specifically because of the medium of the projection, the artifice ‘becomes not unlike “nature”’, despite its not being any kind of nature at all, at least not in a conservative understanding of the word. The guide is not asking us to notice the sun, the standing water, or the reflection, but the artifice—the distance.

Then, the guide ironically equates the sincere and the artificial: ‘both act as immersive backdrops or non-mediums’. The sincere and the artificial blend, become indistinct. The traveler can’t know where they stand because representation skews reality until there is effectively no real—only gesture. The guide’s framing, rhetorical shifts, and direct address challenge any idea that apocalypse occurs as we expect or as any of the end-of-the-world movies we’ve made for ourselves. Those are just stories of material destruction. We’re limited to our view of the world and our position in it. That’s what’s destroyed here: our orientation within our own ontology—ontology itself a mere narrative we’ve fabricated—nulling the expectation that material behaves as we interpret it. On the contrary, we are it, and we can’t fully understand ourselves because we aren’t objective.

            The side altars at the end of this excerpt are uncannily in conversation with DeVoogd’s application of the poem as threshold, the concurrence of aporetic apocalypse, and the road that gets us there. ‘Altar’ is a word Yearous-Algozin uses for the poem as a medium. Another is ‘monument’, though ‘story’ is used most:

                        this end that unfurls

                        out before us is a story

                        poorly remembered and poorly told

                        cast into some inaccessible future

                        such that

                        all we have to say to each other

                        are these impoverished half-forgotten stories…’ (Yearous-Algozin 36-37)

Yearous-Algozin quite literally states that ‘this end’ that we’ve brought about is reducible to a story, at least in the mind of the ‘guide’. The excerpt even implies that the story is what destroys the world. The cliché of ‘the world as we know it’ has particular salience here because of course the story is not what literally destroys the literal world. World destruction does not mean the Earth exploding, or some other instance of annihilation porn. That’s the fear of loss talking, the opposite of the apocalyptics I see in Via and A Feeling Called Heaven. The story destroys our understanding of the world, the world as we know it, as we interpret it, and destroys our previous notions of it, introducing us to new information, a new space that might as well be called aporetic. Though, at the same time, the story seems to be a means of creation, as is consistent with the word ‘fabrication’. We both live and die by its double-edge. I desperately want to map creation and destruction onto the false-dualism of sincerity and artifice, but both convincingly occur to me as either sincerity or artifice and vice versa.

I’m intimidated by how rigorous, dense, and far reaching DeVoogd’s book is. It transcends time frames, investing in literary kinships from Dante to Marie de France. It’s difficult to tell if what’s interesting in these kinships is Marie de France’s work relative to DeVoogd’s, or the motion across such disparate periods by way of literature, introducing them as mutually indistinguishable, almost folding time. Echoes of New Narrative are pervasive, a temporal playfulness and intimacy that hearkens Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe. It might be a bit of an obvious comparison since Glück blurbed the book, but I could see Margery as an influence, particularly for the Marie de France portion. DeVoogd gets the balance of commotion and sweeping movements exactly right. It’s like being inside a Bosch painting—dimension collapses, though less torture.

Nonlinearity and fictional connections to true literary figures of the past, along with near constant motion from reality to artifice and back, gives the impression that apocalypse has always been happening, is happening right now, and will continue to happen at every juncture moving forward. Apocalypse becomes not a closed question of when, but an open question of how—not in the sense of how it will happen, but how do we recognise it, how do we approach this inevitable intimacy with the unknown without condemning it. Much like the metaphor of the road I mentioned before, every step could be a threshold into the next land. Via’s apocalyptics gives me this simultaneous sensation of abundance and absence.

From A Feeling Called Heaven, I gather a sense of timelessness from the guide’s performance of artifice, but in an opposite way to Via. The direct address creates an immediacy in which everything becomes sharply focused on the present. There are no references to anything in our history. The context is vastly abstracted. There are no markers of an actual time frame, like the 80s, for example. What happens is a sort of ultra-present somehow outside my present as reader, who’s holding this book, reading it in bed, in the park, at the beach. None of these attachments to place or time ground me. Yet from being held by this voice, it’s indiscriminate depiction of bodily sensation, the flux of mental images, even the breath, I am at once my body and the body of the person the guide guides. In one consideration, I’m the same body. In another, I’m infinitely halved.

Such a commitment to the present gives the impression that apocalypse is happening right now, as we speak, which ends up being the same thing as Via. Apocalypse is happening, has been happening, and will continue to happen at every moment. All those moments are now. What this short essay hopes to achieve is to view a small part of how these books undermine nature and future-focused conceptions of apocalypse and insert in their stead a new one: the person and the present. They are not exactly about an ultimate end of time, but a refocus toward the only non-speculative time that we have: now, which is also always ending.

This essay does not refer directly to the social, material, or economic trajectories of apocalypse or climate catastrophe not because it denies their salience or existence, but because Via and A Feeling Called Heaven address apocalypse as a falling apart of a narrativised reality. It is an aesthetic apocalypse, particularly the aesthetics of narrative—the ways in which language and narrative shape reality. On the other side of the narrative reality is reality without our impositions, both material and conceptual. We reveal to ourselves how narrative is used to change reality, the natural world, into something more aligned with expansionist, colonial, and capitalist goals for it—that is, to seek dominion materially and conceptually—condemnable goals responsible for social, material, and economic apocalypse. On the flip side, other narratives are also possible, as well as no narrative at all. Which of these it is and which it isn’t depends greatly on the relationship we develop to the medium, the material, that which filters narrative.

To use narrative qualities to fail narrative, then, is a poetic exercise wholly invested in the relationship between material and concept, as well as an exercise that puts the reader and writer in the face of reality without our narratives. This escapes explanation because explanation is narrative. The process of such a facing is a revelation, an aporia, an apocalypse.