De Paul Eco Conference Liveblog 5

SKYSCRAPER

Carl Sandburg

BY day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and
has a soul.
Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into
it and they mingle among its twenty floors and are
poured out again back to the streets, prairies and
valleys.
It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in and
out all day that give the building a soul of dreams
and thoughts and memories.
(Dumped in the sea or fixed in a desert, who would care
for the building or speak its name or ask a policeman
the way to it?)

Elevators slide on their cables and tubes catch letters and
parcels and iron pipes carry gas and water in and
sewage out.
Wires climb with secrets, carry light and carry words,
and tell terrors and profits and loves--curses of men
grappling plans of business and questions of women
in plots of love.

Hour by hour the caissons reach down to the rock of the
earth and hold the building to a turning planet.
Hour by hour the girders play as ribs and reach out and
hold together the stone walls and floors.

Hour by hour the hand of the mason and the stuff of the
mortar clinch the pieces and parts to the shape an
architect voted.
Hour by hour the sun and the rain, the air and the rust,
and the press of time running into centuries, play
on the building inside and out and use it.

Men who sunk the pilings and mixed the mortar are laid
in graves where the wind whistles a wild song
without words
And so are men who strung the wires and fixed the pipes
and tubes and those who saw it rise floor by floor.
Souls of them all are here, even the hod carrier begging
at back doors hundreds of miles away and the brick-
layer who went to state's prison for shooting another
man while drunk.
(One man fell from a girder and broke his neck at the
end of a straight plunge--he is here--his soul has
gone into the stones of the building.)

On the office doors from tier to tier--hundreds of names
and each name standing for a face written across
with a dead child, a passionate lover, a driving
ambition for a million dollar business or a lobster's
ease of life.

Behind the signs on the doors they work and the walls
tell nothing from room to room.
Ten-dollar-a-week stenographers take letters from
corporation officers, lawyers, efficiency engineers,
and tons of letters go bundled from the building to all
ends of the earth.
Smiles and tears of each office girl go into the soul of
the building just the same as the master-men who
rule the building.

Hands of clocks turn to noon hours and each floor
empties its men and women who go away and eat
and come back to work.
Toward the end of the afternoon all work slackens and
all jobs go slower as the people feel day closing on
them.
One by one the floors are emptied. . . The uniformed
elevator men are gone. Pails clang. . . Scrubbers
work, talking in foreign tongues. Broom and water
and mop clean from the floors human dust and spit,
and machine grime of the day.
Spelled in electric fire on the roof are words telling
miles of houses and people where to buy a thing for
money. The sign speaks till midnight.

Darkness on the hallways. Voices echo. Silence
holds. . . Watchmen walk slow from floor to floor
and try the doors. Revolvers bulge from their hip
pockets. . . Steel safes stand in corners. Money
is stacked in them.
A young watchman leans at a window and sees the lights
of barges butting their way across a harbor, nets of
red and white lanterns in a railroad yard, and a span
of glooms splashed with lines of white and blurs of
crosses and clusters over the sleeping city.
By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars
and has a soul.

Julia Barrett Daniel, Loyola University, “Is a Skyscraper an Ecosystem? Thoughts from Carl Sandburg,”

American environmental crisis as a crisis of imagination
Sandburg on skyscraper as ecological
rise of urbanism. anxieties about lack of green space in American cities. where was the average citizen to find nature amidst the crowdedness?
so nature must be incorporated within city limits
Olmstead park space; Burnham’s plan for Chicago
others reimagined what nature could mean within a city environment

skyscapers as creature as well as habitat for Sandburg
making a wilderness ethos of the past present
playfulness of material exchange
“the smiles and the tears of each office girl go into the soul of the building”
interaction of lights and atmosphere
night as dark gift from skyscraper; sky and structure create one another [me: this seems like a correlationist kind of a poetics to me]

skyscrapers arising from the stuff of the wilderness they displace
junk as raw materials of the surrounding area...
“the junk stood up into skyscrapers” created out of clay, Adamic
[me: I’m not convinced this isn’t just sheer modernism in the most anti-ecological way]

why do we subdivide into natural and unnatural

response by Don Deere, DePaul University
skyscraper as a process made and remade by its daily interaction by those who move around it and the sky illuminates it
process rather than product
the nature of the urban can use this tool
but is it relevant today
The People Yes: Sandburg gains some critical distance to his soulful animated skyscraper
having accounted for pyramids, temples, cathedrals; then wonders about the skyscrapers; he begins to speculate on the death of the monument to the new age
we have reached the “soft whispering” of which S. writes
have we indeed merely be supplanted by technocrats who suppress our whispers
an image of new urban nature
does Sandburg provide us with any tools?

Response: the ecological idyll isn’t what sandburg does, it’s always messy
I don’t know what we do with skyscrapers now
Sandburg’s vision not just true of a skyscraper: this dynamic view of space can be taken up again
do skyscrapers have to be capitalist monoliths

Liam: literary criticism and philosophy should marry and produce more children like Tim Morton!
Today is the 75th anniversary of the term ecosystem (Tansley)

Answer: I’ve come to this by fusing ecocriticism with materialist feminism
nature and wilderness keep sneaking in to my ides about ecology so I have to police them

Question: skyscraper as ambiguity and the question of gender

Answer: skyscraper is in drag in the poem, muddling male–female stereotypes
Adam and skyscraper made of dust; he’s playing with some gender boundaries for sure

Question: futurism and its historical weight
Don’s response: the aggression of futurism praising the machine; a speeding motorcycle is more beautiful than the victory of Samothrace
“Bolshevik superpoems”

Question: my house inhabits me as much as I inhabit it as much as I posit it as an object of critique; i’m profoundly responsible for it
are we truly alienated but if it weren’t for us they wouldn’t exist...

Answer: they also physically relate. my bathroom wall was full of mold and i got very sick. i was becoming a host for pieces of plaster and mold
once you go through the looking glass of thinking about these material interactions the weirder and more intimate and more muddled it becomes