The Crisis of the Now

An immersion in the everyday increases to the degree to which history shrinks, whether from the direction of the past or the future. This history may be that of an individual life or the vaster expanses of collective endeavor. Each new economy and set of technologies is accompanied by its own notion of history, and there’s no doubt that contemporary hyper-capitalism has collapsed history into an apocalyptic present of economic precarity and impending planet-wide environmental destruction. It is not a coincidence that a more widespread awareness of climate change and a renewed interest in socialism have arisen together, especially for the younger generations for whom the future feels foreclosed. Yet capitalism’s attempt to reach into every aspect of human existence is a sign less of its robustness than its desperation, looking to squeeze a profit from anything and everything. Past and future become fodder and byproducts for this process.

Never before have humans been so immersed in the everyday, and never have they been less attuned to it. What constantly streams through the screens of computers and electronic devices is heavily mediated and manipulated, usually in collaboration with their users, whose uncompensated participation is then extracted for profit. It is a massive, global-wide mobilization of free labor, which is doubly exploited in that this unpaid army is constantly being driven toward making a purchase. The ultimate goal for these technologies, which are of course owned by the largest corporations in the world, is neither the accumulation of data nor the prediction of consumer choices, but the actual modification of behavior and physical movement. It is one reason that smartphones continue to track their users and forward this information to potential advertisers, even when a device’s location feature is turned off. Controlling bodies has always been crucial to social control, which is why change never really happens until people take to the streets. Digital technologies have been helpful for this as well.

Brenda Hillman’s poetry book Extra Hidden Life, among the Days is filled with references to her iPhone, and includes numerous small, color photographs she took with it. It also contains two elegies, two odes, a daybook consisting of twenty-four journal poems, and individual poems both lyrical and political. As its title signals, it is a book that seeks to reclaim—or redirect—attention to the everyday and the ordinary, while locating them within larger histories (of political resistance) and bioregions (the American Southwest and Northern California). Lichen, the interdependent, multispecies organism that will most likely outlast human civilization and yet is so ignorable, features prominently: “Anything so radical & ordinary stands for something.” Central, too, are death and loss, which are sewn into the everyday, even if daily life is structured to cloak them. In the way that it leaks meaning, poetry can never not be at least partly about loss.

Social control aims to make the everyday ordinary—to naturalize it. In North America, the everyday has always dovetailed nicely with the myth of the individual. Yet the ordinary can be obdurate, and the everyday is the first stage of agency. The ordinary can slip out of the everyday to whatever degree an object can slip out of human time. The ordinary is close to the everyday, without being synonymous with it. One of the appeals of the everyday, no matter what one’s critical or political approach, is its messiness. This messiness can also be a misbehaving, and Hillman’s poems are frequently disruptive and irruptive, even when in Extra Hidden Life, among the Days she employs conventional forms (ode, elegy, etc.). Her photographs frequently interrupt the text. Or sometimes the environment speaks in languages that necessarily remain inscrutable. For instance, Hillman compares writing to the carvings made by beetles in wood, even as these marks are impossible to decipher.

For more than twenty years, Hillman’s poetry has tracked the relation of humans to ecology. Extra Hidden...