The Green Aevum: Deep Time and Useful Fictions between Frank Kermode, Edmund Spenser, and Ed Roberson

James Dowthwaite individual and collective, within which ethical choices can be made." 2 In many ways, Roberson gives us an aesthetic of deep time, even if he is writing from the vantage point of the Anthropocene, that "human-dominated, geological epoch" proposed in 2000 by Chemist and Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen. 3 What I will show, reading his work through Kermode's framework, is that deep time, a concept that proposes to move beyond an anthropocentric understanding of the universe, remains characterized by the structural and aesthetic marks of the human structuring of reality; namely, our fictions.Before turning to Kermode and Roberson, however, we need to understand the poetic qualities of "deep time" itself.The concept, which effectively extends notions of time and history to a geological scale, would seem to be the opposite of the anthropomorphic tendencies that constitute narrative fiction or poetic visions.This conclusion is deceptive, however.Let us look at the first definition of deep time, given by John McPhee in his 1981 book Basin and Range, drawing on the scientific vision of the 18th-century geologist, John Hutton.With your arms spread wide again to represent all time on earth, look at one hand with its line of life.The Cambrian begins in the wrist, and the Permian Extinction is at the outer end of the palm.All of Cenozoic is in a fingerprint, and in a single stroke with a mediumgrained nail file you could eradicate human history. 4 This is a compelling analogy and is an important reminder to anthropomorphic understandings of the age of the universe, with their attendant tendencies to reduce the universe to the generations of mankind.But it nevertheless obscures a certain way of thinking about time and about humanity.Most significantly it mistakes quantity of time for quality.It is not only unsurprising that humanity is concerned with human time but also inevitable: time is a human mapping of the fabric of the universe.The analogy makes this clear, in that the human arm is the vehicle, the material, which stands for the abstract tenor of a non-human time.It is framed in human terms: it is my wrist, my palm, my fingerprint, and my fingernail.And furthermore, the filing of the nail is a particular kind of ending.If the length is what matters, then one could just as well take the other end of the arm.What McPhee's account does not address is that the whole arm has its part in human history, in that it constitutes the past out of which we conceive our emergence, and which is thus framed by our present moment.The arm is constituted backward from the nail, in other words.The dramatic effect of the nail filing destroys more than the piece of nail; it destroys the whole frame of reference and the analogy with it.