ABlog

So, I’ve been reading Thoreau’s “Walking” with Imagining Reality (my creative nonfiction class).” It’s the essay that contains that famous declaration: “[I]n Wildness [not ‘wilderness,’ as it’s commonly misquoted] is the preservation of the World.” After an extended discussion of the structure of the essay, my smart class came up with the crucial questions: “What is ‘the wild’ for Thoreau?” and “What does Thoreau want us to do [differently]?”

We listed on the chalk board some of the things Thoreau says about the wild—what he connects it to, what he separates it from. Our list that looked something like this:

wild = good
wild = dark(er)
wild = West
wild = part and parcel of Nature
wild = strong
wild = free
wild = an essential component of imaginative literature
wild = raw
wild = most alive
wild = not yet changed or subdued by human intervention
wild = pure
wild = related to solitude
wild = present even in that which appears tame
wild = an ignorance more “intelligent” than knowledge
wild = vulnerable
a swamp is one emblematic instance of wildness

The class was much better at plumbing the complexities of this strange concept, wildness, as it is poetically invoked within Thoreau’s text than they were at deciding what the author thought we should do to infuse wildness into a society with which he was so clearly dissatisfied. After we’d batted that one around for a while, I asked them my own $64,000 question: Is there any relevance to this concept of wildness in today’s world? I mentioned having my own generational perspective on that question. One student said she would like to know what this perspective was, but class was nearly over by then and I didn’t want to waste time speechifying. Here, then, is the speech.

Although my students are certainly very good readers, and willing to make an honest effort, I feel a kind of despair when faced with the necessity to try to bridge the gap between Thoreau’s “wildness” and the ways in which they view their lives (human life). The ways in which everything in their surroundings encourages them to view their lives (human life, “the world”). I’m reminded of how, in the novel Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko depicts a terrible struggle between her Native hero Tayo’s moments of fragile faith in the earth and his moments of massive doubt. As the novel points out, the entirety of white civilization is a material as much as discursive refutation of the indigenous conviction concerning an identity between people and land. Like Tayo in his weaker moments, we look around us and think: everything that counts is manmade. And the manmade world—the tampered-with world—is so clearly not only in the ascendant but massively expanding its power and reach with every day that passes. Massively expanding its already conclusive conquest of the Real.

Anything that hasn’t yet been appreciably tampered with is so plainly vulnerable. The mere existence of the “pristine” seems like an invitation to tampering, as virginity invites violation. How many times can we hear of the pending extinction of yet another faltering species, how many times can environmental legislation be relaxed or circumvented, how many times can environmental legislation be flouted, how many times can corporations be allowed to put making a buck over the well-being of innumerable future generations that might live here if we don’t make it impossible, how many times can radiation be released into the atmosphere, how many times can tankers full of oil discharge their cargoes into the oceans, with how much mercury and depleted uranium can the soil be sown, how many rivers can be dammed how many times, how many forests can be terminated with extreme prejudice, how many seas can be brought to a rolling boil, how many icecaps liquefied, how many genes subjected to ingenious modifications…before the Wild comes to seem a merely quaint concept, something fit only for consignment to the theme park of an official Wilderness Area?

“I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows”—Thoreau offers his credo.

Well, then: God must surely be good and dead.

Each crime against the earth serves a dual purpose—on one level, it fulfills some utilitarian goal; on another and far more sinister level, it weakens human "civilization's" only rival for supremacy in the realm of the Real. The Earth has to be killed for reasons very like the ones that made the rulers of the United States of North America feel it imperative to eliminate Sandino, Arbenz, Lumumba, Allende, and all the rest: the threat of a good example cannot be tolerated.

In the face of my despair at the possibility of outarguing the so-persuasive arguments being made by facts on the ground, I spoke a word to my students that I figured would do a good deal to make my case for me. This word was Hurricane.

The Hurricane—in particular, Hurricane Katrina—surely stands for the point at which the paradox of nature and culture finally, definitively, obviously begins to swallow its own tail. For what could be more wild—more ferocious, unbiddable, and less answerable to human agendas—than this extreme of violent weather? Yet, if it’s true, as many scientists insist, that the intensity if not the frequency of such storms is being affected by global warming, Hurricane Katrina may be another manifestation of the fact that we’re far beyond the point where that “wild” that is conceived of as unfolding on its own terms, apart from human tampering, i.e. can be reliably distinguished from the “non-wild.”

There is nothing tame about a hurricane, even one that draws its power from the effects of people driving too many SUV’s. But then, neither is there anything tame about a Mississippi River delta that floods disastrously as a result of many decades of ever more stringent flood control efforts.

There is no end to the power of untamed forces. There are only more and less intelligent ways—more beautiful and uglier ways--more life-promoting and more death-inviting ways--to live with those forces.

So in honor of the old guy, who foresaw our predicament down to the fever of gatedness that besets us (“At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only,--when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road…Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come”), here are a couple of snippets from a poem I started a while ago. It’s called “Talking Back to Thoreau” and was inspired by an earlier class to whom I tried to teach Walden, with the result that several students concluded H.D.T. was an elitist creep who could safely be ignored.

When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall?—Thoreau, “Walking”

A place with trees
where no one tries
to sell me anything—
wilderness?
socialism?

no—

it’s just
the Botanic Garden
on the cheap.

Over autumn lawns,
the orthodox converse.
White chest-blazes
mark them.

Leaf-blowers
blast through the peace
manned by women
in ear muffs.

The rose garden wears
the discounted look
of chic resorts
in tough times
(crestfallen, stalwart blooms
amid the tougher plump
of rose hips,
bare, ruined choirs
coming).
The bleak
of tourist beaches
après coup.

*****

Mr. Thoreau
can’t come
to the phone
right now

so after the beep
please leave
an epigram
or bean.

*****

Far-fetched sensations,
recorded history.

The now of the 1930’s
spools from the radio.

(“One world at a time”
said wry Thoreau

dying
at 44.)

I had
n’t an

y one
til you

*****

November morning,
a forest in a puddle.

The world
makes itself.

One miracle.
No other.

*****

The wild—what is it?
Ah, Thoreau—
we could have been contented,
thinking
near the earth.



(Instead of which, here we sit, out of our minds. Unpreserved to beat the band.)