“The tiny features below, taken together with the gentle mass of Montblanc towering above them, the Vanoise glacier almost invisible in the shimmering distance, and the Alpine panorama that occupied half the horizon, had for the first time in her life awoken in her a sense of the contrarities that are in our longings.” — W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants
In college I spent a year on the top floor of a brick building looking at aerial images of Vermont in winter, scanning white snow field and pasture for the dark mass of moose. We also reviewed hundreds of hi-resolution images of the cursive salt marsh on Massachusetts’s Plum Island, pictured above. I was supposed to be learning about LIDAR, GIS, and determining whether or not I would be pursuing a path in computer-assisted image analysis and manipulation. For a time, there was something appealing about this path to me, that looking closely at images and developing a skill to interpret the fine details I was seeing as meaningful information, that I could actually read what I saw.
I’m still charmed by this notion, even though I no longer really believe it to be true. Those images were beautiful but told me very little. These days I tend to think that such aerial imagery obscures more than it reveals. I get especially wound up about this when viewing footage from a nature documentary or any B-roll from above showing a flock of migrating birds or wild horses “running free.” These shots are always set to inspiring music, the original audio of loud whirring the drone blades deleted, despite the fact that it’s the sound and eerie presence of said drone which startles the animals into movement, which is fleeing not free-ing, but a single letter makes little difference in the deathly logic of vision.
Recently I read two books, Silverfish by Rone Shavers, and Elizabeth/The Story of the Drone by Louise Akers, in close succession. One is a slim science fiction novel, and the other is a full length poetry collection, but both share a lot of similarities: drones referred to as angels, taking on the names of women and possibly even their consciousness and memories. Shavers’s drones are tools of war, while Akers’s are not quite so defined, but the language and association of war is still there. I’d argue it’s actually impossible for drones to be separated from war in visual or literary imagery, given the drone’s evolution from military operations to the open market, and thankfully neither of these books try to avoid this connotation. But I did find interesting their attempts at getting underneath this top-down visual imposition of the drone and its hunger for death, their willingness to go inside of a machine built expressly for killing and viewing from the best angle at which one might kill and ask just how different is this vantage point from the all-knowing third person perspective of many a narrative.
Shavers puts it succinctly in the epilogue to his novel in which the function of the technologically advanced society’s drones, which they call “Angels,” are described in great detail:
“[F]or every action or incident she was directly involved in, Angel-R produced a narrative, a counter-narrative, and what we’ve termed an ‘alternarrative’: an additional log that was confined to her subconscious but could be shared among other Angels through the web. This quickly became known as Lingua Angelica: the language of a doubled, double consciousness. The result is that the Angels were capable of examining the world from multiple perspectives, telling a story in multiple ways at once, and in this capacity they surpassed their contemporary human counterparts.”
These two books ask, in very different ways: is it not possible that from their high-up vantage point that drones might collect enough information to determine a new course of action? One which doesn’t use altitude for the tactical advantage, but for understanding how to feel from “multiple ways at once,” as Shavers puts it in his clever squaring of DuBois’s double-consciousness. An all-seeing drone is more than a little like a god or an angel, originally conceived to explain terror and devastation, to give it meaning, and then later on bestowed with benevolence when they couldn’t bear the suffering in their own name any longer. Who are these new intermediaries between us and the skies, and are they here for a long time or will they hasten our mutual destruction? And just how implicated is the project of literature, with its desire to see and describe everything, in this evolution of perspective into war?
I think both Shavers and Akers answer that the top-down mode of perspective is at least partially at fault, and the stories they tell fracture and kaleidoscope (if I can make that into a verb) in order to get around this formally. Here is Akers, thinking this through in one of her lovely moments of bringing the theory behind her writing into the poetry itself:
drone orientation is vertical=heterosexual
ask what is the relationship between our contemporary means of
distributing death, and the aesthetic forms by which that death is
transmitted, recoded, mediated?ask why some things are written in the passive voice.
say “oh my god” in the passive voice.
it begins with the disambiguation of the word ‘vector,’
with the marxist understanding of time as a vector; the
inauguration of the present in recorded time; the disassembling of
progenitors; the disassembling of futurity along with antecedent.god is the antecedent of drones. easy.
This is only a small targeted sampling of books using drones in their structural DNA, and not just as a plot device. There are others, like Tommy Orange’s There There, which has a scene involving a drone that encapsulates the narrative motion of that book, which I’ve written about before. And I’m sure there are others I don’t know about (let me know?).
I return to that deleted audio from drone footage used in film, the deafening volume of it if we layered each deleted track on top of one another and how the ability to separate content into different ‘channels’—audio and visual and textual—shows us how beauty and fear aren’t just layered over top one another. They are intricately intertwined.
Upcoming/News/Still Don’t Have a Cute Name for This Section
Stories: My short story “Trapunto” was published last week in Joyland Magazine. The title is the Italian word for a quilting technique in which the back of the quilt is sliced open and additional stuffing is added to provide more dimension on the front—I’m on a material kick with my titles lately.
Classes: Container Work, my small group writing workshops with an emphasis on self-awareness and publishing, starts next week! Session 2 on Thursdays has one spot left, and there are spaces open in Session 1 on Monday evenings if that’s your jam. These are designed to build a supportive community of writers over time who want to engage deeply in both the creation and distribution of their work. This includes Zoom conversations with editors, authors and others to talk about the above, and all Container Work participants are invited, past and present, even if their session has ended. Most recently we were visited by Editor & Storyteller Briana Gwin of Milkweed Books. In other words, reach out/sign up if you’re interested in joining us!
And if you’re local to the Portland area but like your writing workshops in-person, then check out my upcoming 5-week workshop at the Independent Publishing Resource Center, “PUBLISHING TRANS STORIES.” The title, I hope, is self explanatory, but more info at the link if you’re interested. Sliding scale! Starts Feb 19.
Residencies: This past weekend I spent as a guest at the Sitka Center for Art & Ecology on their campus on the Oregon coast. The ocean was glorious, the rainforest deep and dark, and drinking coffee with a herd of elk during a writing session can’t be beat. The deadline to apply for the next cycle of residencies is April 15. Thank you, Sitka, for having me!