Rally

​​Squandering ooze to squeezed / dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks / treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, / nature’s bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest / to her, her clearest-selvèd spark
Man, how fast his firedint, / his mark on mind is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned. O pity and indig / nation! Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, / death blots black out: nor mark
Is any of him at all so stark

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and the Comfort of the Resurrection (excerpt) - Gerard Manley Hopkins

Rally is the sister work to Relic, which was purpose-built for Scott Lawrie’s Confessions and spoke to the cyclic nature of human modes of social control. Hopkins’ poem also examines cycles, in this case, the dynamic chaos and flux of the natural world, in which humanity is at the apex and, following the apocalypse, will be redeemed.

Heraclitus, hero of the poem, recognised that everything is in a state of flux; he believed that despite an appearance of perpetuity and stability, everything is in constant motion and subject to battling forces and internal conflicts. Any apparent harmony conceals an underlying strife. Strife is essential, and for Heraclitus, fire is the element t​​hat embodies this (a theory much akin to what we now understand as the basic structure of energy transformation from potential to active). Capitalism, on the other hand, presents a static, infinite sterility that obstructs underlying instabilities.

Strife is what we’re all feeling, but striving is what we’re doing, striving to work our way through the unbounded challenges wrought by the minute (virus) and the gargantuan (global warming). Humans may pride ourselves on having reached the peak of evolution with our ever-developing technologies and our intricate evolutionary models - believing it is our complexities that make us special - but we are currently being vitiated by the natural world.

However, these are good days for bleak thoughts; our sense of stability is undermined as we are forced to consider our human ontology and address questions around the way we live and how we engage with our planet and one another whilst concurrently equating the absurdity of our responses to what we have constructed as the ‘natural’ order of things. Of course, every society perceives itself to be at a point of unique crisis. Yes, we feel we’re on the cusp of calamity - in fact, for many of us, it has just occurred in the form of the 2023 Auckland floods. Although playing with psychic discomfort and surrounded by the accoutrements of a doomed humanity, Rally offers a kernel of hope in her blank centre, harmony as a counterpoint to the catastrophic, like the still centre of a Heraclitean dancing flame. In Hopkins’ poem, the apocalypse comes to finally release us from the elements and find God. While Relic was about one individual’s struggle to escape an unjust system, Rally suggests that we may escape the system without completing this apocalyptic journey we’re hell-bent on.

— Fillary, Rally