Why Wildness?

Because for most of my life I have lived and worked alone out of sight of any neighbor in the middle of hundreds of acres of forest, people often ask me, “Why do you like living out there?” I am not a misanthrope, a person who detests mankind. I not only admire the human animal above all others, but I believe over the long run civilization has made the right choices and will learn how to manage both itself and the natural environment.

Many of the people who ask why I want to live in a wild place are fellow environmentalists but of the kind who believe that the human race is at best ignorant and self-destructive, at worst, a selfish and cruel horde that pillages and plunders innocent nature. When such an environmentalist asks why I live alone, I should reverse the question and ask why he or she is not living in a wild place, enjoying a vacation from civilization and communing with the spirits of nature.

Most environmentalists feel about nature the same way they often say they feel about New York or Chicago--a nice place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there. When they do move to the country, they usually bring their domestic partners, both human and animal. Going for a walk in the woods with a dog is akin to attending a concert with a turned on paper shredder. These are often the same people who delight in drinking from clear streams oblivious to the excrement or dead bodies upstream, and who often kiss their dogs and cats who have just licked their own unbathed genitals and rectums.

I do not feel the need to drink nature’s excrement and kiss its dirty kisser exactly because I have observed it closely and thought about it long and hard. So why would anyone, including me, would want to live in a wild place without human neighbors?

My answer is power. Living here I have the thrill I experienced as a city kid entering the ocean waves for the first time. They bowled me over, tossed me around, slammed me into the sand, and spit me out in the foam. I kept going back for more. I learned to duck under the waves and to body surf on the crests, no expensive board between me and that power, something like galloping bareback.

I have come to appreciate the risks and enjoy other powers of nature—cold, wind, trees, sun, and mountains. Living with these powers and protected by few intermediaries and defenses tests our limits and defines the edges of our lives. In short, it is a way of defining who we are.

Wildness and its powers do something more important for some of us. Oddly enough the people who often find the greatest relief living in the presence of a wild power are prone to self-doubt and depression. Their personal frustrations often come from their commitment to make a difference in the civilized world. Their lack of power, if you will.

That’s how it was for me when I left my forest and served for two years as a resident adviser on housing and land reform in a Central Asian capital city of 1.5 million people. I was struggling with the language, struggling with bureaucracy there and in Washington, infuriated by the daily dose of corrupt officials, and breathing city air thick and greasy with coal smoke, car exhaust, and diesel soot.

I had the good fortune to live in a shoddy little neighborhood of old cottages instead of the tall concrete apartment buildings where the embassy security officer thought Americans should live. Every morning I got up early enough to walk outside. High above the city of Alma Ata (now Almaty), from east to west rose an unbroken wall of snow covered peaks 15,000 feet high, gleaming in the morning sun. In geological time these are new mountains, a few rifts northward toward Siberia from the Himalayas. They had been rising for millions of years. And for millions of years the snows and glaciers had been shaving them down, grinding the grit from them, cascading avalanches of mud and rock over the plains below. The city of Alma Ata and my cottage sat on a gentle slope of old avalanches. As recently as twenty years earlier the mountains had invaded parts of town with boulders and mud.

Every morning I paused to look at these mountains, to drink them in with my eyes. I grew very small beneath them. I had lived more than five decades, but my life was a nanosecond in their time. Civilization was a little bubble. Those mountains loomed above me like the crests of ocean waves. The forces that had been building them for millennia sometimes shook the city and made the glasses dance on my kitchen shelf and the light bulb swing on its cord.

Every morning I looked at the great still peaks and went on to my work with my staff and my clients. In my mind, we were like the children my brother and I were when we went into the ocean waves and locked our hands together to see if we could stand up as a big ocean wave washed over us. No matter how firmly my brother and I locked arms, sooner or later we were knocked down. My staff and I would do our best, but it would stand only afew seconds in the cosmic scheme of things. You might think it odd I took some comfort in that realization. But after all, it shrunk not only the importance of my work but the importance of my frustrations and failures.

Apart from that kind of comfort and perspective, I have no other explanation for why I like to live in a wild place. Whether the wildness is ocean waves, great mountains, or the stillness of an old forest, it tells me what Lord David Cecil’s father, the prime minister of England, once told him: “Few things matter very much, and most things don’t matter at all.”

THE NOBODY AMONG THE SOMEBODIES

You’ve seen it or you can see it—the way 47 year old, beetle-browed, double chinned Susan Boyle stuffs a sandwich in her face, tells the backstage interviewer she’s ready to sing, then stumps out onto the stage of a nationally televised British talent show. She dares to confront a live audience of mainly young and hip Brits in her nondescript beige dress that covers her thick body more like a tube than a garment. Her sturdy legs protrude from below and terminate in white high heels that she uses somewhat as if they were stilts. If you haven’t watched, please do it now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY


The three judges make a chick sandwich—two tanned unblemished guys flanking a sleek young blonde. Watch the guys snigger as she introduces herself. “And what’s your name, darling?” asks the youngest guy leaning back and playing with his pen. He asks her age and rolls his eyes when she says she is 47. When she says she wants to be as famous as Elaine Page, the beautiful blonde who starred in the debut of Evita, judges and audience faces wince and snigger.



By her own description she was just another Scottish woman living alone with her cat Pebbles, singing in her church choir, never married, never courted, never noticed outside her own circle of friends. Today over 12 million people have watched her sing on YouTube.

What made her an instant sensation on the Internet and British and American television? Not her sure enough good singing voice. Her real triumph was the way she suddenly and decisively smashed and shamed the smug superiority of the three gliteratti judges, the two fay, condescending back stage assistants, and an audience ready to laugh at a bush-browed, sack-of -potatoes woman who dared sing for them in a national talent show.

And what will she sing a judge asks. “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Miserables she announces confidently to the audience that clearly pities the dreamer. Within a few bars not just her voice but her confidence and her identification with the song lift both audience and judges out of their seats. They are applauding and shouting approval. She sings on. The song is everything.

If you don’t know the song, it opens with this stanza:

I dreamed a dream in time gone by
When hope was high,
And life worth living
I dreamed that love would never die
I dreamed that God would be forgiving.

The last lines are these:

But there are dreams that cannot be
And there are storms
We cannot weather...

I had a dream my life would be
So different from this hell I'm living
So different now from what it seems
Now life has killed
The dream I dreamed.

As the applause and screaming approval die down, the older of the two male judges tells her that when she walked onto the stage “and stood there with that cheeky grin and said, ‘I want to be like Elaine Page,’ everyone was laughing at you.” The younger guy says he had been expecting “something extraordinary” and it’s clear he means extraordinarily bad.

Few people, even professional actors and singers, have ever turned an audience around as decisively as this Scottish nobody. And she did it not by acting or performing in any professional sense.

Those judges, theater people, television hotshots, and the hip audience—they all had a dream. Their dream was that they were somebody and other people were nobodies. Many of us dream this to justify ourselves, and most of us know better. Emily Dickinson once played on this theme with her lines:

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us -- don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Susan Boyle proved that inside every nobody is a somebody. Perhaps she reached inside of those frogs and that bog and killed their dreams. But she brought back life to their hearts.

Idealism and Realism: Clarified by Vasily Grossman

I recently upset a friend by writing that idealists have been responsible for many of history’s greatest disasters. “Thank God for idealists,” she replied. My words brought to her mind a choice between hidebound conservatives and optimistic, compassionate progressives; defenders of the status quo and reformers guided by a shining ideal. Maybe Natan Sharansky captured the difference when he noted that it would be unfair to criticize the inventor of the wheel for not having invented the pneumatic tire.

The idealist judges the existing order from the ideal rather than by its past progress or its ability to improve or the flexibility of its institutions. Idealists have often created havoc and suffering in proportion to the urgency and passion with which they insist the world measure up.

I do not contend that there is no safe dose of idealism, but history warns us that the world has been denied a lot of measurable and possible progress because politicians and political movements have chosen to pursue unachievable and often unworkable ideals. Few people have written so well about the dangers of idealism as Vasily Grossman. Here are passages from his huge novel about WWII,Life and Fate.

Whenever we see the dawn of an eternal good that will never be overcome by evil. . . . whenever we see this dawn, the blood of old people and children is always being shed.

I have seen people being annihilated in the name of an idea as good and fine and humane as the ideal of Christianity. I saw whole villages dying of hunger; I saw peasant children dying in the snows of Siberia; I saw trains bound for Siberia with hundreds and thousands of men and women from Moscow, Leningrad and every city in Russia -- men and women who had been declared enemies of a great and bright idea of social good. The idea was something fine and noble -- yet it killed without mercy, crippled the lives of others, and separated wives from husbands, and children from fathers.
. . .
and yet ordinary people bear love in their hearts, are naturally full of love and pity for any living thing. At the end of the day's work they prefer the warmth of the hearth to a bonfire in the public square.

From Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert Chandler. Vasily Grossman was born in Ukraine in 1905 and served as a war correspondent in the fiercest fighting between Soviet and German troops. The KGB confiscated what they thought were all copies of his novel.

Elmer Kelton Is More Than The Faulkner of Texas

Hate to say it but I wish novelist Elmer Kelton had not won the Spur Award from the Western Writers of America six times. Very few people know him except the readers of “westerns.” As Dee Brown, the author of best seller Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, said, “Elmer Kelton does not write Westerns. He writes fine novels set in the West.” I would add he deserves the same kind of wide recognition as Faulkner. (Another day I’ll muse on why being a Southern writer is a badge of honor while being a Western writer is a literary pigeon hole.)

Kelton’s genius is the same as Faulkner’s—the ability to see the big picture through a small frame, to see the full scope of human possibility in people few of us ever see. The difference between Faulkner and Kelton is that you don’t need an English professor to give you the illusion that you understand what he writes.

Like Faulkner at his clearest, a Kelton dialogue about some particular gritty routine can open bring into clear and personal focus an understanding of a big issue like the nature of freedom or the role of government or the duties of love without ever stepping out off a fast moving story.

Perhaps Kelton is widely read but seldom taught for two reasons. He doesn’t have a lot of the mumbo jumbo that professors like to play with, and he is not politically correct. A student recently sent me the reading list for an American studies course. It had filled its politically correct diversity quota by having a gay and lesbian writer, a couple of black and Latino writers, and a feminist. All minor writers and message writers rather than good story tellers. With such quotas to fill and given the mentality behind the quota many courses in American literature cannot find a place for anything that seems devoted to the old American icon, the Cowboy.

Suffice to say that Kelton’s Mexicans, women, and Indians struggle with and sometimes enjoy real lives rather than feeling sorry for themselves. They reveal the complexity of race and gender issues in a way only the characters necessary to a believable story can do. Enough said. Kelton speaks for himself and I recommend starting with The Time It Never Rained or The Good Old Boys.

“The way Hewey saw it, the Lord had purposely made every person different. He could not understand why so many people were determined to thwart the Lord’s work by making everyone the same.” The Good Old Boys , p. 52.

That same footloose cowboy tells his established farmer brother, “I can do anything I put my mind to.”
“And your back. . . You’ve never been lazy, Hewey. You could do anything be anything you wanted.”
“I am what I want to be.” , The Good Old Boys, p. 123


Today's link is to a seasonal poem by novelist Amy Belding Brown (Mr. Emerson's Wife):
http://amybeldingbrown.blogspot.com/2009/03/red-winged-blackbird.html

The Eleventh Commandment: Listen

No one reads the "old school" poets much except as assignments or unless the poets are old enough to have the prestige of time and survival. Yet poetry accounts for the only commencement address I remember in its entirety, even though I was not at Harvard that year or ever, and still had a year to go before my own high school graduation. I offer this background to build on the previous blog about why no one remembers poetry. For me, my history with this poem suggests, real poetry is real memory.

The address was the Phi Beta Kappa poem written and read at Harvard's 1956 commencement by poet John Holmes. In the fall of my senior year in high school I clipped it from Harper's Magazine and still have it, probably because I still need the advice.

The Eleventh Commandment

I
When Moses came down from the mountain and the cloud,
He came alone down the rocks, and there alone a while,
The air above him empty and all still, he stood.
There had been trumpets in the fire, but he was whole.
He was Moses, older than old, remembering what he saw,
Saying to himself, a white light in his face,
What he must say to the people, remembering the law.

A man can live to an age that is outside age,
Where forgetting is forgotten, and remembering
Is the hand's motion turning an earlier page.
Nothing is unimportant there, and everything
Is written on one page or another of the book.
Whatever the old men need to know, they know
They have but to turn the pages, turn, and look.

Moses would say everything God had said to him
To the people waiting in the valley below to hear,
The cubits of the tabernacle he would build for them,
The cornering, the colors. But there was one more
Commandment more than ten. Only an auditor
Very old, an old man with Moses' many years,
Could know after the ten commandments one more.

He had been up there a long time hearing what he heard.
He had carried up there all he had ever known.
Now he must utter before and after God's word
What both knew. And shining, Moses went down.
He read from the tablet the last word: Listen.
Those who were to be the new world heard the law,
And Moses began again, with the first word: Listen.

II
Time passed (you can hear time passing) and men begat,
But not daughters with hearing, nor sons with ears.
Oh, a few musicians, and poets. But most forgot,
And the generations became lookers-at, and seers.
Lost, lost, all the shouts and the lovely saying.
Sound of the wind in olives. Birds, and children.
The shepherd's whistle, the priests at noon praying.

And we cannot hear now the ancient rivers in spring,
Because no one who listened wrote of the sound,
Nor of trumpets, nor the wordless songs girls sing
In their mothers' houses, nor wheels on the ground.
But there are trumpets in trees, and river-song.
Listen. The shiver of wind. The shoes of children.
Trees never stopped. Listen. Nor girls, for long.

A world-gale blows. He who has ears, let him hear.
Under the roof of the day our history moves,
Moving away in the corridors, or trampling near.
Memory murmurs in all the rooms. The sound lives.
Sound is a living thing. Life speaks to be heard.
At the windows it comes in, we are the openings
To the wind on us, over and over us poured.

Do not shut it out. You cannot shut it out.
Listen to the length of all life in one voice.
(But it is loud. But it is meaningless, ugly. But.)
Only the noisy make noise. The noisy like noise.
Noise is the most unremembered of all sound.
It forgets itself and is gone as soon as come.
You listen to the stillest voices of the mind.

You listen for the sounds that tell you time,
The lick and lock of a swung clock-pendulum,
The turning over in bed before dawn, the room
Breathing with the house, the electric hum
Coming on or clicking off, gurgling of water,
The traffic decrescendo, the shutting of doors,
The always sounds that only tell you it is later.

For their own sake, you hear the sound of tools.
A hammer on a nail is-a hammer on a nail.
Saws sound like saws. The rigor of steel rules
And levels is a grammar of meaning without fail.
Drills. Chisels. An axe-blade swung true
To the wood-grain, and the split stick dropped.
Tools doing what they tell you they can do.

The monuments of music, music's fountain
That falls lifting, the terraces toward sky
Lit or shadowed as clouds pass above a mountain,
We look long at. The ear becomes the eye,
Hearing the blue cliffs, and eye climbs
Those towers to their tops, comes to silence down,
And again ascends, and a hundred hundred times.

III
But strings, brass, drums are not music, nor a page.
The piano lives when hands strike music forth,
But is not music, nor theater voices on a stage,
Nor a command an action, nor a compass north.
There is no word unless a listener to the word
Hears it, and with all his branching blood hears,
And makes happen in space the thing he heard.

Who is the hero, then, the speaker-hero?
The maker of music, the stick that beats the drum?
No, the listener: the figure that makes a zero
The number ten, the one that dares be dumb.
A huge courage is needed for the college years,
Some in the professor, living by the mouth,
Infinitely more in a student, living by his ears.

Let us devise honors for this good listener,
Who, while the world and time were running away,
Stayed, in dependence, and without demur,
And lived, and is living to listen another day.
Praise the good listener, yet envy him.
He is that man who is all that he has heard.
One hopes no more than to be his homonym.

So he goes out to begin at being old,
At being another Moses, with time his aid,
He who will do the telling, not he who is told.
But even Moses the lawgiver listened to God.
Achieving wisdom, at whatever score and ten,
He talks less, and his face is a kind of shining,
And he listens to all that is said by all men.

He listens with Indian patience, wary, serene,
Amused, giving everything new its old name.
History is a picture changing from familiar scene
To scene, to one who listens beyond the frame.
He hears what the archeologists listen for,
That part of the story after the story's end,
The more that children ask when they ask for more.

The good listener is strong, the talker weak.
The talker talking drains away his strength.
It fills the listener to hear a speaker speak.
He is a calm always of the greater length,
Receiving the turbulence into his own peace
Where it sinks like a slow stone, and rests,
And the rings round where it plunged widen and cease.

The rings smile in silence, or seem to smile.
The listener waits for another stone to fall.
It falls, face-to-face, with or without style,
Or, high above him, flung at a great wall,
Our pulpit-toning, Parliament-thundering, long
Doubled and balanced dependent clauses hinged,
Verbed, Saxon-and-Roman-Englished on the tongue.

Or the ordinary, dear, silly, coded talk
Of a family, that though seven generations
Of bloods mingle, if a least child speak,
His cousins understand by his intonations.
Or as in married life: what is not said
Is what is said, and years ago, and guessed,
And ritualized, and heard inside the head.

Or the remarkable gabble of the vocaphile,
The trickle, spatter, rally, and rainy rush
When two meet after an absence for a little while
Who do not wish to be heard, but abhor a hush.
Yet never in rage think you to puncture the ear.
Though the crimes in the name of language done
Be dire, it is happier to hear than not hear.

IV
It is not enough that one's own inner voice
Make of one's life a lifelong monotone.
I, me, mine, to-for-because-of me, rejoice
A man but little, then less, less, and none.
What does he hear for news who has only heard
From his own island? It is a treasure of dust
On the wind when he unlocks his word-hoard.

Moses' commandment opens the world's mouth
To utter the memory of life. One listener
Is man multiplied, man taking in time's breath
To be in one body ancestor and heir.
He owes one duty thus: attention. Man
If he means to live shall hold his whole mind
At ready awake. With this the law began.

So Moses brought the eleventh commandment down,
Knowing his will stir, his blood hasten
That the word be said aloud, the word be known,
That on it all men might take hold and fasten
On it, and hear it in all tongues: Listen.

(This and other of his poems are available at the Tufts Digital Library, http://dl.tufts.edu/view_text.jsp?pid=tufts:UA069.005.DO.00013 )

Old School, New School, No School

When I ask my son to be more orderly or methodical about his writing (or anything else), he often says, "Dad, you're old school." He goes to school, but when I see some of the work that not only passes but receives Bs and As, I wonder if it's really a school he attends or a pep rally. For several decades the same has seemed true of new poetry. It's not old school. It doesn't seem to have been to any school.

A good deal is incomprehensible. A lot of the comprehensible seems merely prose chopped up into lines. I often think I'm missing something, so to be fair, I try to read it as prose and see if any structure, anything that distinguishes prose from poetry or song stands out. So far nothing. Often the lines are little more than a notation to tell a reader where to pause briefly to emphasize a point. The most memorable of this stuff is memorable for the message or the humor, not for the craft. It's enjoys a limited popularity the way a comic professor gets student plaudits for entertaining rather than teaching.

German poetry has a tradition of short, pointed poetry. I offer a poem about poetry itself (among other things). It also helps explain why almost no one can quote a poem written in the lat 20 years from memory. (Can you?)

ON ORIGINALITY

Somebody says: "of no school I am part,
Never to living master lost my heart;
Nor any more can I be said
To have learned anything from the dead."
That statement--subject to appeal--
Means: "I'm a self-made imbecile."

Goethe, translated by Michael Hamburger