What is the Necropastoral? by Joyelle McSweeney
▻https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2014/04/what-is-the-necropastoral
The Necropastoral is a political-aesthetic zone in which the fact of mankind’s depredations cannot be separated from an experience of “nature” which is poisoned, mutated, aberrant, spectacular, full of ill effects and affects. The Necropastoral is a non-rational zone, anachronistic, it often looks backwards and does not subscribe to Cartesian coordinates or Enlightenment notions of rationality and linearity, cause and effect. It does not subscribe to humanism but is interested in non-human modalities, like those of bugs, viruses, weeds and mold. Marosa di Giorgio: “Esa loca azucena nos va a asesinar.” The definitive processes of the Necropastoral are decay, vagueness, interembodiment, fluidity, seepage, inflammation, supersaturation. The Necropastoral is literally subterannean, Hadean, Arcadian in the sense that Death lives there. The Necropastoral is not an “alternative” version of reality but it is a place where the farcical and outrageous horrors of Anthopocenic “life” are made visible as Death.