On Cleanliness and Godliness
by Grace Sandall
Image from Naja Bertolt Jensen.
Too much water, too little are the two directions in which the climate-change pendulum swings. We know the time is nigh when it comes to righting the wrongs we have committed to the planet. Growing up, I was told the sea gives and takes away—as though this sense of karmic retribution is unfamiliar in the human realm. But the ebbs and flows of tides do not just shape our natural cycles, they map our modern social and economic metaphors, our human business of trading and exchange. They are our debts and repayments, off-shore saving accounts and IOUs; assets, frozen, dissolving, or liquified; currency itself.
A recent report by the UN declares we are entering “water bankruptcy.” The economic metaphor is familiar to us by now. We have, the report suggests, radically overspent in terms of oceanic resources: we have diminished our global savings account; we have irreparably damaged our credit score. This is not just ebbs and flows that the report speaks of. Beyond the floods and shrinkages on the horizontal plane, we know that plastic waste is being discovered in the Arctic, infiltrating our vertical world, deep in the northern seas. Scholars writing on the so-called “Blue Humanities” warn us that we have, beyond comprehension, plundered our depths. The UN report suggests we should move beyond the crisis paradigm because crisis suggests reversibility, and because we have crossed a point of no returns.
When I started writing about waste and its relationship to literature, I discovered the eco-gothic framework as something that spoke to non-linearity, existing on the axis of the deep and unimaginable. The sea has, most famously, been used as a metaphor for the subconscious, and so too does the eco-gothic suggest a framework for thinking about the things that resurface. Rachel Webb Jekanowski, writing in Energy Humanities, calls this “repressed returns in different material or spectral forms.” This approach to literature can, similar to psychoanalysis, reveal the hidden structural mechanisms that govern our narratives. It also embraces the murky, polluting materials, the literal by-products of modernity. Through the eco-gothic we glimpse the shadows cast from the spotless mind.
Ben Jonson, writing in the 17th century and like most writers of his time, saw the sea as this medium and message of modernity, facilitating commerce, trade, and the onset of British colonialism. In his poem “On the Famous Voyage,” it is this waste, the shadow of empire, that he documents. He spins a journey down the Thames as a mock-heroic scatalogical descent into an urban underworld. Filled with waste, the Thames is a “bankside creature wet,” filthy, sordid, and alive: mother nature’s sinister double. This was an age where the natural world saw the most radical reconception in economic usefulness, where the old system was mapped, defined, drained, enclosed upon and commodified. Rather than treating nature as benevolent, Jonson peers into the grotesque possibilities of unchecked expansion, where the straightforward journey forward is interrupted, repeatedly, by the horrors of the deep.
It is the gothic in general that puts us in this speculative mood. This is the what-if that encapsulates the improbable probabilities and imaginative limitations common in climate change discourse. What will the hypothetical future of our hypothetical children look like? What seasons might there be in 2050? What should we—can we—prepare for? If we treat waste as the underbelly of progress, it is a perfect metaphor for the gothic’s monstrous dimension, itself a representation of uncanny individualisation, the kind that multiplies, threatening to collapse in on itself, doomed to haunt.
Cats there lay divers had been flea’d and roasted, / And after mouldy grown, again were toasted, / Then selling not, a dish was ta’en to mince ’em, / But still, it seem’d, the rankness did convince ’em, / For here they were thrown in with th’ melted pewter / Yet drown’d they not . . .
In true Frankensteinian style, Jonson invokes the horrors of unwieldy offspring cursing their creators. The hybrid creatures he speaks of do not die or exist within human temporality, “they [have] five lives in future.” Cleanliness is next to godliness, and in this vein, Jonson leaves divinity as some half-remembered thing: “. . . methinks ’tis odd / That all this while I have forgot some god.”
This is probably because we tend to interpret climate change, or at least environmental uncertainty as it was better understood in Jonson’s time, in accordance with divine authority and thus as a stand-in signifier. There is nothing sounding more like a god’s wrath than floods, disaster, and the tomorrow and tomorrow of catastrophe. In our own times, this looks like political figures pointing fingers, conspiring against gaps in meteorological knowledge: Hugo Chavez is rumored to blame the US for the 2010 Haiti earthquake; Trump’s recent paring back of low emission policy was backed by Lee Zeldin, who speculates that the 2009 ruling is the “holy grail of climate change religion.” Where does fiction begin and end? Who is the author-god of the natural world? Out of sight in the realm of power, Luke Tyrl warns that “the fracturing of the consensus has been far more profound at what we’d call ‘elite level.’” Whoever they are, the gods are fighting.
The afterlives of waste, like our politicians, splutter toward a tomorrow indifferent to humanity. It is often hard to distinguish this strain of environmental thought from the narratives of climate doomerism, which encourages a feeling of paralysis in the present. In the early modern period, this looked like stagnation: older systems of ripening and rotting unable to occur in capitalist narratives. This has never been merely metaphorical. We know specific material conditions are required for decomposition, we know that most of our plastic cannot be reassimilated, broken down or reconfigured into some natural order. Jonson’s imaginary waters offer us the terrifying stretch of deep time, a gaping mouth of a long unknown. Our materiality will outlive us all.
It is easy to desire a fatalistic retreat from the physical world altogether, but this is where the eco-gothic returns, to distort such clean distinctions between mind and body, death and life. Here we embark on the necessary journeys interlinking relationships between the human and the more-than human world. We must consider the plurality of energies existing in a single space. Eventually, we might move beyond feelings of anxiety, fear, and anticipation. Beyond moving in a linear fashion forward, we deserve to spend time in the plundered depths, the planes through which consumption and extraction, pollution and sanitation merge, amid the violence and forgetting that often marks sea-stories, and sea-changes.
The prioritization of land has historically undermined oceanic spaces; we might call this settler colonialism, a strain of imperial logic; Wallace Stevens announces the “maker’s rage to order words of the sea.” Suspended, but not exactly floating, perhaps we can de-enshrine the shipwreck narrative altogether, do away with ideas of homecoming and assimilation. Western ideals of suffering and salvage do not provide concrete devices for implementing change in the wake of the Anthropocene, anyway. I would forget authority, gods, like Jonson does.
There are scholars, researchers, writers, artists, and activists recalibrating our literatures—not just poems and novels, but also our maps and reports—into sites of speculation between colonial ideologies and environmental justice. The abuse and exploitation of our terra has fractured distinctions between land and non-land altogether. Sarah Nuttall, in e-flux, writes on the uncanny “vanishing points” of postcolonial environments, such as the mining landscapes in Johannesburg, which become neither wet nor dry, but a place where “labor constantly disappears in a material and metaphorical terrain of solid and fluid, vertical and horizontal.” On November 24, 2024, fourteen men and boys surfaced from deep underground at Stilfontein, dripping wet after illegally mining for gold. The site was un-used and in a state of disrepair, but people were willing to risk their lives for the gold seams that might, or might not have remained. Authorities tried to cut off supplies being delivered to the miners: the operation was called “Close the Hole.” They resurfaced dripping wet, dehydrated; bleeding hands, bare feet.
“For here they were thrown in with th’ melted pewter, / Yet drowned they not.” In murky water, Jonson’s “melted pewter” refers to both the tin-metal alloy, and the kind of melting point that bodies of water become in cultural practices of profit-making. A common material of early modern crockery, pewter was often mixed with lead—with the capacity to pollute, fester, and exercise dangerous half-lives outside of consumer purpose.
Determining the point at which things become useless is a subjective exercise. Exactly what, or who, is deemed invaluable can come to seem like a divine act of systemic marginalisation. In the mesh of our environment, it is evident that object-hood is a fate inescapable for many. Rosalind Morris analyzes the mining landscapes: there is a ghostly structure left in the abandoned quarters, a “great strange creature that towers above Durban Deep, one of its legs missing.” She notes “a kind of scavenging that has taken over everything.”
We can note the humanness of these skeletal structures against a disavowal of bodies and ecosystems that mechanize the labor. There are man-made things which do not abide by the man-made logic of The End. A hole remains open; simultaneously spitting forth futures of waste and scarcity. These repressed, resurfacing, undying bodies belong as much to the unconscious as they do to the material world. Writing about the environment, either implicitly or explicitly, becomes a task of honoring the past, of remembering the dead, of conceptualizing what is no longer there and what cannot remain.
Part of literature now, beyond embracing the subterranean, taboo, illicit, and parasocial, is this duty we have to undermine the rigid structures that frame our current conceptions of justice, horror, and futurity. Writing through the lens of the eco-gothic also most radically suggests that all texts should be treated as sites of speculation. More than this, we require new foundations, literally. We have depleted the aquifers underground; countries are sinking. And so too does the eco-gothic attempt to be more than a rhetorical device: like water bankruptcy, like waste, the metaphors we live by provide us the distance we need from a subject, but they also act as a bridge, a means of translation. What can scavenging teach us about rootlessness and verticality as a new kind of order? Survival is uncertain, crises fade in and out of global importance, and we stop glancing to the heavens. The skies are empty, our waters full.
GRACE SANDALL writes from both London and Madrid. She is currently a journalist for The Borgen Project, where she writes on new technologies, businesses, and markets, and her other writings have appeared in The Good Press, and forthcoming in The Eco Review. She graduated in 2024 with an MA in Renaissance Literature from the University of Bristol. She writes towards some vague sense of object-oriented ontology, gesturing towards the non-human world.
