but looks ëbetween/ The lines.í Berkeley does not offer a simple
choice between facts and water; this binary either/or mode of
philosophy is undermined to reveal how facts inhabit the water and
water erodes the facts.
A tension between being possessed and dispossessed is enacted
by the nomadic subjects of Facts About Water, where a number of
subjectivities map their differing routes between land and sea, holding
onto facts while facing the potential for flood. Disengaging with what
we take to be typically political, Berkeleyís aesthetic writes of
indefinite subjects in unlocatable places and their relationship with
one another. The poems demonstrate an interest in the gap between
ëutopian potentialityí and how gendered bodies are positioned within
unfree spaces. But the poetry moves away from the myths of
motherland into a different territory. The poems do not ask the
questions: ëWhat is my nation? How can I repossess ìWomanî and
ìNationî?í The poems signify not a ëpolitical poetryí but an ethical
aesthetic that thinks beyond the politics of a delimited sovereign
territory, sometimes called the nation-state, which is decried by the
marine lover, Irigaray, and Nietzsche:^68
The State ñ that cold monster that claims to be the people and, over the heads of
the herds, hands a belief in love and the sword of desire. The State that speaks
of good and evil in a single language and, in that one language, decrees only
lies. For there is no common language that speaks the truth. And the State has
stolen his language from each individual and then mixed them all up in one
death wish. (p.25)The poethics of Berkeleyís Facts About Water demonstrate how this
ësingle languageí leaks.
68 Irigaray’s note on this refers to a quotation from Nietzsche: ‘State is the name
of the coldest of all monsters. Coldly it tells lies too, and this lie crawls out of
its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people.’ That is a lie! It was creators who created
people and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life.’ Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, First Part, ‘On The New Idol’, The Portable Nietzsche, ed., &
trans., W. Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954), p.160.