Bestiality of the Involved

"Spring Ulmer takes, as a starting point for this essay collection, Theodor Adorno's accusation that a life "purely as a fact will strangle other life." As she throws herself this way and that in her search for love and meaning, Ulmer refuses to shirk her own complicity in the terror and suffering of the present era. Here is a book that interrogates its own form. How, Ulmer asks, does one render the real, and what is the relationship between art and activism? On an odyssey to become a mother, she doggedly surveys what it means not only to create, but also to mother in this day and age. In this self-portrait as seen through disparate encounters, Ulmer talks with respective neighbors-a hunter in the Vermont woods, a Rwandan ex-soldier online, an immigrant in a subway car, cadets at a military school, a stranger at an airport-and invites us along as she works as farmhand, secretary, and professor. Waylaid by tragedy, Ulmer questions how we might move beyond Adornoian guilt into another ethical paradigm-one that cultivates emotional intelligence. The impulse to see and what it means to lay claim to anyone or anything is troubled water-marred by the stirring up of social memory and the brutal human imprint on the natural world, yet Ulmer learns, after the death of her father, that a returned gaze portends the joining of souls she has just eschewed. A life, Ulmer intimates, can also honor other life. Such is Ulmer's labor"--