DATABLEED reads Dan Power’s ‘Snail Generations’
Writing about snails in Patricia Highsmith’s fiction, Sally West describes the ‘resolutely alien’ quality of snails; their ‘glorious animal otherness’ that resists ‘human efforts to interpret and domesticate them’ (2022, 197; 207). Dan Power’s heroic crown of sonnets, Snail Generations – a collaboration with AI text generators ChatGPT and the now-defunct Google Bard – maintains this otherness in its descriptions of the process of heliciculture, or snail farming.
The sonnets reflect that throughout human history, as Annina Klappert has argued, snails ‘essentially appear as objects’ (2023, 52). In the poems, the snails are agents acting upon the world, burrowing 'freely'; wrestling; venturing out; meandering; and eating 'from the world'. But they are, throughout the sequence, acted upon by humans in the poems, who are largely invisibilized by the passive voice: the snails are 'spilled'; 'set loose'; 'trowelled'; 'unpacked'; 'set free'; 'preserved'; 'plucked'; 'tilled and sown', all without mention of the humans doing these actions. It is only in the penultimate, fourteenth poem, prior to the crowning sonnetto magistrale, when humans appear, as ‘thin lords over dying lands’, stalking the dark shed like a predator, their faces hidden. These are, in other words, not Haraway’s ‘knots of entangled companion species’ that Klappert discusses, in which species ‘are consequent on a subject- and object-shaping dance of encounters’ (2023, 51-2). This is a dynamic in which snails are understood as a commodity with economic value.
The sonnets have a recursive quality: each iteration is a re-versioning of the snail breeding process, from hibernation to breeding, hatching, growing, and ‘harvesting’. This repetitive re-versioning mimics the way a snail’s shell is added to in increments, each sonnet, growing in revolutions, adding another layer, another convolution, to the whole (or whorl). In this sense, the use of AI text generators in the writing process operates as key to the poetics of the piece. In mathematics, convolution creates various overlapping copies that follow a pre-determined pattern. A convolutional neural network is a multilayered architecture of computational models used for making predictions from data, often used in deep learning. Power’s poetic process, in other words, reflects the poem’s subject, using a convolutional technique to explore a convolutional species.
In each permutation, the snails are slightly different, even as the helicicultural process remains similar. The poems employ rich metaphors to describe the snails: they are ‘like marbles,’ ‘like chocolate coins,’ ‘like an ancient, tongueless bell’, ‘like clods of earth’, ‘like seeds’, ‘like maggots,’ ‘like boils’, ‘like slicks of oil’, ‘like tiny dying stars,’ ‘like sludge,’ like dead Romans, and ‘like autumn leaves’. In this way, they are made to stand in for, and symbolize, everything from the terrestrial to the cosmic; the organic and the inorganic; the sacred and the abject; the pure and the polluting. They become, in the poem’s looping iterations, empty signifiers absorbing meaning. We might link this back to what West calls their ‘alien animal otherness’; while we map metaphors upon snails as a way of understanding their strangeness, they nonetheless resist such metaphors because they are so unlike anything else except themselves.
As the word ‘generations’ in the title of the crown of sonnets implies, these are poems that are ultimately about legacy. Every generation of snails, like every new generation of humans, transmits to the next its relationship patterns and behaviours, while each new generation gradually shifts those patterns in new directions. In Sonnet XII, the snails are born as a ‘generation with no memory’ who ‘loot the garden, stockpiling the world into bunkered cupboards of themselves’. And Sonnet XIV hints at climate collapse, with farmers lacking ‘faith’ in their crops’ ability to grow. It is difficult not to draw comparisons with our current moment, in which super-rich tech billionaires and AI developers like Sam Altman (CEO of Open AI) and Mark Zuckerberg (Meta founder) invest in doomsday shelters to protect themselves from global instability. But perhaps such bunkers are just like the ‘fragile cages’ of the snails, which – as in the poems – might easily be ‘crushed to pearl-grey dust, then scattered like ashes on fertile soil.’
References
Klappert, A. (2023) 'Meet Snails and Humans: Current Artworks as "Knots of Entangled Companion Species", Transpositiones 2, 51-74
West, S., (2022), '"The Motto of the Mollusc": Patricia Highsmith and the Semiotics of Snails', in Hawthorn, R. and Miller, J., Animals in Detective Fiction, Palgrave Macmillan, 191-209