From Questions to Integrity:

Arcadia as Analyses and Map

A review of Arch Hades’s Arcadia

“In a society where publicity and participation are rewarded with ‘likes’ and envy, we are reduced to expressing ourselves through self-exhibited consumption and branding,” Arch Hades writes in Arcadia, striking the heart where ego and anxiety meet. The never-ending ‘Current’ she coins—the reduction of our lives to an endless stream of information and production that punishes us for not participating—is so ubiquitous it seems like second nature. Yet beneath the Current is a lie: no matter how far upstream we go, no matter how many accomplishments we achieve, we’re left feeling hollow. 

Unlike most of my reviews, I’m drawn to write about of Arcadia in first-person. The poem speaks directly to us as individuals and as a collective, going deeper than the warnings we’ve heard before—the risks of screen time, the dearth of true connection, the horrifying rates of body dysmorphia and teen suicide because no one is allowed to feel they are enough—and substantiates them with age-old philosophy. When speaking to Hades about her work’s intentions, she said she hoped to distill complex ideas by philosophers like Nietzsche, Sartre, and Zuboff into accessible language.

In this effort, she succeeds, bringing us back to poetry’s roots. Before writing, stories were told aloud in poetic form: elements like rhyme and meter helped information stay intact. While free verse poetry is most common today, Hades work signals a revival of formal rhyme and meter. In fact, in a film collaboration with Award-winning artist Andrés Reisinger and Grammy-winning musician RAC, Arcadia became the most expensive poem ever sold. The poem works powerfully on the page, but out loud it is captivating, its truth now rhythmic.

Often this truth takes the shape of our most pressing questions. For example, we’re told to convince ourselves we’re unique, but deep down we know that we’re not. How do we reconcile this contradiction? Where can we find meaning, and should we even try? “How do we deal with our present delusions?” she writes. Without prescribing answers, Hades offers steps towards peace. These include being in nature, creating beauty for beauty’s sake, and choosing morality even when it won’t benefit our images or careers. I’d like to highlight that last point for two reasons: first, as Hades notes, without the rules of religion we’re exploring new, murkier moral grounds than past generations. But second, without dogma, we now have an opportunity to create our own resonant truths.

This creation might take time. To show how we got here, Hades outlines a convincing historical-philosophy. Without religion at the forefront, there is a “God-shaped hole” which 21C consumerism and the Current try to fill. Emphasis on “try”: as Albert Camus writes, “the only means of fighting a plague is common decency,” but when the first thing on our minds is our own image, it can be hard to know what decency means. Without the other, the “I” can be suffocating; without relief from the Current, we once again feel powerless to question a society.

But we can question it, Arcadia reminds us. “If you don’t know where to start / aim to tell one truth,” Hades writes, recalling Martha Beck’s notion of integrity as wholeness that starts by being honest about where, and who, you are.

As we see in Arcadia’s second canto, honesty starts with the right questions. In a structure reminiscent of Dante’s The Divine Comedy or Beck’s The Way of Integrity, the first three cantos of Arcadia invoke a situating and a reckoning. How do we survive/thrive in a society without being enslaved by it? How do we maintain authenticity when we’re rewarded (at least at first) by self-sacrifice to a simulacrum? But eventually, the questioning settles and the fourth canto, “Silence,” steers us to solitude. “It’s in the wilderness / where we safely hand over control,” she writes, reminding me of a Frost poem padding through the snow.

That wilderness might be psychological, sanctioned, or geographic, Hades and I noting our own trajectories that mirrored the cantos: from city to countryside to somewhere in the middle. While stillness is one of the most important things I’ve ever undertaken, it’s not the end. In the last canto, “The Chorus,” Hades harnesses the hope inherent in great existential philosophy. Here, there’s a balance of our actions, intentions, and internal beliefs, no matter the cultural norms. As Judith Butler writes, “One does not always stay intact” after loss of any kind. But if we must change, we can at least change for a truth we choose: “But I won’t turn away / from the world and all in it / I think I’ll stay / and rediscover myself entirely within it.”