Just Get Yourself High: Join the BABEL Working Group

by EILEEN JOY

But when we sit together, close . . . we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an insubstantial territory.
--Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Myra Seaman and I are delighted to announce that the BABEL Working Group is launching today a brand-new website, which you can see here:

NEW WEBSITE: The BABEL Working Group

If you are not already a member of BABEL, why don't you join? As we like to say [often], BABEL is a non-hierarchical scholarly collective and post-institutional assemblage with no leaders or followers, no top and no bottom, and only a middle. Membership carries with it no fees, no obligations, and no hassles, and accrues to its members all the symbolic capital they need for whatever meanings they require. Our chief commitment is the cultivation of a more mindful “being-together” with others who work alongside us in the leaning towers of the post-historical university where we roam as a multiplicity, a pack, not of subjects but of singularities without identity or unity, looking for other roaming packs and multiplicities with which to cohabit and build glittering misfit heterotopias.

A little more conventionally, we also like to say that we are a collective and desiring-assemblage of scholars (primarily medievalists, but also including persons working in other temporal periods and fields, such as early modern and Victorian studies, critical and cultural theory, film and women’s studies, critical sexuality studies, and so on) in North America, the U.K., Australia, and beyond who are working to develop new cross-disciplinary alliances among the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and the fine arts in order to formulate and practice new “critical humanisms,” as well as to develop a more present-minded medieval studies and a more historically-minded cultural studies.

To join BABEL [which does provide you with a discounted subscription rate to postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies], simply email me [at: ejoy@siue.edu] and ask to be added to our list-serv, which is a news-only [not a discussion] list-serv, and therefore will not clutter up your email inbox. Every month or so, you will receive email digests of where BABEL is going and what projects and events it has cooking, and also various calls for assistance with our ongoing events and projects, such as [don't forget] our 2nd Biennial Meeting in September 2012 in Boston:

cruising in the ruins: the question of disciplinarity in the post/medieval university

Or our panels for the 2012 International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, Michigan, which you can see HERE [and if you are interested in participating on any of these, please let us know, also at: ejoy@siue.edu]. You can also follow us on Facebook HERE.

If you join BABEL today, you can start bossing us around, and we really like that. Plus, we'll send you a free case of "no regrets." Cheers!

good bye / g'day

From the PP that accompanies my talk: Avebury, 2006

by J J Cohen

So I've barely blogged of late, and do you know why? That evil person at that other medieval blog made me write a lecture, and now she is forcing me to go all the way to Melbourne to deliver it.

So, look, we could all complain about Stephanie Trigg until we turn blue, but that won't change the world, and it won't shorten the 16 hour flight from LAX to Oz. Instead I will say: good-bye. I don't expect to have much internet access for the next few weeks, especially once the Cohens leave Melbourne for our family adventure. We are staying in some rural areas around Victoria, including a cottage on the side of a dormant volcano in a game reserve and a solar-powered Eco-Lodge in the mountains, surrounded by kangaroos and koalas. We'll also be driving the Great Ocean Road -- and, considering my lack of experience steering from the wrong side of the car, we may be turning the Shipwreck Coast into the Autowreck Coast as well.

So, wish us luck. I would say that I am dreading the long flight with the kids but to be honest, they are looking forward to the endless movies and snacks. The only thing they don't really want to do is sit next to me. Apparently I complain from time to time.

And oh yes: I will publicly acknowledge that Stephanie has been wonderful about setting all of this up, and I may have to retract some of my sourness. But as they say in Australia: better a sourpuss than a platypus. Yes, they really say that.

CFP: Active Objects

by J J Cohen

This CFP looks great: two intriguing sessions for the next Kzoo.

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Call for Papers:  Active Objects

Panels sponsored by the International Center of Medieval Art
47th International Congress on Medieval Studies, May 10-13 2012

Active Objects I: Optics and Transparency
Active Objects II: Agency and Phenomenology

Inspired by the recent exhibitions of reliquaries in Cleveland, Baltimore, and London, these sessions invite considerations of how object-centered approaches develop our understanding of reliquaries, vasa sacra, and other instruments of faith. If we conceive of those objects as active agents, and not merely as passive elements in devotional practice, how does that change our perception of their function and their aesthetic nature? How did the vivid nature of these objects -- their mass and texture, their form, their brilliance, their aroma -- shape the way people acted with them, or simply behaved in their presence? Also, is it possible to track the ways in which the agency of a specific object changed over time? Finally, should we, can we, and do we want to consider how the agentic power of medieval objects influences our own relations with them in the present day?

“Active Objects” is organized by the Material Collective, a group of medievalists pursuing collaborative discoveries, humane histories, and the interpretive possibilities of the material. We invite proposals that engage phenomenology, optical theories, relational aesthetics, Actor-Network Theory, Thing Theory, notions of affect, and other object-centered approaches; we seek papers that consider how objects matter in medieval Christian, Islamic, and Jewish traditions, as well as in the interactions of faiths.

Please send paper proposals (abstract of no more than 300 words, and a completed Participant Information Form<http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/Assets/pdf/congress/PIF2012.pdf>) by September 15, 2011 to  Karen Overbey (karen.overbey@tufts.edu) and Ben C. Tilghman (btilghman@gmail.com).

A Fourteenth-Century Ecology: Chaucer's "The Former Age"

by KARL STEEL

“The question of ecological morality is always approached as if it were a matter of authorizing or prohibiting an extension of the moral quality to new beings (animals, rivers, glaciers, or oceans), whereas exactly the opposite is the case. What we should find amazing are the strange operations whereby we have constantly restricted the list of beings to whose appeal we should have been able to respond.”
Émilie Hache and Bruno Latour, “Morality or Moralism: An Exercise in Sensitization.”

Five weeks ago, I had hoped to put Chaucer's "The Former Age" in conversation with the Alexander and Dindimus tradition and with fourteenth-century reactions to the European encounter with the Canary Islanders. 6000 words (my utmost limit) is not enough, and I had to drop the Canary Islands. No worries! Soon I hope to have something to say here about The Canarien, a bizarre early fifteenth-century chronicle of an attempted conquest (briefly: it gilds a vulgar chain of squabbles, failures, and slaving with the glory of chivalry and faith: the effect is grotesque and grimly hilarious, like a drunk senior research analyst in a disheveled clown suit). Meanwhile, here's a portion of the argument that, knock on wood (but gently, gently), will see print sometime next year.

If you don't know "The Former Age," it's structurally and thematically based on Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy Book II, Meter 5 and a handful of other works. It describes a time when people were free of commerce, agriculture, or technology: they do not harvest grain, for example, but rather rub the kernels between their hands (l. 11). They're vegetarian communists who refuse to harm anyone or anything: not each other, not animals, not the earth or the sea, not wounded by the plow (l. 9) or carved by the prow (l. 21).

Criticism of "The Former Age" typically does souce or historical studies, the latter tending to see the poem's pessimism as a symptom of the politics of the late 1380s or early 1390s. That's fine. However, I'm reading the poem as a critique not only of human institutions but of the human itself. In sum, I read it as an antihumanist manifesto in the vein of Émilie Hache and Bruno Latour's wonderful "Morality or Moralism." I do this by attending, especially, to the former agers' unlimited moral sensitivity but also to Chaucer's additions to his sources, and its affinities with a thematically related set of texts, the British witnesses to the encounter between Alexander the Great and the ascetic philosophers of India, the Gymnosophists and Dindimus and the Brahmans. I plan to talk about this Dindimus material in another post.

Chaucer's few additions include a few animal comparisons and his despairing final stanza, which bemoans that the world is now full of lust, deceit, and murder, with no way out. Lines 7 and 37 in effect say that these people eat like pigs: "They eten mast, hawes, and swich pounage"; "noght but mast or apples is therinne." Golden Age people eat acorns: this is a cliché, mocked from Cicero to Petrarch, and sneered at by Lucretius, who says that primordial people traded acorns for sex. The pig-comparison's unusual, though, at least in the Golden Age tradition. In my book, I read this as a humiliating contrapasso against people who don't eat pigs: eat pork or be treated like pork. In medieval Christian texts, this happens to Jews, Muslims, and now to these vegetarians, who, like pigs, eat "mast, hawes, and swich pounage" in the woods rather than enjoying the products of the grange.

The other animal comparison comes in line 50, where Chaucer calls these people lambish. Perhaps not alarming, until you remember that for a dozen years Chaucer oversaw the wool custom and wool subsidy for the Port of London. In this time, few English were more involved in the sheep trade: worthy is the lamb &c. Note too that one of the witnesses of "The Former Age" traveled with Lydgate's "Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep," a poem that the ram wins by arguing, in effect, that English industry commercializes every bit of the sheep, its fleece, meat, horn, hooves, and skin (here I think of Upton Sinclair's "they use everything of the pig except the squeal").

And then there's the despair of the last stanza, Chaucer's longest addition. Taken as a whole, "The Former Age" imagines a time without human domination, a time whose people recognize the constitutive vulnerability of everything as morally significant (see Derrida on the "nonpower at the heart of power" in The Animal that Therefore I am); a time whose people saw the face (in a Levinasian sense) everywhere and acted accordingly. "The Former Age" imagines this time, and admires these people, sure, but it also chooses to think of them as animals, there to be used and traded; and it chooses to imagine this time as irrevocably lost.

But Chaucer's other so-called Boethian poems ("Truth," "Lak of Stedfastnesse," and "Gentilesse") hope for something better. Why not this poem too? I read it as written in a voice unequal to its subject, a voice that cannot give up on human privileges (Nicola Masciandaro and Gillian Rudd have also read the poem's voice suspiciously). I see the failure of the poem's voice as indirectly asking us to do better, to try harder to get past the despair and sad domination of being human. Unlike the poetic voice, we readers, hoping better, can use this supposedly lost past to get at another future (infinite citations here, but Piotr Gwiazda's Former Age article, which uses Ernst Bloch, is more than good enough).

Yet there's another lesson. What would a life without human privileges look like? Without clear distinctions between subject and object, human and animal, nature and culture, vulnerability and breakability? One that took, say, the lessons of Vibrant Matter much further than Jane Bennett was willing to go, that allowed itself to know how enmeshed we are in everything (think Morton), that responded with the utmost sensivity to anything, as Hache and Latour might have us do?

Frankly, it would be kind of awful. These people don't eat half enough (l. 11); their food is scarce and thin (l. 36); and “no doun of fetheres ne no bleched shete / was kid to hem, but in seurtee they slepte” (ll. 45-6): the but sets their safety against their discomfort. Choose one or the other. Here we see what it may mean to open moral consideration to all, to attempt to live without harm, without the certainty of any distinction between subject and object, human and animal, nature and culture, flesh and the earth. It is a world of hungry and vulnerable people, intermeshed with and sympathetic to all. There is a kind of hope here, then, but—or and—it may be a hope that erases the human altogether.

(image from Bodleian Library, MS Douce 195, 59v, via here)

Crowd Review Now LIVE: Becoming-Media Issue [postmedieval]

Figure 1. Reading Room, New York Public Library

by EILEEN JOY

I am excited to announce that the papers for the Crowd Review of postmedieval's special issue on Becoming-Media [slated for publication in March 2012] are now live and available for comment on the Crowd Review's website:

• Seeta Chaganti, "Danse Macabre in the Virtual Churchyard"
• Eddie Christie, "Writing in Wax, Writing in Water"
• Arne Flaten, "Reproducible Media(s) in the Early Fifteenth Century (Mostly Italian)"
• Julia Lupton, "Thinking with Things: Hannah Woolley to Hannah Arendt"
  
• Eugene Thacker, "The Wayless Abyss: Mysticism and Mediation"
• Whitney Trettien, "Becoming Plant: Magnifying a Microhistory of Media Circuits in Nehemiah Grew's Anatomy of Plants (1682)"

In step with the mission of the journal, this issue represents a wide range of fields and subjects, including performance studies (dance), architecture, art history, poetics, medieval literature, history of printing and engraving, the decorative arts, movement studies, history of taste and judgment, object-oriented studies, intellectual history, new media and technology studies, composition studies, mysticism, philosophy, botany, the history of books, history of science, the vegetal, the animal, theology, etc. What all of the essays have in common, in the words of the special issue's co-editors, Jen Boyle and Martin Foys, has something to do with

our dependence on the recursive circuitry and tangle of technologies, bodies, narratives, spaces, and mediating technics, across historical periods and across literary, scientific, philosophical, and theological modes of expression.

And in some sympathy with the aims of our own blog here [In The Middle] and with postmedieval's objective to trouble and complicate the supposed divides between past and present times, Jen and Martin also write, relative to the aims of this issue,

. . . the casting of new media studies as itself “new” raises troubling questions. To what extent is mediation ever “new”? Indeed, as the medhyo at the center of “medieval” would suggest, mediation appears as an always incomplete “middling” and “meddling” – always becoming, to itself and something other than itself; a troubling, meddling, unstable go-between. This second sense of becoming-media extends questions about the mediating artifact within its historical context to include issues of embodied and historical temporality; periodization as “meddling”; the feedback loop of technics-consciousness; the glance, glimpse, and touch of the mediated image as political and aesthetic affect; and the unstable registers of the trans/hyper-mediation of multiple past-present-futures.

We invite EVERYONE to join us in what is, for now, an EXPERIMENT in the crowd review of the papers listed above, and which will extend from today, July 16th, through Thursday, September 15th. We have set up the crowd review on a very user-friendly weblog-styled WordPress website, which allows you to comment as little or as much as you like, on one or more [or any portion] of the papers, and you can find everything you need to know to participate as a reviewer here:

• Crowd Review: How To Comment

Vive la Crowd Review!

The multifurcation of social media

by J J Cohen

So I'm on Google+.

It's been about a week, during which time most of the conversations have centered upon how to distinguish the site from other social media. At first, I must admit, I thought G+ would simply mirror my activities on Facebook and Twitter. I posted that I wished some program existed that would cross-post to all three at once so that I would not have to do so manually. Then Sarah Werner shared Tim Maly's Unlink Your Feeds: A Manifesto. Maly's plea not duplicate information across these spaces but to craft ways of distinguishing each forum resonates with me: I do get tired of seeing the same information about the people I follow presented as a tweet, a FB link, a blog entry that appears in my RSS reader, and now as a Google+ post. Why not specialize what is presented in each location and thereby create something uniquely suited to each?

Google+ is in its mewling infancy, so it is difficult to predict what it will in time become. Right now it seems a concentrated and tech savvy space which has attracted those with an abiding interest in social media and scholarly -- as well as other forms of -- communication. (At least among those who are posting actively; there is also a large population of people who signed up and are wondering what to do next). The ability G+ offers to classify those to whom you are connected into various circles, though, means that inevitably much of what it accomplishes will replicate Facebook, though in a more controlled, private and specialized way: you can post the vacation pics to your family and the Latin blegs to your medievalist friends. Here is how -- tentatively, and for the time being -- I am using the service.

Facebook is good for all purpose social updates, comic interactions, and quick catching up on various friends' and family members' lives. It's a dive in and skim kind of space, an enjoyable break from (say) composing a public lecture about affect and stone. Twitter is great for sharing links, for some quick and spontaneous interaction, and sometimes even swift feedback on questions and ideas. It's where I learn the most about digital humanities and the scholarly uses of social media, as well as a locale where I interact with many non-GW graduate students, especially (but not only) those who for various reasons wouldn't think of friending me on FB. As a blog, In the Middle offers a forum for more sustained rumination on medieval studies, critical theory and humanities topics, since there is no character limit to posts. If it has become less interactive over the years (we don't attract nearly as many comments as we used to), that's not because it is less read -- our audience is at an all time high -- but because such conversations seem to have relocated to Twitter and FB. And many of us are experiencing social media fatigue: it's enough to keep up with email.

At present I am thinking of Google+ as a hybrid space, a cross between FB and a blog, where there is social interaction around posts that tend to be much more substantial than anything I'd put up in the House of Zuckerberg. Another description: G+ is a workshop, where current research and essays and talks in progress come together, and topics of interest (especially, so far, meta discussions of social media) receive more sustained conversation. Facebook is the most personal venue, Twitter more professional, Google+ (so far) even more academia-oriented, and this blog a professional space with the occasional personal excursus.

We'll see if I feel the same way in a month. Meanwhile, are you on Google+? How are you using it? And even if you are not, do use different social media differently?

my lithic totem

by J J Cohen

Yes I should be writing that "Feeling Stone" talk, but then again I have 15 hours locked in an airplane journeying from Los Angeles to Melbourne, and what else am I going to do? Watch movies? Sleep? Please.

Well, maybe I should at least have a draft. Here is a picture of my desk this morning as I attempt to harness the powers of an extinct marine creature become a rock. Ammonites are fascinating: Pliny gave them their name (ammonis cornua) because they look like the horns of a ram (Ammon was an Egyptian god who was sometimes depicted with horns, or so says Wikipedia). They survived a good 300 million years before they vanished. Neolithic tombs like Stoney Littleton worked them into their decoration, seemingly an art born of stone itself. Fossils will make a minor appearance in this talk, which contains a section on stone as an artistic agent.

marking infinity

by J J Cohen

I'm just back from a swift, intense trip to NYC to view the Lee Ufan exhibit at the Guggenheim. Ufan is  Korean-born artist whose work is deeply influenced by his time in Japan. His fame comes from two rather different media: monochrome and minimalist painting (tansaekhwa), and sparse installation pieces that use rocks paired with industrial products like steel sheets, metallic bands, latex and pillows. The strategic use of blank space in both kinds of art can be annoying: there is something too precious, too screamingly aesthetic about these pieces, especially because having stone stand for nature and steel for culture is just too easy. But the exhibit is also suggestive. Ufan speaks of creating ephemeral networks of relation that include the viewer as well as the surroundings. It takes a commitment on the viewer's part to participate in that network, but once that surrender occurs the art becomes vibrant.

I learned this truth through experience. When I first started walking the exhibit I was underwhelmed. The pieces are modest and the museum is thick with summer visitors. I'd brought my daughter Katherine along with me, thinking it would make the trip to New York special for both of us. She'd been patient during the bus ride, and now I could see that she was wondering why the Guggenheim had been our destination. "So that's it?" she asked. "Just rocks on the floor?" She was voicing my own disappointment -- I must have expected a numinousness in the pieces that just wasn't there. To make it interesting I pointed to two stones that were separated by a metal sheet. "What do you think they are doing?" I asked. "What's the story here?" She rightly pointed out that the shapes of the rocks made it seem like they were peering forward, yet the screen and their own immobility ensured that they would never catch sight of each other. The piece seemed to be about yearning for something you are certain must be present, but forever out of sight and guarded from touch. Another installation was similar, but this time the second rock was under the seam of some metal sheets. Should the desiring rock ever be able to move forward, it would succeed only in crushing what it aimed to reach. Later versions of this series (most of them entitled Relatum, for things connected to each other), had rocks mischievously peeking from behind a screen, about to enter a ring for combat (said Katherine), or gathered in a circle and seated on royal pillows as if at some inscrutable parliament. You can discern from how I am describing these installations that what seems so still, so devoid of energy and motion, becomes as you walk around the pieces and start to link them to yourself and to narratives and to each other, metal and stone that is weirdly kinetic. The materials demand stories, and the stories grant them motion.

Of course, your reverie will be constantly broken by the museum guards, who with weary authority must repeat every few moments that the installations must not be touched. It is so natural for an onlooker to place a hand on the stone that despite the signs prohibiting this intimacy visitors perpetually forget.

My favorite moment was the exhibit's final segment, in a dead-end on the Guggenenheim's top floor. Not many people seem to make it that far; those who do behold only three tall museum walls that reach towards a small sky light. Each wall is adorned with a single brushstroke of grey paint. Ufan created these as site-specific versions of some of his famously stark canvases. I asked the museum guide who had been stationed to keep an eye on the walls what will happen to the three pieces once exhibit closes: would the drywall be cut and the strokes preserved? He told me no, they would be painted over. The artist never intended them to endure -- and indeed most of the stone installations were also transient copies of installations from elsewhere that would also be dismantled. Networks possess brief lives, even networks with rocks, but they create memories that persist, for a while. I asked the guide what kinds of questions people ask him, and he said most wanted to know if the skylight was part of the installation (it is not). Finally I asked him what he thinks about in that dead-end space, and he told me it was his favorite place to stand: serene, an end-point, an invitation, a place that would vanish soon, but a space that would haunt him afterwards for the time he had spent.

I wish I could have photographed the installations, but the Guggenheim doesn't allow pictures anywhere but the entrance foyer. I've therefore chosen to illustrate this post with one of my favorite scenes. Katherine and I sat on a bench and watched visitors enthralled by the museum's spiraling ramp fail to realize that they had become a part of one of Ufan's Relatum installations. Several bumped into the screen while snapping pictures of the ceiling. A harried guard was constantly reminding people that they were walking through art not mere metal and stones.

Besides re-learning how to live with and in art, another pleasure of this New York trip was Katherine's companionship. Despite our visits to the Central Park Zoo and Dylan's Candy Bar, the Guggenheim was her favorite destination: stories about the stones have haunted her since we started to imagine together what fables they relate. Her inexhaustible enthusiasm for pillow fights and jumping on the bed at the hotel helped us through a wet night that prevented much other activity. Two of Katherine's favorite people in the world, Karl and his wife ALK, were good enough to meet us in Central Park after the museum, and to have an early Indian dinner with us as well. For a weekend that focused upon stones, it was lively, powerful, and -- like those strokes of grey that Ufan left upon the museum wall -- not to be forgotten.

Beowulf in the Dark, Medieval Madness, and Blue: Some Items of Possible Interest

by EILEEN JOY

Readers of In The Middle may be interested to know that Blackwell's online journal Literature Compass, has just published a cluster of essays, "Beowulf in the Dark," edited by Francis Auld [Vol. 8, Issue 7: July 2011], that grew out of a 2008 MLA conference session on Beowulf and contemporary film:

Frances Auld, "Beowulf's Broken Bodies"

Bill Schipper, "All Talk: Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf, Wealtheow, and Grendel's Mother"

Eileen Jankowski, "The Post-9/11 Hero"

Robin Norris, "Resistance to Genocide in the Postmodern Beowulf"

As one of the Editorial Board members for the journal, I'm happy to pass on .pdfs of any of the essays for those who might be interested and whose institutions don't have subscription access to the journal.

Also of possible interest to our readers might be the recently-published volume of essays, edited by Wendy Turner, on Madness in Medieval Law and Custom [Brill, 2010], just reviewed in The Medieval Review by Michael Sizer who finds the volume a useful companion [and maybe also an historical corrective to] Foucault's work on the history of madness. I've been thinking about "madness" lately myself, partly because one of the sessions sponsored by BABEL at the Kalamazoo Congress this past May was on that topic, but also because there was a lively discussion on the topic recently across the speculative realist/object-oriented ontology/ecologies blogosphere:

• Levi Bryant, "Depression, Drugs, Society, and Politics" [Larval Subjects]
• Levi Bryant, "The Symptom and the Symptom" [Larval Subjects]

I myself began thinking recently about depression and ecology in relation to Jeffrey's new book project, Prismatic Ecologies, a planned volume of essays that had its genesis HERE and whose final list of contributors looks like this:

1. Jeffrey J. Cohen: Ecology’s Rainbow
2. Kathleen Stewart: Red
3. Robert McRuer: Pink
4. Lowell Duckert: Maroon
5. Julian Yates: Orange
6. Graham Harman: Gold
7. Vin Nardizzi: Greener
8. Allan Stoekl: Chartreuse
9. Will Stockton: Beige
10. Steve Mentz: Brown
11. Eileen Joy: Blue
12. Stacy Alaimo: Bluish-Black
13. Levi Bryant: Black
14. Jen Hill: Grey
15. Ed Keller: Silver
16. Bernd Herzogenrath: White
17. Ben Woodard: Ultraviolet
18. Tim Morton: X-Ray
19. Afterword: Lawrence Buell

My own thinking on all of this is sketchy at best, and I just KNOW it will change as I go along, but I'll share with everyone here the abstract I sent Jeffrey last week for my chapter [all comments and bibliographic assistance are much welcomed!]:

Blue

At a recent conference session (at the 2011 Kalamazoo Congress) devoted to ‘madness’ and mental illness as methodology (as well as particular forms of ‘medievalism’), an interesting question was raised: is madness partly the product (or even, ingenitor) of various social collaborations -- between people, but also between persons and their environments, both human and non-human? Is madness, further, something to be located on the so-called ‘interior’ of sentience and biological physiology, or is it in the world somehow, with the ‘becoming-haptic’ of the human mind only one of its many effects? Is madness, in other words, ecological -- does it have, or signify, an ecology?

Following Timothy Morton’s argument that too much of current ‘ecological’ thinking hinges upon the spectrum of ‘bright,’ optimistic, ‘sunny’ greens that are ‘holistic, hearty, and healthy,’ often leaving aside ‘negativity, introversion, femininity, writing, mediation, ambiguity, darkness, irony, fragmentation, and sickness’ (The Ecological Thought, p. 16), this essay will focus on sadness and melancholy as forms and signs of deep ecological connections, as well as ethically valuable modes of ‘plugging in’ to ‘worlds’ as always already post-catastrophe. More specifically, through readings of the Old English poems Seafarer and Wanderer, this essay will trace the co-implicated and also affective relations between the human figures and the non-human ‘strange strangers’ of post-apocalyptic (post-war, but also post-human) medieval landscapes in order to formulate a ‘blue’ ecological aesthetic that might take better account of our world as both empty (alone) and full (intimate).