It’s certainly raining here: that’s right, no snow, just rain, and lots of it. If it were 15 degrees colder, we’d be up to our necks in snowdrifts, which most of my neighbors would prefer. Me too, I think. As I noted once before, if you can’t see the mountains and it’s overcast, the main drag looks like somewhere in Indiana. (I used the windshield wipers today for the first time in months.)
I have been reading an actual book, though: The Oregon Trail, by Francis Parkman. Yup. If you’ve never examined this 1846 first person account of life with the Indians on the way to the Black Hills, you absolutely must. The author is hideously racist but an exquisite descriptive writer whose accounts of Nature along the way are utterly spellbinding, as are the long narratives of life with the “Dakotas.” I read 200 pages last night and feel like I’m still there, eating dried meat and sleeping on a buffalo robe.
What I take away from that are two things: first, the “country” has always mainly consisted of a rude association of pillagers, bent on enriching themselves at the expense of the common good. Second, as I read the book, I could see the author getting more and more in tune with his surroundings, despite all his complaining. Even a 19th-century man, accustomed to think of woods as something to be cut down and “conquered,” experiences at least a little soul change along the way. This is highly exciting and depressing at the same time, because most of us have no access to the kind of natural environment that serves this healing purpose! The more we destroy, the less chance we have to find our way home.
When I lived back in Maryland, there were tiny pockets of natural habitat behind the farms and housing developments. If I went out on the water in my little boat, I could find short stretches of shoreline that probably looked the same as they had before humans came to plunder. Magical slivers of REALITY, you might say, but it wasn’t enough for me. The reason I came out here to the frontier was to find more of what nourishes my whole being. Sometimes it’s lonely, but I will never go back to the land of freeways and shopping malls except to visit.
What some call primitive is actually cutting edge. I know that now for certain. The same dynamic that almost wrenched Parkman into the present tense and full awareness is still there, waiting.
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You’re in a great American tradition, my friend. A sympathetic critic once described Fennimore Cooper, Parkman, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, R.H. Dana, as “palefaces who long to be redskins”. To throw away “sivilization” and “cut out for the territories” – Mark Twain speaking there. Sal and Dean “on the road”. Right up to the fellow in “Into the Wild”. Many, many more in that tradition, and many different nuances of it, but it is uniquely American. With all the wilderness we have in Canada we don’t really have that strain in our thinking. No Canadian could have written “Moby Dick”. Or “The Oregon Trail” for that matter. We love the idea of “the North” and we all have (well, not me, but lots of quite ordinary folks do have) nice little cottages an hour or so’s drive from the big cities we mostly live in. Our predominant metaphor for the way we humans fit into the great fierce world of nature is “the Bush Garden”. Something both domesticated and wild. Americans of the tradition you’re in, John, crave the wildness pure and simple, see the wildness as a purifying alternative to the evil and inauthenticity of human societies.
Well, there’s room in my world for all these postures. I have trouble seeing anything especially moral about life on the edges, but I do respond to the esthetics of it. That’s more interesting to me than the claims advanced on the basis of moral superiority. Here I know I differ with you. No, for me the question is rarely whether an action or opinion is moral but whether it is interesting, dangerous, courageous, unique, original. No one would read Parkman today for his morality. But who cares about that? His prose was the ticket.
Well, I’ve been having a kind of slash-and-gash day, so I was ready to delete this. Already did, once, in fact, then put it back.
As long as you commented, it can stay up a little longer. The only thing I don’t want to do is get in anybody’s way. When I’m ornery, I put things down, and there you go, I’m sittin’ in the middle of the road. It’s a continual struggle to just leave things be and pay attention.
But you’ve mentioned the moral superiority thing before. I guess that comes through when I’m preachy, but I honestly don’t feel that way or intend that impression. Others have taken it the way you sometimes do, so there must be a subtext somewhere. Maybe I have one, I usually do. Three or four, at least.
As another old friend, David Ashworth, once said to me, “each one of us has got his own little path through the world,” and this is mine. I’m not morally superior or move evolved for taking it. (Quite the opposite, in fact, for having dithered so long.) I couldn’t ever have done anything any other way, of course. That’s either exhilarating or depressing, depending on the context.
So here I am, in Taos, New Mexico, still drawing breath in the Land of No Excuses. What I’m after is direct experience — did you see this? — I want healing and wholeness. I want freedom from fear. I want union. I want mutability and transparency. I want ultimate mobility. I want to be light as a feather. I want to be as light as the thought of a feather. All the things I want are really inner issues, or should I say just one, and Nature is the key.
Your original post was good, but your reply was REALLY good. You’re a tough self-censor, my friend. After reading both the original and your response, I’m inclined to retract my own critique on the moral question. You’re quite clearly working out your own destiny in your own way using your own words to describe the experience. Bravo! That’s what all us humans ought to be doing, that’s what we were put on earth to do. You do it with more self-consciousness and more expressiveness than others, and you do it out in the open, nakedly. The cheap shots of a guy like me are sometimes your reward for this. Anyhow, we’re all god-damned messes, full of contradictions, ill-considered opinions, foggy vaguenesses and – once in a great while – moments of grace such as you describe on your home page. Until Gabriel sounds his trumpet, anyhow.
I myself claim to despise moralisms, but maybe I only despise them when they don’t quite jibe with my own self-found ones. Most of my favourite authors were obsessed with the question “how should we live?” Almost every word Tolstoy ever wrote was a response to that question. No, I’m a bit of a hypocrite when I claim to hate morality. My prejudices are the legacy of too many sermons endured on too many Sunday mornings.