Kenai Peninsula, Alaska, spring 1994, camping in grizzly bear country—”the Dark One”
These essays should be read in the following sequence. They are chapter drafts of “The Language of Wildness.”
We have come to where history ends
. . . this is unfinished
I am not a real writer. I must be honest about this. A true writer writes regularly, generally daily, consuming quarts of ink. The hard stuff. Smell their breath: reeks of ink. Palpate the liver: enlarged. Real writers are literary winos.
That is not me. I write in fits and starts. Binges. This makes me a dry drunk most of the time. (Besides, what I call a book is really no more than a long meditation, which doesn’t qualify as a real book.)
There is a deeper, more disturbing reason why I’m not a real writer. I am running out of language. I sometimes feel like Alice’s Cheshire Cat, a bit of me disappearing with each volume. This might seem paradoxical from someone who has published several books. The important thing is not that books were written, but where they led me—to the far side of language.
The Great Forgetting
Published as the foreword to Gay Bradshaw, Elephants on the Edge: What Elephants Teach Us about Humanity (Yale University Press, 2009).
Elephant breakdown, the subject herein, disturbs me. It says my own was inevitable. Recall Nietzsche’s crackup, triggered by the sight of a tradesman flogging a horse, and you begin to understand what I’m talking about.
We are all susceptible. Descartes in dressing gown before his hearth, demolishing, as if brick by brick, his rational mind—one of the more famous crackups of history. The cloak of composure we wear carries its own unraveling—the bit of thread lying exposed. Sometimes, as with Nietzsche, it happens in a thunderclap of shattering dissonance.
Whether swift or slow, this is how we grow. “By being defeated, decisively,/by constantly greater beings.”[1]
Thoreau’s crackup occurred on a camping trip in the Maine wilderness. Alone in the swirling mists at Katahdin’s summit, he felt a great energy moving near him. “What is this Titan that has possession of me?” “Contact! Contact!” he shouts into the pages of his journal. “Who are we? Where are we?” The sober author of Walden was in a place not controlled by man—untouchable, impenetrable, and impalpable. The mountain awakened with “a force not bound to be kind to man,” Thoreau noted chillingly.[2]
So did the untouchable, impenetrable, impalpable Uncertainty that wrestled with Jesus of Nazareth for forty days and nights. “That kneaded him as if to change his shape.”[3] Forty days in the presence of something language cannot reach—yet reborn, in the end, into the Jesus of History.
Confessions of a fugitive
Standing on the shore of this lake wrapped in early evening. The water is calm in the gentle rain. I reach up and turn off the headlamp to stand in darkness. Suddenly I am fully here with this lake and its powers. Suddenly I am susceptible to this place.
This is precisely where I wish to be. In the dark I shall tell you that I am a fugitive from civilization. It is why I canoed across ponds and lakes and beaver dams to this spot this evening. It is why I resigned my professorship and moved to this wilderness far flung from the metropolis.
I am scarred by civilization’s words. Wounded by its speech in the news and in its literature and in the press of the throng. I could tell you that I am conducting scholarly research on language, hoping to find better words within the flasks and smoking test-tubes of a laboratory, or digging an ancient tomb to uncover lost powers of speech. But that would not be the truth of it. The truth is I am a desperate man who abandoned research and dismissed the class and shook hands with colleagues, to be here tonight in a spring rain. To turn off this light and listen.
A magician who became a philosopher told me years ago that to hear is also to be heard. He said: This is the way of the universe, whether we comprehend it or not. An observation like that recasts the whole proposition of human communication.
I turn off the light and believe him that my anguish is listened to by the lake in this rain.
Where the wild things are
. . . “The Great Forgetting” (above) was abstracted from this longer, more developed piece.
Once in springtime I stood upon a grizzly bear track huge and fresh in new snow. As I did, “a streak of reality/ broke in upon this stage through that fissure.” No, not fear. I want to be clear about that. The sensation was not entirely comfortable—let me be clear about this too. It was a force ancient and essential to the shaping of human nature that suddenly engulfed me. I was standing on the sacred ground of wildness, within the precincts of a consciousness vaster than my own. Undulating loose-limbed wildness had passed this way just moments before, leaving its clawed imprint to devour me with the terrible, ancient question, What is man if not the handiwork of wildness?
I am not alone in asking this question. In the crashing tonnage of a sperm whale Herman Melville experienced “some colossal alien existence without which man himself would be incomplete.” For Faulkner the question loomed in the figure of an old bear in a Mississippi wilderness. “So I will have to see him,” resolved the boy, Isaac McCaslin, “without dread or even hope. I will have to look at him.” What was “this boy… born knowing and fearing too maybe but without being afraid, that [he] could go ten miles on a compass because he wanted to look at a bear none of us had ever got near enough to put a bullet in and looked at the bear and came the ten miles back on the compass in the dark”? Faulkner frames the question through one of his characters. It is critical; surely it is one of the oldest questions known to mankind.
What was I, too, born knowing and fearing (but without being afraid), which compelled me to seek out the “wild immortal spirit” of a huge bear? “Not even a mortal beast,” continues Faulkner, “but an anachronism indomitable and invincible out of an old dead time.”
Or was it the other way around? Did the wild immortal spirit seek me? “Lost in his freedom, Man pursues/ The shadow of his images,” writes Auden. And yet it need not be this way. Perhaps, on some axis of reality, it is never this way. Perhaps, as Auden says in his next line, “the Unknown seeks the known.”
The Unknown is not some Middle Eastern deity; it is wildness and it is universal. The “untouchable, impenetrable, impalpable” thing. Thoreau would discover this on a camping trip in the Maine wilderness. Alone in the swirling mists at Katahdin’s summit he felt a great energy moving near him. “What is this Titan that has possession of me?” “Contact! contact!” he shouts into the pages of his journal. “Who are we? Where are we?” The sober author of Walden was in a place not controlled by man—untouchable, impenetrable, and impalpable.
“Because a python is an elephant”
. . . this is incomplete
“She glided beautifully along and sat down,” a San (Bushman) woman is quietly telling an American with a notepad. (We are standing in a dusty, parched village in the Kalahari Desert, eavesdropping on the ethnologist Megan Biesele as she interviews a woman about Python Woman. Python Woman, G!kon//’amdima, happens to be the beautiful, sensual daughter-in-law of the creator Kaoxa. It would not be too much of a stretch, I believe, to call her the Bushman equivalent of the biblical Eve crossed with the Virgin Mary. Like the Blessed Virgin among the devout, G!kon//’amdima is considered the ideal woman and very real.) “She glided beautifully along and sat down,” the woman is saying, “because she was a person, an elephant girl. Because a python is an elephant.”
Something isn’t right here; what we just heard is nonsensical. “How can that be?” protests Biesele. “I thought a python was one thing and an elephant was another thing!” (Listen: The river of language is about to be restored to its original direction.) “Yes, that’s true,” cheerfully agrees the woman—“but people say that a python is an elephant anyway.”
This is not a good answer. It gets worse. By the end of the interview G!kon//’amdima is not only Python Woman and Elephant Girl, she is also Beautiful Antbear Woman and Human Maiden and, for her final showstopper (Is there ever any final event in the language of wildness?) she transforms into a steenbok.
Christ the bear
. . . this is under construction
“The ear of language rests/ on the breast of the world,” writes the poet Robert Bringhurst,
unable to know and unable to care
whether it listens inward or outward.
I am convinced the ear of language is formed in the womb, this chamber where life splits itself and as it does all conceivable need is met. Call it the Discourse of Grace. A river of grace through a cord, a basin of grace cradling the form—consciousness awakens within this conversation from which words will someday ring forth. “The world is immense,” muses Rilke, “and like a word that is still growing in the silence”—the word growing in silence in this realm we call womb.
In a brilliant riff on “therolinguistics” (the language of wild things), novelist Ursula LeGuin gives us a feel for what this uterine Word might be like. (Though in this instance it is not uterine, but avian: the Emperor penguin of the Antarctic, cradling its single egg.) “I say, imagine it: the ice, the scouring snow, the darkness, the ceaseless whine and scream of wind. In that black desolation a little band of poets crouches…. On the feet of each one, under the warm belly feathers, rests one large egg, thus preserved from the mortal touch of the ice.” We are drawn to the next line: “ The poets cannot hear each other; they cannot see each other. They can only feel the other’s warmth. That is their poetry, that is their art.”
LeGuin’s genius is to equate warmth, the warmth of touch, with language. She calls it poetry. “Like all kinetic literatures, it is silent; unlike other kinetic literatures, it is all but immobile, ineffably subtle. The ruffling of a feather; the shifting of a wing, the touch, the slight, faint, warm touch of the one beside you. In unutterable, miserable, black solitude, the affirmation. In absence, presence. In death, life.”
In the womb, the poets—mother and child—touch one another.
Neuron by neuron, bundle by bundle, mind awakens within this nursery where no intimacy is withheld. “I was before the world,” softly speaks the “voice of those who nurse.”