At any point on the bodymind spectrum, two things come together—a bit of information and a bit of matter. Of the two, the information has a longer life span than the solid matter it is matched with…This fact makes us realize that memory must be more permanent than matter. What is a cell then? It is a memory that has built some matter around itself, forming a specific pattern. Your body is just the place your memory calls home
Browsing category: Place
Maybe You Will Be The Ones … PDF
...Lake Powell is a dramatic testament to the troubling American impulse to use our technology and daring to coerce nature to our own purposes, our belief that the planet is here for whatever use we can make of it. And while the redrocks of Powell speak to the planet's history of creative forces, they also alert us to the ahistoric moment we occupy now. For the first time, the consequences of our acts affect the entire planet, all peoples and all beings. As I imagine what the next fifty years might bring, I know that we either will have learned to be responsible planetary stewards of our human creativity, or have wreaked unimaginable havoc with our only home.
We have never been here before. Human imagination has given us powers unlike anything in the past. Our immediate challenge is to deal with the consequences of human imagination, and to use this special gift of the human species on behalf of all life. (But whatever happens to us, the rocks will continue their cycles of emergence and disintegration.)...
All the Questions
When you step through
the back door
into the kitchen
father is still
sitting at the table
with a newspaper
folded open
in front of him
and pen raised, working
the crossword puzzle.
In the living room
mother is sleeping
her peaceful sleep
at last, in a purple
robe, with her head
back, slippered feet
up and twisted
knuckle hands crossed
right over left
in her lap.
Through the south window
in your old room
you see leaves
on the giant ash tree
turning yellow again
in setting sun
and falling slowly
to the ground and one
by one all the questions
you ever had become clear.
Number one across:
a four-letter word
for no longer.
Number one down:
an eleven letter word
for gone.
Where the World Began – PDF
A strange place it was, that place where the world began. A place of incredible happenings, splendours and revelations, despairs like multitudinous pits of isolated hells. A place of shadow-spookiness, inhabited by the unknown dead. A place of jubilation and of mourning, horrible and beautiful....
... This is where my world began. A world which includes the ancestors—both my own and other people’s ancestors who became mine. A world which formed me, and continues to do so, even while I fought it in some of its aspects, and continue to do so. A world which gives me my own lifework to do, because it was here that I learned the sight of my own particular eyes.
A Literature of Place – PDF
.... The real topic of nature writing, I think, is not nature but the evolving structure of communities from which nature has been removed, often as a consequence of modern economic development. It is writing concerned, further, with the biological and spiritual fate of those communities. It also assumes that the fate of humanity and nature are inseparable. Nature writing in the United States merges here, I believe, with other sorts of post-colonial writing, particularly in Commonwealth countries. In numerous essays it addresses the problem of spiritual collapse in the West and, like those literatures, it is in search of a modern human identity that lies beyond nationalism and material wealth. ...
To Make Landscape a Place, You Have to Feel It
There is a big difference between "place" and "landscape," even though the words are often used interchangeably. The original meaning of "landscape" came from 17th-century artistic discourse. It referred to "a picture representing natural inland scenery" (as opposed to a portrait or a sea view, according to the Oxford English Dictionary) and the term has continued to be associated with visual perceptions of land. Regardless of the scope of its perspective, whether small or large, landscape includes awareness of how the land has been shaped by human or natural agencies. It is not "wilderness." It is not "pristine." "Place" is more personal and multi-dimensional altogether. It is temporal as well as spatial, because it thickens with personal memories, local stories, history and archaeology. It’s not just a question of how things look, but of how things feel to those who know it well.
Postcodes and map coordinates offer precise locations, but don’t fully distinguish one place from another. The feelings associated with local stories and histories become attached to particular features — triumph or humiliation on the school sports field; tender trysts beneath the cherry trees; the proud hotel that once opened its doors to celebrity guests; the house wounded by the fatal fire. The stories that can cluster around ordinary features usually remain invisible to outsiders, and even events startling enough to hit the national headlines rapidly become yesterday’s news. People passing through see little if any of the life within those streets. For those looking on from a distance, buildings are houses, not homes. They might be architectural gems in stunning surroundings, but they won’t possess the intimate associations that transform landscape into place.
The representation of landscape as a defined view from a particular spot originated in 17th-century Dutch art and flourished in Britain and France in the 18th and 19th centuries. As more people enjoyed more leisure and the means to travel, so they became eager to see more of the country for themselves. William Gilpin’s popular guidebooks, illustrated with his own sketches, helped the new tourists to stop at the optimal spots for seeing landscapes. If they invested in a Claude Glass (a kind of pocket mirror made of polished obsidian in an oval frame), tourists could stand with their backs to the valley and enjoy a lake with hills behind and a hanging bough in the foreground, all perfectly arranged in the glass like a painting by Claude Lorrain. The Claude Glass made for landscape in the extreme — a view of the place so distant that even those physically present saw an idealized reflection. The modern tourist who manipulates holiday shots before sharing them is an heir to the Gilpin legacy.
William Wordsworth thought that landscapes should become places. He grew up in the English Lake District, an area warmly endorsed by Gilpin, but it was personal experience and the stories of those who lived there that mattered most to Wordsworth. Many of his poems recreate the hidden lives of those who left their traces on the land; others convey vivid memories of personal experiences that altered the landscape for ever — turning it into a deeply felt place.
In Preoccupations (1980), Seamus Heaney, a modern poet of place, paid special tribute to Wordsworth as "the first man to articulate the nurture that becomes available to the feelings through dwelling in one dear perpetual place." But though Wordsworth wrote so passionately about the region he had known since birth, its special meaning dawned on him fully only when he wasn’t there. His first substantial poem was written after he left the Lakes to study at Cambridge, while a very cold winter in Germany prompted his later recollections of his Lakeland boyhood in The Prelude (1850). It was only after a decade of restless travelling that Wordsworth returned to settle in Grasmere with his sister Dorothy, and then poem after poem poured out. Places can require absence, at least to be felt most deeply.
So perspective matters when it comes to place. Recently, cultural geographers have challenged assumptions about the apparent difference between insider and outsider perspectives, because of the less desirable implications of dividing people into those who "belong" and others who "do not belong." The excluded might come from another region or race, or merely fail to conform to local norms: the homeless, the homosexual and the handicapped have each been grouped by some societies as "out of place." This has led to new readings of place in terms of stasis and mobility. Instead of regarding "place" as stable and ultimately knowable to those who belong there, it might be understood as a much more mobile space, open to numerous experiences and characterized also by its confluence of passing people.
In Place (2014), the geographer Tim Cresswell has summed up this more dynamic view as "routes" rather than "roots." And once routes are seen as essential to the sense of place, the experiences and perceptions of visitors — be they travellers, tourists or traders — become as much part of the place as those of its inhabitants, while the places thicken with additional layers of meaning and contrasting perspectives. This mobilized sense of place means that landscapes cease to be so distant: the more detached perspective can in turn contribute to the developing collective meaning. There are many instances of places being transformed by artists — coming across the region with a fresh perspective, they see and then create something that wasn’t there before.
In recent years, David Hockney’s great sequence of Yorkshire landscapes is perhaps the most powerful response to a place. The artist has given us, unquestionably, landscapes, in that they represent real scenes from a particular spot, but they are also passionate celebrations of places, created by someone who has known the area all his life. Hockney’s series combines the wide view of the internationally travelled artist with the profound understanding of a deeply rooted Yorkshireman. They represent landscape and place.
This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.
https://aeon.co/ideas/it-s-not-easy-to-make-landscape-a-place-you-have-to-feel-it
A dream tells you …
A dream tells you where you are, not what to do . .
Don’t dreams, images …
Don’t dreams, images and metaphors come from the same place, the same ground? The place where we experience a certain kind of truth?
The Politics of Place: An Interview with Terry Tempest Williams
The connection between language and landscape is a perennial theme of American letters. Nature has been a well-spring for many of our finest writers — from Whitman and Thoreau to Peter Mathiessen and Edward Abbey. Terry Tempest Williams belongs in this tradition. A native of Utah, her naturalist writing has been richly influenced by the sprawling landscape of the West. It also draws on the values and beliefs of her Mormon background.
Terry Tempest Williams was thrown into the literary spotlight in 1991 with the release of her sixth book, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. It describes how the Great Salt Lake rose to record levels and eventually flooded the wetlands that serve as a refuge for migratory birds in Northern Utah. Williams tells the story against the backdrop of her family's struggle with cancer as a result of living downwind from a nuclear test site.
For Williams, there is a very close connection between ourselves, our people, and our native place. In the words of the Utne Reader magazine — which recently described her as one of today's leading "visionaries" — her writing "follows wilderness trails into the realm of memory and family, exploring gender and community through the prism of landscape."
Scott London:You've said that your writing is a response to questions.
Terry Tempest Williams: Yes. I think about the poet Rainer Maria Rilke who said that it's the questions that move us, not the answers. As a writer, I believe that it's our task, our responsibility, to hold the mirror up to social injustices that we see and to create a prayer of beauty. The questions serve us in that capacity.
I can tell you that in Refuge the question that was burning in me was, how do we find refuge in change? Everything around me that was familiar had been turned inside out with my mother's diagnosis of ovarian cancer and with the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge being flooded. With Pieces of White Shell, it was, What stories do we tell that evoke a sense of place? With An Unspoken Hunger it was really, How do we engage in community? Am I an artist or am I an activist? So it was, How does a poetics of place translate into a politics of place. And in A Desert Quartet the question that was burning inside me was a very private one: How might we make love to the land?
Pico Iyer describes his writing as "intimate letters to a stranger," and I think that is what the writing process is. It begins with a question, and then you follow this path of exploration.
London: At a recent talk you surprised a lot of people in the audience by saying that you don't consider yourself a writer. That was a very puzzling thing to hear from someone who has written eight books.
Williams: Yes. Well, it feels so presumptuous somehow. I know the struggle from the inside out and I would never be so bold as to call myself a writer. I think that is what other people call you. But I consider myself a member of a community in Salt Lake City, in Utah, in the American West, in this country. And writing is what I do. That is the tool out of which I can express my love. My activism is a result of my love. So whether it's trying to preserve the wilderness in Southern Utah or writing about an erotics of place, it is that same impulse — to try to make sense of the world, to try to preserve something that is beautiful, to ask the tough questions, the push the boundaries of what is acceptable.
London: One of the underlying themes of your work is the power of place and the importance of a land we can call our own. Tell me about your own homeland.
Williams: I think the whole idea of home is central to who we are as human beings. What I can tell you about my home is that I live just outside of Salt Lake City in a place called Emigration Canyon. It's on the Mormon trail. When Brigham Young came through with the early Mormon pioneers in 1847 and said "This is the place," that's the view we see every morning when we leave the Canyon and enter the Salt Lake Valley. So I feel deeply connected, not only because of my Mormon roots, which are five or six generations, but because of where we live. There isn't a day that goes by that I'm not mindful of the spiritual sovereignty that was sought by my people in coming to Utah.
London: You once said that one needs a sense of humor to live in Salt Lake City.
Williams: That's very true, and increasingly so given the political climate that we see in this country, and especially in Utah. I also think that's true in the American West in general. You can't take yourself seriously very long because you are immediately confronted with big weather, big country, and there is a sense of humility that rises out of the landscape.
London: I've been to Utah several times. The last time I was there I drove through on dusty back roads. I've been to the Sahara and even that seems more hospitable than some parts of Utah! It's so windy, desolate, and barren. I wonder how a landscape can inspire such reverence and poetry in one person and seem so God-forsaken to another.
Williams: I think it's what we're used to. Home is where we have a history. So when I'm standing in the middle of the salt flats, where you swear that the pupils of your eyes have turned white because of the searing heat that is rising from the desert, I think of my childhood, I think of my mother, my father, my grandparents; I think of the history that we hold there and it is beautiful to me. But it is both a blessing and a burden to be rooted in place. It's recognizing the pattern of things, almost feeling a place before you even see it. In Southern Utah, on the Colorado plateau where canyon walls rise upward like praying hands, that is a holy place to me.
London: In An Unspoken Hunger you say, "Perhaps the most radical act we can commit is to stay home." What do you mean by that?
Williams: I really believe that to stay home, to learn the names of things, to realize who we live among... The notion that we can extend our sense of community, our idea of community, to include all life forms — plants, animals, rocks, rivers and human beings — then I believe a politics of place emerges where we are deeply accountable to our communities, to our neighborhoods, to our home. Otherwise, who is there to chart the changes? If we are not home, if we are not rooted deeply in place, making that commitment to dig in and stay put ... if we don't know the names of things, if don't know pronghorn antelope, if we don't know blacktail jackrabbit, if we don't know sage, pinyon, juniper, then I think we are living a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions. Then we enter a place of true desolation.
I remember a phone call from a friend of mine who lives along the MacKenzie River. She said, "This is the first year in twenty that the chinook salmon have not returned." This woman knows the names of things. This woman is committed to a place. And she sounded the alarm.
London: What do you think happens when we lose a sense of intimacy with the natural world around us?
Williams: I think our lack of intimacy with the land has initiated a lack of intimacy with each other. What we perceive as non- human, outside of us, is actually in direct relationship with us.
London: You were talking about the concept of "community." What does that mean to you?
Williams: Community is extremely intimate. When we talk about humor, I love that you know when you're home because there is laughter in the room, there is humor, there is shorthand. That is about community. I think community is a shared history, it's a shared experience. It's not always agreement. In fact, I think that often it isn't. It's the commitment, again, to stay with something — to go the duration. You can't walk away. It's like a marriage, only I think it's more difficult to divorce yourself from community than it is to a human being because the strands are interconnected and so various.
London: You mentioned Pico Iyer. He has described home as the sense of a bleak landscape — something that inspires the sort of melancholy that only a truly familiar place can evoke. That seems so very different from what you are saying.
Williams: Having lived in Utah all of my life, I can tell you that in many ways I know of no place more lonely, no place more unfamiliar. When I talk about how it is both a blessing and a burden to have those kinds of roots, it can be terribly isolating, because when you are so familiar, you know the shadow. My family lives all around me. We see each other daily. It's very, very complicated. I think that families hold us together and they split us apart. I think my heart breaks daily living in Salt Lake City, Utah. But I still love it. And that is the richness, the texture. So when Pico talks about home being a place of isolation, I think he's right. But it's the paradox. I think that's why I so love Great Salt Lake. Every day when I look out at that lake, I think, "Ah, paradox" — a body of water than no one can drink. It's the liquid lie of the desert. But I think we have those paradoxes within us and certainly the whole idea of home is windswept with paradox.
London: If we go back to your book Refuge for a moment, your "refuge" was tied both to a place and to a people, and you were losing them both. You called it an "unnatural history of family and place." In what way was it unnatural?
Williams: "Natural" in the sense that death is part of our lives — the Great Bear Migratory Bird Refuge was being flooded by the rise of the Great Salt Lake; my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer; both are natural phenomena. "Unnatural" in the sense of what is imposed on those cycles. In the case of Great Salt Lake, the state of Utah decides to put in a $60 million pumping project to pump the water into the West Desert — hardly natural. In terms of my mother's diagnosis with cancer, what are the options: chemotherapy, radiation. Natural? It's debatable. Then this overlying cloud, if you will, of nuclear testing in the 1950s and 60s which moved all the way up the Wasatch front in Utah. The whole issue of downwind, even being downwinders — natural? Hardly.
The question I'm constantly asking myself is: what are we afraid of? I think it's important for us to follow that line of fear, because that is ultimately our line of growth.
London: "Downwinders," what does that mean?
Williams: Downwinders, meaning those people, individuals, communities that were downwind of the nuclear test site. During those years when we were testing atomic bombs above ground, when we watched them for entertainment from the roofs of our high schools, little did we know what was raining down on us, little did we know what would appear years later. I write about that in Refuge — "The Clan of One-Breasted Women." With so many of the women in my family being diagnosed with breast cancer, mastectomies led to one-breasted women. I believe it is the result of nuclear fallout.
This is not peculiar to my family. There are thousands of stories and narratives in the nuclear west that also bear this out. Natural? I don't think so. That's what I was referring to.
London: In Refuge, you also talk about the connection between your church and the whole downwinder phenomenon. Perhaps you can expand on that a bit.
Williams: I think that what I was talking about was that as a woman growing up in a Mormon tradition in Salt Lake City, Utah, we were taught — and we are still led to believe — that the most important value is obedience. But that obedience in the name of religion or patriotism ultimately takes our souls. So I think it's this larger issue of what is acceptable and what is not; where do we maintain obedience and law and where do we engage in civil disobedience — where we can cross the line physically and metaphorically and say, "No, this is no longer appropriate behavior." For me, that was a decision that I had to make and did make personally, to commit civil disobedience together with many other individuals from Utah and around the country and the world, in saying no to nuclear testing. Many people don't realize that we have been testing nuclear bombs underground right up until 1992. President Bush at that time placed a moratorium on all testing in this country and President Clinton has maintained that.
London: How central is your Mormon faith to your identity as a writer — has it had a big influence on your work and ideas?
Williams: It's hard to answer because, again, I don't think we can separate our upbringing from what we are. I am a Mormon woman, I am not orthodox. It is the lens through which I see the world. I hear the Tabernacle Choir and it still makes me weep. There are other things within the culture that absolutely enrage me, and for me it is sacred rage. But it's not just peculiar to Mormonism — it's any patriarchy that I think stops, thwarts, or denies our creativity.
So the question that I'm constantly asking myself is, What are we afraid of? I think it's important for us to follow that line of fear, because that is ultimately our line of growth. I feel that within the Mormon culture there is a tremendous amount of fear — of women's voices, of questioning of authority, and ultimately of our own creativity.
London: In this culture we tend to draw very distinct lines between the spiritual world and the political world. And yet you don't seem to see any separation between them. You've said that for you it's all one — the spiritual and the political, your home life and your landscape.
Williams: I think we learn that lesson well by observing the natural world. There is no separation. That is the wonderful ecological mind that Gregory Bateson talks about — the patterns that connect, the stories that inform and inspire us and teach us what is possible. Somewhere along the line we have become segregated in the way we think about things and become compartmentalized. Again, I think that contributes to our sense of isolation and our lack of a whole vision of the world — seeing the world whole, even holy. I can't imagine a secular life, a spiritual life, an intellectual life, a physical life. I mean, we would be completely wrought with schizophrenia, wouldn't we?
So I love the interrelatedness of things. We were just observing out at Point Reyes a whole colony of elephant seals and it was so deeply beautiful, and it was so deeply spiritual. It was fascinating listening to this wonderful biologist, Sarah Allen Miller, speak of her relationship to these beings for 20 years. How the males, the bulls, have this capacity to dive a mile deep, can you imagine? And along the way they sleep while they dive. And I kept thinking, "And what are their dreams?" And the fact that they can stay under water for up to two hours. Think of the kind of ecological mind that an elephant seal holds. Then looking at the females, these unbelievably luxurious creatures that were just sunbathing on this crescent beach with the waves breaking out beyond them. Then they would just ripple out into the water in these blue-black bodies, just merging with the water. It was the most erotic experience I've ever seen. We were there for hours. No separation between the spiritual and the physical. It was all one. I had the sense that we had the privilege of witnessing other — literally another culture, that extension of community.
London: You've said that your connection to the natural world is also your connection to yourself. Do you think that's true for everybody?
Williams: We're animals, I think we forget that. I think there is an ancient archetypal memory that still exists within us. If we deny that, what is the cost? So I do think it's what binds us as human beings. I wonder, What is it to be human? Especially now that we are so urban. How do we remember our connection with place? What is the umbilical cord that roots us to that primal, instinctive, erotic place? Every time I walk to the edge of this continent and feel the sand beneath my feet, feel the seafoam move up my body, I think, "Ah, yes, evolution." [laughs] You know, it's there, we just forget.
I worry, Scott, that we are a people in a process of great transition and we are forgetting what we are connected to. We are losing our frame of reference. Pelicans pass by and we hardly know who they are, we don't know their stories. Again, at what price? I think it's leading us to a place of inconsolable loneliness. That's what I mean by "An Unspoken Hunger." It's a hunger that cannot be quelled by material things. It's a hunger that cannot be quelled by the constant denial. I think that the only thing that can bring us into a place of fullness is being out in the land with other. Then we remember where the source of our power lies.
London: One of your great gifts as a writer is your ability to translate your experience of nature into words. Yet nature seems to inspire in us not words but silence — after all, that is one of the most profound reasons for living close to nature, to get beyond words. Do you find that sometimes the words get in the way?
Williams: That is so true, and I love what you just said about silence going beyond words. And, who knows, hopefully there will come a time when I have no words, when I can honor and hold that kind of stillness that I so need, crave, and desire in the natural world. I think you are absolutely right. Isn't that intimacy? When you are with a landscape or a human being where there is no need to speak, but simply to listen, to perceive, to feel. And I worry... (I think I must be worried all the time — maybe that is the other side of joy, you know, holding that line of the full range of emotions.) But we are losing our sense of silence in the world.
My husband, Brooke, and I were in the San Juan Mountains in Colorado. We were at almost 13,000 feet. I cannot imagine being in a place where there was greater silence, a deeper silence. But this peculiar sound, when the sun would set, occurred which was almost like these... the only way I can describe it to you is, it was like there was a turbine, a motor. I'm not talking UFOs here, I'm saying it was this very disturbing, low-grade noise that was almost coming up from the valley floor. And we were miles away from any towns or cities. And this is a frequent story that is being told in the American West right now. I know people have been hearing this bizarre low-frequency noise — it's not a benevolent sound, it's a very disturbing sound. I know friends who have been hearing it in Taos, New Mexico. A writer-friend of mine, Linda Hogan, a Chickasaw poet, has been hearing it around her home. And also in Utah. And I wonder what this sound is. Is it the sound of an industrialized society that is in the process of going mad?
So, I wonder about silence. Also about darkness. I love the idea that city lights are a "conspiracy" against higher thoughts. If we can no longer see the stars, then where can our thoughts travel to? So, I think there is much to preserve — not just landscape, but the qualities that are inherent in landscape, in wild places: silence, darkness.
London: Camus said that beauty can drive us to despair. Rilke also said something about that; he spoke of beauty as the "beginning of terror." What is it that is so terrifying about beauty — especially the kind we find in nature?
Williams: Scott, that is such a powerful point. You know, that Rilke quote — "Beauty is the beginning of terror" — I think about that a lot. I remember, Brooke and I were in Sagres in Portugal. In your travels, if you look at Portugal and Spain and Spain is the hair and Portugal is the face, Sagres is the chin. We were right there on this point and Brooke had gone in another direction and I was literally perched with the fishermen on this unbelievably steep precipice as they were throwing these lines of light down into the sea, hundreds of feet, and pulling up these fish for their families. It was so beautiful. I stayed there all day long. I had to fight to not leap off. It was not a suicidal response, it was not out of despair. It was out of this sheer desire to merge. That was terrifying to me, because I thought, "I am going to leap." I finally had to remove myself. And Brooke said, "Let's go on a walk tonight," and I just said, "I'm too afraid, because I have no control over the impulses I feel on the edge of that cliff."
It was at that moment that I realized what Rilke was talking about: beauty as the beginning of terror. It's that realization that we are so small, and yet we are so large in our capacity to relate to the beauty of things. So, again, that paradox. My life meant so little at that moment. It was just much more important to be part of the sea.
London: That terror is also related to a certain pain that we can experience — which you spoke of recently when you said that the pain that we feel when we confront the natural world is a very different one from the mental anguish that many of us live with day in and day out.
Williams: The Japanese have a word — aware — which, in my understanding is, again, that full range — both the joy and the sorrow of our life. One does not exist without the other. And I really feel that. It's the delicacy and the strength of our relations. And I feel it most acutely in those intimate moments — with another person, in a landscape that is beloved.
London: But what about this pain that comes from mental anguish? You write of the "distracted and domesticated" life. Why is that so dangerous?
Williams: Because then I think we're skating on surfaces. I know it in my own life — and I think that is where this frustration comes in. It's not the place we want to be, but it's the place our society requires that we be. There is no fulfillment there. So we become numbed, we become drugged, we become less than we are. And I think that we know that. That is the anguish I hear you talking about. Whereas the pain that one feels in the natural world arises out of beauty. The pain that we feel when we are making love with someone is that we know it will end. It's that paradoxical response of joy and suffering. One, as we were saying, cannot exist without the other. They mirror each other. They live in the same house. And it moves us to tears.
I recently got back from Hiroshima and it was fascinating to me how the Japanese accommodate this paradox. We were talking about this word aware, which on the page looks like "aware," which speaks to both the pain and the beauty of our lives. Being there, what I perceived was that this is a sorrow that is not a grief that one forgets or recovers from, but it is a burning, searing illumination of love for the delicacy and strength of our relations. What was interesting... I would love to just read this. This is a piece that I just wrote for The Nation in their 50th anniversary issue of 1945 and World War II.
[Reading:] Kenzaburo Oe writes in Hiroshima Notes, "Hiroshima is like a nakedly exposed wound inflicted on all mankind. Like all wounds, this one poses two potential outcomes: the hope of human recovery, and the danger of fatal corruption." Shoko Itoh has just completed translating a newly found manuscript of Henry David Thoreau, "The Dispersion of Seeds." She tells me how moved she is by his words, the import of his ideas. "The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. This every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although in almost all men obstructed, and as yet unborn." If, as Shoko Itoh says, "all religions are born of light," then perhaps Hiroshima has given birth to a religion of peace. Aware. The active soul.
London: You have spoken of moving from the age of nationalism into the age of economism, suggesting that we may be standing on the brink of a new age, an age of Earthism. Maybe you can expand on that?
Williams: This is the idea of John Cobb, a theologian at Carlton College. I found that really fascinating. I love the ordered mind of history because it takes us out of the chaos, momentarily, and says, "Ah, so this is the story we are engaged in." I think it's interesting to think about on the 50th anniversary of Hiroshima, which will be on August 6, 1995, and as we are thinking about World War II and what it means to us now, fifty years later. That was a time of tremendous nationalism in the United States, Britain, Japan, Germany. And what happened as a result? Where did that go to its extreme? Of course, John Cobb tells us it went to its extreme with the Holocaust. That then gave rise to economism: everything seen through the lens of economics — the build-up after World War II. We see certainly it in the American West, we see it all over the world. At what point does economism reach its limit — where, again, we find ourselves at the absolute limit of that era. John Cobb is saying that perhaps we are beginning to see that now as our greed goes completely out of control and everything is seen through money, through corporate power, etc., etc. We know it well. He asked the question, What will be the holocaust that takes us to the next era? — which he describes as "Earthism."
As we sat there listening to this discussion, I thought, "We're already there." We are seeing the holocaust of another order. Exxon Valdez: 500,000 otters dead; 550,000 muirs — sea birds — dead. The rain forests. Our forests in the Pacific Northwest. What we are seeing in terms of the wise-use movement and what they are asking us to do and to let go of in terms of wild lands in Utah, Montana, Idaho.
To me, we are in the midst of such broad-scale destruction, both psychically and physically, that the only thing that can threaten the grip, loosen the hold, of economism, I believe, is a discussion of the sacred born out of our regard and compassion and intelligence for the earth and the creatures on the earth.
London: We tend to take very extreme views of nature in America. We see it as ours to do whatever we please with, or, conversely, as something to rope off and protect from human intervention. Do you think we will ever learn to coexist with nature in a way that benefits both?
Williams: I believe it is possible, and I think we have powerful role-models among us in the American West. Certainly the Hopis, a timeless civilization that understands sustainability and what that means about living in harmony, in tandem with the natural world. We have much to learn from them, and they will survive us, I feel certain about that. When you look at the Pueblo communities along the Rio Grande, when you talk to the Navajo people, the Ute people, and certainly the native peoples of California who still have their communities intact, it is what they have always known: that we are not apart from nature but a part of it.
London: But we don't have much of a history of living in tune with nature.
Williams: You are absolutely right, for us as Anglos who are very new to this landscape, we don't have a history yet. I look at Los Angeles and I ask myself, How can this ever be sustainable? And what are we contributing to that? Because we are all complicit. None of us is without blame. It's so difficult and it's so overwhelming and I think we have to make small choices in our own lives that can loom large collectively. But I worry. I think it's about capitalism, consumerism, our consumptive nature as a species approaching the 21st century. I certainly don't have the answers.
London: How do we address this in our personal lives?
Williams: I think that it's too much to take on the world. It's too much to take on Los Angeles. All I can do is to go back home to the canyon where we live and ask the kinds of questions that can make a difference in our neighborhoods. How do we want to govern ourselves? How do we want to regulate development. We've just started an Emigration Canyon watershed council. We had our first meeting in our living room last week. And what was our goal? Simply to talk to each other, because there is a huge rift between those people in the canyon who want more development, those people in the canyon who want less, and the way that we are bound on this issue is the water — how much water we have. So I think that water is a tremendous organizing principle. Maybe that is one of the places, particularly in the arid West, we can begin thinking about these things.
London: Trying to find common ground.
Williams: Absolutely. And also respecting each other's differences and then figuring out how we can proceed given those different points of view.
London: With all the talk about the ecological crisis we are facing now, environmental policies seem to be losing ground. How is it that such a big gap has developed between what we say we value on the one hand and what we legislate on the other?
Williams: I feel we have to begin standing our ground in the places we love. I think that we have to demand that concern for the land, concern for the Earth, and this extension of community that we've been speaking of, is not marginal — in the same way that women's rights are not marginal, in the same way that rights for children are not marginal. There is no separation between the health of human beings and the health of the land. It is all part of a compassionate view of the world. How we take that view and match it with what we see in Congress with the decimations of the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, child care... I think it's an outrage. You and I have spoken about what we can do as citizens, what we can do as a responsive citizenry, and this is where we have to shatter our complacency and become "active souls," as Thoreau puts it, and be prepared to engage in aware — that personal struggle between our grief and our sorrow. But I don't think we have any choice.
When I met Breyten Breytenbach, the South African poet, in Mexico — it was a symposium on landscape and culture — we were talking about this revolution, this evolution of the spirit. As you know, he is an extraordinary poet who wrote True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist and had been involved for years in the anti-apartheid movement, was imprisoned for seven, and he knows the shadow of the active soul. I remember asking him, "What can we do if we are interested in this revolution, this evolution of the spirit?" And he looked at me, dead-eye center, and he said, "You Americans, you have mastered the art of living with the unacceptable."
I think we have to stand up against what is unacceptable, and to push the boundaries and reclaim a more humane way of being in the world, so that we can extend our compassionate intelligence and begin to work with a strengthened will and imagination that can take us into the future.
This interview was adapted from the public radio series "Insight & Outlook." It appears in A Voice in the Wilderness: Conversations with Terry Tempest Williams, edited by Michael Austin (Utah State University Press, 2006). © Copyright 2012 by Scott London. All rights reserved.
How much, I wonder …
How much, I wonder, of our life’s reflection is whispered to us from the distance of valley floors and high chilly winds? Places we’ve never been or only imagined color our notions of place, while landscapes live outside our door and call to within our souls.
As a writer …
As a writer I want to ask on behalf of the reader: How can a person obtain this? How can you occupy a place and also have it occupy you? How can you find such a reciprocity? The key, I think, is to become vulnerable to a place. If you open yourself up, you can build intimacy. Out of such intimacy may come a sense of belonging, a sense of not being isolated in the universe.
To experience a place …
To experience a place I need to walk in it as often as I can. Abenaki native poet Joseph Bruchac says, 'We need to walk to know sacred places, those around us and those within. We need to walk to remember the songs.'
This is where my world began …
This is where my world began…A world which formed me, and continues to do so, even while I fought it in some of its aspects…A world which gives me my own lifework to do, because it was here that I learned the sight of my own particular eyes.
There are Birds Here – for Detroit
There are birds here,
so many birds here
is what I was trying to say
when they said those birds were metaphors
for what is trapped
between buildings
and buildings. No.
The birds are here
to root around for bread
the girl’s hands tear
and toss like confetti. No,
I don’t mean the bread is torn like cotton,
I said confetti, and no
not the confetti
a tank can make of a building.
I mean the confetti
a boy can’t stop smiling about
and no his smile isn’t much
like a skeleton at all. And no
his neighborhood is not like a war zone.
I am trying to say
his neighborhood
is as tattered and feathered
as anything else,
as shadow pierced by sun
and light parted
by shadow-dance as anything else,
but they won’t stop saying
how lovely the ruins,
how ruined the lovely
children must be in that birdless city.
What Kind of Times are These
There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.
I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled
this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.
I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light —
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.
And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees.
Summer in a Small Town
When the men leave me,
they leave me in a beautiful place.
It is always late summer.
When I think of them now,
I think of the place.
And being happy alone afterwards.
This time it's Clinton, New York.
I swim in the public pool
at six when the other people
have gone home.
The sky is grey, the air hot.
I walk back across the mown lawn
loving the smell and the houses
so completely it leaves my heart empty.
Early Hominids Slept in Trees
This was before they slipped into caves
and painted the drama of the hunt, before
their stone tools and splendid fires,
when early hominids filled the trees
like night. They climbed a ladder
of branches into evening where they
arranged themselves beneath
the applause of leaves. There were
wind storms and lightning and somehow
babies were held and people snored
or turned over. Surely someone was
afraid of heights? And someone
must have secured a place at the bottom,
or slept on the ground, demonstrating
how it might be done? Balanced up there,
in the mythic beginning, they were
safer from predators that walked
on four legs, swishing tails.
They clung to the trunk: felt the world
growing colder, the new power in their thumbs.
Trees were like houses and going home
meant climbing into the sky where words
appeared inside them like stars.
Trains
I am seduced by trains. When one moans in the night like some
dragon gone lame, I rise and put on my grandfather's suit. I pack a
small bag, step out onto the porch, and wait in the darkness. I rest
my broad-brimmed hat on my knee. To a passerby I'm a curious
sight—a solitary man sitting in the night. There's something
unsettling about a traveler who doesn't know where he's headed.
You can't predict his next move. In a week you may receive a
postcard from Haiti. Madagascar. You might turn on your
answering machine and hear his voice amid the tumult of a
Bangkok avenue. All afternoon you feel the weight of the things
you've never done. Don't think about it too much. Everything
starts to sound like a train.
Toward Paris
My first time on the night train
I couldn't sleep
With expectation, the lucky
Shapes of houses wrapped in dream—
Trees slowed, then creaked to a stop.
4:00 a.m. under country stars.
Lower the window: new air,
A deserted dirt road and
A peasant pedaling away,
A wand-like loaf in his hand,
Tail-light growing weak
Red in the dark, as if his work
Was to bring fresh light
To woods and fields. He did,
Keeping me there at that
Balanced blue hour even later
In the Sainte Chappelle,
The blur of the Louvre and after.
The Sound of a Train
Even now, I hear one and I long to leave
without a suitcase or a plan; I want to step
onto the platform and reach for
the porter’s hand and buy a ticket
to some other life; I want to sit
in the big seats and watch fields
turn into rivers or cities. I want to eat
cake on the dining car’s
unsteady tablecloths, to sleep
while whole seasons
slip by. I want to be a passenger
again: a person who hears the name
of a place and stands up, a person
who steps into the steam of arrival.