Shells, Bones, and Silence: Modernism’s Elegiac Attention

I was talking last summer with a friend about the mass losses occurring across the globe, and she asked me whether I found it odd that there were no memorials to those lost to the Covid pandemic, nor forms of yearly remembrance in the United States. I was embarrassed to realize that I had not thought about that lack—I was so focused on the return to normalcy from Covid and the other cataclysmic events in the world that my amnesia mirrored that of the culture around me. There are no monuments to those fallen (like we can find in most towns and cities for wars ranging from the Revolutionary War to Korea), no national moments of silence observed, and even almost no forms of local remembrance. While the AIDS Memorial Quilt is an ongoing project that continues to remind us of the toll of that epidemic and the continued presence of AIDS/HIV, the Covid pandemic has no counterpart. Even the WorldoMeter’s Coronavirus Tracker, a statistical tool that revealed the staggering extent of the virus’s toll—over 7 million deaths world-wide—stopped being updated as of April 2024, because both individuals and countries are no longer recording the deaths accurately. Covid may become the contemporary equivalent to what Elizabeth Outka call the “modernist mystery” of the absence of the 1918–1919 flu pandemic from the literature of the time.[1] 

There are many social, political, and psychological reasons that our culture is more attuned now to the loss of learning than the loss of lives to the Covid pandemic. Yet the lack of such memorialization points to why this moment is ripe for a turn to modernist elegies: it is because of the form of attention—an elegiac attention—that they create and demand. Modernist elegiac attention can help us think about, I’d argue, “forgotten” losses like those from Covid, as well as ongoing ones, both environmental and human, from the snowballing effects of climate change.[2]

It is hard for me to think about the modern elegy without turning to Jahan Ramazani’s work in the Poetry of Mourning; he argues that while traditional poetic elegies practiced “an art of saving,” the modern elegy instead engaged in “what Elizabeth Bishop calls an ‘art of losing.’”[3] The result, he notes, is that the modern elegy “resembles not so much a suture as ‘an open wound,’ in Freud’s disturbing trope for melancholia” (Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning, 4). It provides no resolution, and it asks the reader to spend time with the experience of grief without the promise of consolation. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian’s work on loss elaborates upon the productive nature of this melancholic aesthetic; they write that the “continued engagement with the various and ongoing forms of loss” and “[t]he ability of the melancholic object to express multiple losses at once” is what makes melancholia “a general condition of possibility for subjectivity.”[4] Evocatively, Outka describes Virginia Woolf’s language of grief in To the Lighthouse as creating “an aesthetics of ineffability, built from images of absence, silence, emptiness, darkness, and nothingness” (Outka, Viral Modernism, 245). Loss here is not simply devastating, but also generative.

Rather than offering a compensatory consolation, therefore, the “melancholic mourning” performed by modernist elegies highlights the irresolvable and consuming, if creative, nature of grief (Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning, 4). But such elegies also foreground how difficult it is to notice or remember the losses that don’t fit into a neat cycle of productive mourning, since such losses require a particular form of attention—an elegiac attention—that is hard to inhabit or sustain in the face of the relentless machinery of modern life. We see why such forms of attention might be difficult, I think, in Wallace Stevens’s “The Death of a Soldier,” where in the final two stanzas he writes that:

Death is absolute and without memorial,

As in a season of autumn,

When the wind stops,

When the wind stops and, over the heavens,

The clouds go, nevertheless,

In their direction.[5]

Nature does not weep with the mourner here—rather, the tone of the simile hinges on that adverbial conjunction, “nevertheless,” setting up a fundamentally conflicted relationship between loss and presence. Death ends a life, but the world continues. The wind stops and, despite all our expectations and even hopes, the clouds keep going. Time passes. After the contained first stanzas of the poem, each ending with a period, the comma after “stops” and the repetition of “[w]hen the wind stops” causes a double-take—we experience strangeness and estrangement. The space between those repeated phrases gestures to this jolt or moment of reorientation of attention. Stevens’s final lines have a chill to them; they reveal movement without teleology, without human cause or meaning. The action takes place over the heavens but has no traffic with the promises of an afterlife connected to our idea of heaven. The poem has us notice and rest with this knowledge.

In pointing out the movement of the clouds, Stevens presents a kind of elegiac attention to the interlaced levels of what is not there: the wind; a reason for the clouds’ movement; any human grasp on cause and effect. The elegy for a human—the soldier—becomes an argument about how we must move beyond the human to fathom the absolute nature of death. Steven’s attention to the unseen reminds me of a line from Woolf’s The Waves, a novel which itself revolves elegiacally around the figure of Percival, the hero who is lost like the dead soldier, while the world of the other characters continues, though they return to him again and again as a touchstone figure. Bernard, the storyteller of the book, thinks as he enters London, newly engaged and ready to embark upon adult life:

And, what is this moment of time, this particular day in which I have found myself caught? The growl of traffic might be any uproar—forest trees or the roar of wild beasts. Time has whizzed back an inch or two on its reel; our short progress has been cancelled. I think also that our bodies are in truth naked. We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.[6]

“[T]his particular day in which I have found myself caught”—that phrase brilliantly hints at the insentient way we tend to move through our own lives, plotted trajectories determining our paths, with only a surface awareness of where we are, as bodies and minds, in time. Pausing on that thought allows Bernard to see something not only about the long durée that is embedded in every space, but also what is no longer there—the shells, bones, and silence that we cover and ignore. He thinks himself beneath the surface and becomes aware of the absences and the losses that underpin the present moment; at the same time, this insight circumvents the attentional demands that keep that realization, that focus, at bay. Bernard’s glimpse of deep time—a time that takes the human out of the equation—makes him want “to visit the profound depths; once in a while to exercise my prerogative not always to act, but to explore; to hear vague, ancestral sounds of boughs creaking, of mammoths; to indulge impossible desires to embrace the whole world with the arms of understanding” (Woolf, Waves, 114). This is the kind of pause that Stevens’s poem creates for the reader; he, too, draws attention to an absence that might be missed when only focusing on the movement around (or above). Both require a kind of quiet attentiveness—a movement outside the human—though Stevens seems to end with that erasure, while Bernard returns to “the whole world” with the desire to embrace and understand.

Bernard could be practicing something akin to what current attention activists, like those academics and artists involved in the Strother School of Attention and the Friends of Attention, are asking us to relearn, cultivate, and share. These thinkers argue that we are existing in an era of attention drought, and that practicing attention—true attention—is necessary for the work of “world-building.”[7] Attending to shells, bones, and silence requires, as Bernard realizes, a retreat from acting, improving, continuing; it is a retreat from the ideals of progress and achievement that modern capitalist society fosters and demands. The current movements devoted to retraining us to sustain deep and thoughtful attention are forms of resistance against the constant assaults on our minds, bodies, and time within late capitalism. In the Friends of Attention’s “Twelve Theses on Attention” (2019), they describe an impossible “dialectic of attentional freedom” that underpins our current state of attentional crisis: true attention “consists in the ability to submit one’s attention to the attentional path traced by another,” but it is countered by the false freedom of “endless solicitation” and endless “choice” (thesis VI). They argue:

This dialectic has been deliberately manipulated by market structures and technologies to the point that we are increasingly incapable of true attention. Our attention has never been more free, or more continuously entrapped. Our attentional environments are thus catastrophic. True attention is fundamentally endangered (thesis VII).

An education in attention is one that is political and constructive, even as it seems to occupy a space entirely outside of the doing (and undoing) of our economic and political moment. It is logical that the Friends of Attention formed in 2018, as political traumas were unfolding across the world (and on every device), and that it has only gained momentum and a wider audience in the face of the radical pause (and the equally radical turn to the virtual world for all interactions) occasioned by the Covid pandemic. There is an elegiac nature to an act of attention that creates the space and time to see deeply, to go behind and beyond what is on the immediate surface. It is elegiac in the modernist sense because it involves noting absence and then resting with that absence, seeing it not as a launch pad to a new dynamic or relationship or a step further up the rung of the ladder of life, but instead beholding (to quote Stevens again), “[n]othing that is not there and the nothing that is.”[8]

To behold these two forms of nothingness, to engage with an “aesthetics of ineffability” in Stevens and Woolf—those decisions raise questions about both the form and function of art. Unsurprisingly, Woolf struggled with how to classify her books; she wrote in her diary on June 27, 1925, while working on To the Lighthouse: “while I try to write, I am making up ‘To the Lighthouse’—the sea is to be heard all through it. I have an idea that I will invent a new name for my books to supplant ‘novel’. A new -------- by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?”[9] She resolves on “elegy,” perhaps, as illustrative of the kind of attention to the world and people that her novels both give and involve. Indeed, such elegiac attention—recognizing that death and the immutable processes that lead us to it underpin everything—is something that the writer Ali Smith, in her remarkable essays in Artful (itself an imagined elegy to a lost partner), sees as fundamental to all art. She muses, “[i]t’s the act of making it up, from the combination of what we’ve got and what we haven’t, that makes the human, makes the art, makes this transformation possible, like it’s the eye engaged in the creative act, in union with a kind of not seeing.”[10] Art emerges from imagination, which is the seeing of what is there and not there at the same time. It is an act of creation done not to compensate for what is lost or unseen, but in order to make the empty space itself resonant and vibrating with meaning.

Smith is working with a modernist elegiac vision of art—though she does not go as far as Stevens does with his gesture to the void of the “nothing that is”—with her emphasis on the awareness of death and absence that underpins all artworks. Modernist elegies and the modernist “elegiac temper,” to borrow a term from John Vickery, deny neat resolutions or consolatory gestures; these pieces aren’t there to make us feel good, but instead to remind us of the irresolvable nature of loss.[11] As such, these elegies are both aesthetically resonant and politically and ethically useful to us right now. What they might teach us, most of all, is that we do not need a particular poetic form, but instead a particular form of attention in order to grapple with and perhaps even to see loss. We must look at the moving clouds and become aware of the still air; we must peer beneath the pavement and see the shells, the bones, the silence that undergird the city life above in order to pay the elegiac attention that allows for grief—and memory—without anesthetization or distraction.

While there might be many ways to become attentive to “[n]othing that is not there,” reading these texts by Stevens and Woolf suggests that art can teach us how to pause, listen, observe, and understand, and that modernist elegies alert us to the deep buried or ignored losses. This is not a new thought, of course, about art’s ability to stop us in our tracks and make us reconsider the world. It emerges not only in the Stevens and Woolf lines, but also in places like Walter Pater’s call for the consideration of every moment (“Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end”) and his claim that art enables this focused concentration most completely, or in Jeannette Winterson’s unhesitating assertion that “[a]rt is conscious and its effect on its audience is to stimulate consciousness.”[12] But more than an initial rapt pause is needed, and I think modernist elegies reveal a specific kind of attention necessary for, what Auden might call, were he here, a low distracted decade.

As Judith Butler wrote in the post 9/11 American moment, “[i]f we are interested in arresting cycles of violence to produce less violent outcomes, it is no doubt important to ask what, politically, might be made of grief besides a cry for war.”[13] Similarly, in the face of the long history of racial violence and oppression, Kevin Quashie calls for an “aesthetic of quiet,” not to ignore the value of seeing “black culture through the lens of resistance,” but to allow for “a consciousness that exists beyond the expectation of resistance.” [14] While elegy does not offer a straightforward course to political action, art defines, clarifies, and articulates how we see the world, and it offers ways of being, ways of acting, and ways of thinking that we cannot formulate while trapped in the habitual modes of thinking that define our everyday existence. The drive towards a return to “normalcy”; the constant drumbeat in celebration of resilience; the self-anesthetizing nature of modern consumer culture, with its focus on gratitude, products that solve our problems, and self-care that promises individual balance in the face of the world’s deep imbalances—these are our current responses to grief and to our loss of connection. Though I noted the chill of the final lines of “The Death of a Soldier,” which decenter the human and embed loss within a non-human trajectory, taking us towards the void of the “nothing that is,” it may be that only by walking up to that void or following the “attentional path” of the non-human can we return, as Bernard does, to an embrace of the world.

Perhaps we have no grand memorials to those who died from Covid because the political uses of memorialization (to promote national unity, to ignite chauvinistic impulses) are not viable in this case; because it touched everyone, perhaps we do not feel the need to reinforce and display the humanity of its victims. There is dismay and regret, too, that our country was taken off-guard and responded politically; there is also the isolation in which so many of the deaths occurred. Such a sense of regret, desperation, and belatedness likely also undergirds our collective looking away from the environmental catastrophes occurring with increasing rapidity.

While an elegiac attention may be neither politically satisfying nor emotionally economical, Woolf’s shells, bones, and silence point presciently towards three present and expanding losses in our world right now—the environmental losses that include species, spaces, and ecosystems (shells); the human deaths from war, illness, famine, and upheaval (bones); and the more difficult to codify or mark, but equally omnipresent losses of attention, reflection, and consideration (silence). This final category—this space of silence under the pavement, away from the noise and bustle of the city—perhaps underpins the other losses, because an “ethics of attention” involves “the effort to draw closer to the astonishing reality of things, through those forms of pure attention that are unmixed with evaluations of utility and judgment, and free from the deforming grasp of a seizing hand (or eye or mind)” (Friends of Attention, “Twelve Theses,” thesis X). If we cannot give the world the elegiac attention it needs—the attention that allows us to notice more than just what is on the surface, present, and moving—then we cannot reckon with our losses nor engage in acts of world-building and creation crucial to human flourishing.