Talkers And Dreamers

There had never been anything wrong in my life that a few good days in the wilderness wouldn't cure. PAM HOUSTON

Richard Mabey, one of our foremost English nature writers and compiler of Flora Britannica (about the folklore of British plants), published in 2005 a highly personal memoir called Nature Cure which documented his nervous breakdown. His recovery is closely bound up with his rediscovery of and reconnection with the natural world. He says this about language and nature: It is as if in using the facility of language, the thing we believe most separates us from nature, we are constantly pulled back to its, and our, origins... Learning to write again was what finally made me better - and I believe that language and imagination, far from alienating us from nature, are our most powerful and natural tools for re-engaging with it... Culture isn't the opposite or contrary of nature. It's the interface between us and the non-human world, our species' semi-permeable membrane. This is in fact similar to what The Grizzled Scribe was saying in his comment on my post from yesterday.

Mabey cites various writers who have explored this 'interface' - Aldo Leopold, Henry Thoreau, Gary Snyder, Annie Dillard, and the poet John Clare, of whom he writes: Clare was one of the few writers... to have created a language that joined rather than separated nature and culture. I would also add the name of Edward Abbey to this list - for out of the wild anarchy and bitter irony, the anguish and contradictoriness of Desert Solitaire, comes a plea for the absolute necessity and importance of wilderness, and an appeal for a true, universal 'civilization' rather than the one-sided, prejudiced, short-sighted 'culture' of a particular society in a particular tiime and place (when his book was published, in the 1960s, issues such as overpopulation, nuclear catastrophe, industrial tourism and the destruction of wilderness were very much on Abbey's mind). Through his brilliant writing, through his words, thoughts and ideas, Abbey demonstrates (to me at any rate) very much a 'civilized' mind - pointing out as he does the gulf between mankind and nature, and hinting how it may be possible to bridge it.

Yes, language and imagination are quite definitely natural products of human evolution, and may be used by poets, by writers, by all of us in order to reconnect with the natural world, a world we lost in the Garden of Eden after the Fall from Grace (if we choose to see it in these mythological terms). As Mabey writes: We have evolved as talkers and dreamers. That is our niche in the world, something we can't undo. But can't we see those very skills as our way back, rather than the cause of our exile?

In summation of the rather difficult subject I've tried to tackle in these last few posts (hopefully I haven't tied myself in too many knots!) I'll quote Gary Snyder from his book Unnatural Writing: Consciousness, mind and language are fundamentally wild. 'Wild' as in wild ecosystems - richly interconnected, interdependent and incredibly complex. Diverse, ancient and full of information... Narratives are one sort of trace that we leave in the world. All our literatures are leavings, of the same order as the myths of wilderness people who leave behind only stories and a few stone tools. Other orders of being have their own literature. Narrative in the deer world is a track of scents that is passed on from deer to deer, with an art of interpretation which is instinctive. A literature of bloodstains, a bit of piss, a whiff of estrus, a hit of rut, a scrape on a sapling, and long gone.

Essence Of Juniper

In the chapter Cliffrose And Bayonets from Desert Solitaire Abbey wrestles philosophically and emotionally with his favourite juniper tree: I've had this tree under surveillance ever since my arrival at Arches, hoping to learn something from it, to discover the significance in its form, to make a connection through its life with whatever falls beyond. Have failed. The essence of the juniper continues to elude me unless, as I presently suspect, its surface is also the essence. Two living things on the same earth, respiring in a common medium, we contact one another but without direct communication. Intuition, sympathy, empathy, all fail to guide me into the heart of this being - if it has a heart... At times I am exasperated by the juniper's static pose; something in its stylized gesture of appeal, that dead claw against the sky, suggests catalepsy. Perhaps the tree is mad...

Another significant, highly charged passage - so typical of Abbey. I think it's complex what he means here, a complexity which truthfully reflects our ambiguous relationship with nature. Just look at it closely. He has the tree "under surveillance"! What an interesting and revealing choice of phrase, suggesting both a stealthy wariness (it's almost as if the tree were up to no good or were suspiciously reluctant to bare its secrets) and also a certain clinical, scientific observation.

Abbey goes on to reinforce the idea that "surface" is also "essence" (an idea which should be familiar from my previous posts) - yet at the same time this isn't enough for him. He's obviously frustrated as hell at not being able to penetrate any further into the tree's essential tree-ness. He's actually "exasperated" that the tree is motionless, seemingly comatose, possibly "mad"! Despite his best intentions, he's anthropomorphizing the tree - something he philosophically never wanted to do!

So it seems inevitable and necessary that we have recourse to human words and emotions in order to relate to the non-human world, to bridge the gap between culture and nature. I would go further and say that it is good and right that we do so, and that we've now come full circle from the concept that words and feelings and human culture can alienate us from the natural world to the idea that they may in fact be the very things that connect us to it. But more of this tomorrow when I'll give support to this view from the English nature writer Richard Mabey...

A Hard And Brutal Mysticism

The personification of the natural is exactly the tendency I wish to suppress in myself, to eliminate for good. I am here [the desert near Moab, Utah] not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description. To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a non-human world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.

I think this paragraph from The First Morning, the opening chapter of Desert Solitaire, is hugely important. In it - and in the piece quoted yesterday - Abbey makes clear the philosophy behind his summer sojourn in Arches National Monument, south-east Utah, as park ranger; and flags up the intention behind his writing of the book.

Yesterday's quote shows Abbey to be suspicious of those who claim to have found an "underlying reality", a hidden, universal metaphysic, an abtract, deep ground and meaning to existence. Instead he urges us to look closely, and register sensuously, the beauty and richness which lies before us as revealed directly by our sense impressions: "the surface of things". (And what a surface!)

In the above passage we read that Abbey wants "to look at and into [my italics] a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture" etc, to experience these natural objects as themselves and for what they really are, uncluttered as far as possible with the baggage of nomenclature, human emotional sentiment, anthropomorphism, and "cultural apparatus". He's attempting to get rid of the barrier between the thought-ful human person and the thought-less bird, beast and flower, or nighthawk, cougar and cactus. H's trying to grasp the "elemental and fundamental" in a direct, quasi-mystical way.

Kant gave us the concepts of "phenomena" (objects perceived by our 5 senses) and "noumena" (objects which are "things-in-themselves", existing as essences beyond the reach of human perception). Hence the term "anti-Kantian" - for Abbey dreams of removing that bridge between subject and object, perceiver and perceived.

Paradox - because it's hardly possible to do this, as Abbey himself knows full well, except perhaps in transitory flashes of illumination and insight. Such experiences are beyond rational thought, beyond speech - yet Abbey, and all the rest of us, only have words at our disposal with which to attempt even an approximate description. (Perhaps music is a more suitable and direct medium.) It's a human need and necessity to describe, collate, measure and put in some sort of order the world around us - yet by doing these things we automatically create a verbal and mental division between ourselves and raw, unhumanized nature.

So Abbey can only "dream" of this "hard and brutal mysticism". Indeed, if it's achieved, it's a risky business, and he says he may end up compromising "everything human" in himself.

The Surface Of Things

Like Chris Townsend and Forest Wisdom, I've been considering the legacy of Edward Abbey recently (Abbey died just over 20 years ago on 14th March 1989). For my money the man had all the right ideas about wilderness and the natural world and civilization. His book Desert Solitaire: A Season In The Wilderness is an unquestioned masterpiece - it's eloquent, passionate, poetic, unsentimental, witty, provocative, opinionated and belligerent. His aim is to shock us out of our habitual torpor. And he succeeds. I'd like to ponder this book in more depth when I've more time and energy than I have right now (I've been driving 1000 miles a week lately - don't know what Abbey would have made of that!) In the meantime here's a wonderful quotation from the author's introduction to the book, in which he sets out his stall:

I believe that there is a kind of poetry, even a kind of truth, in simple fact...

It will be objected that the book deals too much with the surface of things, and fails to engage and reveal the patterns of unifying relationships which form the true underlying reality of existence. Here I must confess that I know nothing whatever about true underlying reality, having never met any. There are many people who say they have, I know, but they've been luckier than I.

For my own part I am pleased enough with surfaces - in fact they alone seem to me to be of much importance. Such things for example as the grasp of a child's hand in your own, the flavor of an apple, the embrace of friend or lover, the silk of a girl's thigh, the sunlight on rock and leaves, the feel of music, the bark of a tree, the abrasion of granite and sand, the plunge of clear water into a pool, the face of the wind - what else is there? What else do we need?

Wilderness Connection

Have a listen to Cameron McNeish's inspiring podcast with Ron Craighead of Backpackinglight at http://www.backpackinglight.com/. Cameron is editor of tgo, the UK's leading outdoors mag, and is passionate about the importance of 'wilderness connection'. His informal and enthusiastic reflections range far and wide, from the shielings and ancient standing stones of Scotland to the significance of wilderness writers such as John Muir, Edward Abbey and Colin Fletcher. He's romantic and emotional about the subject - but also pragmatic and realistic about the need to lobby politicians and get them on our side in order to achieve rights of access to the countryside and to preserve wilderness areas.